about beacontale

A beacon does not want your ship. It stands where the rocks are, so that you can hold your own course. That is the only job of these letters.

beacontale is a small publication about a large subject: the interior life, and what is happening to it. We live in the loneliest era on record, and the products sold as its cure are, mostly, machines for deepening it - lights built to be sailed toward, wrecking what they attract. I write about that. I write about the older thing, too: the forty-thousand-year human practice of keeping a self, the wonder we were taught to stop noticing, and the quiet conviction that you were already enough before anyone profited from your forgetting it.

There is no program here. No course, no method, no seven steps. I am not here to improve you - I don't believe you arrived broken. These are letters from one traveler to another, written in the belief that the road is the point, and that most people learn this too late to spend it.

Who writes this. The essays are written under the pen name Mark Tintley. The name is a vessel, worn openly - a register in which certain true things can be said at full height.

Where I stand. I am the founder of SoulgateLabs, a company building the alternative some of these essays describe. beacontale is not that company's website, carries none of its offers, and asks nothing of you on its behalf. When an essay points there, it points openly, and the walk is yours to take or not. These letters are the word; the door is elsewhere, clearly marked.

Supporting the writing. beacontale is free. Readers who wish to may pay for a subscription; the money funds the writing and its independence - more letters, deeper ones, beholden to no one. It buys nothing else and unlocks no shortcut to anything.

Trust your compass. It still works. It always did.

— M