It's 10:25pm here in New Zealand, and I've just watched your latest episode. At this time in the evening, right before the senses sag under the weight of the world, I can start to feel this light. Not the internet, because the internet doesn’t glow, it flickers, it glitches, and at times it hungers. But here right now, we glow. We kindle something here, don't we?. It takes participation, though, and lately I’ve been thinking of this little Substack circle, now I see it as a campfire for the modern wanderer, the kind of fire you find only after you’ve wandered far enough away from the noise to hear your own words again. A fire seemed to gather from sentences. A fire fed by all our half-formed truths and tender confessions. This is a fire that doesn’t need to be perfect to keep us warm because meaning.. real meaning.. isn’t loud. It’s not a trumpet blast or a flawless thesis. Meaning is what happens when someone says, “I felt that too,” and something shifts in your chest like a star remembering its job.
That is what we’re doing here..
Trading sparks and sharing warmth. Letting our words be an ancient kind of smoke signal.. I’m here. I’m alive. I’m listening. Every time you post, it feels like another log dropped onto the flames, not to feed some algorithmic beast, but to keep the human thing burning. The old, primordial thing, the thing inside us that still believes a story can be medicine and a shared silence can be holy.
If you still yourself, you can almost hear the hiss and pop of it, the communal heat of strangers becoming a kind of soft tribe, even if only for the length of a paragraph
Maybe this is how meaning survives on a planet running on empty batteries: through small circles of people choosing to sit close, choosing to speak honestly, choosing to warm each other through the long night. So, welcome back to the fire, friends. I'll keep your spot open.
It's 10:25pm here in New Zealand, and I've just watched your latest episode. At this time in the evening, right before the senses sag under the weight of the world, I can start to feel this light. Not the internet, because the internet doesn’t glow, it flickers, it glitches, and at times it hungers. But here right now, we glow. We kindle something here, don't we?. It takes participation, though, and lately I’ve been thinking of this little Substack circle, now I see it as a campfire for the modern wanderer, the kind of fire you find only after you’ve wandered far enough away from the noise to hear your own words again. A fire seemed to gather from sentences. A fire fed by all our half-formed truths and tender confessions. This is a fire that doesn’t need to be perfect to keep us warm because meaning.. real meaning.. isn’t loud. It’s not a trumpet blast or a flawless thesis. Meaning is what happens when someone says, “I felt that too,” and something shifts in your chest like a star remembering its job.
That is what we’re doing here..
Trading sparks and sharing warmth. Letting our words be an ancient kind of smoke signal.. I’m here. I’m alive. I’m listening. Every time you post, it feels like another log dropped onto the flames, not to feed some algorithmic beast, but to keep the human thing burning. The old, primordial thing, the thing inside us that still believes a story can be medicine and a shared silence can be holy.
If you still yourself, you can almost hear the hiss and pop of it, the communal heat of strangers becoming a kind of soft tribe, even if only for the length of a paragraph
Maybe this is how meaning survives on a planet running on empty batteries: through small circles of people choosing to sit close, choosing to speak honestly, choosing to warm each other through the long night. So, welcome back to the fire, friends. I'll keep your spot open.