Exciting Changes Ahead: Launching a Free Substack Newsletter for My Blog Subscribers

Friends, I hope you all are well - this will be a relatively short post, as I'm in the process of making a few changes.    As always, I'll be continuing my posts about death, grief and loss - from the context of biomechanical death all the way up to the death of culture and civilization, of course, and everything in between.    

For years now, I've gotten private emails through my contact page from readers - I love this feature and want to keep it.  I really do read every email I get, and I like hearing stories from other people, even when they're stories about loss.    I think we are all storytellers at heart - we tell stories about everything: life, loss, love, death, grief, work, and more.   And these stories are what create the timelines of our lives, and they're the cornerstone of who we are.   I'm saying this because I don't want to stop that practice - I want to keep reading your stories! Even when I can't repsond, I still read them, and they're important to me.  

We are all storytellers. 

A couple of years ago, I toyed around with Substack, and created a profile there and made some posts.   I am on the fence about whether I like it or not as a publication tool overall, but it might serve me well for sending out occasional newsletters. So I've circled back around to it, and I plan to re-engage it as a newsletter service and use it to write a once-monthly or biweekly newsletter to send out to anyone who wants to receive it.    

One important item of note, however: it will be a free subscription. I do not intend to use it as a tool to generate money; I'm not trying to get paid from it. I want to engage in dialogue, after all, and no one should have to pay to do that.  So all access/content will be free to anyone who signs up.  I don't exactly know yet how often I'll post: right now, I'm committing to once each month, and I'm going to try to make these posts on the full moon each month, because I think there is importance in honoring the cycles of the Earth, and this is one other way I'm trying to do it.   So the letters won't arrive on the exact same day each month, but they'll be monthly newsletters nonetheless.  I may later on decide to write newsletters every couple of weeks, but death is a heavy subject, no matter how it is framed, and I think there's only so much of it people can talk about before it grows tiresome. So for now, monthly will be just fine. 

I'll still be posting here, and I'm trying to commit to doing that weekly now.  It's hard, I won't lie.   I don't produce insightful posts when I don't feel inspired, and I can go literally go months without inspiration. But letters from all of you tell me that you want more frequent and consistent posts, so I will try to honor that, even if I'm posting about an upcoming change or announcing a gap.   

Thank you all for your support and engagement.  I want your stories and your thoughts - even if I can't respond individually.  I hope to be able to offer something of use to you - whether you're journeying through grief over a love one's passing, or you're navigating some other significant change in your life. I hope I can offer hope here through the lens of reimagining what living and dying look like.    

Stay tuned for more later on about this, but for now, just know that I'm working on this behind the scences and I'll make another announcement later on about it when it comes to launch. Thank you for sticking with me.