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Personal · Jun 2025 · 2 min read

Crown Shyness

Breathing air into email.

Crown shyness is what botanists call the gap trees leave between each other. Their canopies almost touch in the sky but never quite do. A natural distance that breathes.

I looked at my inbox. Everything was jammed together. So I breathed the same gap into it. Each thread floats with its own space. It sounds like a small thing. It felt like a different inbox entirely.

Once I have the feeling I want, I go looking for where it already exists. Not as metaphor. As material. The physical world has already solved the problem of producing feelings. I'm borrowing something that works.