The Moot

Subscriber Q&A

Paul Kingsnorth writing over at the Abbey of Misrule does this thing he calls “The Monthly Salon” where his subscribers are asked what they’d like him to write about in the coming month.

I’m not going to do that.

Not that I don’t love you all, I’m just not great at prompted writing. Articles come to me, or they don’t, pretty much instantaneously, and then I sit down and spend some hours hammering them out into text. That’s my process. The basic premise of the recent Onan the Librarian piece, for example, came to me, more or less fully formed, in about twenty seconds while I was out running. I am basically a Greek playwright in that way, a man who goes out into nature and hopes to hear from the muse. If I were to ask you all for topics and so on… I just don’t think they’d be that good. My heart probably wouldn’t be in it.

That said, back in February 2022 I tried a “subscriber Q&A” as a thank you to paid subscribers of this substack and I think it went well. To be honest I’d almost forgotten about it, but recently a very kind reader sent me a lovely email reminding me of the Q&A and saying how much my answer had meant to him at the time when he was in a bad place. That was nice. I’m always trying to find ways to help my readers, and I think of this substack as a “Worldview Repair Service” and kind of treat it like a metaphysical blue collar job. People have cracks in the foundations of their philosophy, or the beams holding up their belief systems aren’t quite straight, and I try, best as I can, to help them fix the seemingly intractable problems related to their faith. That reader’s email reminded me that maybe Q&As are another way to do that.

Frankly though, I was then and am now a bit nervous about doing subscriber Q&As. The fear being that I’ll put this out there and nobody will ask any questions or have any comments, and that will be a lot like throwing a party nobody attends. Embarrassing. I mean listen, I’m always surprised anyone reads my posts at all, let alone “likes” them, and similarly it will be a pleasant surprise if anyone asks for my opinion or advice or just wants to talk. But, if I one of my responses was meaningful enough to a reader that he got in touch with me a year and a half later to mention it… maybe it’s worth trying to do again.

With that in mind, I’m going to try and do a monthly Q&A session for paid subscribers, starting with this article here. If you leave a comment below, about anything, I will write up a post about a week from now addressing all of your questions and comments. Paul calls his monthly meetings a “Salon”, but that sounds a bit too French or Italian or some other sort of Romance language for my taste. Being much more favorable to Germanic traditions myself, I will call our monthly gatherings here a Moot, which is the Nordic version of the same thing. That’s where the phrase “it’s a moot point” comes from by the way. A Moot Point was a point to be brought up for discussion at a Moot. A gathering of the people, the folk.

So, with that in mind, The July Moot is now in session. Please drop your Moot Points in the comments below. Nothing is off the table and we can and will discuss anything you wish. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber and would like to participate, you can join via the subscription box below.

In other news I am working on two articles now which I hope will come out soon. The first is a bit lighter and more autobiographical than our recent fare and the second quite a bit heavier. It’s the second one really giving me trouble. It’s going to be an article about the incarnation of God and may be the most complicated subject I’ve yet dealt with. Very easy to get wrong. If you would, please say a prayer for me that I’ll be given the skill to write well on the subject. It’s not something I want to mess up.

Until then though, I look forward to speaking with all of you in The Moot.

God bless,

Yoshi

Amor Vincit Omnia.