Dear Kindlings

This letter got very weird in a woo-woo way and I am kind of freaking out about it but it's fine

Hi. I cannot bring myself to call you “kindreds” because it feels too cheesy to me for reasons I can’t identify. I thought about kinders (which is weird to pronounce) and kindles (which is just weird) but finally settled on kindlings because I like the way it reminds me of a tiny spark which can eventually grow to full flame, which I think every creative effort kind of is? And every human soul kind of is too? So you are my kindling as I rub the two sticks of creativity together, and then each of us humans is this kindling of consciousness, filled with the potential to light up the whole world with our pretty, orange light under the right circumstances of combustion.

I dunno. It works in my head.

That’s what I’ve been thinking a shit-ton about lately. How can I keep my head in my own game and not worry one lick what anybody else thinks of me. You know? It’s like, I love writing, and I love sharing my writing online, but I get my head stuck up my own asshole (as my friend Leonie Dawson, who is Australian and amazing, says often in her Aussie accent) the second I start to write with readers in mind at all.

The problem isn’t one of “knowing your audience” or one of intention. The problem is that once that starts to happen, my creativity gets blockaded, and I start feeling weird social limits. I start catering to whatever voices I happen to hear (even though most people who read things don’t share anything at all). My human noggin’ jumps in with all the “great ideas” it can conjure about how to best appeal to folks, what they will like, what they won’t like, and, the true nemesis, “how I can write something that will spread.”

Yeah, shit. That last part. I’ve been writing on the Internet too fucking long. Someone needs to put me out to pasture.

I need to put myself out to pasture.

Pasture. Green grass. Rolling hills. Connectivity to self and to the Universe.

I really do need to get more pastorale up in this bitch.

Like this morning when I was meditating outside in my backyard under my Douglas Fir. I meditated with my eyes open, which I don’t usually do, and…

Whoa. My ADHD brain just did a “fast brain” thing where a bazillion insights all just happened in one insight and I understood something in a completely different way. The thing I understood was: I’m not writing to you, reader, whoever you are. I’m writing to someone/something else. Let’s see if I can retrace the steps so I can explain what I mean.

I was at the point where I was remembering my meditation, and I was remembering having my eyes open, and I was remembering that while my eyes were open I was focused on this certain tree across the alleyway—a tree I find incredibly beautiful that I see regularly on my walks here in Tacoma. It’s leaves are a dark green, and there are these clusters of tiny orange fruit which are so robust and so prolific that it always makes me think very fondly about the true abundance undergirding this Universe. This place we are? It’s a factory of abundance, and when nature (which is another way of saying The Universe because they are one and the same force but one is tied to this planet and the other pertains to the whole everything) finds a way to bring matter into existence, it really seems to revel in it, to make it more and more, to expand, bolus upon bolus, fruit upon fruit, tens upon tens, hundreds up on hundreds, thousands upon thousands, millions upon millions—like those orange clusters in their beautiful arrays serve for me as some kind of fractal of the limitlessness of the galaxies in the universe, and their truly fecund quality—just more and more and more of the good stuff… of the stuff, and that’s how it is here too because this place I inhabit is just as much “space” as outer space is “space”—so this prolificness is the selfsame creative energy that we can tap into ourselves somehow, and be (my mind is laughing right now, but this really is word that fits) kindling for this prolificness. Somehow we participate. Somehow, magically, beautifully, through our thoughts, we participate in this beautiful creation of abundance.

(See? Right there. I just worried if “readers” would get board, and felt a tiny flash of shame about the above paragraph.)

Anyway, as I thought about this tree, I immediately thought to “ask a reader” what kind of trees those are, in the way one does in an online space, where there is this immediate feedback loop and so it feels immediate in its conversational quality. And in fact there is a sub-current of “community-building” motivation to ask things that people can answer. And a lot of the time the answer can come almost instantly.

That is not why I’m here. That’s not what I’m doing here. It can’t be. It has to be different. That stuff is the exact reason my mind gets bogged down and eventually gets stuck up my own ass when I blog or try to write in other ways online—at least in recent years.

So, I realized: I need to be writing one person and it can’t be a reader. It has to always be someone who is not reading. For this space, the readership is purely observational and cannot be participatory.

Then my brain thought of Anne Frank and I laughed internally (for one millisecond) that she was talking to Kitty (I think that was it?) because that name was weirdly similar to the name I came up with for this letter—but I remembered that this served her so well.

And I knew I needed to do the same. That when I am not musing in a letter to a specific person (like my Mom last week, or like Sylvia Plath to whom I wrote a letter that I haven’t yet published) my subject must not be a mystical collection of Readers who may or may not provide instantaneous feedback. That shit messes with my writing head after a while. I’ve never noticed just how much until this moment.

I think this project is going to be very healing for me.

Still writing and still sharing. But allowing my mind the internal privacy it needs to feel fully driftless, and able to wander to whatever subjects it desires.

(Again, an impulse to write something about “this is so boring, I bet, huh?” Methinks this writing-to-a-readership thing might be a hard habit to break.

Anyway, these letters won’t be to Kitty, and they won’t be to Kindlings.

They will be to Kindling.

To the Kindling of the universe. I am blowing and starting a fire. And I writing words meant for the Kindling, the point of action between no-fire and fire, the agent of combustion.

I am reviewing my mind for other random thoughts and tidbits:

* I really do want to know what those trees are called and maybe someday I will look it up.
* I fear that my letters to authors and stuff will sound dumb, but I’m pushing past that fear because damnit, if I feel aligned and it feels right to me, that’s all that matters
* I really love you, kindling, and I’m glad to be writing to you. I’m not even sure exactly who or what you are, but I do feel a lot of affection for you—like I have stumbled into some kind of entity that is enjoying being recognized, called by name, and addressed by letter.

