A note from me about a new/old project

Why not take on more writing?

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The New Remarkable, Reviving a Personal Newsletter

Things change

[Note: this post appears in both of my newsletters]

Last year I started writing a very personal newsletter after life, my life, threw me a stupid blow involving excessive drinking. The newsletter was called The Remarkable and its goal was to honestly record and share my experience dealing with that reality. A personal reality.

But this past April two things happened. My primary newsletter, The Witness Chronicles, which documented my reactions to the increasingly bonkers election year, began to gain traction and I found myself writing nearly daily about unfolding events. My personal letter got lost in the daily job of decoding politics as I saw them.

But now it is post election and the results were disheartening, to put it mildly. Trump’s win has a lot of us contemplating what went wrong and how we can resist his efforts to destroy democracy. A kind of big deal, actually an overwhelming one.

I’m still writing The Witness Chronicles because none of this is remotely over. But I’ve felt a need to write something more personal, more down to earth. So I’m reviving The Remarkable as a place to explore personal change in the face of major cultural changes. Personal essays and life lessons, though that sounds a little more serious than I envision.

It will not be a place to discuss politics, though sometimes they may creep in. I am a spiritual person, though not religious in the western sense, but I look for glimpses of a bigger life where I can find them. Buddhism is my general point of view but not in any organized way other than meditation. But meditation is a good starting point for this personal writing.

I’m in what I call the third third of life, having survived youth and middle age, so I cannot deny that perspective. I’m not a kid anymore and I have no desire to be one again, though I would certainly enjoy being a little more flexible.

Part of what I want to write about, as much for myself as my readers, are the points in life where, when I look back, I see turning points. Places where growth occurred. But I equally will be writing about daily life and those places where we might glimpse something important, places and events that expand our perspective.

This will not be daily. I’m already writing nearly a thousand words daily and that’s a lot, but this will be weekly and, like The Witness Chronicles, readers, both free and paid will receive all the content and will have the opportunity, if you wish, to support me through both paid subs and Buy Me A Coffee. That site is a legitimate way to support online creatives with small donations.

This is an evolving project, so what I’ve just written is just a sketch, notes as much to you the reader as they are for myself.

Frankly, this is a form of self-therapy for me after a wrenching year of insane politics led on one side by fear and open hate. I’m going to try to offer a little quiet, a sort of forest bathing in words. I hope it offers something similar to readers. We certainly need it!

Thanks,

Martin

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