Letter Writing as a Soulmaking Practice

Of all the practices in the soulmaking toolkit, the letter is the strangest to modern eyes and the most powerful in use. It is slow in a fast medium's world, physical in a digital one, and addressed to one person in an age of broadcast. Each of those inversions is exactly the point.

What a letter does that a journal cannot

Soul writing, the daily page at the core of the practice, is a conversation with yourself. The letter adds a second consciousness, and everything changes. Writing to someone converts expression into offering. The presence of a reader disciplines the prose the way a listener disciplines speech: vagueness that survives in a journal dies on its way to another person.

A letter also cannot be taken back. Once sent, it is a commitment to having meant what you said, which is why people discover their actual positions in letters more often than in conversation. And it returns. The reply arrives carrying a view of you from outside, the one perspective the journal can never supply.

Keats worked out the whole idea of soulmaking inside a letter to his brother. The form was not incidental. The thinking went where it went because someone specific was going to read it.

The practice

One letter a month, by hand if possible, to one person, is a complete practice. Three forms, in ascending order of depth:

The account. Write someone your actual month: not the highlight reel, the true account, with the texture the daily pages have been catching. You will find out what the month actually was in the writing of it.

The unsent letter. Written fully, addressed truly, never mailed. For the person you cannot yet say it to, or the one who is gone. The address does the work even when delivery is impossible; this is the written form of the studio's unsendable postcard.

The exchange. Two people, both working the practice, writing monthly. Each letter is soul writing; each reply is witness. Over a year an exchange becomes a record of two people being made, visible to both.

The exchange that anchors ours

The letter exchange built around The Art of Soulmaking pairs outside volunteers with incarcerated students working the same course. Both people write from inside the same practice, which gives the correspondence somewhere to go beyond news and weather. It is the fullest expression of the letter as soulmaking technology: consistent, mutual, and consequential for both writers. The practical guide to joining, and to prison correspondence generally, is at Unconditional Freedom.

Starting this week

Choose one person. Write one page: what your life actually is right now, with one specific scene in it. Ask them two real questions. Mail it. The entire practice is contained in doing that once a month and meaning it.

The letter practice sits inside the full workbook path, with the writing and meditation practices around it, in The Art of Soulmaking.