What is A Becoming?
“You’re a poet. You help people reorient the way they see their lives. And your work is still the place where you are most aware of and in touch with yourself and most aware of the sense of the Divine.”
👆 Someone I trust very much observed this in me during a time when my decade-plus work as a writer felt like it was trickling down to the last of the sand in my hourglass.
(Awful analogy — obviously I’m talking about the shape of my hips.)
I met a beautiful woman last year who made my life better. She’d often talk about what a difficult reality it is that people with eyes to see keep closing them. Another friend — Ever Get Home by Jamie Tworkowski — wonders,“What a strange thing to have a gift we walk away from.” To me, those sound like old stories about putting lights under bushels or hiding coins in the ground.
Writing helps me catch better Glimpses of That Which is Already. The irony is that They Who I most long to experience Are most fully realized in the work that I resist doing — namely: showing up and bare to pages I’d need to write whether or not anyone ever read them at all.
Amazingly, people do read them. They even come to me for help in writing theirs.
For a long time, I positioned / thought of myself as more a pastor than a poet. I’ll have more to say about that, I’m sure. For now — in the words of Audrey Assad —“I have unmistakably found something that will likely surprise no one (except for me) —I am an artist.”
I tell stories. I write poems. I think out loud. I get lost. I get found. I get lost again. I come back around. I speak too soon. I wait too long. I hate rigidity and my resistance makes me rigid. I get stuck in fear traps. I try. I fail. I like weird shit. I’m interested in everything. I mess with language in ways that make me and everyone else uncomfortable, and try not to move it toward perfection, but wholeness — where horizontals meet verticals with space enough for paradox.
“To think is to unify, to make wholes where there are scattered fragments, not merely to imitate (or repeat information) but to contribute a new unity to the world and thus to contribute new form of insight to the world it would otherwise be without.”
Teilhard de Chardin
I try to help people see. I do my best to offer language to those who long for an empathetic witness to this unspeakable reality called being alive.
And — you know — there’s also a kid in me who just loves to dick around. He wants to explore. He wants to write about stuff that isn’t high and lofty. He loves applesauce and peanut butter. Sometimes he peeks his head out. I’d love to give him more breathing room, here — to hold myself to both standards. I think he’s the main reason I’m writing this, now. He found something curious about Substack. It feels like a place where he can exist with a bit more caution thrown to wind. He’s hesitant to give you any definitives about what this should or is supposed to be, and we’re going to heed that warning together, for now.
We’ll see how that pans out.
Why should you pay for this?
Writing has been my professional vocation since I was nineteen years old. Fifteen years.
I’ve ghost-written and copy-written and and UX-written and sales-written and product-written and whatever-other-word-you-want-to-put-in-front-of-the-word-written — probably for a good amount of companies and folks you’re familiar with — to make art-work a doable vocation.
Any artist knows that means you love it and hate it and love it all over again.
How this all unfolds will be a becoming in and of itself. Mostly I just want to treat it like something that’s life-giving, which is the way it feels right now. I don’t want to mess that up.
That said, if you do decide to contribute your bucks, I want to offer some sort of bang in return. Here’s what you’ll get as a paid subscriber:
My audible readings. I’m a huge fan of audiobooks, and my favorite is when the author is the one narrating. I’ll be including an audio version of each Substack article — poetry, prose, or otherwise — as read by yours truly, available only to paid subscribers (minus this one, of course).
My book. It’s All Worth Living For is a coffee-table book featuring a decade’s worth of poetry, prose, journal entries, commentary, illustration, artwork, photography, and more. If you become a founding member, I’ll send it to you right away, for free. If you become a monthly subscriber, I’ll cut the price of yours in half.
Comment-posting & community access. Chat / respond to / engage with myself and other readers in the comments section, as well as behind-the-scenes with threads and notes.
Workshops & special-series access. I’ve got a few interactive journeys that I’d like to take people on. Think “a limited series of posts / explorations / experiences that folks embark upon together.” These will be outside the normal post schedule, and designed more for the sake of interior / spiritual practice.
A ton of other goodies, which you can explore here, including:
Optional entry to my private Discord server. A private online community for folks interested in engaging it.
130+ archived audio and video recordings. I was doin’ Substack before substack was cool, yo. 😂 This archive of written letters spans the course of three full years’ worth of work on topics ranging from poetry, art and creativity to faith and spirituality to the DIY life, and more.
My complete Levi The Poet discography. Immediately accessible to you upon signup in your Membership Library.
