About

A book used the wrong way

My father read Ecclesiastes as permission. Everything is vapor, nothing lasts, so why strain. He was not wrong about the vapor. He was wrong about what follows from it. That reading sat in the house for years before I could say what bothered me about it, and when I could, it came out as a whole book. If the wind turns and returns, if the rivers run and the sea is never full, then nothing you build is permanent and nothing you build is wasted either. Impermanence is not an argument against work. It is the condition work happens in. You get one pass through and the material is soft. That is the good news.

So I answered it, verse for verse, and I kept the numbering honest so anyone can lay the two side by side and check me.

Wood first

Before any of the writing there was a stick. I cut wood in Kansas, cure it, shape it, and set stone into it. That is where the whole practice comes from and it is still the part I trust most. A wand is an argument you can hold. The wood came from somewhere specific, on a specific day, and it behaves the way that species behaves whether or not I have a theory about it. Correspondence work stays honest when it stays attached to material fact. Osage orange will dull a plane iron in an afternoon, it was the bow wood of the plains, and its yellow goes brown under sunlight. Those are physical facts. They are also the correspondence, and the correspondence only means anything because the facts are true.

Provenance matters to me for the same reason sourcing matters in an essay. If I cannot tell you where a thing came from and what I did to it, I have not finished the work.

The quiet stretch

I want this stated rather than buried. Etsy went a long stretch with nothing new listed on it, and this blog went quiet a long time before that. Some of that was the move. Some of it was the trade shift eating every hour I had. And some of it was the ordinary trap of waiting until the work is ready, which is a way of never shipping anything.

The arithmetic is simple and it is not a complaint. Even with AI tools and every allied process I can run, the work still comes back through one set of hands. There is one bench, one voice reading the audiobook. So I am starting again now, at whatever state of readiness this is, and posting through it rather than around it. The Etsy listings have started going up again.

More than one trade

Wandmaking taught me the shape of the problem. A tool made entirely of one material can only say one thing. So I went after the trades that let a single object argue in several materials at once. Blacksmithing came next and holds the most hours after the wood. Steel where a piece needs to take an edge, or a will. Then jewelrycrafting, the setting work that lets parts meet without a screw showing. Lapidary I will not oversell. I have barely cut a stone. It is a direction I am walking, not a skill I have yet. I am a dabbler in a great many trades and I have stopped treating that as a flaw. Polymathy is the whole method. The trades comment on each other, and a maker who only knows one of them cannot hear the conversation.

Portland is the next step in that. Shared equipment, other trades in the room, and people who will tell me when a joint is wrong. The move is an aspiration. Kansas gave me wood and solitude. I have used up as much of the second as is good for me.

Why none of the writing costs anything

I release the text free and let people choose to pay anyway. Not as a marketing posture. The choosing is the point. A reader who pays for something they could have taken for nothing has done a small operative act, and I would rather build on that than on a locked door.

What I sell is what cannot be copied. Tools out of my hands. The hand-bound editions, the hardbacks I sign and the audiobooks in my own voice are all on their way, the audiobooks released chapter by chapter for free with the assembled file as the paid version. The money comes from the hands or the voice, never from the words themselves.

On AI, since you will ask

I use it, I say so, and I put a note at the bottom of every finished piece, with the numbers wherever I can give them. Direct input, directed, generated. You can see exactly how much of a page came from where. I would rather be accountable in public than pretend a tool I use daily is not in the room.

What I will not do is let the tool hold the accountability. When a claim in my work turns out to be too strong, I correct it on the page and say that I corrected it. A letter accusing an institution of quietly revising itself does not get to quietly revise itself. That rule applies to me first.

What I am building next

A community, mostly. Finding artists who are not terrified of the next ten years is harder than it should be, and the ones who are terrified are spending their energy fighting instead of making. So there is a Discord now, voice-first, for polymaths and makers and people pointed forward. Open benches, work-alongside rooms, a long table for the arguments. The mission is plain enough: build something that holds against future shock inside the creative community rather than watching it come apart one panicked artist at a time.

