A Short Century

100 newsletters, a sale, and a little faith

This is, somehow, the 100th iteration of this newsletter. I’m not quite sure how I found my rhythm and started writing more consistently in the second half of 2023, but I’m grateful that so many of you have supported this writing recently, and that so many of you have stuck with me since we launched this. It turns out that I am able to write more regularly when I know wonderful people will be reading, sharing, providing feedback, and more.

So, thank you. Thank you for the massive support you’ve lent me in so many ways. This has been a strange and difficult year, and I times I have written to allow myself to keep going as much as I’ve written for you. But after one hundred newsletters it’s become even clearer to me that I want to devote more and more of myself to this work. To help me reach that goal I’m launching my first sale, which is a 40% off situation. You can subscribe for a year for $30, or go month-to-month for 3 bucks a month. I hope this makes being a supporting reader more accessible, and I hope you’ll take me up on this offer.

I understand that not everyone will be able to become a supporting reader, and I assure you that lots and lots of my writing will never be behind a paywall. But this holiday season I will make a push, alongside this sale that runs through New Year's Day, because I want to be able to provide you with quality writing that is well researched and well edited. Within the next year I hope to start working with an editor, as I’ve written to you before. It’s hard to know what the future will bring, but I hope to be able to provide you with writing that helps make sense of these turbulent times and helps you to take action to make this a better world.

Photo by Edward Howell on Unsplash

This past year has been filled with immense and ongoing difficulties as well as radiant moments of hope breaking through. Folks everywhere are shaping and articulating and building a vision of change in the form of resurgent people power. Just as the threat and reality of fascism begins to block out the sky, millions of us are starting to fight back in a more coordinated and powerful movement than we’ve seen in decades. I’ve tried to both chronicle and provide some perspective in this tumultuous time. Mine is just one voice in a multitude, but I think and hope there are unique elements of my writing. I hope, for instance, that I’ve been able to offer a little fuel and a little shift in perspective that helps us to continue on. I also like to think that the little mantra I adopted at the beginning of this project “writing that zooms out” is one I’ve largely stuck to. Sometimes we all get bogged down in the weeds, but I try to take a step back here with you and help us see the bigger patterns at play, even if they’re not always pleasant ones. And when our reality is unpleasant, I hope that I've helped us move towards addressing the problems at hand in some small way.

In the coming year we’ll be faced with many of the same difficulties. There is certainly a reckoning coming in 2024, perhaps multiple reckonings. And the only way we’ll get through them is together. What I hope to emphasize and reemphasize is that a paradigm shift is needed, and that it’s starting to break through the cracks of this world. This shift looks like caring for each other, knowing that we are more powerful than we’ve been taught, and that we can access that power if we build as a collective instead of scrabbling alone. Every day we have opportunities to act, opportunities to build. I hope I can help make these opportunities more visible, more accessible to you in the new year. I hope to play some small part in helping your mindset shift and in helping you plug into the vital organizing that could change our world. If you’re able to support me in this work, I am immensely grateful. And if not I completely understand, I will continue to write as much as I can, and I hope it proves useful and helpful to you.

Photo by Agence Olloweb on Unsplash

I’d like to thank supporting readers the only way (or the best way) I know how, with a little writing for these cold winter days. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been in need of some faith recently, and I’ve found it hard to come by. The one person I can turn to right now is the late, great Octavia Butler. Many of you will know her from your own reading, or my Earthseed series from last winter, but today I want to dive into her words as an offering to supporting subscribers:

“All that you touch

You Change.

 All that you Change

 Changes you.

 The only lasting truth

 is Change.

 God

 is Change.”

― Octavia E. Butler