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Not to bury the lede, we ended up stranded on that stretch of road for four hours, the longest traffic jam I’ve ever experienced. We would eventually learn that there had been a serious multi-vehicle accident up ahead. There were no fatalities, fortunately, but some people (including children) had to be cut out of their mangled vehicles, and two were airlifted to Louisville hospitals.

I felt so many things during this adventure. I’d love to report that being such a relaxed, go-with-the-flow sort of guy, I was unfazed. But I’m not that guy, so at least at first, I felt anger and frustration at having our plans thwarted. I hated feeling trapped and helpless, completely and utterly in the hands of far-larger-than-me forces over which I had absolutely no control. What kind of idiots design an interstate system in which one mishap turns the situation into a miles-long asphalt prison yard? Why in the world does it take hours to clear such a wreck? The environmentalist in me fumed at all the fuel being needlessly burned to keep air-conditioners running on this sweltering 95-degree day – including our own car, since of course we had three baby Holland lop rabbits with us, which my wife and daughters had just acquired (because hey, that’s what you do when you’re in the middle of a stressful move), and we had to keep those poor panting bunnies from overheating. The whole thing felt like a waste-of-time-and-resources fiasco, and I don’t like being caught in the middle of fiascos.

It’s hard, however, to stay too indignant when you know that a few miles up the road, kids are being cut out of cars and medivacked away to an uncertain fate. No matter how bad my day may have felt to me, theirs was infinitely worse. I also began to understand that this epic experience would be memorable, and we had some choices about the kind of memories we would make. Would we just remember how pissed off we were and how badly we needed to pee? Or were there other options?

One of the things I’ve learned (and have to keep relearning) from decades of mindfulness practice is to allow reality rather than fight it: to engage whatever is happening – inside your mind or out in the world – with curiosity and compassion rather than judgment and anger. To whatever degree you can manage this (and you always do it imperfectly), you’ll be better able to choose behaviors that are more helpful, for your own well-being and the well-being of those around you.

***

One reality I accept is that my body doesn’t allow me to sit for long periods, so I soon got out of the car and wandered around a bit to stretch my legs. Other folks were doing the same, and in a way that truly mortified my socially reticent wife and daughters, I began to engage these strangers in conversation. I met a tall, thin, good-natured Middle-eastern truck driver, who offered me almonds and pistachios. I talked to a guy about the fancy bass boat he was trailering. We all traded what scant information we had about the traffic jam. Parents carted their kids (and themselves) off to the woods for emergency bathroom runs. A young teenager came by offering to give us water and snacks. Not being able to stop me, my family finally joined me, and we chatted for quite a while with a woman who frequented Renaissance fairs and sold hand-forged medieval swords. Soon we were treated to photos of her in her period-accurate costume, while the man she was with, a recent widower, hauled out his tablet and proudly barraged us with pictures of his two dachshunds and an RV he was rehabbing. We invited folks to check out our massively cute Holland lops, which were an especially big hit with the young kids in the minivan behind us. We formed an impromptu block party, this little knot of humanity stuck together on I-71 South. To my surprise, no one I encountered was angry or mean-spirited; everyone seemed to be taking this snafu in stride.

What I’ll remember most about this day, I think, is the experience of neighborliness. We didn’t form deep friendships or lasting bonds, and in fact I don’t think I even learned anyone’s name. Regardless, I felt a lovely kind of kinship with these total strangers, these fellow travelers who hailed from all different backgrounds and were headed Lord knows where. I’m sure we all had varying opinions on politics and social or environmental issues. But, all of us thrown together by chance rather than choice, we found ways to connect, to show kindness and concern, to be curious and polite and helpful: to be good neighbors to each other.

***

To be neighborly in these ways is, I believe, how we’re fundamentally wired. The corrosive divisiveness and meanness that characterize our current public life do not feel inevitable to me; they feel like an unfortunate aberration fed and fostered by those, whether tech moguls or political figures or others, who reap short-term profit from our strife. We can, therefore, awaken from this fever dream. It may and probably will take some sort of common catastrophe to bring out our best; there’s good historical evidence that times of trial actually foster greater cooperation rather than cutthroat, guns-drawn competition. Just as interstates supply a reliable stream of accidents and traffic jams, I’m sure our increasingly unstable world will continue to supply plenty of occasions that will invite and require us to be good neighbors to each other.

But here’s another idea: instead of just waiting for the next catastrophe, what if we committed to building our neighborliness muscles all along the way? What if we made those small but significant efforts to offer helping hands and kind gestures to those around us? What if we found little ways to celebrate and laugh together, to show a little curiosity about each other’s lives? What if we were able to gently pierce the self-imposed bubbles in which so many of us have become encapsulated? Not only would our natural neighborly instincts and our communal life be strengthened, but, as I did with my I-71 neighbors, we could have such good times along the way.

P.S. If you like this Substack, please share it with a friend. I am trying to make a living from my writing, but I also want to make these essays available at no cost to all readers, in the spirit of gift. Paid options are available for those who are able to support it financially and want a few extra perks – thank you! To all my readers, another great way to support this writing is to do some shopping at Eden’s Heart Collective (www.edensheart.com), our intergenerational family business, where you’ll find a variety of beautiful handmade artistic products that will, I hope, make your heart sing.

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“You must have a place to which you can go in your heart, your mind, or your house, almost every day, where you do not owe anyone and where no one owes you – a place that simply allows for the blossoming of something new and promising.” – Joseph Campbell

I’m writing this essay in my writing cabin, shortly before we complete our move to the farm my wife Cyndi grew up on in Western Pennsylvania. Right now it’s an early Sunday morning in mid-August. The day is shaping up to be another muggy, hot beast, but for now, I’m comfortable in my un-air-conditioned little space.

I built this tiny 8’ x 8’ cabin early on in our 12-year tenure on this property. We moved from a farm where I was always busy building or fixing something, and when we moved to this place, one of my many heartbreaks was how little the place seemed to need from me. So, with young kids and an intense need for a useful project, I set about making them a playhouse. I repurposed all kinds of odds-end-ends lumber that the previous owners had haphazardly strewn throughout the woods – thanks for that – and I added my own scrap wood leftovers from various projects. With very little by way of purchased materials, I put together a Frankensteinesque structure with a cute little attic loft.

The kids LOVED this space, spending countless hours out here, immersed in their imaginative play. I soon was tasked with cutting the door in half to make a Dutch door, since they informed me this was essential for the smooth operation of their Hungry Pedestrian restaurant, which they ran out of the playhouse. When I asked them about the name, they explained patiently that only a really hungry person traveling by foot would be interested in the stones, sticks, and grass that constituted the dishes their restaurant had on offer. As far as I know, my wife and I were their only patrons.

Eventually, the kids outgrew the playhouse, and my wife took it over for a brief time as her art studio. But it was basically a spring-and-fall setup, as the cabin was frigid in the winter and a furnace in the summer, so Cyndi soon found other digs.

***

Up to this point in my side-hustle writing career, with a few books under my belt and years’ worth of monthly magazine columns and articles, I’d never really had a single place devoted to my craft. I’d been writing at the kitchen table, on the back porch, or anywhere else I could perch my laptop. With the playhouse/studio standing empty and unused, however, I finally decided that my writing deserved a space of its own. So years after I built it for others, I adopted the space for myself. I insulated it, added a space heater for the winter and a fan for the summer, and put in my standing desk.

For several years now, this little cabin has been the place where I’ve composed almost every line I’ve published and plenty that I haven’t. In many ways, it’s ideal: tucked into the woods with a big window offering me regular views of all the wildlife that occupy our woods, but only forty feet from our back porch, so I have electricity and (God help me) wi-fi. In some ways it’s not so ideal. Even with insulation, I’ve had plenty of winter mornings when I started writing with the cabin right at the freezing mark, and the little space heater took an eternity to bring it to a more reasonable temperature (turns out that typing with gloves or numb fingers is equally challenging). I’ve sweltered through plenty of hot and humid summer evenings with only a little fan for comfort. I cohabit with various insects. But in all this, the cabin has an absolutely unassailable advantage: it’s my space, a room of my own. The only thing I do in here is write (and occasionally, nap), almost every day, for at least an hour and a half.

I can’t begin to tell you what a gift this cabin has been to me. Whatever other nonsense may be going on in my life – and believe me, there’s been a lot of it – when I get in this space, all of that pretty much falls away. It’s like muscle memory: my body and my mind know that when I’m in the cabin, it’s time to write – or, as is often the case, to stare at a blank screen for disturbingly long periods of time, wondering with existential angst if I’m all out of helpful words for the rest of my life. This place has been a wonderful shelter for the shy, vulnerable, insecure creature that is my writer’s heart, and I’m grateful.

***

When we get to the farm in Pennsylvania, there’s no writing cabin or wood shop waiting for me. Cyndi, bless her, has greenlighted me to spend whatever time and money it will take in order to build both. I am preposterously excited about this; I’ve been sketching out designs for months, and I can’t wait to start swinging a hammer. And at the same time, I have some ambivalence. Writing and woodworking are beautiful creative pursuits; they have been inordinately good for my soul. They have also been inordinately bad for our bank account. These are not the sort of occupations that provide a steady, comfortable income – at least not for me, at least not yet, and quite likely, not ever. I’ve been all right with that not only because they are soul-balming alternatives to my career burnout but also because, thus far, they also haven’t required much capital investment: I inherited most of my woodworking equipment from my stepdad, and I’ve worked out of a garage that didn’t require much to repurpose into a shop. In Pennsylvania, however, the situation is different, and spending what I’ll need to spend in order to build what I need feels like an indulgence and an irresponsible risk.

Any of us who do creative work, whether as a hobby or a profession, have a decision to make at some point: do we believe enough in the work to make a real, sacred space for it in our lives? In many cases, this will be a literal space: a room in our house, a cabin in our back yard, an outbuilding on our farm. In all cases, we will have to make space for it in our calendar, carving out the time to practice and improve our craft.

There’s no guarantee that making such investments will have a tangible payoff. Maybe we never turn a profit, publish a piece, or get anything more than mediocre at our pursuit. And maybe, just maybe, none of those things are actually the point. Maybe the payoff is the safety of this sheltered space and the joy of pursuing your creative dreams in it. Maybe your reward is the ways your heart and soul and mind and character are reshaped in the process. Maybe it’s enough to share your imperfect work generously with others, bringing them a bit of happiness with your love and generosity. Maybe you’ll be paid back in the dividends of hope: that something new and beautiful can still be born and blossom in this hurting world.

P.S. If you like this Substack, please share it with a friend. I am trying to make a living from my writing, but I also want to make these essays available at no cost to all readers, in the spirit of gift. Paid options are available for those who are able to support it financially and want a few extra perks – thank you! To all my readers, another great way to support this writing is to do some shopping at Eden’s Heart Collective (www.edensheart.com), our intergenerational family business, where you’ll find a variety of beautiful handmade artistic products that will, I hope, make your heart sing.

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When I was in college, I spent my junior year studying in Hamburg, Germany. I went all in on the experience, becoming fluent in the language, investing wholeheartedly in my friendships with German students, traveling all over Europe, and making some amazing memories. A few weeks before this 11-month stint was to conclude, I realized that I had shifted into goodbye mode. When I went with friends to hear the weekly community drumming evening in the Stadtpark, or met them for coffee or beers, all these things had a special quality to them, because I knew each particular event was likely the last of its kind I would experience. And when I finally left the country, my heart broke. Ein Teil von mir ist immer in Deutschland geblieben.

I don’t regret the heartbreak of such goodbyes. Broken hearts can heal, and I plan get to the end of my days with a thoroughly banged-up heart. The heart that hasn’t been broken repeatedly hasn’t loved enough.

In the past year, life has been serving me up plenty of other heart-breaking goodbyes. With a sudden and radical career change, I said goodbye to my comfortable identity as a non-profit leader. With the onset of some serious autoimmune issues, I said goodbye to the reliably robust health I’ve always taken for granted. Being with her in her final days and hours, I said goodbye to my beloved mom, who had lived with a sword-of-Damocles cancer diagnosis for more than twenty years. And now that we’re moving to my wife’s home place farm in Western Pennsylvania, we’re saying all kinds of goodbyes: to friends, colleagues, family, our beloved parish and fellow church choir members. We’re saying goodbye to the rugged wooded hills and rolling farm fields of rural southern Indiana, where I’ve spent almost all my life, surrounded by down-to-earth, sincere, kind, generous, no-nonsense Midwestern neighbors. Just as happened in Germany several decades ago, I’m doing my best to savor these goodbyes, even as they break my heart, over and over and over.

As a society, I think we’ve also shifted into goodbye mode, whether we’re conscious of it or not. In our politics, we’re saying goodbye to any sense of comity, decorum, bipartisanship, or real effectiveness. In our economic lives, especially with the rise of AI, we’re saying goodbye to security or predictability. Environmentally, we’re saying goodbye to an unprecedented number of species, to diverse habitats and wild places, to healthy soil, water, air, and a stable climate. The world as we have known it is passing away, never to return.