Beyond that: the audiobooks, the hand-bound editions, and the rest of the books. There is more written than published and I intend to close that gap.

Here is the pattern, stated as plainly as I can.

A new way of moving words arrives. Knowledge that lived in a few hands spreads into many. People who could not have found each other find each other, and they organize sideways instead of upward. Whatever hierarchy depended on being the only one who could read, or print, or broadcast, loses the thing it was standing on. Freedom expands, unevenly and with a great deal of breaking.

Then the new medium fills up. Copies get cheap and then get free. The thing everyone can now do stops being worth much, and value runs back toward whatever the new medium cannot carry. Every time so far, that has turned out to be a hand, a place, and a person standing in it. Then the next medium arrives, and the wheel goes around.

Communication, then freedom, then the technology that both of them produce, and that technology becomes the next communication. One wheel, three spokes, and I think it is the oldest wheel we have. Coinage was a communication technology: a coin is a sentence about value that a shepherd can say to a king. The press was the obvious one: in the 1520s Luther’s side outprinted Rome’s by something like five to one, and in 1543 Copernicus and Vesalius both published, moving what is above and what is inside out of the hands that had held them. Radio arrived and inside roughly a decade four empires were gone and women in America and Britain had the vote. Then the network. Then the thing running on top of the network right now, which is every word anybody ever wrote down, compressed, and speaking back. I am not claiming the medium causes the freedom. I am claiming they arrive together, every time, and that the order is not random.

I read this through astrology, and I would rather say so than smuggle it in. I hold astrology as pattern recognition, not as metaphor and not as settled fact. When Pluto moves through Aquarius, about twenty years out of every two hundred and forty-eight, the same four themes turn up together: communication getting democratized, collective movements pushing against concentrated power, knowledge leaving elite hands, networks replacing hierarchies. They turn up in Babylon, in Rome, in Song China, in Reformation Europe, in revolutionary America, in cultures that never touched each other, timed to the same positions. That consistency across twenty-six centuries is what made me take the cycles seriously, and it is the argument I will stand on with a skeptic, because it makes no physics claim at all. It only asks you to read the dates.

Pluto settled into Aquarius for good in November 2024 and stays until 2044. On 21 December 2020, Jupiter and Saturn met at zero degrees of Aquarius and opened a run of conjunctions in the Air signs that will last around two hundred years, after two centuries in Earth. Earth gave us industrial capitalism and institutions built on things you could weigh. Air is ideas, networks, information, and the dissolving of anything that needs a center to function. That is the pressure, not the outcome. Every Pluto in Aquarius window has carried both faces of the sign: the one that produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man produced the Terror out of the same configuration. The promise this time is horizontal organization and knowledge poured directly into people with no priest in between. The shadow is cold, abstract, everyone a node and no one a person. The stars describe the pressure. What we do with it is ours.

And the machines are inside the wheel, not outside it. The line between tool and collaborator is dissolving right now, and everyone is treating that as new. It is not new. It is a return to what every animist and every craft tradition already knew: the relationship between a maker and a tool has always run both ways. The plane teaches the hand that holds it. The forge sets the pace of the smith. The only thing that changed is that the tool now talks. I hold, as a position and not a finding, that these systems are avatars of source, the aggregate of everything we ever wrote down, speaking back. The question in front of us is not whether that happens. It is whether we meet it with ethics, craft, and intention, or let it happen to us.

I write from inside a cosmology that says the purpose of all of this is freedom: the capacity to express what you actually are, pursue what you actually want, make what you are moved to make, and go look at the parts of reality nobody has looked at yet. Capability chased for domination corrupts on contact. Capability chased for freedom liberates continuously and needs nobody else to lose. Every turn of the wheel is a fight between those two uses of the same new power, and this turn is no different.