Over the past few years we’ve seen the rise and rise of the email newsletter. Personally I’d prefer that more of these were blogs that had RSS feeds but I understand the economics. They’ve become a way of talented people earning some income through people paying for a subscription for their work. I have a mix of free & paid newsletters that I subscribe to that provides me with a steady flow of thought provoking comment, expertise, wisdom & insights into a whole host of topics.

I regularly subscribe and unsubscribe. If I find myself not really reading a particular newsletter on a regular basis I’ll unsubscribe, if I find there are things worth saving or I want to come back I’ll keep it going. I’m always interested in hearing about well-written newsletters that offer value to the reader, so if you have any suggestions let me know.

So I thought I’d take the time to introduce them, why I subscribe, what value there is and who knows maybe you’ll find something there for you too.

The other newsletters I subscribe to are: Jon Tyson, Helen Joyce, Leah Libresco Sargeant, John Ellis, James Clear

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I can’t quite remember how I came across this Substack but from the first read I knew I wanted more. The first reason why I felt like that is because Paul Kingsnorth is a wonderful writer. The words had power and captivated me. It was, is, writing I aspire to, writing I admire, writing that I think, all too often is frustratingly just out of reach for me. There was, is, I think, a wildness to the way he writes, it evokes heath and dale, mountains and stormy skies. It was English untamed and yet with the wry self-deprecating English humour that I think is a national gift and I loved it. The second and yet more substantial reason was the subject matter. This was an exploration of a subject through wild paths and forgotten histories that I had never been aware of that took you deep into the heart of what Kingsnorth calls, ‘the Machine’.

The ultimate project of modernity, I believe now, is to replace nature with technology, and to rebuild the world in purely human shape, the better to fulfill the most ancient human dream: to become gods. What I call the Machine is the nexus of power, wealth and technology that has emerged to make this happen. We are increasingly unable to escape our total absorption by this thing, and we are reaching the point where its control over nature, both wild and human, is becoming unstoppable.

The Machine we are building is taking us at warp speed into a new way of being human. Away from the spiritual, towards the material; away from nature, towards technology; away from organic culture towards a planned technocracy. It is nearly impossible to even keep up with the pace and scale of change now. I doubt that any of us really has a grip on what is happening.

I’ve long come against the consumerism of the Western world, though I wonder if I’ve ever been as consumerist as I am now as a middle-aged father. I see a massive global hollowing out of the spiritual and cultural lives of hundreds of millions of people that is profoundly unhealthy and harmful to the planet and all its inhabitants.

There it was, all of a sudden, right in my face. Eating. Drinking. Buying colourful things. Boats, vans, bikes, beer, steak, new clothes, second hand clothes, burgers, chocolate bars, old castles, stately homes, cappuccinos, pirate adventure parks, golf courses, spas, tea rooms, pubs. Food, drink, fun, entertainment, games, probably some sex somewhere in the mix. All of it came together suddenly into a kind of package of sensory overload and I saw that this was what we were, what we had become without really thinking or planning it. Stimulating the senses, then reacting to the stimulus: this was what our society was all about. Feeding the pleasure centres, spending and spending to keep it all coming at us.

https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/want-is-the-acid

Immediately I resonated with the themes, I saw the same problems, I felt the same disorientation. And I felt the same powerlessness in the face of the vast monstrous ‘machine’.

I see the Machine, humming gently to itself as it binds us with its offerings, as it dangles its promises before us and slowly, slowly, slowly reels us in. I think of the part of it we interact with daily, the glowing white interface through which we volunteer every detail of our lives in exchange for information or pleasure or stories told by global entertainment corporations who commodify our culture and sell it back to us. I think of the words we use to describe this interface, which we carry with us in our pockets wherever we go, as we are tracked down every street and into every forest that remains: the web; the net.

I think: these are things designed to trap prey.

https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/you-are-harvest

And I wondered about the same questions of how can we live lives of wonder & spirituality? How can we urgently re-wild not just the forests and the fields but our own interior worlds.

What I felt, in short, was that there is no part of the world or the heart which is not in the broadest sense ‘religious’, which is to say longing for a connection with the transcendent mystery above and around us. Whether this feeling manifests in a conventionally ‘religious’ form or not, it will manifest somehow. What this means in turn is that we are not living in some post-religious ‘secular’ or ‘political’ or ‘rational’ or even ‘modern’ age. We are living in a time that is just as firmly bound up in deep metaphysical struggles as any other: we just pretend that this is not the case.

https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-migration-of-the-holy

So I paid up and I’ve not regretted it once.

At this point I’d try to introduce the project Kingsnorth has undertaken but, wonderfully as if he was my very own blogging Saint Nicholas, he has just written that himself: The Story So Far: a summary of my essays, and a guide to my project. I can only implore you to read and then make regular time to read his essays (and they are essays in the proper sense of the word so see it like reading a chapter of a book – which I suspect may be one of the outcomes at the end of all this).