How do we navigate so many irrevocable losses? We can, of course, ignore them, distracting ourselves with social media, online gaming, content streaming, and the various titillations of the digital age. We can retreat to nostalgia for an era when we imagine everything to have been Great. We can numb ourselves with substance abuse and other forms of addiction. We can rage against the losses, demonizing those whom we hold responsible. We can succumb to them, collapsing in despair and paralysis.

Or, we can commit to saying good goodbyes: with presence, gratitude, heartbreak, and hope. As I sat with my dying mom, I felt present to her in a way I’d never experienced before. She wasn’t a perfect person or a perfect mother, nor I a perfect son, and there were unresolved issues between us. But those final days we had together nonetheless glowed with a special light, as if additional colors had been added to the spectrum of my vision. I was grateful: for all she had been to me and so many others, and for the many wonderful decades we’d had together – far more than I ever thought her cancer would allow us. When she passed away, something broke in my heart that will not fully heal in this lifetime; the world without your mother in it can never be the same world. And yet, even as I mourn this great loss, I don’t intend to wallow in grief the rest of my life. An exciting new chapter is unfolding for me and my family, and I try every day to trust that it will bring opportunities for service and satisfaction that I can scarcely imagine at present. We are moving forward, as best we can, in hope.

Saying good goodbyes won’t bring back the things and people we’ve lost and the world we are all losing. Nor will it lessen the excruciating pain these losses entail. Lament doesn’t change the facts on the ground – but it does change us. We can love and savor all that is precious in this world, even as it is disappearing. We can let our vulnerable hearts be broken open, so they have greater capacity for kindness and care. Such are the sort of hearts that will be able to shine in the darkness of loss. Such are the hopeful hearts that can usher in whatever goodness may be possible in the world that emerges from the ashes of the present.

P.S. If you like this Substack, please share it with a friend. I am trying to make a living from my writing, but I also want to make these essays available at no cost to all readers, in the spirit of gift. Paid options are available for those who are able to support it financially and want a few extra perks – thank you! To all my readers, another great way to support this writing is to do some shopping at Eden’s Heart Collective (www.edensheart.com), our intergenerational family business, where you’ll find a variety of beautiful handmade artistic products that will, I hope, make your heart sing.

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The other night, my wife Cyndi made a gentle-but-firm observation in the form of a question: “Do you think you might be ingesting too much online content?” It was late in the evening, and I was at the computer, watching a movie on Netflix while feeding a photo scanner to digitize old photo albums before throwing them away to save space for our upcoming move. It was mindless, boring, time-consuming work, so temptation-bundling this task with a movie made it tolerable.

It’s not the first time Cyndi has made such an observation, and I reacted as I usually do: with defensiveness and self-justification. I do silent meditation every morning; I spend long stretches working quietly without my headphones; it was a thoughtful, nuanced, highbrow movie; I probably wouldn’t get these photo albums scanned without some sort of incentive. Look at how virtuous I am.

“Only you know,” Cyndi responded patiently, cutting through my crap as she always does, “what the right amount is.” What a ninja move – uggh.

So, I’ve been thinking about this. All my self-justifications are indeed true, but I think it could also be true that Cyndi is right (as she usually is). Even having walked away from a hectic, always-on career, even with a much slower pace of life, even having eschewed the siren call of social media, I do watch and listen to a lot: books, podcasts, audiobooks, automated reads of NYT and Substack articles, and Netflix.

There are two main reasons I consume so much content. One is that I have a restlessly curious mind and a strong desire to be well-read and well-informed (and to feel smart). I’ve listened to classic and contemporary fiction, history, philosophy, cultural critique, news, economic and political analysis from across the spectrum. Most of it is high quality, and almost all of it is stuff I’d never make time to read in hardcopy. I had The Brothers Karamazov on my nightstand for years and was making no progress, then I listened to it in its unabridged entirety during a roofing project and some other chores (and yes, if you’re wondering, at 1.5x speed) – and went on to listen to Anna Karenina, Kristin Lavransdatter, the Brontë and Jane Austin canons, several Charles Dickens tomes, and plenty else. And, to be honest, plenty of science fiction, thrillers, and other mindfluff. I may not process them as deeply or remember them as well as if I’d read them in print, nor am I ready to discuss them in a graduate literature seminar. But, I’ve told myself, if the choice is to listen to The Brothers K or to never get through it at all, an audiobook doesn’t seem so bad.

The second reason is that I like to be productive and I don’t like to be bored. I absorb almost 100% of this content while multi-tasking: while I’m exercising, while I’m doing mindless tasks in the woodshop or outdoors; while I’m doing dishes or getting meals ready or cleaning up. The engineer in me, who is always looking for ways to optimize and be efficient, loves that I can make such good use of my time.

***

I’m beginning to suspect that both of those reasons may be, well, suspect. There’s nothing wrong with intellectual curiosity or a desire for productivity, per se. But they also have a shadow side. Wanting to be well-read and engage with good content may stem from noble intentions, but it just as easily may come from the desire to impress others or to live up to some imagined standard of intellectual heft. It may also grow out of a misguided belief that if I can just consume enough of other people’s thoughts, I’ll know “the answers” and therefore have some means for exerting control amidst the chaos and craziness in my own life and in the broader world. But Four Thousand Weeks author Oliver Burkeman is right: we’ll never get a true handle on the chaos. We’ll never read enough, our thinking will always have gaps and contradictions – and lo and behold, we stumble on nonetheless.

The desire to replace boredom with efficiency and productivity can be even more of a problem. I’ve always been an overachiever, and while that has worked pretty well for me, it also wired me in such a way that I’m very tempted to conflate my self-worth with what I can get done in a day (or year or lifetime). But this is a recipe for deep psychological insecurity (just ask my string of therapists) and it isn’t really sucking the marrow out of life – which takes, unavoidably, time. And I think truly savoring life also takes, heaven forfend, boredom. Once upon a time, I saw my mind more as a machine or a computer, and my goal was to feed it as much information as possible, as quickly as possible, for it to process. But the older I get, the more I suspect that the mind, like the heart, has reasons that reason does not know. As we’re learning in this dubious digital age, the overstimulated and overstuffed mind struggles to pay real attention to anything or to come up with any interesting and worthwhile insights, just as the overexercised muscle never has time to recover and grow stronger. You have to turn it all off sometimes, especially for your creative life to thrive. How many hours have I spent staring at a blank page or a piece of lumber, before inspiration comes and I see new possibilities? It’s maddeningly unavoidable: boredom is essential to a fruitful, well-lived life.

***

What, then, to do? Even being aware of the temptations it presents, I’m not ready to eschew all of this infinite available content, because so much of it is truly good and helpful. But I don’t want to be addicted to it – which, on some level at least, I probably am. That means a very tricky, ongoing negotiation. An alcoholic or gambling addict can give up booze or betting entirely, but a compulsive eater can’t avoid food.

The Amish are a good example of how to do such negotiation. The caricature of Amish communities is that they are frozen in time technologically, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. They use an increasing amount of modern technology, like solar power, but they always discern together which technologies serve their families and their communities well, and they’re willing to draw hard boundaries around the ones that don’t.

I’m not sure if I’ll end up with a hard-and-fast rule about this, but I’m thinking about two guiding principles. One is to avoid content driven by an algorithm – so no TikTok or Facebook reels at all (no problem – I hate them anyway), and using Youtube in a very careful, targeted way (big problem – how many times have I opened the app for some DIY tip and ended up sucked into watching dashcam footage of highway accidents?!?). The other is to choose a general ratio for content ingestion, perhaps using only half of the time I would have available for it, leaving the other half to be bored; to pay better attention to my surroundings, my work at hand, and my interior life; to process what I have ingested; to be open to the muse.

I’ll admit that this feels pretty scary to me. I’d rather drill a hole in my head than plug away on the elliptical trainer for thirty minutes without some entertainment. But who knows what new possibilities may emerge? Maybe, if that’s so intolerable, I’ll leave the elliptical in the basement and start doing more exercise outside, whatever the weather or season? Maybe, as I scan photo albums, I can just relive those memories – which, in all likelihood, is the only time I’ll probably spend with those photos. Maybe a less content-driven life has some gifts to offer that I can’t even imagine until I give it a try.

I’m not sure what I’m going to commit to, and if you want to leave a comment or contact me otherwise, I’d be very interested in how you all negotiate the place of podcasts, audiobooks, and streaming video content in your own lives. And when you do unplug, what gifts do you find – or what finds you – on the far side of boredom?

P.S. If you like this Substack, please share it with a friend. I am trying to make a living from my writing, but I also want to make these essays available at no cost to all readers, in the spirit of gift. Paid options are available for those who are able to support it financially and want a few extra perks – thank you! To all my readers, another great way to support this writing is to do some shopping at Eden’s Heart Collective (www.edensheart.com), our intergenerational family business, where you’ll find a variety of beautiful handmade artistic products.

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about silence and noise. When I was a nonprofit CEO in Louisville, KY, I always found it ironic that though I ran a mindfulness-based spirituality center, the work was often busy, hectic, and most of all, noisy, due to an open-plan office in which you could hardly avoid overhearing every co-worker’s conversation. When I really needed to concentrate on important projects, I would often retreat to a study carrel hidden away up in the library stacks at nearby Bellarmine University, just for little peace. As a rural person, I also never got used to the background noise of an urban environment: horns honking, sirens blaring, car stereos thumping, jets roaring in and out of the nearby airport, and the constant hum of traffic.

While I find the soundscape of cities claustrophobic, it often isn’t much better out here in the country. We live on a two-lane rural highway, which has a particularly high volume of mufflerless pickup trucks tearing by day and night. We also live near a busy railroad track, so we contend with the rumble of diesel trains and their deafening whistle at two nearby crossings (my wife and kids love the trains; I, not so much). There’s also the drone and whine of lawnmowers and leaf blowers and tractors, the snarl of chainsaws, our own share of jet traffic overhead, and of course, the regular staccato of gunfire from hunting and target shooting. Sometimes, some crazy person sets off what must be a bomb or a canon. It’s a far, loud cry from quiet out here. I find I can’t sleep without a white noise machine going.

Whether urban or rural, the noisiness I describe is pretty much par for the course in this country. There are hardly any places left in the US where you can experience real, genuine silence. Acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, in fact, claims silence is an endangered species, on the verge of extinction. In his book, One Square Inch of Silence, he describes a small red stone he placed in the Hoh Rainforest at Olympic National Park, to mark and help preserve what has been “the quietest place in the United States.” Such places, sadly, are becoming increasingly rare.

* * *

As I have transitioned from busy urban nonprofit leader to the monkish life of a rural hermit woodworker and writer, I have felt more and more need for silence. No longer are my days filled with meetings and phone calls; I often go a full workday without ever saying or hearing a word. I find myself craving silence. I feel less and less need or desire to speak – much to the relief of my family members, among whom I have something of a reputation for, well, talking out of my @ss.

Yet I also, and too often, fill that empty space with podcasts and audiobooks, to engage my mind when I’m doing more menial tasks. And I create plenty of noise, myself. Much of the time in my shop, I’m running machinery that’s so loud I need to take precautions to protect my hearing. I, too, operate noisy tractors, chainsaws, a sawmill, and lawn equipment. If I crave silence so much, I ask myself all the time, why do I keep making so darn much noise?

I believe that for the good of our souls, we all need silence, which Gorden Hempton defines as “real presence”: not the absence of sound, per se, but the absence of manmade noise. And yet we’re enveloped in such noise – much of it inescapable at this point in history, but plenty that we actively choose, like an always-on television. It’s part of the larger problem of human artifice in the modern industrialized world: whether with noise pollution, light pollution, air pollution, water pollution, or climate change, we tend to spoil our own nest.

* * *

We’re all caught up in and complicit with our noisy world. But I believe it’s possible to live with more intention toward a better, quieter future. How?

First, it’s helpful to remember the sound of silence. If and when you can, make pilgrimages and retreats to places that still retain some semblance of quiet. Olympic, Yellowstone, Big Bend, other national parks, and the Minnesota Boundary Waters offer the deep quiet of natural settings. Out-of-the-way convents and monasteries offer some respite from noise. Or perhaps you might visit the town of Green Bank, West Virginia. Deep in the Alleghany Mountains, Green Bank is a government-mandated quiet zone that restricts technology use due to a radio astronomy telescope located there, making it the quietest town in America.

You needn’t travel anywhere to experience the most profound and important quiet of all: inner silence. In fact, I’m convinced that one of the reasons we create so much noise is that, as the French philosopher Blaise Pascal observed, we’re deeply afraid being alone in the silence of our own soul: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Commit, if you dare, to the great adventure of getting to know your inner life by having regular periods when you turn off music, shows, podcasts, news, and other distractions. Through meditation and contemplative prayer practices, you can begin to explore the noisiness of your own monkey mind as well as occasionally break through to the deep, divine silence that lies beneath all your internal mental chatter.

