The shape of a life
my book | living+writing | relational intelligence | careers | links
Welcome, especially to new subscribers. You’re reading this because you subscribed to Field Notes (or its previous incarnation, RedLands). Here, you can expect short vignettes, notes from my Westcountry village and the inner/outer world beyond, fragments from my walks and my writing desk, and personal essays. You can read more about me and Field Notes here.
📚 My book
After meetings with a whole range of publishers — small independents to multiple divisions of Penguin and Hachette — I’ll be publishing my book with the brilliant independent UK publisher Little Toller (a “small but discerning press”!) and hopefully with others internationally (watch this space). I’ll be sharing more about the whole experience soon. In a few words though? — it feels good to find people who get my book, who have the time and passion to help craft it, who will nurture not only the book but me and my career. Not all publishers seemed to offer this. I am so glad to work with one that does. More soon!
Speaking of which…
📚 The shape of a book/life
The words have stopped coming. Or, to be more precise, the thoughts are coming like a torrent but I seem to have lost the ability to catch them in a way that makes sense, in a way that I can hold and so communicate. This is *not* good timing (see point above…).
It is as if I am the in-between of caterpillar and butterfly — no longer recognisable as a caterpillar, not yet a butterfly, existing and so writing only as a dissolved/unformed soup of elements.
From this soup, a question: What sacrifices must be made to truly inhabit a life? — my life? It is a question has snagged me, like a bramble grabbing at my cardigan . It is a question that Paul Kingsnorth asks in his thoughtful, poetic, despairing, hopeful book Savage Gods. He asks lots of things in this book (which he wrote shortly before becoming an Orthodox Christian) and surrenders many more, admitting he has lost faith in words.
“I am 44 years old now. I am in the last half, the last third, the last quarter of my life; whichever it is, the active part, the burning, is behind me and dying back in time. The second half of a life is governed by the moon, not the sun. It is water time, not fire time, and I can no longer write books with plots that work, I can no longer structure stories and bring them to a climax, I can no longer craft and carve the paragraphs and the sentences. I can't plan a narrative journey because none of it makes sense to me now and if I think like that, if I think that that is the work, then I cannot even pick up a pen.
It's a terrible and a liberating discovery. Life is not that shape.
Life is not the shape of a book.”
My own book is in a form that works, that holds what I think it needs to hold, that people have praised. I think that is enough. But it is not a form that allows complete entry to the things that are stirring in my soup, or a form that matches my soul or the universe — namely, a chaotic but at times cohering thing that is as full of darkness as it is light. Perhaps I am asking too much of my book, or of myself. Perhaps this is why I sometimes feel let down by books when ends are gathered and forced into neatness, so that nothing is left nameless, no questions left, no space for the awe-full soupiness of existence. Perhaps these are stirrings for a subsequent book.
If I wrote a book in the shape of questions, of soup, of the strange awe of existence, how would anyone take hold of it? Is that a selfish thing to do? Is it the job of a writer to find a way to write and offer the unsayable, whatever its shape? or is it their job to offer something with clear edges, to mould life into plots that work, stories with a climax, journeys that have a clear narrative arc — even if that might not be the most honest expression of what we are called to?
What I am trying to say I think is this: if life is not the shape of a book, then what shape should a book be? Answers on a postcard please (or a comment or message…)!
🤖 Machine learning/relational learning
I read a couple of pieces recently that linger in my mind. This one, about students who are sitting exams at school and university only to find the future jobs they were promised are being taken by AI. And another piece about the rapid decline in global emotional intelligence, plus rising levels of burnout, declines in empathy, trust, motivation, and increased loneliness. It’s a decline that is even more striking in younger generations. “In short: we’re in a global emotional recession with sustained declines in our capacity to connect, adapt, and move ahead” the piece says. “We’re already outsourcing so much of our thinking, and even our feelings, to machines. That’s only advancing…. As AI grows, we also need to grow.”
There is plenty being written about AI. About what it’s giving and costing our societies and our souls. About its ethics and environmental impact.
What I have been thinking about alongside those things, is the idea of a second Industrial Revolution in which we reclaim our humanity and recognise what it is that humans are gifted at that machines can never be — things like creativity, craft, storytelling, connection, love. In particular, I think about the skills of relationship needed to underpin this.
If emotional intelligence is in decline then empathy, listening, forgiveness, and all the other skills of relationship are things to practice and muscles to claim and use. AI cannot do this for us, it is not bothered about the rise of loneliness or the “lovelessness” that bell hooks [sic] speaks of. Its interest (or really the interest of the people and companies behind it) lies in us being lonely and isolated, because then we will turn to it more.
In Sarah Stein Lubrano’s recent post, she shares how in natural disasters those who have more social connections are more likely to survive. Surviving the ‘apocalypse’ (the end of something and the beginning of something new) will require us to “learn how to share resources, how to support your neighbours, how to resolve group conflict, how to befriend a stranger, have to have difficult conversations, how to listen and learn from other people.” These are things that we learn by being in inconvenient, time-consuming, frustrating, joyful, soul-nurturing relationship, not by sitting in our rooms chatting with AI.
Jobs, work, careers — these do not just have to be about income, or productivity, but at best they can also be about understanding and expanding into the shape of ourselves and each other. I pray those students wondering where their future jobs are (and really any of us wondering what our future work looks like) will invest as much in the apprenticeship of relationship as in that of machines, and find a way of life that in some way honours our souls and our becoming world.
✨ Things I’ve enjoyed lately:
🎶 The album ‘Tree’ by the producer and arranger John Metcalfe. It is soaring, euphoric, playful. He says it is part of the “music that people are trying to create to connect with things that are huge and beautiful and inexplicable around them. My album's about describing our relationship with something as every-day and extraordinary as a tree, and how it can be an incredibly important part of who we are.”
📞 ‘The Quantum Telecommunications Network of Grief’ by Kimberley Coburn here on Substack. I love Kimberley’s writing. Here, she poetically links grief, time, and quantum physics. “I wonder, though, if more Wind Phones keep appearing like an ethereal telecommunications network because something in us already understands what physics only hints at: that we forge connections more enduring than death. That time isn’t as linear as we pretend it is.”
📕 The North Road, by Rob Cowen. In this “genre-defying and profoundly personal book, Cowen follows this ghost road from beginning to end on a journey through history, place, people and time.” It is on its surface about the old road between Scotland and London. But like many of my favourite books, it contains layers.
📺 Shifty, by Adam Curtis. A five-part documentary made of archive footage about the power shifts in Britain at the end of the 20th century. Eye-opening, enraging, creative and clear.
🖼️ My husband Jake writes increasingly about art and what it has to tell us about life’s questions, often through a faith-based lens. In this piece, a painting, a party, and the experience of a kilted man help him to think about friendship and being known, and how these are different to small talk and niceties.
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Always so grateful for your insight and humbled by your kind words about my little 'stack 💚🌬️
I really enjoyed The North Road - one I'll be returning to I think. I enjoyed your husband's piece too btw - thanks for sharing.