Making Of: The Digital Wellspring Story
The journey to building a home for inspiration, expansion, and personal development
The beginning is the most important part of the work.
Plato
A story is an invitation, and a challenge, and a choice.
Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
Would you look at that? Back again for another Making Of. This time the Digital Wellspring story.
Before we start, can we get into how dramatic and over-the-top that title is? We’ll see if I earn it!
Let me tell you how Notion changed my life far before it became a central, organizing piece of this journey.
Last year, awash in all the emotions and grief described in Prologue, I struggled to make sense of up versus down and what I would do next.
If you remember, I had quit the job, left the apartment, the city, and was back in a place I had a challenging relationship with.
Looking back, I spent an inordinate amount of time reading: about myself, the world, Psychology, metaphysics, the heart(!), and much more.
I would finish one book and start another. I would start one book and simultaneously start another. Just looking for answers and clarity on how I could wisely move forward.
Strangely, only just this year did it dawn on me that I should NEVER be without a daybook (journal for daily impressions and insights); which is crazy since the act and value of writing was the very premise of Love Letter Podcast.
I should have given myself a place to store and sift through the muddled thoughts I had during such a potent, excavative time. I likely would have made sense of it all sooner…
So there I was just reading books hoping for something to stick. One day I would think “Yes, this is it!” And after lunch, all the energy would be gone from this newfound path. Back to square none.
Then one day, after many months of accounts talking about this organization tool, I downloaded Notion.
I’ll never forget it. It was the day AIR came out on Prime. My family was watching the Michael Jordan and Nike story and I was looking at a workspace that would change my life.
I remember sitting on the floor playing around on this blank page/workspace learning the different functions of the tool. I think I may have created a page within a page and like a flash, I realized the potential of this tool and was hooked.
From that day, I was in Notion every day building pages, taking notes, and dumping all the things that would have gone in a journal. After getting my essential pages built, creating a routine, and identifying the general categories I wanted to furnish, I began noticing the patterns.
I began noticing that I wasn’t as all over the place as I thought and that in reality, I was building a varied knowledge base I would regularly reference.
Although at the time it seemed like I was grasping at straws, I was really building the foundation of knowledge, the wells I would draw from for “The Ascent.”
Only later when I looked back over last year was I able to see that when I felt I was moving aimlessly through the dark, I was actually working through a curriculum tailor-made for me that would support this current volume and future phases of my work. As you might expect, when it all came together, I was blown away and better understood why it “took so long.”
Still, in a slight, directionless, jobless haze, I was just creating pages and brainstorming all kinds of things. From April 5th when I downloaded the app to around mid-June I was simply reading and building in Notion. Unwittingly preparing for everything that would come next…
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During this time, I realized that most, if not all, of my aspirations up to 2022ish, had me working in service of other people with little consideration of who I was or what I wanted.
As I began to shed this desire to sell the benefit of employee development TO corporations or develop the ability to read Astrological charts for other people or even help other people build their businesses, it became imperative for me to create a life (and ultimately a website) where I could boldly be myself.
Unbeknownst to me, I was well on my way. Over the course of June and July of last year, I collected and took stock of all the tools I had acquired from my corporate work, “failed” side hustles, workshops I attended, workshops I led, my childhood and adolescence, and compiled them on index cards and in Notion.
I identified all the tools at my disposal I could leverage toward the construction of some new thing. The ideas I had were like lily pads in a pond: plentiful but none more exciting than another. Then, very subtly, topics and concepts began emerging in my awareness that didn’t yet belong to any real framework or vehicle.
Two questions, however, that tumbled out of me to ponder that essentially catalyzed my forward motion despite feeling all this immense shame were:
What if you are meant to demonstrate walking out of destruction?
What if people NEED to see you mid-flight to where you’re going?
Considering things from this perspective, my not being “together” wasn’t a problem, but rather a prerequisite of things I might say and offer.