When you begin to cultivate inner quiet, it becomes easier to seek, find, and cherish the small pockets of silence that our world still offers. Despite all the noise pollution where I live, for example, there are short, sacred moments when there are no cars or trains or jets passing by, no lawn equipment running, no stereos blaring or shots being fired – when it’s just wonderfully, blessedly quiet. Savor these moments. In a degraded and degrading world, we can’t live in paradise. We can only get glimpses of it and hold on to them as promises of a world that may yet come, when we’ve learned to live more gently on this planet.

It’s also possible to use external noise as a sort of mindfulness bell. In some formal meditation traditions, a bell is often rung at various intervals during a meditation period, to help recollect and refocus the inevitably wandering minds of the meditators (I prefer the bell to another method, which involves hitting meditators with a stick). When the jet roars by overhead, it offers a chance to remind ourselves of our need for silence, be grateful for the moments when we can experience it, and cultivate compassion for whatever is lost or broken in humankind, which causes us to create such a noisy world. Lord, forgive us, for we know not what we do.

Consider, also, how you might make less noise. Ask yourself the question Wendell Berry raises in his cantankerously wonderful poem, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”: “Will this disturb the sleep/ of a woman near to giving birth?”. Who knows how you might answer this question: using an electric car or lawn mower (or better yet, a bike and a scythe), picking up a handsaw rather than a power saw, or finding any number of ways you might make your life less mechanized and more meaningful.

Finally, when you do make noise, make it with mindful attention and intention. Ask yourself if what you’re doing or making is worth the noise it adds to the world, and if you can’t answer that in the affirmative, considering not doing it – or doing it less, or differently.

* * *

Cultivating more silence in your life isn’t just a self-help trick for a more peaceful individual life. At a time when large corporations profit immensely by polluting our collective life with chatter and noise, resisting this is a quietly radical, revolutionary act, for the sake of a better world.

P.S. If you like this Substack, please share it with a friend. I am trying to make a living from my writing, but I also want to make these essays available at no cost to all readers, in the spirit of gift. Paid options are available for those who are able to support it financially and want a few extra perks – thank you! To all my readers, another great way to support this writing is to do some shopping at Eden’s Heart Collective (www.edensheart.com), our intergenerational family business, where you’ll find a variety of beautiful handmade artistic products.

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Our home and property are nestled into several hundred acres of woods. In addition to ticks and privacy, this setting also provides us up-close encounters with wildlife. White-tailed deer traipse through our yard as if they owned it, and red foxes skit around with furtive abandon. Our concrete driveway has patch marks where, just after it had been poured, some impatient creature padded across it and left indelible prints.

Of all these wild inhabitants, my favorite is the opossum. Unfortunately, most opossums I see are dead on the road, where their poor vision and lumbering gait make them all too vulnerable to careless drivers. But one has been living in our backyard for quite a while, and I see it (him? her? Not sure.) frequently. Of an early morning or late evening, it often trundles by my writing cabin or boldly noses around on our back patio and in our landscaping, oblivious to our outdoor cats, who give it a side eye and a wide berth.

What strikes me most about this opossum, aside from its being a marsupial and having an awesome prehensile tail, is that it has clearly been through the wringer. When I first saw it, it looked mangy and ragged. I’m no expert on opossums, but it clearly did not seem well. To make matters worse, the next time I saw it, some other creature had clearly gotten the better of it. One of its ears ear was torn in half and its coat was matted with blood. Since I don’t know how to run a field hospital for wounded wildlife, I just gave it a prayer and a blessing, figuring nature would take its course.

By whatever stubborn miracle, nature taking its course meant that this amazing creature healed up and its coat filled out. I don’t know if it has recurring nightmares about the traumatic encounter that left it so injured, but what I do know is that it has apparently found a way to go about its waddling way, living its best opossum life.

***

Fear has been a pretty constant companion for me throughout the decades. Fear of rejection or ridicule, fear of professional failure, fear of losing my health or financial security, fear of not appearing to have it all together, fear of disappointing people and not measuring up, fear of being abandoned and alone and unloved. This background radiation of fear is almost certainly why I’ve been drawn to risky pastimes like off-road motorcycling, mountain biking, and rock climbing – which, in their narrow, adrenaline-fueled domains, provided some inoculation against the larger, more amorphous, and ultimately far more threatening fears.

Being a person with a lot of fears, of course I’ve always been moved by all the “Fear not” passages in Hebrew and Christian scriptures. They’re clearly speaking to a pretty universal human problem and certainly speaking to a Kyle Kramer problem. But I’ve also been a little annoyed by these passages, because I’ve tended to read them as a command: get your act together, summon your faith and willpower, and dispense with this fear nonsense. As if that were easy.

The irony of my various fears is that many of them have actually happened. I have hit dead-ends in my career, suffered some pretty grievous physical and emotional injuries, dealt with a serious health issue, been painfully betrayed, had relationships detonate or deteriorate. Like that opossum’s ear, I’m mangled in any number of ways.

And yet here I am, still here, still functioning decently well as a human being, still trying to contribute something helpful to the world, and actually happier and more content than I’ve been at any other point in my life. Here’s the mindbender: When I consider why I feel better and quite a bit less fearful now than I have for decades, I realize it’s not despite the fact that many of the things I feared actually came to pass in my life, but, at least in some cases, because they did. When sh!t hits the fan and you survive it, you realize that you can survive it and even grow from it. The sharp teeth of fear become a little duller. You remember how many kind people reached out to console and help you. You begin to understand that life isn’t about getting to the end without damage, but being broken repeatedly and experiencing the grace of healing and the support of others. And not that toxically positive “coming back even stronger” BS; some disasters do terrible and irreversible damage. Ukrainians will carry their war wounds to the grave. Jacob limped the rest of this life after wrestling with God. But he became the father of a nation and, in my opinion, a better and wiser man than he’d been.

***

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not a masochist and I’m not trying to borrow trouble. I’m not especially happy about some of the things that have happened to me, and I’m deeply grateful I’ve managed to avoid catastrophes that are truly, unbearably, life-breakingly terrible. But a life lived in fear is more terrible. Fear, as Frank Herbert wrote in Dune, is the mind-killer. And the heart-killer. And the joy-killer. Learning to “fear not” turns out, annoyingly, to be one of the most crucial tasks of spiritual maturity.

And one of the most painful. When you turn around and face your fear, it generally doesn’t just evaporate harmlessly like a black mist. As often as not, it beats the living hell out of you. Which, of course, sucks. Why can’t these lessons be cheaper to learn? Mathein, pathein, wrote the world-weary ancient Greeks: to learn is to suffer. Darn those ancient Greeks for being right.

***

The opossum isn’t fast or ferocious. It doesn’t have body armor or quills or sharp claws or big fangs for much in the way of self-defense (though it does excrete a terrible smell from its anus when threatened; not a bad trick, fear-farting). It basically has to take its lumps, just as we do, with our soft bodies and our vulnerable hearts. Like my opossum friend with its mangled ear, we don’t get out of this life unscathed. But if we let the scathing do its difficult work on us, we may become a little less fearful and a little more free.

P.S. If you like this Substack, please share it with a friend. I am trying to make a living from my writing, but I also want to make these essays available at no cost to all readers, in the spirit of gift. Paid options are available for those who are able to support it financially and want a few extra perks – thank you! To all my readers, another great way to support this writing is to do some shopping at Eden’s Heart Collective (www.edensheart.com), our intergenerational family business, where you’ll find a variety of beautiful handmade artistic products.

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I’m fortunate to have a friend who owns a sailboat on the Ohio River and who often lets me and my kids crew on it. We generally head several miles upriver from the marina in downtown Louisville to Six Mile Island or beyond, then back down. It’s always an adventure, tacking across the river, dodging barges and other boats, and taking best advantage of the unpredictable winds in the river valley. Sometimes it’s such slow going that we need to fire up the engine to help us along. Sometimes the wind is so boisterous that the boat heels over strongly and gives us a pretty wild ride. Every time we go out, I learn more: about broad reaches, beam reaches, and close hauled winds, about halyards and jib sheets and topping lift lines, about the river and its currents. It’s a great joy.

Sometimes, however, I feel a little guilt about the time I spend on the water. We’re not hauling cargo or “accomplishing” anything. We just sail up the river, turn around, and sail right back down. Unlike other forms of recreation I’ve done over the years, like rock climbing and mountain biking, it’s not even good exercise. What, I ask myself, is the point?

If you’re a normal human being, you’re probably rolling your eyes right now. Can’t this guy be a little less Catholic about this, and dispense with the guilt? Can’t I just accept that the point of sailing is pleasure, and, with the wisdom of Mary Oliver, let the soft animal of my body love what it loves? Why not stop agonizing over it and simply enjoy it? I ask myself the same questions all the time. What in the world is wrong with me?

There’s a long list, much of which falls under the category of being a Chronically Serious Person. Part of my dis-ease is feeling that I need to earn my worth by what I accomplish. If you’ve never tried on that psychological malady, don’t. It’s not a great way to move through life – especially when, inevitably, you fall short of these imagined expectations. Only recently, after I experienced a serious career upheaval and medical issues, have some serious cracks appeared in that false idol.

The deeper issue, however, isn’t just what’s wrong with me (a lot), but what’s wrong with the world. If you pay any attention whatsoever, it’s pretty clear that things aren’t in great shape right now. Our political system is profoundly broken and dysfunctional. Environmental problems are mounting and our communities are frayed and polarized. I’m painfully aware of these issues all the time, so if I sharpen it to a fine point, the question I’m really asking is this: what’s the best way to spend your limited time when the world is burning? Shouldn’t I be calling my senators, holding a protest sign, ladling out soup to the homeless, chaining myself to old-growth trees, advocating for poor harassed immigrants? When my grandkids ask me what I did in the face of multiple unfolding disasters that threaten the well-being of the entire planet and its peoples, do I want to tell them that, um, I went sailing?

***

Maybe so. The wise, long-time activists I’ve known tell me that self-care is essential to stay at such difficult and often discouraging work. If recreational sailing is what recharges you and helps you stay in the fight for a better world, I can hear them saying, then do whatever floats your boat. Fair point.

But I think something else is also at play here. I’ve moved through much of my life like a bulldozer, setting a direction and then applying tremendous force and horsepower to move forward, over and through obstacles rather than around them. I’m not unlike the current American president, who has assumed he can bend other people and entire countries to his will simply through the force of his personality (and the American military). And he’s just a symptom of a similar broader trend: the hubristic, Ozymandian assumption that the world is ours to do with whatever we wish. The problem, as both the president and the rest of us are discovering, is that the world just doesn’t work that way. It stubbornly resists our efforts to control it, and the more we double down on such methods, the more things go awry.

Which brings me back to sailing. Boiled down to its essence, sailing is a way to move through the world that requires learning how to work with, not against, forces beyond your control. You can’t dictate how much or which way the wind blows, but you can figure out how to cooperate with it to get where you want to go – even if the path you take can rarely be a straight line. In this way, sailing is a wonderful middle ground between motoring and drifting – the former imposing direction through will and force, and the latter having no direction at all.

I think that may be why I’m drawn to it. I’m pretty much done trying to motor and push my way through life, but I don’t want to drift, either. And as I think about all the issues of our burning world, I wonder if what they require is not more force – which, after all, is the mindset that helped get us into a lot of our current messes – but the ability to work with given circumstances skillfully, with cooperation rather than the sheer imposition of will. In this respect, to just “sail through” something is a bit of a misnomer, since sailing is about skillful attentiveness rather than lazy ease. Learning how to navigate a sailboat, I’m realizing, might help develop a decent set of tools for navigating difficult times more generally.

Beautiful as I may find that metaphor, however, I think there’s still more to this. At their molten core, most of the broad-scale problems we face in our times are not just the result of misguided laws and economic policies. We keep creating these messes and failing to fix them because, individually and collectively, we’ve forgotten or ignored some fundamental truths: that we belong to each other and to the Earth of which we’re made, and that embracing our belonging can be a source of endless pleasure, satisfaction, and meaning. Put another way, we have to change, in our orientation toward the world and each other, before we can expect to resolve any of our myriad social and environmental issues.

I don’t think this kind of change happens by hammering ourselves into a new shape. Meaningful and lasting change is more subtle, and this is where sailing may actually be one of a thousand helpful means to such necessary evolution of our character. Because, beyond whatever transferable skills it may teach for navigating one’s life, sailing offers the experience of communion. When I’m out on a sailboat, I’m spending time with people I care about, cooperating with them for a common purpose, working closely with the often unpredictable forces of nature. This is why I can’t help but loving it, and the deep joy I feel under sail makes me think that this way of being in communion with others and with the world is what we’re made for. The more we can experience it – whether on a sailboat or a farm, in a hospital or office or construction site or house of worship – the better chance we’ll have of becoming the sort of people who will take good care of the human community and our Earthly home. We might just find a way to sail through to a more beautiful world.

