A monthly paper newsletter for staying alive in the age of madness.

Our lives got Buried.

Under endless menial tasks, obligations, optimizations.

Under the shattering noise of a world tearing itself apart.

Under the screens we spend years on*.

You used to run to the beach and flip into the surf; now you grumble across the sand and tepidly take a breath, fighting off wind and sun.

We're not lazy. Not undisciplined. Not broken.

We're trying to stay lit inside a world designed to dim us.

Every hour we spend inside the screen — scrolling, clicking, consuming, reacting — something warm goes a little colder. A soft heart goes rigid.

It's not a metaphor.

Maybe you can feel it in your bones right now.

*A comprehensive report from Eyesafe estimates that the average person born today will spend roughly 21 years of their lifetime looking at screens — over a quarter of their life and more than 40% of their waking hours.

How it Started

I'm an 'existential detective' and I run a company that restores vintage typewriters. I'm a writer of books, a dreamer, a father.

After a broken neck drove me to a life of healing — sitting with real people in real anguish, unraveling lifetime traumas.

I had to be ablaze to make these sessions work. To keep sharpening the point, I moved to a cabin in the redwoods and ate nothing but fruit for a year.

During Covid, the healing business slumbered and the typewriter business grew.

I stumbled into the same trap everyone falls into: I became a person who limped from screen to screen all day, mistaking this digital double for 'life'.

The writing slowed. The creative sketches dried up. Then it all stopped.

I crashed all the way down to Earth.

Like moonlight in dewdrop at the tip of a blade of grass...

I could feel the light in me fighting to hold on.

I started writing again — a page per day on a typewriter, away from screens — not because typewriters are quirky and retro, but because I am more alive when I am off screens.

That's one thing I know.

I'm more intuitive, loving, creative, and compassionate.

Research I'd been drawn to for years — Steiner's Anthroposophy, Gurdjieff and The Work, the esoteric Christian traditions, Stoic philosophy — stopped being mere intellectual curiosities and started to become maps for reality.

I started a paper NExUS, a screenless thinking system. It freed me up to create more and more off screen.

My flights into heaven; crashes to Earth. The writing became the witness.

No more hermit life in the redwoods, my friend. No more long dry fasts and fruitarian years.

Now I'm a father with a host of commitments, I'm embracing the middle way.

The challenge is different — staying ablaze while raising a child, running a business, falling in love with life again and again.

It's the paper.

The Budden Papers is an unfolding practice. Every month, I write something because every cell in my body screams to see it written. Nah, that language is not strong enough.

The things I'm discovering and refining: about freedom, creativity, spirituality... they come rushing out.

Then I print it, fold it, and mail it to your door, you beautiful thing.

This is a real paper newsletter to unfold, tatter, stain, touch, claw at. We unfold the paper and we unfold ourselves. That's the idea.

And it's not just a marketing prop. There isn't even a digital version. No PDFs. No archives. No algorithms deciding when you see it.

No beckoning into endless digital interactions.

It exists only on paper, for you.

These traditions I draw from — Anthroposophy, The Fourth Way, esoteric Christianity, Somatic healing — they require stillness and discernment. But I think they can protect the sacred things that modern life has only begun to destroy.

The true creative life exists in a delicate balance between the force that hardens you and the force that scatters you.

Outside of algorithmic manipulation.

That balance doesn't come from optimization. It comes from rhythm. From practice. From turning back toward the living world when everything around you is drawing itself into the machine.

It comes from breaking free of the matrix long enough to feel this rapturous thing... BEING.

What Arrives

Writing designed to ignite your mind — that explores the intersection between spiritual philosophies, creative practices, and healing our gritty reality.

About 12 pages.

Practices aligned with the cycle ahead. Rhythms built into nature and history, and footnotes for those.

Questions designed to disrupt and comfort. Letters from others walking this path.

It's not supposed to be polished wisdom from a mountaintop.

It's a ragged conversation with the most human impulses, the darkest and most divine.

It's field notes from a man who falls asleep, wakes back up, and commits to staying awake however possible.

It's supposed to throw a spark that ignites your own creative passions...

Will you let it?