Merch-store discounts + more. Be it a t-shirt or an album, physical or digital, old or new – you name it – for as long as you remain a paid subscriber.
A Brief History (Or: Going Back To Go Forward)
Years ago, I started a personal iteration of the Substack model through my own email list. I called it the LTP Weekly. I based it off of designer Tobias Van Schneider’s model. He used to send his subscribers an email every Sunday night. I joined his list the week he was celebrating his 100th email. I was sitting at my dining room table that night, and wrote an email to my subscribers, then and there, asking them if they’d be interested in something similar.
I had begun to think of myself as a professional writer who never wrote, and I pulled that trigger hoping some form of public accountability might kick my ass back into gear.
It did. I wrote 147 Editions of the LTP Weekly over the course of the almost-three years that began that night — everything from poetry to essays and articles about… you name it.
You can access all of them, and other Subscriber Secrets (👈 a dumb, fancy name for patron-perks) by becoming a paid subscriber.
That project changed my life, honestly. I built The Fraction Club around it about a year in, when — after realizing how much work I’d committed myself to on a weekly basis — I needed to figure out a way to make my newfound time investment worthwhile. It became a subscription-based community that has since had a few hundred people pass through my Discord server (or remain actively involved up to this day), and folks still trickle in despite the fact that — due to burnout and its ensuing mental-health-whatevers — I stopped writing the LTP Weekly a long time ago (though the archives are still a member perk)...
But I have been looking for an outlet, again.
When Substack popped up on the scene, I wondered, “How would I do it? What would I write?”
I started following a few people whose work was interesting to me — D.L. Mayfield’s “God Is My Special Interest” and David Dark’s “Dark Matter” and Diana Butler Bass’ “The Cottage” and Yung Pueblo’s “Notes” and Nadia Bolz-Weber’s “The Corners” to name a few. It really is a fascinating model for writers and readers, alike.
I asked my friend Alex (or perhaps you know of his project, Creator History) what he thought of me creating an account and he said, “Generally your public writing is poetry, but I’d just love your thoughts, too.”
And I think that’s what this would have to be for me to really feel good about it: just thoughts. The moment I start thinking about what it might mean that I am now on Substack 🙀 or (god forbid) content creation is the moment I 86 the vibe altogether.
The folks I love to follow have their schtick, but it’s… their space. They speak their minds.
I like that.
D.L. was writing the other day about how comfortable Substack has allowed her to feel safe in her own little corner of the internet.
I love that.
On Expectation
I don’t know that I’ve ever felt as though I could call anywhere on the internet “comfortable” or “safe,” but I suppose a part of that has to do with the expectations I have of it, personally, and the expectations I create of it for others.
That said, I’ve discovered a few things about myself during the last decade-and-a-half that I need to tell you as you consider supporting my work, so… here’s the god’s-honest-truth:
Aside from the offerings I’ve already outlined in sections above, I’ve gotta say that the tier-based, offer-monthly-exclusives, Patreon-esque system… stresses me out.
Trying to be an internet-community-facilitator / always-on-engagement-guy left me feeling anxious about whether or not I was giving supporters enough perks to justify their ten bucks a month. It’s not that I’m ungrateful, but I came to realize that I never set out to work as a perks-guy, and I’d rather create income elsewhere than have the creativity they wanted to support in the first place overshadowed by worry that I’m not doing enough in what my friend Scott calls the “you give this much, I give this much” system.
I burnt myself out pretty bad (okay… the coals went out) attempting to offer a ton of extras in addition to the jobs I already work beneath the umbrella of this vocation as an artist creating for the world-at-large. Graciously, many people have continued to financially support my work despite long periods of silence, and others continue to ask me how they can contribute to make sure I keep on keeping on. I’m grateful for that, and… a bit of honest disclaimer-ing helps me calm my own nerves.
I’ve written enough marketing-copy to know for a fact that this is not the kind of ending you get hired to write for someone’s sales-page, and nevertheless… we’re nearing the end of mine. 😉
I want to write about stuff I’m interested in thinking and talking about (you know: books, God, poetry, mental health, religion, therapy, philosophy, plants, meditation, creative and spirituality, helping human beings, psychology, popcorn, fear, Love, the unbearable brightness of being, consciousness, etc.).
You know — super chill stuff.
Maybe it’d be a good thing to re-develop a practice of casting my net to the other side of the boat and letting my freak flag fly.