P.S. As I researched this essay, I learned that sail power actually can help bring about a more sustainable world in a more direct way, as well. Replacing or retrofitting the world’s diesel-powered maritime cargo fleet for high-tech sailing could actually make a meaningful 3% dent in global carbon emissions. And those ships look really cool, too.

P.P.S. If you like this Substack, please share it with a friend. I am trying to make a living from my writing, but I also want to make these essays available at no cost to all readers, in the spirit of gift. Paid options are available for those who are able to support it financially and want a few extra perks – thank you! To all my readers, another great way to support this writing is to do some shopping at Eden’s Heart Collective (www.edensheart.com), our intergenerational family business, where you’ll find a variety of beautiful handmade artistic products.

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Getting a house ready for sale is always a reckoning, especially if you’ve lived in it any length of time. As we gear up to move to my wife’s home place farm in western Pennsylvania, we’re preparing to sell this house that has been home to us for the last dozen years. We’re patching cracks and touching up paint. We’re upgrading our ancient and well-worn kitchen appliances, which I have kept in service with superglue, replacement parts, Youtube repair videos, and sheer stubbornness. We’re cutting back errant branches, trimming shaggy shrubbery, re-grouting patio flagstones, powerwashing, fixing wonky door latches, and pulling endless weeds.

As I do with most things, I have ambivalent feelings in all this. On the one hand, I’m feeling pretty good. The place is looking better than it ever has since we bought it. I’m feeling hopeful we’ll find buyers for this house that will love and enjoy this place as we have (and give us a decent price for it).

On the other hand, I’m a little rueful about what we’d been willing to get used to and live with – issues that now, as we prepare to sell, we’re finally taking care of. Why, for example, did I not spend $5 and a little bit of time to fix our doorbell, since we’ve had bare live wires sticking out of a hole next to the door for over a decade? Since I made this minor repair, all of us have been taking turns randomly ringing the bell – simply because we can (I swear, we’re not starved for entertainment). Had we kept up better with some of these minor chores, we could have been enjoying such pleasures all along the way, rather than just bequeathing them to the next owner.

***

As hard as we’re working now to get our place ready to sell, I know it’s a fraction of what we’ll be in for when we move soon to my wife’s family farm. Sometimes I get tired and intimidated just thinking about it, but mostly I’m excited. We never felt that we’d be staying long in our current place, so we didn’t make many long-term, large-scale investments in it. But the farm is different. We intend for it to be the place where we grow old and die. At least two of our kids plan to live their lives on the property, as well. Who knows what curveballs the future will throw us, but at this point, we’re moving forward with the hope and assumption that this farm will be our and our kids’ forever home – which makes us think a lot differently about how we’ll invest in the place. Right out of the gate, I’ll be converting part of a large barn into a wood shop or building a new standalone shop. We’ll renovate one bathroom and add another, re-do the kitchen, fix up an art studio, and do plenty of painting. The current discussion is whether our twin daughters, who have will have separate bedrooms for the first time in their lives, get a hobbit door between their rooms. Outside, we’ll be planting orchard trees, berry bushes, and grape vines. I’m dreaming of solar panels and building a new writing cabin out of lumber I mill from trees on the property. However all these projects turn out, here’s one thing I’m sure of: if we move in and discover a loose hinge or a janky electrical switch, I’m going to fix it right away, before I get used to it as it is.

***

As I work on our house, I’m drawing some larger parallels with how humanity at large is living in our collective home, this planet Earth. We seem to be failing at one of the most essential human tasks: finding a way to exist harmoniously within the rest of the natural world. We’re living in this place as if we didn’t really belong here, as if it isn’t our forever home. As a result, we’re not only neglecting some of the basics, like maintaining healthy soils and waterways and forests. We’re also actively destroying huge swathes of it through large-scale mining, “property development,” and other aggressions. In all this, we’re not only screwing over the next owners, but we’re denying ourselves the pleasures of fully belonging for the time we’re here. It’s amazing to me, what we’ve been willing to live with: asphalt and ugly strip malls and billboards everywhere we turn, blighted neighborhoods, polluted rivers, unbreathable air, degraded croplands and forests.

What if, instead, we began to live in this world as if it were truly a long-term home, for us and those who come after? Because, after all, it is.

Like many others in our difficult era, I’ve become deeply disillusioned with the possibilities of changing the this-world-isn’t-our-home dynamic from the top down, with big levers of political or economic power. I’m also aware that failing to make large-scale change can and probably does spell doom for us as a species. But regardless how things turn out as a whole, I still think it’s worthwhile for us to start treating our own homes and local communities as places of real belonging, not temporary holdovers until our next move, Armageddon, the Singularity, or colonizing Mars and the moon. We could do the little things to make our places lovely, and we could even take big outrageous swings that make no economic sense but make our heart sing. We could even, for once, show some restraint. Who knows what such actions and deliberate inactions could add up to collectively? At the very least, we could create some small oases of beauty and goodness in a rapidly expanding desert. They won’t be perfect and they may not last and they may not be enough to save what needs saving. But they could give us great pleasure and purpose in the meantime. And we’ll be doing right, as best we can, by the next owners.

P.S. If you like this Substack, please share it with a friend. I am trying to make a living from my writing, but I also want to make these essays available at no cost to all readers, in the spirit of gift. Paid options are available for those who are able to support it financially and want a few extra perks – thank you! To all my readers, another great way to support this writing is to do some shopping at Eden’s Heart Collective (www.edensheart.com), our intergenerational family business, where you’ll find a variety of beautiful handmade artistic products.

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As a woodworker, I do most of my making in my shop, with precision tools and under fairly controlled conditions. Wood is a living material and always throws curve balls, but those happen within a fairly predictable range and there are generally reliable ways to deal with them. Not so, however, with teenagers. Recently I did a different, much wilder kind of making: of memories, when my son Elijah and I flew to Minneapolis for my nephew’s wedding.

I was nervous about the trip for many weeks beforehand. Eli, 19, is at a beautiful, tender, maddening age somewhere between adolescence and full adulthood. He and I are in the season of head-butting, where he is trying to carve out an independent niche in our family, and I’m trying to figure out how to let him become his own man – so very, very different from me – while still providing him the support and scaffolding he still needs but may not realize or be willing to admit. I mostly screw this up, so in addition to being dad-cringe, I often just plain piss him off – and vice-versa. As our trip approached, I worried that I would do some version of my usual parental blunderbussing and would end up just further excavating the chasm I often feel between us.

My wise wife gave me some good counsel prior to our departure. “Just mostly ignore him,” Cyndi told me. “That’s probably what he wants anyway.” So I did my best to follow her advice. I didn’t try to engage him in deep conversation. As we navigated through airport concourses, I let him hang back or go ahead, making sure he got to where he needed to go but not embarrassing him with too much interaction. On the plane, we watched the movies he chose and I tried to appreciate them. At the various wedding festivities, where he knew hardly anyone, I tried subtly to include him but also let him hang out on the sidelines, listening to music on his airpods.

At one point, we had several hours of free time in downtown Minneapolis, so we decided to explore the Minneapolis riverfront area together. As we walked across Stone Arch Bridge and wandered through Father Hennepin Bluff Park, I let him set the pace and chart the direction. He’s an avid photographer, so he spent a lot of time making various photos. We admired St. Anthony Falls and the workings of the Hennepin Island hydroelectric plant. My main job was just to make sure we got back to the hotel on time; beyond that, the agenda was his.

The upshot of all this is that, to my great delight, Eli seemed to have a good time on the trip, as did I. Together, we made some wonderful memories – ones that I hope will bridge the space between us rather than widen it. And all it took on my part was being present, letting go of any particular agenda, and in general, not trying so hard.

***

I’m not writing this essay to brag about what feels like a parental victory. If anything, I’m trying to understand why this good experience was more the exception than the rule, both in my parenting and in my life more generally.

I’ve always been a try-harder sort of person. That has had its upsides and rewards, but deep into my midlife, I’m encountering multiple data points that this push-push-push way of being in the world has a shadow side, as well: it is mostly rooted in fear, anxiety, and an overall scarcity mindset. I know I came by such attitudes honestly, for both of my parents were/are similarly oriented. And after reading Jeremy Lent’s fascinating book, The Patterning Instinct, I’m wondering if the roots of my work-hard-and-worry-hard orientation actually go far deeper, all the way back to the dawn of agriculture itself.

Prior to the rise of farming, according to Lent, nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes could supply their needs with a leisurely two to three hours of work per day, and the varied diet and possibility of migration made scarcity and malnutrition rare – as evidenced by recent archeological evidence that such peoples enjoyed overall good health and physical robustness. With the advent of agriculture, however, we had to work a lot harder and were much more subject to the vagaries of weather, disease, and other risks that could radically diminish or destroy an all-eggs-in-one-basket harvest. For all its benefits, feast-or-famine agriculture increased our workloads, degraded our health, and caused greater anxiety about the future (and led to the rise of civilization, specialized trades, bureaucracy, large-scale war and conquest, etc. – topics for another day). Hunter-gatherers did not have to work or worry nearly as much as farmers did.

Most of us are as far removed from farming as we are from hunting and foraging. Short of large-scale societal collapse (which I don’t rule out), few of us can or will return to such lifestyles. But I believe we carry the DNA of both foragers and farmers in our bodies and our psyches. If that’s true, then both attitudes are available to us: the more carefree attitude of hunter-gatherers, and the more serious buckle-down attitude of the farmers. The trick is to figure out how and when to deploy one rather than the other. I don’t want to lose the hoe-the-damn-weeds capacity to work hard toward a goal; the willpower and discipline involved in that are valuable assets, since life doesn’t always hand us roses. But, as I learned from just bumming around and hanging out with my son, a lighter grasp on life generally brings better results, in terms of relationships (especially with teenagers!) and one’s overall physical and mental well-being.

***

The most solid foundation for relaxing a bit is trust: trust that the world is more benign than it is threatening and more generous than penurious; trust that most people are good-hearted and kind; trust that, in some form or fashion, most things can ultimately turn out for the good. In an increasingly chaotic world, this trust is not easy: both planet and people can be unspeakably, tragically cruel. Trust is a deliberate act of faith, whether in Divine Providence or Mother Nature or the adaptive power of evolution or all of these. It’s an acknowledgment that many if not most things are out of my control, and that that’s all right, perhaps even good.

Given how I’m wired, I find cultivating this faith to be especially challenging, so in its severe mercy, life has seen fit to sledge-hammer it repeatedly into my stubborn heart through various exogenous and self-inflicted disasters and setbacks, which have forced me to loosen my grip on things. But on some blessed occasions, it comes as a gentle, loving invitation that’s as free and easy as a walk in the park with my son.

P.S. If you like this Substack, please share it with a friend. I am trying to make a living from my writing, but I also want to make these essays available at no cost to all readers, in the spirit of gift. Paid options are available for those who are able to support it financially and want a few extra perks – thank you! To all my readers, another great way to support this writing is to do some shopping at Eden’s Heart Collective (www.edensheart.com), our intergenerational family business, where you’ll find a variety of beautiful handmade artistic products that will, I hope, make your heart sing.

Subscribe now

My mom loved stuff. She was, I don’t mind saying it (because I have this tendency as well), an exquisitely organized packrat. On neat shelves and in labeled bins, she maintained a huge collection of fabrics for her sewing and multi-media materials for her handmade notecards. The walls of her and my stepdad’s large home were adorned with art and hundreds of their own framed 8x10 photos, taken from their extensive travels. Mom loved seasonal decoration, so the attic was full of decorations for Easter, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. For Christmas – I’m not exaggerating – they erected and decorated no less than seven artificial trees. As she and my stepdad got older, they actually had to hire temp helpers just to bring down the endless boxes of Christmas decorations.

Over the years, we shook our heads at all this and begged them to start paring down. Mom cheerily dismissed our concerns, saying that when they were gone, we could just back up a dumpster to the house and have at it.

Easier said than done. My mom died late last year, and with my stepdad already in a nursing home, it was time to clean out and sell their house. As the kid who lived the closest, this task fell mainly to me. Weekend after weekend, I made the 90-minute trip and tried my best to empty this massive house, with its 18 closets and its huge attic and basement storage room. What do you keep?

I felt so many emotions throughout this process. I was in the tenderness of early grief, and I wanted to preserve anything and everything that helped me hold on to my mom. I also felt a smoldering rage that they had made essentially zero effort to get a handle on all the stuff, leaving it to those of us who already had plenty to deal with. Mostly, I felt what Fr. Richard Rohr calls a bright sadness, as I painfully sifted through the artifacts of what had been their good, rich, full life. Mom navigated a difficult first marriage and a painful divorce but ended up with a deeply devoted life partner of several decades, with whom she had countless travel adventures and made many happy memories. She and my stepdad lived in deep connection to their community, with a huge circle of friends. I was profoundly grateful for the beautiful story all that stuff told of their life together.

