Clearing

Why I Built This

For years I thought I was a bad meditator. Every time I tried to empty my mind, things piled back in. Then I realized: my mind calms when it has something to focus on.

I love trees. So I started opening field guides to random pages—Sierra Club, Audubon, National Geographic—immersing myself for a minute, then meditating on what I'd learned.

It worked. The problem wasn't my attention. It was the absence of a worthy object.

The naturalists weren't meditating—they were observing. But observation at that depth of attention is meditation.

Clearing is built on that insight. Each session focuses on something real and named: a Coast Redwood, a Monarch's migration, Saturn's rings, a coral reef's symbiosis. You read for a moment, then rest your attention on the subject in silence.

Some sessions draw from the original nature writers: Muir on sequoias, Thoreau on oaks, Carson on the sea. These writers weren't describing nature for relaxation content. They were practicing a discipline of attention that we've since pathologized as "mindfulness" and commercialized into ambient noise.

Other sessions—diatom geometry, cosmic web filaments, coral reef symbiosis—feature original scientific writing in that same tradition. The discipline of attention extends beyond what Muir could see with his eyes.

No music. No voice. No filler. Just prose that deserves attention, and silence.