You’re invited to the Quiet Life community!

…and please join our first candlelit Ask Me Anything, on Zoom!

Hello, O kindred spirit,

For the past twenty years, I’ve been exploring a particular realm of human nature: the quiet, the sensitive, the thoughtful, the bittersweet. 

It has always seemed clear to me that this way of being can lead to a richer, deeper form of happiness.

Yet I know that people who operate on this frequency often feel out of step with the always-on, bafflingly-loud, and thick-skinned world around them. 

So how great would it be to have a place you can go, when you want to connect with other people (including me) who share your frequency? 

A place that’s attuned to your love of quiet, depth, and beauty?

A place where you can make progress on your creative dreams and projects; learn to use your own unique powers; and add more art, poetry, beauty, ideas, psychology, and well-being to your life?

That place finally exists. Three weeks ago, I wrote to you about the Quiet Life community (for people who don’t necessarily love communities 😀). And I’m very excited to tell you that we’re going live tomorrow! (You, dear Kindred subscriber, are the first to know - though you can share the news with your friends and family today.)

Here’s how it’ll all work. There are three different kinds of memberships:

FREE MEMBERS: As a current subscriber to the Kindred Letters, you already have a free subscription to the Quiet Life; you don’t need to do anything else. You’ll continue to receive two or three Kindred Letters per month. You’ll also have the occasional ability to comment on these letters.

PAID MEMBERS: $10 a month/$99 a year

The Quiet Life is purely reader-sustained. As a paid subscriber, you’ll be able to support our project, and also gain access to: 

• A bonus, more personal, Kindred Letter each month (plus all the other letters I send, of course)

• Ability to comment on my letters, posts, chats, threads, voicemails, and prompts, interacting with me and with other members of the Quiet Life

• Candlelit Sunday chats, featuring AMAs (Ask Me Anything) and Diving Deep/Journaling zoom sessions with me, and my interviews with some of my favorite authors and thinkers (you’ll be able to ask questions, if you like)

• “Voicemails” from me, in which I’ll share thoughts (in audio form), read poetry to you, and encourage you to adopt life-nourishing habits

• Practices designed to elevate your mood, improve your health, & help you tune into joy and beauty

• Share your own creative work and writings 

• Whatever else we dream up! We will no doubt evolve, as we figure out, together, what works best. 

My aim is for you to come away from your first year experiencing more of that “richer, deeper form of happiness” I mentioned before.  

***PLEASE KNOW that there will never be pressure on you to “participate” or to do groupy things. Mostly, you’ll just be getting more “content” from me in various forms – written, audio, and video. But you’ll also have many opportunities to connect with me, and with each other – to the extent you’d like. 

** Time zones: We’ll try to accommodate as many time zones as possible (please bear with us as we figure this out) and no matter what, everything will be available for you to read/watch/listen to later.

FOUNDING MEMBERS: $300/year

If you’d like to support my work, AND to fund three scholarship memberships for others, please consider a founding membership! You’ll receive everything that paid members do, plus the great satisfaction of supporting those without means.

GIFT MEMBERSHIPS

If you’d like to give a membership to your friends and family members who are also lovers of quiet, depth, and beauty, as a holiday gift, you can do that, too!

SCHOLARSHIPS

If you can’t afford the above, WE WANT YOU TO JOIN ANYWAY. Really, really, really. No one should decline to participate for lack of funds. We’re offering partial and full scholarships – please email us at hello@thequietlife.net, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

SHARE

If you think your friends or family would like to know about all this, you can easily share this post with them:

What happens once I’ve signed up for a paid or founding membership?

*As soon as you join, you’ll get access to the first voicemail I’ve recorded for you. You can also join a written chat, right now, with me and others. And you can browse through some of the Kindred Letters that are archived on the membership site. Just go here to access everything. And, please look out for your first full Kindred Letter, in a few days.

***Also!! Our first candlelit Sunday Chat/AMA (Ask Me Anything) will be a week from Sunday, December 17, at 12 pm Eastern/9 am Pacific/5 pm UK /10:30 pm India, on Zoom.  

If you’d like to submit a question for me to answer in this first AMA, just hit reply and ask your question! I probably won’t be able to get to them all, but we’ll hold on to them for future AMA sessions. 

---

Oh, that weird “putting yourself out there” feeling. With every new book or talk I’ve done, there’s always that uncomfortable feeling of exposure, when things go live. And so I close this letter with a (manageable) knot in my stomach. 

But many of the most rewarding things I’ve done involve such knots. And I think that this Quiet Life community is one of them.

So here goes. If you’ve appreciated my work, this is a great way to support it…and to dive deep into what I hope will be a life-changing realm for you. 

In fact, I’ll close by asking you to consider whether there’s anything YOU would like to put out into the world – or simply a hobby or pursuit that you’d like to quietly take up on your own? Drop your comments, below!

As always, I am very glad that you’re here, and do not take it lightly.

I hope to see you today in our written chat, and next Sunday on Zoom!

Love,

P.S. You’ve probably noticed that today’s Kindred Letter looks a little different from before. That’s because the Quiet Life will be hosted on Substack, an amazing platform I’ve admired for years. I’ve chosen Substack because it will allow us to connect more easily with each other, and also to tap into a vast network of other authors and artists – e.g., stay tuned for upcoming collaborations with the writers Elizabeth Gilbert and Suleika Jaouad.