We tried, therefore, to be good stewards of all of their things, to honor the memories they carried. We donated the clothing. We sold the fabrics and (very sadly) the grand piano and whatever else we could. We gave away her thousands of cards to friends. We arranged a party to celebrate and give away their beautiful framed photos. We took a lot of the art and much of the cookware. I hauled off photo albums from my and my sister’s childhood, which I’ve since savored, scanned, and thrown away. I adopted all of Nelson’s woodworking tools, supplies, and lumber.

Though we did what we could, in the end I had to call a guy who cleans out houses. Thankfully, I wasn’t there while he and his crew got rid of what was still left. When the house was finally empty, it was so hard to walk through it. It wasn’t the same house; it felt like the memories had been stripped out and its soul had left it.

***

Though I’m a Christian, I’ve also practiced Buddhist meditation for over thirty years, and that training has helped me cultivate a certain degree of present-moment awareness. Being mindful in the present is good and helpful, but I’m realizing it isn’t enough. There is such a thing as narcissism of the present: disregarding the past and paying insufficient heed to the demands of the future. “Those who cannot remember the past,” wrote George Santayana in 1905, “are condemned to repeat it.” That’s our culture right now, in a nutshell, as so-called leaders flirt with authoritarian government and increased militarism, both of which history has shown to end in disaster.

The present state of affairs makes clear that we’ve forgotten so, so much about how to live peaceably with the land and with each other. Most of us don’t know the basics of home repair, much less how to raise crops, hunt game, forage, build shelter, or navigate without GPS. We have lost, or are busy losing, the ability to cooperate with rather than demonize each other – hence the feckless inability of our current federal government to accomplish much more than attack or alienate other countries, raise prices, and build ostentatious victory arches to celebrate such dubious non-achievements.

***

It’s not inevitable that we pour a viable future down the gaping sinkhole of a recklessly narcissistic present. We are creatures of memory, individually and culturally. How else could my wife and I instantly recall the tune and lyrics of 80s pop songs we haven’t heard in decades? (It’s definitely not because all those songs were especially memorable – although Bon Jovi’s hair certainly was.) Why else would Wendell Berry write so many novels exploring the rich stories of a bygone way of life in rural Kentucky? Although we are busy destroying or at least neglecting it, we humans have a wonderful ability to remember our past and therefore evolve our future. Despite our current madness, I continue to believe that the arc of the human moral universe will indeed continue to bend slowly, in fits and starts, with plenty of intervening disasters and backsliding, toward justice – and that the bending of that arc depends on remembering. To remember, in the original Latin, means to be mindful of, again – to bring the past into present-moment awareness. How can we ensure a better future by living in a present that also contains and honors the past, without being enslaved or overburdened by it?

For this, as for so many other important things in life, some of our best teachers are trees. Trees are present-moment creatures, tuning themselves exquisitely to the conditions they find themselves in, and they are creatures of the future, storing sugar for winter and building soil and underground connections for subsequent generations. But they are also, and especially, creatures of the past. Their very bodies are a history book of their lives, with annual rings telling the story of the place they are rooted. Drought, wind, nutrient levels, pollution, wildfire, sunlight or shade, brutal cold or extreme heat, competition, and pest infestations can all be read in the patterns of those rings. And, in ways still fairly mysterious us, trees somehow encode how to respond to challenges in their environment that they have experienced in the past. They remember how, especially in difficult times, to take care of themselves and each other.

Unlike trees, I think it’s undeniably true that we have become a people unmoored, adrift from our past in a way that degrades our present and jeopardizes our future. But I also think it’s true that stitched deep deep deep in the fabric of our individual and cultural DNA, we, like trees, have some inkling for belonging in this world – this world with which we co-evolved for billions of years, ever since we were cute little unicellular creatures. At the very least, even if we can’t access the particular knowledge and skills of our ancestors – many of which would have to be different today anyway, given how much our physical and social world has changed from theirs – I’d like to hope that we still have the desire to belong, embedded in the fibers of our being. Perhaps this is one of the greatest gifts of memory: the recollection that this place is our home, that we do belong here. We are not strangers in a strange land.

Just as deep in our DNA, I think we also know how to belong to each other. As much as our solipsistic online lives and our individualist consumer economy might fool us into thinking otherwise, we evolved for social cooperation and connection. We are hardwired for love.

***

As I’ve described in another essay, my family and I are in the process of moving to the farm my wife Cyndi grew up on in western Pennsylvania. Her father bought the land in the early 1970s, so he has over half a century’s worth of memories there. He’s also been part of that rural community for all that time – and it shows, from the people who check on him if he misses daily Mass to the neighbors who always come and plow out his drive when it snows. He’ll be living with us after we buy his place, and I’m eager to learn all I can from him about the ins and outs of the farm, the house, and the community that surrounds him. I don’t want that knowledge and those connections to be lost when he passes away. Just as I hope we can be good caretakers of the farm he built, I hope we can also be inheritors and good stewards of all the memories that have been made on it and in that community.

Cyndi reminded me the other day that in 2026, we’ll have cleaned out three houses: my mom’s after her death, our own in preparation for our move, and a good bit of my father-in-law’s, to make room for our own stuff. Ye gads. We have accumulated way, way too many things, and having learned some hard lessons from having to empty my mom’s house, we’re trying to get rid of as much as we can. What, we’re asking yet again, do we keep?

The desire to belong well in our new place has been the guide to our winnowing. The easiest decisions concern what we’ll need for the practical aspects of our belonging: the tools, machines, cookware, materials, and supplies required to farm, garden, cook, can, make art and do woodworking. We’re bringing artwork and furniture that will make this new/old house feel like our home, rather than just a place we have visited or grown up in.

The hardest part is deciding what to bring that helps us preserve our memories. Human memory, amazing as it is, is also fickle and unreliable. We forget good times and bad. We whitewash and catastrophize. We need physical things to help anchor our memory in the actual past as opposed to our imagined past. My family and I are trying to figure out what items will help us preserve honest memories without condemning us to live in an overstuffed museum. For example, I recently saved a wooden truck and airplane from our kids’ overzealous basement cleaning. I made these with my beloved Grandpa Shelly, who later committed suicide. They’re clumsily built, festooned with magic marker, and not pretty or practical, but they help hold my complicated memories of him, and I can’t bear to part with them. Cyndi has insisted that if I’m going to keep them, I have to display them prominently, not hide them in the basement. Fair enough – they’ll sit on a shelf in my new wood shop.

***

If we want to be good, treelike creatures, belonging well in our place and to each other, we can’t just live in an oblivious present. We need the memories, and the artifacts of memory, that can help us hold on to what is useful and precious, as well as helping us avoid or manage disasters. We need inherited spiritual, moral, and practical skills and knowledge to live decent lives, as well as the tools and equipment such lives will require – whether those be hammers and saws or the techniques of non-violent communication and consensus-building. On the national and international stage, we’re seeing now what happens when you horde too much of the wrong thing – mainly trophies of power, pretension, and subservient fealty – and throw away what really matters: communal ties, the insights and instruments of science, the hard-earned lessons of history, and a moral compass.

In such trying times, remembering becomes a radical act. Remembering may even help us re-member everything that is currently being dismembered, destroyed, and discarded. What we must keep, ultimately, is our hold on love – even as Love always holds, remembers, and re-members us.

P.S. If you like this Substack, please share it with a friend. I am trying to make a living from my writing, but I also want to make these essays available at no cost to all readers, in the spirit of gift. Paid options are available for those who are able to support it financially and want a few extra perks – thank you! To all my readers, another great way to support this writing is to do some shopping at Eden’s Heart Collective (www.edensheart.com), our intergenerational family business, where you’ll find a variety of beautiful handmade artistic products that will, I hope, make your heart sing.

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When I was in graduate school, I took a long summer road trip to visit various communal farms devoted to simple living. While working for several weeks at Koinonia Farm in Americus, Georgia, I met another idealistic young man named Kevin. Kevin had made an interesting decision: he never wanted to own more than he could carry on his person in a single trip. He really wanted to keep things simple.

I’ve thought a lot about Kevin over the years. He, alongside Wendell Berry, was in my head when I decided to embark on what has been a lifelong quest to live simply, close to the land. And in my early homesteading days, I think Kevin would have been on board: as I built a house and barn on my first farm, I camped for almost a year, living without electricity, heat, running water, or indoor plumbing. It was miserable glorious.

Then, however, I parted ways with Kevin’s ideals. I met Cyndi, whom I hoped to marry, and my mom gave me some vital dating advice: most women really appreciate a flush toilet. So, I installed real plumbing and a septic system, along with off-grid solar power and an increasing number of amenities, like a functioning refrigerator. The gambit worked, and I somehow convinced Cyndi to join me in this simple living experiment. But as things have unfolded, simple has stopped looking quite so simple.

***

For many years, my ideals of simplicity have chafed against the hopeless complexity of my reality. I’ve berated myself as a hypocrite, writing paeans about simplicity but often being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of our stuff and the myriad responsibilities tied up with it. Lately, however, I’ll admit I’ve stopped worrying so much about it. Part of that is being in my WGAF fifties and just not caring as much about what people think. Most of it, however, is because I’ve come to realize that unless you’re a single-celled amoeba, simplicity is not only impossible; in many of its forms, it’s a wrong-headed ideal.

In nature, things are unfathomably complex. Healthy ecosystems are intricate webs whose interconnections we’re just beginning to understand. It’s this very complexity that gives nature its richness and resilience – compared to, say, the oversimplified ecosystem of a monocrop cornfield, which requires huge inputs of energy and is vulnerable to pests, disease, and drought.

The same is true for human beings. Even the life of a pre-historic hunter-gatherer wouldn’t be simple. She may not have had to file taxes or pay insurance and a mortgage, but she had to be exquisitely tuned to her environment, highly skilled in any number of ways, and regularly busy with the constant work of sustenance and the negotiations of social life in the tribe. From the multitudes of beneficial bacteria in our gut to the wonder and weirdness of our inner life and our relationships, there’s nothing simple about us. And why should there be? Aren’t we each and all, in the words of the psalmist, “fearfully and wonderfully made”?

***

If we are complex beings living in a complex world, does it even make sense to make simplicity a goal, anyway? What feels better to me these days is to acknowledge that life is complicated and to lean into that with gusto – especially if the alternative is being a simplistic, passive, consumerist automaton, force-fed algorithmic crap by behemoth corporations (not to put too fine a point on it). If simplicity isn’t the right goal, the point becomes choosing, with attention and intention, the kind of complexity you want to embrace.

When you pay attention to your life, what do you notice? What kinds of complexity feel empowering or liberating to you? What kinds invite you into wonder and reverence for this world? Or, on the other hand, what kinds of complexity frazzle you and stress you out? What kinds make you more a slave to a corporation that cares about you only for your purchasing power? What kinds prevent you from becoming your best, most generous, most loving and open-hearted self? With the data you get from paying attention, you can then form your intentions: the values and priorities that serve as the guide for which forms of complexity you’ll choose to accept or embrace.

For my part, I love living the DIY life of rural self-reliance, so I choose the complexities it entails. After a twelve-year sojourn at our current residence, we’ve chosen to move to the home place farm my wife grew up on, which we’ve purchased from her elderly father. I know, based on the fifteen years we spent on our previous farm, that we’re signing up once again for a million additional responsibilities, from caring for my father-in-law to tending orchards, gardens, livestock, outbuildings, and a woodlot. It would be far simpler to stay here in this place, which doesn’t require nearly as much of us. But we’ve been in this way station harbor long enough; it’s time once again to sail out to the deep, where things are vastly more complicated but vastly more interesting, as well.

As we prepare to move to the farm in Pennsylvania, I’m certainly overwhelmed at hauling tractors, a sawmill, massively heavy woodworking machines, and about a million tools across the country. But other than while I’m managing this move, those tools don’t feel like an encumbrance to me; they feel like freedom. With them, I’ve built houses and barns and sheds, repaired ailing vehicles and faulty plumbing, made untold amounts of firewood and lumber, and turned out a plethora of beautiful and useful items in my wood shop. With them, as it goes in Thomas the Train stories, I can be a Very Useful Engine. For me, these tools are an essential element of my creativity and a means of self-empowerment. Considering the difficulty and expense of moving them, I realize also that in general, they keep me anchored to a particular place – which, I learned from Benedictine monks and their vow of stability, can be a very good thing. Accepting the complexity of owning all these things feels like a reasonable tradeoff for the benefits they bring.

***

That said, I think there’s an important place for efforts toward living more simply. True, some such efforts might be head-in-the-sandism or performative virtue-signaling. But most, I think, are a good and reasonable reaction to our consumerist economy and to the overwhelm we experience in the face the myriad distractions of our over-wired age, the various crises that show up in our inboxes and newsfeeds, and the hypersonic pace of technological change. There are plenty of forms of unhealthy complexity, for example, that we’d be far better off without. What if we checked email just a few times a day, rather than, as is now common in the average workplace, once every few minutes? What if we unplugged ourselves from the Hunger Games Matrix of social media? What if we did away with therapeutic or competitive shopping and ignored the latest fashions and trends? What if, heaven help us, we decided not to jump on the AI bandwagon?