I knew I needed a vehicle to communicate these concepts, where I had been, and other musings I felt might have an audience. Lucky for me I didn’t have to look far.
I was already aware of the platform Medium, but I stumbled across Substack, fell in love with the tools (like hosting a podcast in addition to writing), and began building v1 of Mel’s Substack. I named it that because I didn’t want to keep saying “newsletter,” but I figured most people didn’t know what Substack even was. I certainly didn’t. (I personally thought it was some boring tech thing.)
Once I was ready to “re-emerge” from my dark night of the soul with all the aforementioned in tow, I shared the post ‘Heal Loudly' on Instagram and we were off to the races.
We had begun “The Ascent.”
The funny thing is and what confirms to me that “The Ascent” was as much given as it was planned and created, was that most of the concepts, stages, and framing for it came after seeing the images that would represent each of the stages, namely the image for Prologue to Destruction (and in the Instagram post picture above).
There was something about that foreboding moon that seemed to illustrate perfectly what had happened and preceded everything I felt and was wading through. The image felt grave and potent and significant and it compelled me to tell about it.
With images for the five stages in hand, the spirit of the journey quickly revealed itself.
After many months of bereavement (I really loved New York and my dynamic life), I had direction and a daring journey before me. As you’ve seen, I wrote, narrated, described, and distilled this journey into the best and most illustrative words I could find, all leading up to MelvynRustin.com, my digital playground and wellspring of inspiration.
I had always known that Wellspring would include launching my Notion workspace, but it was only after Wellspring had begun that I finally saw it as the culmination, the release, the full moon, if you will, of the journey.
After over 65 written and recorded posts, it no longer seemed like a small thing. It felt like a house for my words and my essence that required care in both its construction and its release. I also think after I did the video for Mountainous Musings, I sensed the stakes had changed a bit…
As I mentioned in Small Steps, my aim was to build a great foundation for “The Ascent” and anything that might follow in a place for me to share musings about the world, projects I’m working on, and inspiring things I regularly come across.
I didn’t want a website that was simply a display of who I am or what I had done or just a place for me to launch and sell things, but a dynamic, living space where I could grow, change, and share. I wanted to create a place where you might not ever know exactly what you were going to get, but would always leave with what you needed to take the next step on your journey (which is why I pray so much now!).
I wanted to create my own library of inspiration and interest that served as a vehicle to get ideas worth sharing across the world and through the universe. I am immensely proud of both the result and how seamless it is for me to update, modify, and build on. I love practicality and this helps me be just that: practical and helpful. I can’t wait to see what it looks like 3, 6, and 9 months from now.
The name! Funny enough, at NO point throughout this journey did I EVER call it a digital wellspring. Ever. I believe the juxtaposition of those two words came together the night before I released it?? I was like “Oh! Bottomless well of inspiration. Well. Wellspring. Digital space. Digital Wellspring.” And ran with it.
Ever since I started practicing heart coherence, I just go for it. Who cares if it works! It’ll get the people going!
Once I received the idea to call it a digital wellspring and how few posts would come after it, I gasped and thought “WOW. This is the peak, the primary point of this stage. A gift for me and them that will be a relic from this journey we will regularly return to.” And I may have wept.
Another reason I may have wept was the massive gravity I felt for this release. Not only was I excited to release it and could imagine the enduring impact it could have, but only in the eleventh hour did I have the idea of recording a duo of videos for its release.
I attempted to record one video and “failed” miserably after over a dozen takes, but I kept reminding myself to “Stay the course. Use it as fuel.” Over and over and over.
What also indicated to me the importance of this thing was how much I still had left to do in the days leading up to its release and allll the obstacles, distractions, and requests that surfaced in the 72 hours leading up to releasing it.
There were more than a dozen times I almost lost my shit and considered pushing things back or just going to sleep and “figuring it out in the morning.” But I wouldn’t relent, I wouldn’t let myself get hooked into minutiae and last-minute requests, and I wouldn’t be deterred from what I felt was a beautiful near-finish to an unbelievable journey.
