The future of this newsletter

& look how far we have come.

Sep 03, 2022

If I could trace a single continuity across the year and a half since I started Surrender Now, it would be grief. I started writing Volume I, ‘Breakdown & Recovery,’ after a seven-year hiatus from literary composition when my friend Daphne died last April.

The keenness of that grief — which was felt not just for Daphne, but for all the friends I have lost in the last few years to deaths of despair — hooked me back into awareness of the power of my craft: I wanted to heal with my words.

But then Raphael died in the midst of publishing my story, and I was the one who needed healing. The sleepless nights of early bereavement left me with a choice: I could either dwell upon the horror of my sudden loss, or relive the sequence of miracles that brought him to me in the first place.

Putting my stories into words was a way to remember that there are no cruel accidents in a life justly lived, and no pain is without purpose in the flow of experience. If miracles are the subject of Surrender Now, then my method as an author has been to explore the pain that brings miracles to life through the lens of subjective experience.

A lot changes in a year and a half, at least in my world. The discipline of posting, week after week, assumed a ritual significance that I did not interrupt even whilst living through the depths of despair. It is no exaggeration to say that this project saved my life. If I have healed with my words, the healing that took place was my own.

This is my 86th newsletter. Those of you who have been around since the beginning have now received a sum total of at least 160,000 words from my brain into your inbox. I have plenty more stories to tell and three more volumes plotted out for Surrender Now, but I will be taking a few months’ break for a few reasons.

The first is that life commitments beyond this newsletter are beckoning for attention. The second is that the period of nineteenth months I spent living at Samaya Ashram — which is the subject of Volume IV, ‘Transformation’ — is damnably difficult to write about, because that place was like a portal to the nonsense dimension.

The whole concept of being a singular self kind of bilged out like an overripe mango fermenting on the ground in the heat of summer, and that kind of experience doesn’t lend itself easily to linear narration. Even so, it was a time and a place truly aligned with the miraculous; and it was there that I found what was needed to work miracles in myself.

I look forward to telling you all about it. I will be back in your inboxes later this year with a fresh vibe and snippets from Volume IV, ‘Transformation.’

Things I have loved lately:

The Buddhist Cosmology series by Ajahn Sona.
- This series of dialogues between two Theravada monks offers an endlessly fascinating and detailed account of Buddhist worldview and afterlife.
Raised by Wolves by Jess Ho.
- Poignant and viscerally funny, this is everything a memoir needs to be. I laughed and I wept and I wanted more. Jess also writes a newsletter, which I recommended here.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh.
- A hilarious, dark, inappropriate, deftly-executed and brilliant novel. I read it in a single feverish session, unable to put it down. Thank you Josephine for this one.
The pageless function on Google Docs.
- A private thrill, but well worth sharing.
Jackfruit season!
- With a few hours of latex-y prep-work and seed peeling, I can feed my family three meals in one day from a single jackfruit: ripe segments for breakfast, curried strings for lunch, and stir-fried seeds with chili and garlic for dinner. Life is good.
It has also been a very good week for my favourite newsletters: