Be greeted, (fellow) psychoneurotics!

In which I finally hit "publish" on my intended quarterly newsletters...

(Welcome to my inaugural quarterlyish newsletter! I anticipate each of these to have three sections: First, a philosophical reflection about something on my mind, second, some chatting about books and things, and finally, “news”… Thanks for joining me! Oh, and if you aren’t familiar with the reference, the title is a shout-out to my favorite Polish psychologist, Kazimierz Dabrowski…)

Hello there! Oh, dear. I have been writing this post for two months now. It’s certainly time to do or die; to choose between publish or delete. Here goes nothing!

See, I have finally figured out why I have struggled for so long to just hit “publish,” and it’s this insight that I think I’d most like to pass along (along with some yapping about books and reminding the world that yes, I am a writer, and yes, I’ve got some new projects coming along…)

First, it’s confession time. In all of my decades of wandering the internet and scribbling in notebooks, this kind of communicating-- blogs, ‘stacks, social media in general-- has never come naturally to me. I’ve planned out and even written much for blogs and sites on a half a dozen different subjects, and I’ve always ended by immediately taking them down or just never putting them up in the first place. Social media accounts get nuked within hours. The notable exception to this is my contribution to the Substack my co-author, Lisa Rose, runs for our book Patterns for Life-- and if it weren’t for Lisa, I guarantee that wouldn’t have lasted, either.
Why, though? I used to try to justify my decisions by appealing to some sort of digital idealism, but I’ve been on the planet too long now to be that black and white. Like any tool, digital media is as good or evil as what we use it for. I know I definitely need periodic fasts from it in order to keep things in the right order, but it’s also true that I’ve made some great friends on the internet, and some of those friendships now go back almost two decades. The digital world reflects the complexity of its organic creators.

And here it is: I think “reflects” is a clue. For the digital world itself is not actually a complex, organic lifeform. It’s much more like the wall in Plato’s cave, and in this analogy, the sunny outdoors is the self that desires to be known.
Look for a minute at these clusters of synonyms: 
Screen, cover, shield, veil, curtain, protection, shroud.
Platform, stage, pulpit, rostrum, podium, dais.

On our screens, we interact via different social media platforms. We use these things as stages-- stages that act as curtains between the performing self and the true self. We stand at the podium of our chosen account and act out a series of postures that serve to protect the true self from the judgment of others, to offer up a curated self that can be affirmed by the eyes of many who seek the same affirmation about themselves.
This digital world is a screen on which we play-- often projecting and interacting not with other complex, organic human beings, but rather the ideas that these other people represent. These ideas, and the people who image them, find their roots in our selves, trotting out to play a part on the vast digital stage. Our physical screens are metaphorical screens, onto which we project the images that move deep within our unknown selves. Hence the constant temptation to the echo chamber.
It is very, very difficult to interact with Internet People as, well, as neighbors. On the stage, on the screen, the ideas come first. We lead with ideas, we communicate about ideas. But in the physical world, the relationships come first-- and often, we find that we have to take care with our ideas, lest they wound our relationships. Neither of these things is wrong per se, but the waters get very muddy when we mix the two, i.e. social media.
Eerily, on the internet stage, it is the ideas themselves, especially those things with roots deep in the psyche, that become the puppet masters. Other people, at their own marked out territories, act as puppets for our own minds to play with. To make matters worse, this generous description assumes that all of the players are generally honest and self-aware…
All these clues lead to something that both wants to be known, and yet avoids discovery. And that is this: I believe that all writers are writing about themselves, and that all readers are searching for a reflection of themselves in a piece of writing. I suspect that it’s almost never about the stories themselves, or the issues themselves, the opinions, the images, the ideas. It’s about a bunch of selves, standing in a crowded room, all asking the aether, “Who am I? Can you tell me?” It’s much too loud and crowded to have the kind of intimate conversation in which those questions might be explored.
Substack, I have figured out, is exceptionally good at creating the illusion of comradery or companionship among people who self-define as intellectuals or thinkers. But one thing I’ve learned from turning online comrades and companions into real friends is that there is a real crucible of transition that must take place. That transitional gauntlet involves both parties mutually understanding and acknowledging how they have projected themselves and their ideas on to one another.
Personally, when it comes to self-discovery and cultivating relationships, I’ve found that I have a profound need for privacy. Hence, no social media; hence, the desire to simply hit “delete”.

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Wow, that was heavy. How about we abruptly switch gears and talk about why I named this thing, “dephilosophize me”?

First of all, here’s the quote from Poetics of Space that gave it to me:
“They have helped me to ‘dephilosophize,’ to shun the allures of culture and to place myself on the margin of convictions acquired through long philosophical inquiry on the subject of scientific thinking. Philosophy makes us ripen quickly, and crystallizes us in a state of maturity. How, then, without ‘dephilosophizing’ ourselves, may we hope to experience the shocks that being receives from new images, shocks which are always the phenomena of youthful being? When we are at an age to imagine, we cannot say how or why we imagine. Then, when we could say how we imagine, we cease to imagine. We should therefore dematurize ourselves.” - Gaston Bachelard

I fell in love with philosophy when I was still young enough to see it as play; only as I have aged have I seen how much it is used as a power to wield over others, and sought to reevaluate my relationship with it. I guess I’d say that I remain a philosopher in the tradition of Jostein Gaarder, and from such a mothership, I’m playing at exploring the universe phenomenologically, that is, in a way that notices the utter weirdness of conscious experience.

Ah, it sounds so fancy! But it is also true that I write books, and all the people who seem to know what they are doing on here say that if one wants to find potential readers, one must have some sort of Presence, preferably one that is able to reach out its tentacles periodically and remind people of its existence. I find I absolutely cannot think of this in terms of marketing. I have a severe allergy to advertising and promotion, and if I think about it too long, I am overcome by the compulsion to just give things away, or even pay people to take them. Unfortunately, I am not independently wealthy, or I probably would do just that (actually, that’s my lottery fantasy-- becoming the Broken Fridge Fairy, and just swooping in and magically replacing broken appliances for people who need them…).

Also, just for the record, I do actually really enjoy getting acquainted with people-- I’m a small-town girl at heart, and I like making connections that make the world feel more like a village (which, you know, in the grand scheme of things, with the size of the universe and all, it really kinda is).

I imagine that most of you who have found me on Substack know of me primarily through my latest published work, Patterns for Life: An Orthodox Reflection on Charlotte Mason Education. While I do love thinking and reading and talking about parenting and education, all of that philosophizing is more of a means to an end for me. I care about parenting intentionally and home education and Charlotte Mason and so on because these are all tools that help me cultivate the kinds of relationships I desire to have with the particular young souls in my care. My energies are focused on the children themselves as the ends, and the philosophies only secondarily as the means. I’ve never pretended to have all of the answers, which admittedly makes it difficult for me to keep churning out words on the subject-- I’m more likely to get lost in the weeds of a particular situation in conversation than hold forth on general best practices. Lisa and I wrote Patterns for Life because we wanted to fill a perceived gap in the home education sphere, that space that connects the practical aspects of Charlotte Mason education with a life lived liturgically in the Orthodox way. The book is less an instruction manual and much more in the spirit of, “Hey, this has helped us; maybe it will help you.”

But if you only know me through Patterns for Life, you might not know that I actually think of myself as primarily a writer of literary fiction. I already have two projects published by Ancient Faith, the children’s book Sasha and the Dragon and the novella The Lion and the Saint, plus I’ve been working for several years now on a series of magical realism novels. The biggest reason you aren’t reading them yet is that I am, after all, first and foremost a home educating mother of six, and I try to be very careful that my best attentions and energies go to them first. This means sloooooooow work. Lucky for me, that’s trending now!

