I've been losing almost everyone I love to machines.
Perhaps it's too late for them. For you?
Once a moon I disappear, type twelve pages, and mail the thing.
You disappear to read it... unfold the paper, unfold yourself.
Reserve your issue
Read the first one cover to cover. Not moved? One email, full refund, keep the paper.
Dear fearless reader...
Everywhere we go... glazed eyes on screens. Every day, more are tumbling into the net. Text them at any hour, any day, and they answer in seconds... seconds! It doesn't matter if they're with their newborn or on a tropical island.
We're never quite alone. Deprived of solitude. Deprived of the pleasure of knowing ourselves and the world.
I say 'almost' everyone because a few are still reachable. The signs are obvious. Bright, curious eyes: a passion. I've been trying to articulate it for a while.
Somebody at Eyesafe did the math and says a person born today will spend twenty-one years looking at a screen. I don't know how they arrived at that. It sounds low.
Diversions. Navigations. Addictions. Tools. What's the difference?
The false promise
Anyone selling you tech-based freedom immediately tethers you to the thing you're supposed to escape. The detox app. The dumbphone with a companion app. The newsletter about attention, delivered with forty videos about mindfulness.
Whether we're researching the beauty of tech or the crisis of it, it's the same net... and we're in it. AI doesn't really solve problems. Tech advances don't really make us happier.
You bought the notebook. You've done the morning pages. Maybe the notebook stayed shut, waiting. Analog cures can fail too.
We need to invent or rediscover a few rules to stay alive. I don't know if it is possible with a smartphone always in tow. But they're making it impossible to function without one.
Being embodied matters... to touch, feel, hold a memory.
The vacuous disembodied thought is dead. We're returning to tactility, to the moment, to a sense-awareness of time. That's why there is this collective return to paper.
The ocean times three
The ocean taught me, broke me, and then resurrected me.
In 2005 I was 'awakened' on a beach in Northern California. I use the term for a lack of options. Walking alongside my father, lugging a wind-up16mm film camera up the beach near Mendocino, notions of legacy swirling in my head. A woman ran past us and off into the distance. When I saw her footprints in the sand, a thought I couldn't quite catch about the things we leave behind. With a swish, a Pacific wave swept in and wiped them out. The beach was mirror smooth, silver-skied. My eyes filled with tears. The camera suddenly felt like dead weight. I was complete, beyond all suffering.
I fell back into my life, going number and number by day. Wrong relationships, wrong motives, wrong thoughts. I mean, 'right' in the sense that they brought me around full circle, but painful. The ocean had provided 'salvation' before and I needed her again. And so it happened...
San Diego. 2008. Late afternoon. A Pacific wave reared up and took me into the depths. My head hit the ocean floor, my right arm lost feeling. Tumbling in the surf, I eventually clawed my way into the light and was taken on a stretcher to the hospital in La Jolla.
"If you were ten pounds heavier, you'd probably be dead," the doctor said.
I was seven days into a water fast. My weight: 155. My usual weight: 165. So when someone says fasting (or losing weight) can save your life, I hear it differently.
When I crawled out of the ocean, I no longer believed in accidents.
That break made me a healer, to the constellations and within my own heart. Years sitting with people in real anguish, helping them unwind lifelong trauma. I believe that we are broken in order to heal. A life upgrade is always preceded by a descent. Make a lunge for heaven, and all hell breaks loose. Etc.
Then Covid came. The healing business, touch-based, was carried online. The typewriter business grew, and it grew on a screen — orders, ads, spreadsheets, a phone that never stopped. I became a man who limped from screen to screen all day and called the digital double "life." The writing slowed. The sketches dried up. My dreams languished.
And the ocean, the thing that woke me and then nearly killed me? Whenever I visited a beach I used to run and flip into the surf. Now I trudge out and put a toe in.
What changed? Not the ocean.
Last September I volunteered to drive a bus full of Waldorf fourth graders to the Outer Banks. The children were powerful in their insistence on presence. There was only one moment, this one. When I tried to get them to think in terms of time, or to limit an activity because of a future one, it never went according to plan. What is time, anyway, but an agreed upon prison? They said it by flinging stones into the surf.
I insisted they not wear sneakers into the ocean. Somehow they convinced me that it was the best idea. Then I'm carrying sneakers back, hiding from counselors that require shoes on at all times. If you're ever in the present, why suffer at all? Why not just break every rule and throw your shoes off?
I'll tell you how to destroy a perfect moment: begin to wonder whether it will last forever.
Grow up, but never grow stiff. Commit to what brings you back to life. Un-commit to what brings you further away.
The escape hatch
Here's how it works. Around each new moon I become impossible to reach for a while, sit at a vintage typewriter (usually a 1959 Smith-Corona), and type about twelve pages: what I found while I was gone, what I'm practicing, what readers wrote back.
Folded, stamped, mailed to your door.