As we try to simplify our lives, I think it’s possible to do so not out of naïve idealism or reactionary ideology, but in helpful ways that get fog off our windshield and draw us closer to the real – in our relationships with others, with the land, and with the Divine. Embracing simplicity in these forms will, ironically but beautifully, probably lead us to new forms of complexity. It will ask more of us, not less – but it will also make us more fully, cantankerously, and wonderfully alive.

P.S. If you like this Substack, please share it with a friend. I am trying to make a living from my writing, but I also want to make these essays available at no cost to all readers, in the spirit of gift. Paid options are available for those who are able to support it financially and want a few extra perks – thank you! To all my readers, another great way to support this writing is to do some shopping at Eden’s Heart Collective (www.edensheart.com), our intergenerational family business, where you’ll find a variety of beautiful handmade artistic products that will, I hope, make your heart sing.

Subscribe now

A well-known adage in woodworking is that you can never have enough clamps. I have more than I can count – bar clamps, pipe clamps, f-clamps, k-body clamps, c-clamps, strap clamps, spring clamps, panel clamps, bowl clamps, corner clamps, toggle clamps, hold-down clamps – and I still have a long wish list. At one point my clamp collection even included our twin daughters, whom I nicknamed Clamp 1 and Clamp 2 when, as young girls, they helped hold boards for me on various projects.

Even if you had enough clamps, clamping can be one of the most difficult, nerve-wracking parts of woodworking. With only a limited amount of time before the glue starts setting, you must line up all the parts properly, put the clamps in place, make them tight-but-not-too-tight, and ensure everything stays aligned as you apply clamping pressure. If you imagine woodworking as a relaxing, bucolic activity, come by my shop during a complicated glue-up. Hammer pounding, mad scrambling, and high-volume, four-letter letter words are often involved – especially when glue jobs go sideways, as they often do. If the parts weren’t cut properly, they won’t glue up right. If you don’t apply enough pressure, or if you apply too much and starve the joint of glue, the joint will be weak. If you glue things out of square, that’s how they’ll stay. A lot can go wrong and often does.

Stressful and messy as clamping can be, it’s also essential to the core creative task of most woodworking projects: taking disparate pieces of wood and joining them together in new ways. I never get tired of the little miracles that occur in my shop every day, when flat boards get transformed into useful and beautiful boxes, bowls, cabinets, and furniture. I never cease to marvel how a properly glued joint is actually stronger than the wood that formed it. All it takes is accurate cuts, good glue, and plenty of pressure.

***

In America, we tend to fetishize a particular kind of freedom. Our country was born in revolution with “Don’t tread on me.” Citizens of New Hampshire want to “Live Free or Die.” “Mountaineers are always free” in West Virginia, and Kentucky, as I once read in a Louisville airport concourse, is the land of “unbridled spirit.” These sorts of slogans refer to what philosophers call “negative freedom:” freedom from constraints, in distinction from positive freedom, which is the freedom for moral responsibility and contribution to the common good.

I see two main problems with the “don’t tread on me” sort of freedom we idolize in America. First, it’s generally premised on individualism, which ignores or misunderstands the truth we are learning from science, psychology, sociology, and our spiritual traditions: human beings, like all creatures, can only exist in relationship. From the mitochondria in our cells and the symbiotic bacteria in our gut, to the complicated webs of family and social ties without which no human being could survive, we are made of community and made for community. To ignore that is not only to get basic ontology wrong but also to set yourself up for isolation and loneliness – which, former surgeon general Vivek Murthy and others have observed, have become an American epidemic.

Second, freedom from constraints is impossible. To be alive, as much as our advertising culture may try to convince us otherwise, is to be constrained: to live within limits. When we marry and stay married, we’ve said yes to our partner, but we’ve also said no to any number of other partners and to the possibilities of other lives we might have lived. In having kids, we sacrifice our time and energy and money for their care and nurture. To commit to making a home in a particular place means you’ll never get to live in all the other places you might have enjoyed. Any sort of faithfulness – to a partner, a family, a place, a trade or craft – will always mean giving up all sorts of other possibilities and living within the limits of the choices you’ve made. We must also live within the biological limits of our own bodies and the ecological limits of our planet. Embracing constraints, rather being free of them, is the simple, undeniable truth of being a creature, and it’s part and parcel of a well-lived, authentic human life.

***

Which brings me back to clamps. Like the zillion different clamps in my wood shop, life has an infinite variety of ways to impose limits and apply pressure. Maybe it’s the responsibilities of work, of caring for young children or elderly parents. Maybe it’s the limitations of aging or medical issues or physical pain. Maybe it’s the psychological scars of trauma, or the stress of financial troubles. All of these, and more, can make you feel trapped, make you feel like the life is being squeezed out of you.

What if, instead of seeing such limits and stressors as things seeking to crush us, we began to understand them as clamps providing the necessary pressure to make us into something new and beautiful? What if they were the only means of transforming us into a new shape, a new whole that integrates and makes sense of all our loose pieces and parts?

As with wood shop glue-ups, it’s good to apply a golden mean to this attitude. Too much pressure can just leave you crushed, broken, or weakened. Sometimes, as was the case for me, a job is genuinely too much and you have to quit. Perhaps the marriage is abusive and therefore needs to end. Maybe the over-caring helicopter parents are truly stifling their kids and need to let them flounder and fail.

On the other hand, just as not clamping hard enough leaves a weak joint, trying to engineer your life in such a way that you never encounter any sort of friction, stress, or constraint doesn’t work either. For one thing, it’s impossible: $h!t just happens to all of us, and we all get our turn on the rack. Better to expect it than to expend all kinds of energy trying to avoid the unavoidable. More importantly, though, a life without such pressures leaves our souls flabby, narcissistic, and ultimately unsatisfied.

Far from hindering us, our limits make us who we are. The various ways we feel squeezed could be the very things that free us to become the individuals and communities we are called to be and to build the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.

P.S. I am trying to make a living from my writing, but I also want to make these essays available at no cost to all readers, in the spirit of the gift. Paid options are available for those who are able to support it financially and want a few extra perks – thank you! To all my readers, another great way to support this writing is to do some shopping at Eden’s Heart Collective (www.edensheart.com), our intergenerational family business, where you’ll find a variety of beautiful handmade artistic products that will, I hope, make your heart sing.

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Who will watch the home place?

Who will tend my heart’s dear space?

Who will fill my empty place

When I am gone from here?

- Kate Long, “Who Will Watch the Home Place”

NOTE: This piece is less essay-ish and much more personal. It’s also longer than what I usually write on Substack. But it describes a very important family transition that will affect my writing moving forward, so I hope you’ll read to the end. Thanks!

When I was an idealistic young college student, I fell in love. I’m not talking about my various dating relationships, all of which eventually blew up or fizzled out. Mentored by writers and conservationists Scott Russell Sanders and Wendell Berry, I fell in love with an idea: the idea of being rooted in a particular place. It’s a simple idea, really: you commit to a specific place, and you let your life unfold there, getting to know it intimately and accepting its gifts and limitations.

I grew up in a suburban neighborhood outside a medium-sized town. I loved that place and I spent about a million hours tromping around the neighborhood and its surrounding woods and fields; decades later, I can still remember all of it. But after I left for college, my mom and stepdad moved, so I’ve never had that home to go back to.

My wife Cyndi, on the other hand, has had a different experience. She grew up in rural western Pennsylvania, on a farm perched on the southern slope of “Old Roundtop,” one of the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. Her parents stayed put, so Cyndi has been able to stay connected to her home place over all these years.

When Cyndi and I met, I’d already made a leap of faith: A few years earlier, still enamored with the idea of committing to a particular piece of land, and likewise smitten by a rural lifestyle, I’d bought some rough farmland in Spencer County, Indiana, about an hour from my home town of Evansville, and I set about making it into a forever home. When Cyndi and I married, she joined me on that place, and we created a beautiful farm and homestead together, while raising three barefoot, utterly analog children. We built an efficient solar-powered home. We tended gardens and orchards and animals. We came to know every square foot of that farm. We watched trees that we planted as saplings grow large enough for our kids to climb in.

***

And then we left the place I thought we’d live on until we died. It’s a very long story, but fifteen years into our farming and homesteading, with me restless in my job and Cyndi feeling lonely and isolated on the farm, I landed a new job opportunity that would mean leaving the place we’d built together. After much agonizing discernment, we sold the farm and moved an hour east to a home in Harrison County, Indiana.

Cyndi and the kids have adored our new place. It’s a lovely, well-appointed house, tucked among the trees on eight acres of steep, wooded hills. I’ve appreciated it, but from the first time I set foot on this land, it has never felt like home to me, like a place we’d stay in for the long term. I’ve not been unhappy, but I’ve also never quite felt like I belong, or that the place needs me in the way our farm did. It’s been a strange feeling, a sort of homelessness in your own house. Over the years, we’ve looked for another farm, but with Louisville driving up land prices in all the surrounding area, we’ve not had any luck. All these years – almost as many now as the time we spent on the Spencer County farm, and long past what would have been normal or healthy – I’ve continued to grieve leaving our farm and to wonder if we should have stayed. I’ve felt like the Israelite community, wandering aimlessly in the desert and longing for a homeland – or at least for the fleshpots of Egypt.

***

The one constant through these years of leaving and grieving our farm has been the relationship we’ve built with Cyndi’s home place farm on Old Roundtop. Just as they did on our own farm, our kids grew up scrambling all over that place, wandering in the woods, boating on the pond, and exploring every nook and cranny of the barns and farmhouse. They’ve sunned themselves on the boulders strewn about the property and picked blueberries, apples, and peaches. I’ve put in countless hours on the seat of a tractor or doing various building and repair projects. We’ve all come to love that place, which we’ve known longer than any other on Earth – Cyndi and our kids their whole lives, and me half of mine. We’ve made so many memories there. Even more than the farm they were raised on, the Pennsylvania farm has become the north star for our daughters’ imaginations; they’ve written countless poems, songs, and stories about it.

In recent years, however, it’s felt like the ground is shifting under that farm, as well. Cyndi’s mom passed away a few years ago, and her dad George, at 91, still lives on the place but has more and more trouble keeping it up. Cyndi and her six siblings all want the farm to stay in the family, but none of us has stepped in and taken it over.

In addition to the grief we’ve felt at leaving our own farm, then, we’ve also been grappling with what it will mean if the Pennsylvania farm is sold out of the family. Every time we sing our version of Kate Long’s classic “Who Will Watch the Home Place,” at least one of us ends up in tears. I wonder: does loving places dearly just afflict you with a series of heartbreaking goodbyes?

***

Last summer, we began thinking really seriously about buying Cyndi’s home place in Penn Run. It’s a beautiful piece of land, with rolling pastures, a large pond, a reliable well and a year-round spring, and woods that haven’t been logged for generations, with some truly ancient trees that probably predate the founding of this country. It’s in a very rural part of Pennsylvania but is only ten minutes outside the small college town of Indiana (whose claim to fame is being the hometown of Jimmy Stewart). We’ve contemplated it over the years, but work, school, friendships, and proximity to my parents have kept us here. Last year, however, the pull became a lot stronger, so we headed out for our summer visit, ready to talk with George about purchasing it.

From the moment we turned into the long driveway, however, I had a feeling of dread. I was literally nauseous for the first two days of the visit. Contemplating the fields and the old farmhouse and outbuildings, and I was overwhelmed by the endless amount of work everything would require. In short, I chickened out, and that short-circuited everything. We went home depressed, discouraged, and chastened. Another heartbreak.

***

Fear and perfectionism have dogged me my whole life. I’ve always striven for security, predictability, and control, and I’ve tortured myself with the thought that I’ll finally be content when I have everything fine-tuned and properly in place. The past year, however, has destroyed that crippling illusion. My nonprofit career ended, far more abruptly than I ever planned. I was diagnosed with a serious autoimmune disease. My mom passed away unexpectedly. $h!t, as it does, happened. And all those fallings-apart gave me two great gifts. The first is the realization that despite what we might wish or pretend, life is basically an unpredictable hot mess, pretty much all the time. As the Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön reminds us, things are always falling apart. The second gift is the faith and trust, however weak and mustard-seed-like, that even in the midst of the dumpster fire that life generally is, it’s all right. Your life doesn’t need to be perfect to be richly rewarding. You can be afraid and still do the hard things. You don’t have to have it all together. Life’s job is not to please us and fulfill our (unreasonable) need for everything to be just so. Messy and slightly out of control (or largely out of control) is about the best we can probably expect – and there’s meaning, purpose, and joy to be found right amid the mess.

The upside of experiencing catastrophes, in other words, is that it can inure you to future catastrophes. With so much having fallen apart for me this last year, I would have thought that I’d be even more worried than ever about things falling apart. And I still do have fear and anxiety, as I probably always will. But I’m finding that I actually worry a lot less these days. I’ve experienced all kinds of losses and excruciating long-term physical pain, and yet, by the grace of God and with the support of a lot of kind and loving people, I’ve survived. I’ve also grown in very important and necessary ways, and I feel more comfortable in my vulnerable skin than I ever have.

