A place to be human

What to expect with a paid subscription

Hello!

If you’re reading this you’re a subscriber to my publication, The Tradition of Living Beautifully. Thanks for the interest in my writing, and for supporting my work either as a paid or free subscriber. Last week I published my first essay in some time, and if you read it, you know I’ve had a lot on my plate lately. I suspended paid subscriptions until I could get the edits of my manuscript back to my editor, which I’ve finally, most joyously, managed to do a few weeks ago. Paid subscriptions are now turned back on, as with the book off my plate for now, I again have space to write for Substack.

If you’re already a paid subscriber you need not do anything; your subscription will reboot and off we go. But in thinking about the reality of writing and content creation, in thinking about how saturated our world is with voices and emails and information, I wanted to be honest about my capacity to share good work with you. The essay I published last week, which I’m rather proud of, took some time to write. Some essays come out quickly, as if they’re falling out of your mouth; others want to emerge slowly, like a sculpture inside a block of marble you need to chip away at.

But whichever way they arrive, I always put a lot of time and care into my writing before the essays depart and I share them with all of you. I’m a bit of a perfectionist, reading and re-reading things until I almost have the whole thing memorized. I like to edit, and enjoy finding what I’m trying to say as I’m writing it, but mainly I want to share good work. Really, very good work, and I don’t want to just email you because I have to get something out this week. The way I see it is, if you’re sitting still long enough to read something I wrote, it better be worth your time.

Essays like this one and this one, they don’t come every week. They’re thoughtful, deep, bubbling works that can’t be churned out like something created on an assembly line. Realistically, I imagine I can send out two, thoughtfully written, deeply engaging essays a month, along with an audio version for paid subscribers only, so you can listen to the essays on your walks or while washing dishes or whatever else throughout your day. If the time to get something else out opens up, I’ll share more content exclusively for paid subscribers, including updates on our house remodel, now that things are really starting to come together, as well as excerpts from my forthcoming memoir, The Dreams that Break Your Heart, but I wanted to be honest and transparent about what you’re paying for.

For $5 a month, you get at least two deep, rich pieces of writing in an oversaturated world of not so thought-out thoughts being shared hither and thither, audio versions of the essays, and special access to subscriber chats and comments. And for those of you who aren’t publishing on Substack, just so you know, when you pay $5 a month, I only get $4 of it, with Substack taking its percentage. If you subscribe at the yearly rate of $50, the cost per month to you for a subscription is even less, coming to about $4 per month.

I’d rather give you more quality than more content. I’d rather give you more authenticity than more stuff, more honesty than merely more words. The pressure to come up with something to say—whether it’s good or not, whether the world needs it or not—every single week or every single day is exactly why there’s so much noise online and in our ears right now. I don’t want to contribute to that.

Your $5 a month doesn’t pay my family’s mortgage (not yet, at least!), but it is a few more bucks in the bank that helps keep daily living moving along in a more bearable way. It does help to keep me writing, thinking about the things I write about, by, if nothing else, keeping at bay the need for me to take other jobs that pull me away from creativity. So to those of you who are paid subscribers, thank you for that gift. It isn’t taken lightly.

I pay for a couple of Substack publications myself, and I’ve noticed that even though it’s something I want to read, I can’t even get to that content every time the authors post. I’ve noticed that it doesn’t matter to me how much content these people give me, just that when they do, it’s thoughtful and inspirational and beautiful.

We are living in dark times. Maybe the world has always been dark, maybe there’s been times of light and times of worse darkness, but where we are now is pretty bleak. People harm children with alacrity, the internet is a place where evil gathers and pedophiles gleefully share their disgusting crimes. People are shot in grocery store parking lots. There are wars afoot and atrocities abound. All of our systems, the ones we once believed in, from government to health care, are broken, and no one seems selfless or uncorrupted enough to fix them. Artificial Intelligence will swiftly make our society one in which we literally, actually, in fact, no longer know what’s real and what is not. Which, I have the sinking feeling, is precisely the point—to add more chaos to what is already such a chaotic world.

What I do want to do here is be an antidote to all of that. Here, I want to be human. I want to be human with you. I want to remember life before all of this became our lives. I want to continue in a way that holds on to what is real and true. I want to remember nature, community, family, tradition, ancestors, love and beauty. And I can’t do that at a machine pace; I have to do it at the pace of a human, a mother, to be specific, a mother and a wife and a sensitive woman.

If all that works for you, I’m so grateful for your continued interest and financial support. If that doesn’t work for you, I understand, but I wanted us to be on the same page.

I’m excited for this return to Substack writing. I find myself going through my days gathering images and thoughts like you gather vegetables from the garden, knowing that at some point I can turn the bounty into work to share with all of you. When you write to tell me you’ve been moved by reading an essay of mine, been inspired, been taken to a place you felt inside of you but couldn’t find the words for, it makes me feel in community, with the like-minded. Well, it makes me feel human.

Thanks for being here with me, truly.