SPECIAL ISSUE: PLEASE TAKE THE DOCU-MENTAL READER SURVEY
Greetings,
I am at a crossroads and I need your help.
docu-mental is ready to evolve. I already have announced that I am folding it into my larger vision of an Ensouled Universe.
Your feedback to date has helped clarify that one of the main reasons for docu-mental’s continued growth is that you like my willingness to ask questions most other media, especially corporate-owned media, won’t ask, or doesn’t even think to ask.
Another reason is that you like the conversations I have with my podcast guests, who often are people with opinions and perspectives you would not have come across otherwise.
I have seen this feedback re-iterated by the data indicating I continue to have a high open-rate among subscribers, even though across the independent cultural and political newsletter industry, open-rates dropped dramatically after the last presidential administration.
I’d like to build off of that loyalty, and turn docu-mental into not just the flagship publication of Ensouled, but into a more interactive, more frequent, more probing outlet of contemporary American thought and culture, but with service in mind.
Put frankly, I’d like to make docu-mental and the entire Ensouled Universe truly worthwhile: more worthy of your time, money, and devotion.
Worthy of your precious mind and imagination!
My intention is to combine my consulting, writing, and podcasting activities into one entity, expanding my original mission of “creating herd immunity to anxiety and depression” into a wider field.
If you’ve followed along, you already know that when I started this journey to map the american states of mind, I wasn’t really sure of what I would find, but suspected it would have to do with the American story — how we define ourselves, why, who told us that was the truth, and what do various parties get out of that story.
A number of issues later, I ran into a huge frigging wall of good ol’ American thought bricks, which I concluded were constructed to keep hierarchy firmly in place.
Some say race comes first. My journey here on these '“pages” has led me to say race is the first and most pernicious tool of the hierarchy.
More than that, I believe hierarchy is the structure that precipitates our collective existential anxiety and depression, manifested in the ways we “other” through racism, sexism, classism, ageism, Nazism, all the “isms”.
And the result is that we’re all nuts to one unnecessary degree or another, and the belief that if we would pull ourselves free from the story that has enlisted us as (mostly) unwitting actors within it, we’d start to actually experience “freedom from” and “freedom to” according to our actual heart’s desires.
Someone close to me likes to point out, correctly I think, that not everyone is ready for that kind of freedom, won’t have a clue in hell what to do with such formlessness and potential.
But some of you are ready, at least a little. For some of you, you’ve conquered your fear of at least considering that there is more behind the curtain drawn so dramatically between us in this world of prescribed roles and shoulds/shouldn’ts, and that of our true, unmediated possibilities and potentials.
Enough of you have grown suspicious of being told who is wrong and who is right.
Even the so-called winners in the games we play might be wondering why they are supposed to:
As I noted previously:
If docu-mental was born to question why Americans experience towering rates of mental anguish, Ensouled’s naissance is to explore what happens when we do something about that, and specifically, what happens when we author our lives, unmediated by hierarchy. I anticipate great things can come from an exploration of “What is the matter?” followed by our individual and deliberate assignment of meaning to that matter.
What I am thinking of doing next is offering subscribers an expanded array of “thought prompts” and other tools, for helping deconstruct the myths and stories that harm us. I don’t know that I will create an actual “tool kit” but will definitely continue to say to you, “Hey, look here. This might be where some of your power has been stolen or has leaked or been hidden from you…”
I may or may not have a political opinion about things. Usually, I don’t. Party affliation too often is a disguise for something more sinister. Mostly, I just get a whiff of who is power-stealing and go for that monster’s jugular.
That might seem self-important, and probably it is, but there is evil in our world and I don’t want any part of it. I want it vanquished. It’s sucking us dry of our soul and spirit, first by zombifying us, and then distracting us with angry non-conversations about who is woke enough or whether “wokeness” is just a ploy.
I want to contribute to the end of our falling prey to these utterly stupid distractions!
You can help me do this by taking a five minute survey.
And then, if you like, you can have a listen to this recording (link is below) of the late Leonard Cohen singing hs song, “Bird on a Wire”.
It’s a song that to me, suggests our vulnerability when we sing out what is most in our hearts, and the same vulnerability we experience if we don’t sing it.
As you listen, perhaps consider what being free, without any previous dibs on what that is “supposed” to mean, might actually mean to you.
Thank you all so much for your continued loyalty and friendship. I hope to serve you better, with your help.
Here’s the link to the survey again.
Peace,
Whitney