***

The crucible of this last year has led our family to a momentous decision. It’s a longer and more complicated story than I’ll write in this piece, which is already getting long, but the short version is this: For reasons I’m still processing, what felt overwhelming and impossible last year now feels like the exact thing we needed to do all along – a solution hiding in plain sight. A few weeks ago we signed all the paperwork to purchase Cyndi’s home place. Cyndi and the kids and I are all moving out to take over tending the farm in Pennsylvania. Cyndi’s dad will live with us, and we’ll take care of him for whatever time he has left. We’ll slowly fix up the farmhouse. We’ll plant gardens and more orchard trees and berry plots. We’ll reinstall fencing and start raising livestock again. We’ll continue our creative work with Eden’s Heart Collective – on the very place that has inspired much of that work in the first place. We will try our best to make it a place of beauty and welcome and health. At least some of our grown kids plan to stay on the farm with us, so eventually we’ll probably do some more building on the property to better accommodate multiple generations.

Having done this before, I know how much work lies ahead of us – more than enough for the rest of our days. At a time in our lives when most people start thinking about winding down the workload, we’ll be winding it up. The task list will never be completed; farming and homesteading are an “infinite game,” which you don’t play to finish but to keep playing. I’m nervous about how well my body will hold up; I’ll have to pace myself much better than I did in my early homesteading days as a young workaholic, and be willing to let younger hands take on more of the work. But even if this adventure doesn’t work out – or, as is more likely, works out differently than we currently imagine – I would rather try and fail at this than spend the rest of my life in grief, regret, and “what ifs” because we didn’t take this one amazing chance when we had it.

For better and worse, with our fears and doubts and utter excitement, with our crazy-hopefully-not-crazy dreams and good intentions, our family will step into the line of succession for the farm on Old Roundtop. With God’s help, we will make a new home in an old home. We finally have a clear answer to Kate Long’s beautiful and haunting song: we will watch the home place.

P.S. These next weeks and months will be a huge transition for us, as we pack up our house and haul its contents, all my woodworking equipment, thousands of board-feet of lumber, tractors, and even my sawmill across the country. If you’re the praying type, please pray for us! And if you’re the reading type, i.e. of this Substack, please be patient with me. I will try to keep up my rhythm of posting an essay a week, but I may need to back off a little temporarily, in length or frequency or both. Interestingly, moving to the Old Roundtop farm has opened up a huge amount of new creative energy for me – I have a feeling I’ll have enough writing content for several lifetimes. But in the meantime, writing time is competing with moving. I’ll do my best!

P.P.S. If you like this Substack, please share it with a friend. I am trying to make a living from my writing, but I also want to make these essays available at no cost to all readers, in the spirit of gift. Paid options are available for those who are able to support it financially and want a few extra perks – thank you! To all my readers, another great way to support this writing is to do some shopping at Eden’s Heart Collective (www.edensheart.com), our intergenerational family business, where you’ll find a variety of beautiful handmade artistic products that will, I hope, make your heart sing.

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Recently, I received a difficult, beautiful call from a stranger who ended up being the friend of a dear friend. She was calling because her husband of many decades was in his last hours or days, and our mutual friend had recommended she contact me about making a cremation urn for him. Over a few conversations in the next few days, during which her husband did pass away, I talked with her about him, the life they had had together, and, as it turns out, the several points of connection we discovered between their lives and mine. She and I went back and forth and worked out a design for an urn that would contain his ashes, and later also hers. Then I got to work.

***

All commission projects are special, but for the gravity of this one, I felt that from start to finish, my work needed to honor the grief of her loss. I went to the way-back of my lumber racks and selected some of my “special reserve” – boards milled from trees I harvested on the organic farm we had in Spencer County, Indiana. That farm was the world to me: it was the place where I thought we’d live until we died, the place where I built everything from scratch, where I’d planted fruit trees and grapevines and gardens, the place where we gave our kids the amazing memories of their early years – and the place that shattered my heart when we decided to leave it for my new job in a new area. Even though I’ve gone on and had a good life in this new place for almost a dozen years, the wounds and grief of that loss have never fully healed. I believe the lumber from that farm somehow contains and carries the love I had for that place and the grief I felt – and still feel – about leaving it. I couldn’t think of better raw materials from which to make this cremation urn.

The motto of Eden’s Heart Woodworks is “beautiful things, made with love, prayer, and care,” and with this commission, I did my best to live up to that motto, hoping and praying that my work might be sufficient to the task. Though I often have a podcast or audiobook playing when I’m in the shop, for this project, I worked almost entirely in silence. The turnaround time was tight, but I didn’t rush, because I know that’s when I make stupid mistakes or drop and damage parts. I took the necessary time to sweat all the details and even to add touches that probably only I would notice. Throughout the entire process, I felt close to the client’s grief – and my own.

While it had its minor flaws, as all pieces do, the urn ended up being one of the most near-perfect pieces I’ve created. I will never forget meeting her at the funeral home to deliver the urn; she was moved to tears. Part of that, I hope, had to do with the level of design and craftsmanship. But most of it, I think, was that she could feel the care I’d put into it: the care I felt for her and her grief, the care for the materials I was working with, and the care for the process of the making. To the best of my abilities, I had made this urn with love, and I believe, as deeply as I believe anything, that my love had soaked into the work just as tangibly as the varnish.

In other words, I believe that the urn I made is, in its own special way, alive. Not that it’s sentient or ambulatory or metabolic, or any of the other markers we might apply to what we normally consider a living creature. Though I don’t understand and can’t explain exactly what I mean, I believe the urn is more than wood and screws and glue. It is alive with the life of the trees that form its material. It is alive with the spirit of its making. It is alive with the memories of the client’s husband. It is alive, I believe, with the Spirit of God, which animates and holds all created things in being.

***

If it’s true that made things can be alive with all that went into their making, however, there’s also a disturbing flip side to this truth. Just as things can be animated with love and care, they can also embody darker energies, as well. I remember once reading the Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh writing about “angry eggs”: eggs produced in factory farms, where the hens endure utterly terrible conditions. He believed that the eggs somehow embody the misery and frustration of the chickens, and when you eat them, you are “eating anger.” Similarly, several years back it came to light that in the Chinese Foxconn factories producing Apple iPhones, labor conditions were so brutal that the factory managers had “suicide nets” installed around the buildings, in response to a string of workers who, in despair, had thrown themselves off the roof. I believe the slick glass rectangles in our pockets (yes, in my pocket, too) embody not just the brilliant ingenuity of engineers but also the environmental and human abuses entailed in their creation. When I visited the German concentration camp of Buchenwald, I could sense that the horrors there had permeated the buildings and the ground itself. Things can also be alive with death and desecration, evil and abuse.

***

There’s great blessing and curse in learning to see material things in their aliveness. You can appreciate and savor the goodness and beauty of the world on a whole new level – an incredible gift, which in my Catholic tradition would be called a “sacramental lens.” But you’re also cursed with the anguish of sensing the pain, suffering, and destructiveness embodied in so much of our stuff – and knowing that we are willingly or unwillingly complicit in much of it.

Coming to know all that soaks into everything that surrounds us, we have a choice and therefore a soul-deep responsibility. “I have set before you,” says the Lord to the people Israel in the book of Deuteronomy, “life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life….” We can’t do it perfectly or consistently, but why not try our best to honor the aliveness of things by choosing life – with all of its rich, deep, paradoxical complexity – in everything we make and buy and use? If we could choose to honor the world’s aliveness in this way, even just sometimes and even just a little, wouldn’t we become more alive, too?

P.S. If you like this Substack, please share it with a friend. I am trying to make a living from my writing, but I also want to make these essays available at no cost to all readers, in the spirit of gift. Paid options are available for those who are able to support it financially and want a few extra perks – thank you! To all my readers, another great way to support this writing is to do some shopping at Eden’s Heart Collective (www.edensheart.com), our intergenerational family business, where you’ll find a variety of beautiful handmade artistic products that will, I hope, make your heart sing.

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In his classic book, The Ecology of Commerce, Paul Hawken makes a distinction between the human industrial economy and the economy of nature. Nature’s economy is circular: the material loops in nature are all closed. Waste from one process becomes food for the next, in solar-powered cycles that will last as long as the sun does. Nature’s circular economy is also restorative, building up “natural capital” in the form of topsoil, biomass, biological complexity, and resilience.

Our industrial economy, on the other hand, is linear and exploitative. Most manufacturing processes extract resources from the Earth (usually with violence), modify them with the help of energy that is mostly derived from fossil fuels, then sell them into the marketplace. The byproducts of the industrial economy are money and waste – the wastes generated during the production process as well as the waste that the products themselves become at the end of their life cycle, since manufacturers generally take little or no responsibility for their disposal.

Industrial processes can be tweaked to be less damaging, but our human economy will only become truly regenerative, Hawken argues, when it fully mimics nature’s economy. Businesses would start counting the true environmental costs of the production, use, and disposal of their products, so that it would no longer be cheaper to be wasteful. They would take “cradle-to-cradle” responsibility for their products, closing the material loops by facilitating the ability for products to be repaired and providing avenues for recycling and repurposing of their products when they are no longer serviceable.

* * *

I agree with Hawken’s argument, and I’ve tried to model Eden’s Heart Woodworks on the ecological principles he espouses. Everything that goes out of my shop is built to last lifetimes and then be repurposed, recycled, burnt, or composted if it can no longer be repaired. But my woodworking also generates a lot of waste. Flitches from sawmilling and cut-offs from the wood shop tend to pile up quickly. Not to mention bushels and bushels of sawdust. Technically, I make use of all of this. I burn a lot of the scraps in our woodstove to heat our home, I use the sawdust for mulch, and I fill in erosion gullies around our property with whatever is left. This does close the material loops, but to my mind, these are crude solutions for beautiful woods in which I’ve invested plenty of time and energy to harvest, mill, kiln dry, and surface. It’s like washing and ironing dollar bills then torching them to stay warm.

One of my ongoing obsessions, therefore, is to deal more creatively with scraps, finding new uses for these leftover materials. Interestingly, these products end up being some of my most beautiful and satisfying work.

* * *

I’m learning some important truths from trying to mimic nature’s circular and regenerative economy in my creative work. First, one of the best things you can do to foster any kind of creativity is to impose constraints on it. We may chafe against limits as being, well, limiting, but in reality, they’re liberating.

A famous example of this comes from the jazz pianist Keith Jarret. In 1975, Jarret was scheduled to play a concert in Cologne, Germany. Blunders on the part of the concert venue, however, accidentally provided him with a worn-out piano that was badly out of tune, with sticking pedals and many dead keys. He went on with the concert anyway but was forced to improvise within these constraints – and gave an utterly magical performance, with the concert recording going on to become the best-selling piano album in jazz history.

When I look through my wood scraps, the constraints of what’s there and not there force me to be curious. What does this odd-shaped piece want to become? How can I put it in relationship with other odd pieces to make something new and surprising? When you’re trying to be creative in this way, you can’t impose plans on the materials; you have to let them speak to you – and those conversations can be some of the most interesting you will have.

The creativity of constraints applies far beyond the concert stage or the wood shop. Although our consumer culture may try to convince us otherwise, we all live within limits, all the time. Through choices and fate, we have this life partner and not any other, these kids, these crazy relatives, this education, this job, this house in this place, these physical and emotional issues, this amount of time and energy. Far from being our prison, these very limits can be the key to making a gorgeous, meaningful life – if we embrace them with willingness and curiosity.

Second, the corollary to the ecological truth that nothing should be wasted is the liberating psychological and spiritual truth is that nothing need be wasted. My image of God is kind of like the pianist Keith Jarrett: an amazing improvisor who can work with all our dead keys, poor tuning, and sticky pedals yet still make some beautiful music out of our lives. I have plenty of bad days when I agonize over poor choices I’ve made, misguided or hurtful things I’ve done or that have been done to me, opportunities I missed. All the dead ends, squandered time and effort, and open loops feel maddening and discouraging. On these days, I see my life as a scrap pile of oddly-shaped pieces that feel like waste, that I can’t seem to make fit anywhere. But what if all these seemingly disparate pieces are raw materials for something far more beautiful than I can imagine? What if none of this need be wasted? What if all of it – the heartbreak and serendipitous joy alike – can be put to use?

* * *

A world without waste isn’t just about learning to pattern our economies after nature’s guidance. It’s also to live with faith that all of us odd-shaped people, with all of these odd-shaped pieces and parts in our messy lives, can belong as part of a larger, lovelier, more resilient whole. In a world without waste, nothing and no one is wasted – because we’ve finally, finally, come to realize that everything and everyone is strangely, wonderfully, and infinitely precious.

P.S. I am trying to make a living from my writing, but I also want to make these essays available at no cost to all readers, in the spirit of the gift. Paid options are available for those who are able to support it financially and want a few extra perks – thank you! To all my readers, another great way to support this writing is to do some shopping at Eden’s Heart Collective (www.edensheart.com), our intergenerational family business, where you’ll find a variety of beautiful handmade artistic products that will, I hope, make your heart sing.

