Dear Reader,

I’m writing you this letter to tell you about a project that we started from our little stationery shop in Cheltenham, an old market town in England. This is not a manifesto, or at least, it’s not meant to be. It’s meant to be an invitation. I wanted to tell you why we started the project, what we believe about letters and their importance, and then to gently invite you to join us, if you think that there’s some sense behind what we’re suggesting.

For centuries of human history, letters performed an extremely valuable role in people’s lives. On the surface, they were a method of communication. People would write to each-other to discuss plans, exchange ideas or explore thoughts. Sometimes, they performed a simple function, sometimes they seemed nothing more than functional objects. But at other times, they would hold something deeper, meaningful and heartfelt. Letter-writing allows you to use words as a craftsman would use a knife. You can carefully intertwine them to ensure their meaning lands exactly as intended. It’s a kind of magic, really: we are able to pause the impermanent, fleeting nature of our life, if only for a few pages.  A butterfly, still beating its paper-thin wings inside an airtight jar. Defying all logic, our words are suspended in time, our handwriting somehow capturing a little part of our essence.

As technology has progressed, we have moved many of our methods of communication online. There is no inherent problem with this, and there is no denying that for every functional use that letters used to perform, it makes a great deal of sense for letters to step aside and humbly hand the job over to technology.

The place where something stands to be lost, however, is in those times where the letter was the butterfly. The letters that were folded into a box and kept forever… the letters that captured an essence.

We can, and many writers do, craft words in an equally precise and careful manner on a screen. The problem lies in the habits. And for humans, habits are everything. When we had the habit of corresponding with anyone not in our immediate vicinity by letter, our actions were underscored by thought and consideration.

Whenever we were apart, physically, from loved ones, the opportunity arose to say something of meaning. We held them in our thoughts and we transformed those thoughts into something that could be held, treasured, considered and kept.

Sitting down to write a letter, it is natural to extend the contents beyond the banal and dip our toes into the realms of the human soul. It is natural to mention the way the sky looks, or the birds chirping, or the book that is shaping the way we see the world that week. When we write letters regularly, we are writing our own story. We are crafting our life intentionally — we are making sure that our loved ones know how we feel about them. We are capturing the flutters of our soul. We are pressing all our enormous feelings into a little distilled packet that holds it for us. It holds it for us even if an ocean separates us. It holds it for us even when we leave this world entirely.

So what happens, when a whole population stops doing something that used to hold so much meaning? Well; we believe there’s a collective sadness, even if we haven’t realised it yet. And yet, we believe the solution is so simple. We just have to start writing letters again! We started the project to solve a personal conundrum. We love letters, we spend our days in our stationery shop discussing their importance. And yet, we still were not writing them as much as we would like. When we leave our lives to chance, it is too easy for convenience to triumph. The project is designed to create a trellis to hold us upright: we pledge to write a letter every Sunday, to ensure that our stories are written. The frame stands firm: we can twist our vines around it. Perhaps some weeks we will meander away, bloom freely, but we have a way of returning to centre, charting the path intended.

So we’re inviting you to join us in writing one letter every Sunday. Forever. Because they really are that important, at least we think so. Because if we stop writing our stories then we might stop living them as fully, too. And that’s not an option, as far as we’re concerned. Life is too precious. We need the butterflies.

We’ve created a pledge that you can sign, that captures your commitment to the cause and keeps you gently accountable. We send a weekly reminder email that is carefully considered. Oh, and it’s completely free to join.

There’s almost 12,000 of us so far, so you’re in good company.

Thank you for reading. I hope the sky is kind to you today, however you need it to be. I hope you can pause to hear the birds chattering. I hope you have someone in mind who you can write a letter to, someone who might not quite know how much you care for them, who might just tuck your words into a box and read them again one day.

Best wishes

Rebecca