I probably listened to more rap that week than I have all year. I was fighting relentlessly to keep my energy levels up.
Then at 12:32 PM on Friday, June 14th during a glorious Mercury Cazimi, I released my digital wellspring out into the world. A product of years of introspection, personal study, podcasting, writing, Notion exploration, and a lifetime of becoming.
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When I decided that the corporate path I was on wasn’t for me and certainly didn’t have me in mind when it was designed, it felt like the rug had been pulled from under me. Now a few weeks over two years later I feel I’ve built my own foundation to stand on.
I’ve built a massive contribution of my beliefs, hopes, and dreams to the world and an accompanying place where I can share who I am as well as who I think we all are and can be.
Notion helped me see how my mind works, what I’m interested in, and how all that could be shared with the world. It helped me realize I’m not all over the place and that yes, my reading list will always be longer than I can keep up with, but that it’s only 7 or so topics I want to regularly read about.
What this workspace helped me realize was that in all this time I wasn’t searching for purpose, I was learning the mechanisms and indicators of purpose to share them with and help cultivate them in others, demonstrating them myself first.
I learned a little before and certainly during this process that: If you feel called to more, you are. That’s it. That’s the prerequisite. And like I said in the post ‘Heal Loudly,’ I volunteer myself as an imperfect tribute. Now, a little more boldly, though.
The creative wave now is to be seen trying.
One of the many things I learned embarking on this journey, building this workspace, and finally launching it, is that you also have to be ok being seeing STARTING.
You have to be ok and willing to post and share when you KNOW it’s version one (not draft one). When you know it could be better, but the marginal improvements you’d get waiting and perfecting might cause you to miss this ideal moment while adding very little (there’s always another ideal moment, of course).
It’s not getting caught up in trivialities when you know it’s only ever about the essence and energy anyway. It’s not having the perfect background or language or mix and hitting submit, post, and share, knowing those who need it will feel it.
What I’m hoping you walk away with from all this is not how great a tool Notion is or the value of creating a website but the importance of learning and understanding how you think and operate.
This structure of writing on a platform that publishes directly to podcast platforms and a website I can update on the go with stuff I love and stumble on is a direct reflection of who I am. It is seamlessly woven into how I go about living my life.
Because Notion has an app, so many of the ideas for posts I’ve shared came to me while on a walk. I would stop, pull my phone out, and write down the idea to return to in LITERAL MONTHS. Or record a stream of consciousness about it on my voice memos app.
So much of our lives, though, is “Do this one thing and solve all your problems.” As I said in Our Sacred Process, learning how you operate is the greatest way to unlock your genius and connect to your creative, powerful system.
So as was the case with me and Notion, I ask you:
What do you keep seeing and potentially ignoring that is trying to squeeze itself into your reality?
What have friends and strangers repeatedly suggested you try or look at or start that you’ve not taken seriously?
How might your essence be best shared with the world?
One of the things that excites me most about being so vocal, so expressive, and so open about my experiences and lessons is how it might spur you into the act of creating beautiful, necessary things. Sans all the pressure.
I can’t thank you enough for joining me on this journey. I’ll discuss it a bit more next in the last post for Wellspring, but when I zoom out I see that we are so supported and the future really is ours to create. I don’t think it’ll be without effort or resistance, but the nature of the things ready to come into form will truly blow us all away.
I’m so grateful and appreciative of the journey we’ve been on and all the beautiful, amazing, wonderful things ahead.
Thanks a ton.
Melvyn
Additional never-before-seen*** pages from my Notion
Drafting a figuring the titles, descriptions, and keynotes of the stages
The Kanban board where I organized posts, collected ideas, and kept track of progress
A working calendar for posts to organize dates and plan ahead
A screengrab of the larger list of books, docs, TV shows, movies, and media I hope to one day complete consuming
***I am KIDDING. Why would y’all care?? 😂😭