Recently Reshelved
Because book people are nebby, and want to know what’s on each other’s shelves...

I had waaaaaaay too many tabs open in my brain that last quarter of 2024. As a result, I finished a mess of books I had been wandering through all year, and several of them really knocked it out of the park. Here are some favorites:

1. Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. Lush and gorgeous philosophical (or rather, phenomenological) treatment of the way we relate to the spaces around us. This book inspired and convicted me on several levels: First of all, it made me even more aware of the power of the atmosphere of the home, and how much work I still have to do on this front in order to create the kinds of experiences in my home that I want to give to my family. It also drew my attention to elements of setting in writing, and coupled with reading Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows earlier in the year, had some profound effects of how I’m manipulating space and setting in my own writing.

2. Winters in the World by Eleanor Parker. Evocative and compelling journey through a year as seen through the eyes of Anglo-Saxon celebration and poetry. Parker’s writing is just phenomenal-- she writes literary prose with the erudition of a scholar, and in my ideal timeline, all academic writing would be so lucid. This is the kind of book that just utterly enriches society because it makes a somewhat esoteric subject completely accessible and absorbing. We native English speakers have much to gain by learning more about the history of our mother-tongue, and Parker’s book is a wonderful way to begin.

3. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. Everything I’d heard about this book is true. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking, poetic and even practical. I truly believe that no real intrapersonal growth can happen without constant awareness of both the imminence of death and the need to practice constant gratitude for every given moment. Books like this are bullshit solvents, you know? Life is short, it’s over very fast, and the powers that be are constantly striving to distract us from that fact with meaningless garbage. Absolutely nothing guarantees tomorrow.

4. The Perilous Order of Camelot Series by A.A. Attanasio. This one’s a reread for me, because it’s on my “take to a desert island” pile. My mom bought me The Dragon and the Unicorn one Christmas when I was in college-- probably because of the title alone-- and the first time I read it, I had to stop every few paragraphs to weep. Attanasio’s vision of the cosmos is just so large and full, it breaks my heart open every time. I see the whole world with better eyes because of these stories.

Bonus: STARWAVE. This is totally not a book, but it’s a recommendation nonetheless. I have always had a soft spot for action video games-- I loved that goofy Power Pad attachment on my NES, I had loads of fun whacking the air on the Wii and WiiU with my older kids, and when we upgraded to Switch, I made sure my daughter and I had a subscription to Just Dance. Then, one day my oldest son came to me with the desire to buy a VR headset. Anticipating my skepticism and possible objections, he led with, “Mom, you know you could play Beat Saber on it, right?”

Oh, my kids know me too well.

Anyway! STARWAVE is a new rhythm dance game, and it is a blast. The movement mechanics behind it are an absolute dream, and it encourages both large movements and expressive, freeform play. And it’s in space. With a catchy EDM soundtrack.
I know it’s fashionable among a certain subset of people to hate on video games in general and VR in particular, but I just can’t bring myself to jump on that bandwagon. STARWAVE is just so much fun, and it’s gotten me through the polar vortex and given me a jumpstart on my new year’s fitness resolutions.

On My Desk

Keep an eye out-- later this year, Basilian Media will be publishing my second children’s book, and it’s sure to become a seasonal favorite! Like my other works, the story peels back the curtain on the spiritual world and helps us all to remember that there’s so much more going on around us that we can see with our physical eyes. Designer Barbara Kavchok is working on the illustrations as we speak, and I can’t wait to share some sneak peeks!

Novel-wise, I’m knee-deep in a prequel story for my magical realism series. The idea for the story presented itself to me about five years ago, and has been marinating in the stew ever since them. At this point., it is bubbling up frantically from my subconcious and wants so badly to be written, it practically pours out of my fingertips every time I sit down.

Thanks for joining me for this first newsletter! Feel free to jump in the comments and say “hello”! Until next time--

In Christ,
Laura E. Wolfe