Then it's your turn. You take the envelope somewhere quiet, become impossible to reach for a while, and unfold the paper. That's the practice. The letter is the excuse for it.
Welcome to this cult of sanity; a place where a few people are fighting for what it means to be human, through these little handmade gestures. As a coach and somatic healer, I didn't want to fight for people's attention in another online group. I wanted something different... opposite, in fact. A community that lives off screen, by the moon.
There is no digital version. No PDF, no archive, no app, no link. Nothing remains if you burn it. I feel free in this paper because only you and a devoted circle ever see it. It doesn't exist digitally, so no trail of backlash. We can be free in the writing and the reading.
Being human, I sometimes miss the moon. Inspiration doesn't fail, but my fingers and the typewriter sometimes do.
We unfold the paper, and we unfold ourselves.
That idea hit me in the face one midnight.
Why the old machine?
Well, I run Classic Typewriter Co, where we restore these beauties, for one. For another, they don't make them anymore, so one has to reach back into the past... an idea I am fond of anyway.
And no notification has ever come through a Smith-Corona.
Then do something with it
You sit down somewhere inspiring and open the letter, and for the length of a long letter your life is returned to you.
Each issue carries a lesson, a small doable task tuned to the season. Take it off the page, into your life.
Month by month we're rebuilding ourselves, reclaiming our bodies, opening our eyes. Move. Touch wind. Kiss water. We invite the world to lean in a little more and whisper.
Your genius — your unique gifts — bounce back online. The digital maw has been eating them for too long.
Give it back. Feed your own precious work instead of an algorithm and your work breathes again: stranger, but truer, definitely more alive.
People might ask what you're doing differently.
What's in the envelope?
The letter — about twelve pages, typed and signed by hand. A philosophically tinged narrative about almost everything, and the essentials I stumble on. It draws from Anthroposophy, the Fourth Way, esoteric Christianity, the Stoics, somatic healing... and from Whitman and Kerouac, who taught me more about this human experience without being didactic than any religion.
The month's lesson — one deliberate practice, woven into the letter, to carry off the page.
Replies to letters from readers walking the same path. I ask two questions and print the answers, anonymously: What brings you closer to life? What brings you further away?
And, when it's ready, the NEXUS. I'm building it out of paper: a series of dated cards representing my most important, intimate, mundane, life-changing thoughts. I won't know which until I leaf through them years from now. It's like catching fireflies — they must be caught in such a way that they stay aglow. When it's ready, I'll show you how.
The creative life balances on a knife's edge between the force that hardens you and the force that scatters you. For me the balance comes from rhythm. From practice. From turning back toward living things while the machines swallow everyone around you.
This isn't polished wisdom from a mountaintop. It's field notes from a man who falls asleep, wakes back up, and commits, again and again, to staying awake.
Beware: there shall be typos, misprints, mistakes.
HUMAN, all too human.
The offer
This paper is an attempt to catch something human... something that is becoming increasingly rare in the age of AI and digital solutions for everything. The world needs alive... ALIVE people now more than ever. We need them to hold that frequency madly, forever.
I don't think we need more information, do you? We need a few slow, deliberate messages that cut through the murk, and a rhythm to hang them on. Something real, arriving at your door, by the moon.
I type every issue by hand. It's then copied and sent out to a community of believers, seekers, humans.
Forty-seven dollars a month for twelve pages of paper. I know. Weigh it against the right thing. It's the community that does it for me.
$47 a month.
Read your first issue cover to cover. If it doesn't move you, send one email and I'll refund it in full — no forms, no back-and-forth.
Keep the issue.
Cancel anytime.
'Almost everyone'. Not you. Hold the line, my friend.
Love and rapture,
Steven Budden Jr.
A Humble Constellation of Stories
P.S. When I sit at the computer, I, too, am lost to the machine. Hence the 'primitive' machine.
When the first envelope arrives, take it somewhere quiet, become impossible to reach for a while, and answer two questions on the back: What brings you closer to life?
What brings you further away?
That's lesson one.
The Budden Papers
Not moved by issue one? One email, full refund, keep everything.
Testimonials
From the healing years, before the papers.
His gentle and loving presence acts like a conduit for transferring energies.
I no longer feel sadness, guilt or shame.
I don't even know why I felt these emotions and I don't care. I'm elated by the lightness of being and happiness I feel every awake moment.
Meret Piderman, Entrepreneur
“My experience with Steven has been life changing, and I don’t say this lightly.
You will experience major breakthroughs and your life will change. It is not easy in the moment.
You will become a more succinct version of yourself, which ultimately brings deep, satisfying peace.”
-Tamara Albaitis, Entrepreneur / Artist, San Francisco, California
“Every second with Steven has been pure healing.
I’ve been to doctors and healers and yogis and medicine men and nothing has had the impact that just a few sessions with Steven has had.”
-Brian Bugh, Product Developer, San Francisco, California.