Thank you, kindling, for taking my correspondence.

*One time, in vision, Grandpa Woody came and instructed me to write every single day. I am wondering if this vehicle will become the way I manage to do that.

*I am really fucking tired, and Lolly just texted me saying she has Covid which is a real bummer. Not sure what we are going to do kids wise, but I suppose we’ll see.

All right kindling, thank you for being my friend. Again, as I said your name, I felt your energetic self somehow—you are a part of the writing process, I feel, and I am addressing you in this interesting, unique way, and I get the feeling you are enjoying it. I just got some serious energetic palpitations in my chest area as I wrote those words, so I can tell you are listening.

Is it you that will take the letters I write to their destinations?

Did you already take my letter to my mom to her?

It arrived to her immediately. It gets to the subjects the instant you press the button.

Did they she like it?

Yes.

Did she have a message for me in response?

Not today. Ask again in the future.

Are you my guide? My spirit guide?

Yes.

Whoa. I’ve been wanting to get in touch with you and have a name for you. It’s super, super weird and surprising that it is happening here in this format.

We have been waiting very patiently. We enjoyed your Daily Downloads previously. Perhaps you are now ready to advance to the next level.

Okay. That’s fine, but it feels like this started taking a direction I never intended. I already feel your answer coming. You’re laughing.

Remember what you called this place? Remember your intention? To be limitless? Driftless? This is the kind of thing that happens when a person truly does take down their walls and accesses creative impetus.

I want so badly to say some things to my audience, just this once, just to clarify something.

Why don’t you then? Limitless. Remember?

Guys, readers, KindlingS with an “s,” the people I started this letter to, I want you to know that I had no fucking clue that this is the direction this letter would go. I’m just following my heart and mind forward into this limitless space, and somehow I accidentally started writing a letter to my Spirit Guides in a cosmic sense. I have always wondered what to call them—they do communication with me somewhat often, thought not as frequently in written form. But I did get the thing I was saying about a message from my Grandpa Woody (who often communed with those who had passed on during his lifetime and was something of a medium) saying that I was to write daily and share those writings. And then for several days, I did this thing called the Daily Download—I believe there is still one I put up on my blog and left there. It was super unusual and felt like I was getting messages from the universe. But then I started literally getting messages from people reading who thought I was crazy. As in, strangers, on the Internet, who followed my writing elsewhere, were dropping messages telling me they were worried I needed to maybe be fucking institutionalized.

So, even though I’m not really interested in feedback here (in the way I explained above—just because it messes with my creative mojo and gets in my head) I just want you to know that at that time, about a year ago, their responses really freaked me out, and I had to check in with people I loved to make sure I wasn’t going fucking insane. Because when you’re doing something online that nobody in your life really even knows or cares much about (isn’t writing the loneliest fucking thing? I love it though!), and you are the only one that can vouch for your own brain in response to real humans on the Internet worrying you are losing your fucking mind, there’s kind of room for doubt, if you know what I mean. Like “sirs and madams, I assure you that, using the checks and balances of this very mind in question, it has been determined that this instrument, about which you have doubt, and with which I have conducted this assessment, is, indeed SOUND.

I mean, freaky, right? Like, how the fuck would be sure I wasn’t losing my marbles without outside eyes viewing the situation. Only crazy people say “I’m NOT crazy, so I don’t NEED to verify if I’m crazy!” Right?

Anyway, I checked in with a few of my people they all reassured me that they could see my continuity of mind, and that what was happening, while odd, made complete sense in the context of the spiritual connection they know me to have, and my family history/proclivity towards mediumship, prophecy, clairvoyance, clairsentience, etc.

But that shit did really mess with me at the time, and so I started not publishing the Daily Downloads, and then I stopped doing them altogether. And some of the were weird admittedly. But they feel powerful to me, and they help me understand things about this universe, and sometimes I weep with joy as I write them, and I think I’m gonna be doing those some the time here? And I don’t want what happened before to happen again.

So, I am asking you to just trust that I know what I’m doing here, and trust that the people around me would let me know if there was a problem. And trust that I have genuinely and seriously investigated this on several fronts, and truly know myself to be sound of mind completely.

This is just some interesting, weird spiritual shit, and I’m inviting you to GET INTO IT.

Or, as Anna says (who is a medium, in the same family tradition I mentioned): “Medium Tings”

Okay, love you whoever you are, dear reader. I guess I’m going radio silent and just focusing on writing letters to people and then sometimes, it seems, if this letter is any indication, I will be writing letters to kindling (ope, I felt it again as I wrote that. SO COOL AND INTERESTING) and those might get real interesting. If they’re anything like the Daily Downloads of yesteryear were, they are actually more like a sequence of “question/answer”

I can’t believe I’m gonna be sharing that stuff here. Exciting and fun and a little nerve-racking.

ANYway, thank you for reading this long-ass weird letter. I really, really hope you keep reading as I go forward, even though, for my own creative health I am going to be addressing others and not you specifically (for the most part at least). Just know that I love you, cheesily and genuinely, whoever you are, and every letter I send has a secret message buried in, all about how you are worthy of love and connection and good things, and I hope for the best for each of you, whoever you are.

Love, Joshua

All right, kindling, I squeezed in a little message to my readers, and now I think I’m ready to put them all the way out of my mind.

Come back tomorrow morning and we will do the first thing.

Okay. I will. See you then.