When I gave up a career in nonprofit leadership to become a full-time writer and woodworker, I don’t think I reckoned adequately with the risks it would entail. Of course, I knew I was giving up decent health insurance, a steady income, and a retirement plan. What I didn’t understand was how dangerous following a creative path can be.

There are, first of all, the physical dangers. Writing may put you at risk of carpal tunnel, near-sightedness, and hemorrhoids, but working with wood puts life and limb at risk. Because I start my projects in the woods, with trees, rather than in the lumberyard picking out boards, I’ve taken on all the risks of small-scale, selective timber harvesting. I’ve since come to learn that logging is categorized as one of the most dangerous professions there is; big chainsaws and several tons of falling wood can really do a number on you (incidentally, however, lumberjacks also report exceptionally high levels of job satisfaction and low levels of stress). Assuming you get the logs to the mill without cutting off your leg or getting yourself crushed, the sawmill, if you’re not careful, will cut through you just as easily as through a log. Once you’ve got the lumber made and you’re in the woodshop, any number of machines can hurt you. I’ve managed to avoid the grizzly injuries that a spinning table saw blade can inflict, but I’ve been battered and bruised by wooden projectiles flying off the lathe or table saw or drill press, and I lost a small part of a finger to a jointer.

Even more dangerous than the physical dangers, however, are the psychological risks of the creative life. As every person who’s stared at a blank page or canvas can tell you, it’s unnerving never to know when – or if – the shy, unpredictable muse may show up in a generous mood. I don’t happen to put a lot of stock in inspiration – I just try to show up to the work every day, however I may feel. Inspiration may visit, and when it does, I see it more as a welcome octane booster than the regular fuel. But I’ve had plenty of stretches in my writing career that were so dry, dark, lonely, and long that I feared I may have nothing more to say. I have days in the wood shop (fortunately, not too many) when I’m tired of making the same old things but daunted about creating something new.

When you pour your heart, soul, skill, and strength into a creative project, what you produce feels like an extension of yourself. If the project fails, if the quality comes up short, if it doesn’t find an audience or it’s not well received – all of these can seem like a judgment on you. I’ve heard and mostly believe all the good advice about learning how to embrace failure as part of the creative process, but at the same time, at least for most of us mere mortals who aren’t named Buddha or Jesus, it’s hard to give your all to something and yet remain unattached to the results of your labors. It’s hard not take failure personally.

The physical and psychological risks of creativity may be daunting, but the spiritual risks are the most dangerous of all. As I see it, the creative path is an attempt to seek the Holy in the material realm. But the Holy, the mysterium tremendum, isn’t to be trifled with. “Does anyone have the foggiest idea,” wrote Annie Dillard, “what sort of power we so blithely invoke?” We are like “children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning” (Teaching a Stone to Talk, 1982).

The risk of seeking God through our creative paths is that, after all, we might find Her. But why should this be dangerous? Isn’t God Love, after all? What could be so bad about discovering Love embedded in the fibers of Creation? Isn’t that our human vocation, after all – to seek, find, and give praise to the Creator? The problem is that, as C.S. Lewis once put it, Aslan may be good, but he’s wild – he’s not a tame lion. To seek God is to risk getting pulled through the back of the wardrobe into a world you never knew existed. “[T]he waking god,” Annie Dillard reminds us, “may draw us out to where we can never return.”

This path of no return is, I think, the opening of our eyes and heart to a deeper reality. It is taking the red pill and waking up from the Matrix of consumerist delusion and its false gods. It is seeing what you can never unsee: the infinite beauty and brokenness of this God-soaked world – which will, if you are even half awake, shatter you. It will call you to a level of caring that could drive you mad. You might just sell all you have and move out to a cave in the desert, or to the slums of Calcutta. You might just chain yourself to a bulldozer to save a forest, or put your own life on the line to protest the inhumane treatment of immigrants and refugees. You might, in other words, find yourself called to do something Completely Unreasonable, to make some sacrifice incomprehensible to the left-brain logic of our Machine culture. “It is a fearful thing,” writes the author of the letter to the Hebrews, “to fall into the hands of the living God.” (Hebrews 10:31).

The cost of the creative life, as is true of the life of divine discipleship more generally, is high – it costs, as T.S. Eliot put it, “not less than everything.” It could cost your job, your health, your reputation, your very life. It will certainly cost you your heart.

I’ve always been afraid of this kind of dangerous divine wildness. I’ve always wanted to play it safe; I’ve never wanted to sail into an unknown sea, trusting that all shall be well. But in an age of so much madness, safety is an illusion anyway. If there is no safety, then, I’d rather seek the Living God than chase after whatever dreams modern Western culture offers. Dangerous as that may be, it seems like a safer bet.

P.S. I am trying to make a living from my writing, but I also want to make these essays available at no cost to all readers, in the spirit of the gift. Paid options are available for those who are able to support it financially and want a few extra perks – thank you! To all my readers, another great way to support this writing is to do some shopping at Eden’s Heart Collective (www.edensheart.com), our intergenerational family business, where you’ll find a variety of beautiful handmade artistic products that will, I hope, make your heart sing.

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One reason I’m a woodworker has to do with legacy. In a throwaway culture awash in disposable, one-time-use products and digital clickbait ephemerality, I want to create tangible things that can be used and passed down for generations. In our family, we eat dinner at a kitchen table handmade by my stepfather, using wood we harvested from the farm where we raised our kids. I still use hand tools that belonged to my grandfathers, and we have some furniture and crystal that go back even further in our family. I love the feeling of connection these things give me, the sense of being in a line of succession. They keep my ancestors close to my heart. When I die, I know that for whatever else I’ve done and failed to do in my life, I can say I’ve created some beautiful things, which will endure.

That being said, here’s a paradox: some of the most meaningful work I do in my shop is making funeral urns. Many of them, I hope, might stay in families for generations, but I know just as many will be on display for a short while and then interred. I spend several hours on each urn, and they often test the outer limits of my creativity and skill as a craftsman. Why should I spend so much time and care on something that will likely just be buried in the ground?

***

Several years ago, at an interfaith event, I watched Tibetan Buddhist monks spend hours and hours, over the course of many days, meticulously creating a large, beautiful mandala out of colored sands. At the event’s conclusion, the monks swept up the mandala, marched down to the Ohio River, and threw the sand into the water. All that work, gone.

Or maybe not. I still remember that mandala, all these years later. It lives on in my memory, and now that you’re reading this, perhaps something of it will live on in you, as well. There are many ways to create a legacy. Even if they’re part of a family’s life for just a few hours at a funeral service, my urns can become part of memories that can be passed down just as meaningfully as an actual object.

***

I don’t want to get too precious about this, however. Memories fade – certainly within one’s own lifetime, and even more certainly down through generations. I carry some of the stories from my parents and even grandparents, but further back than that, things get hazy. I know barely anything about even my great grandparents, much less generations before them. Most of us aren’t Shakespeare or Socrates; we’ll be mostly or entirely forgotten in just a few generations. As good as I may feel about making high-quality, durable objects in my shop, I can admit that on some level, perhaps I’m driven by rage against my own mortality. And I understand that whatever I might make, however solidly constructed, will last but an eyeblink in the context of deep geological time. All, wrote Qoheleth, is vanity and a chase after wind (Ecclesiastes 1:14). That’s the message of the mandala: everything is impermanent.

Impermanence is a strong theme in religious and philosophical traditions. Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and other Stoics had a practice of memento mori, regularly reminding themselves that they would die, as a way to keep things in perspective. I learned this practice in a profound way by working for fifteen years with the Benedictine monks of Saint Meinrad Archabbey, who follow Saint Benedict’s 1500-year-old spiritual directive to “keep death daily before your eyes” (Rule of Benedict 4:47).

In my experience, those who practice memento mori are hardly morbid or moribund. The monks I knew at Saint Meinrad were full of energy and enthusiasm. They were busy with projects and plans. It’s just that they held them more lightly. Thinking regularly about their death actually helped them be more engaged with life.

Memento mori also shines a light on a deep and tragic irony of American culture. The advertising industry, the health and wellness industry, the tech industry, the entertainment industry, and many other elements of our economy make huge profits promoting youth and vitality. Yet as much as our culture may shun and fear mortality, we’re a massively death-dealing culture, from the casualties of our wars of choice to the wanton destruction we wreak upon the natural world and her creatures. Or as the mandala-making Buddhist monks would say, our refusal to accept impermanence creates attachments that cause great suffering, for ourselves and our world.

***

Memento mori, then, is not about brooding but about letting go – while at the same time, paradoxically, caring deeply. Somehow, becoming fully aware of life’s brevity can help you see its preciousness. Some of the most grateful people I know are those who have had a brush with death or are nearing that horizon. My mom died a few months ago, and in her final days, she had an absolutely luminous presence of gratitude. Knowing that all things are passing away can give you eyes to see that all things are a gift. We don’t forge our lives; we’re given them by forces far greater than ourselves, and in a short while, we give them back to those forces – or, as I believe, back to Love, that Force behind all others.

I don’t make mandalas and I’m no monk, but creating funeral urns, I realize, is my own way of practicing memento mori. When I’m in the shop making sawdust, the urns help me remember that I am dust, and to dust I shall return, as they say at the Ash Wednesday services.

Fellow dusty pilgrim, what shall we do in the brief meantime we’re given? Why not live gratefully? Why not give our attention to this wonder-full, passing-away world? Why not create goodness and beauty in whatever imperfect ways we can, for as long as we can?

P.S. I am trying to make a living from my writing, but I also want to make these essays available at no cost to all readers, in the spirit of the gift. Paid options are available for those who are able to support it financially and want a few extra perks – thank you! To all my readers, another great way to support this writing is to do some shopping at Eden’s Heart Collective (www.edensheart.com), our intergenerational family business, where you’ll find a variety of beautiful handmade artistic products (including cremation urns for people and pets) that will, I hope, make your heart sing.

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Pilate would fit right into today’s American political and cultural environment. Our current presidential administration has little regard for truth, dismissing as fake news anything that doesn’t fit the particular narrative that it wants to purvey. On social media, millions offer an airbrushed, exquisitely curated version of themselves, which bears little resemblance to their actual, chaotic lives. Add in the rise of AI and deep fake audio and video, and it’s getting harder and harder to know what content to trust. What is truth, indeed? Why not, like Pilate, just throw up your hands in despair or cynicism or relativism? Or why not, like today’s religious and political fundamentalists, simply double down on your tribe’s version of the truth, and condemn all others?

I hope hope hope it’s darkest before the dawn. The pendulum of history swings constantly, and I’d like to believe that, having reached what feels like a nadir, we may be on the cusp of a new cultural movement that demands and practices a much greater level of authenticity. But, of course, I never want to underestimate a civilization’s ability sink further, even to destroy itself. So, another possible scenario may be that our culture really does lose a meaningful grip on reality, until reality finally crashes undeniably against us in the form of environmental disaster, political and economic collapse, or any of the four horsemen. In that scenario, perhaps there will yet be truth bearers, floating on their little arks in the chaos and trying to preserve the remnants of knowledge and goodness, much as the monastic communities did in the Dark Ages of Europe.

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If we care about truth and would prefer not to live in a world that is an AI-generated simulacrum or a smoking post-apocalyptic ruin, what are we to do? How can we seek, find, and cultivate what is real?

For starters, I try to remind myself, over and over and over, of a mantra from Douglas Adam’s brilliant Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: DON’T PANIC. The climate activist Greta Thünberg was right to complain that all the grownups aren’t acting like the house is on fire, because it is, in about seventeen different ways. But unlike Greta, I don’t advocate for panic. If your house is on fire, you obviously shouldn’t ignore it, because you’ll burn to a crisp. On the other hand, if your house is on fire and you panic, the chances go way up that you will make bad decisions in the heat of the moment and therefore burn to a crisp, or leave a loved one behind. So yes, we must take this critical crisis moment seriously – but so seriously that we slow down and retain some capacity for clear thinking and what the Buddhists call “right action.”

What is “right action” in the face of a crisis of truth? I should admit that I’m putting less and less faith in top-down solutions. They depend on People In Power to cooperate and create the right legislative and economic frameworks for the sake of the common good. I’m not holding my breath on those stars aligning – and even if by some miracle they do, the fragile Pax Romana thus forged might be built on sand that could shift with the next election cycle, stock downturn, or CEO’s whim. I’ll still root and work for this kind of change, but I won’t hold my breath for it to happen and I won’t ever assume it will endure.

Meanwhile, with the assumption that if the people lead, the leaders will follow, I’m interested in starting closer to home – at home, in fact, with the real relationships we have with real people and with real, tangible things. The more mediating layers there are between you and reality, the more chances there are for distortion, obfuscation, and the general degradation of truth. It’s the difference between talking directly with a loved one or trying to communicate with them by playing a game of telephone. Or the difference between eating a meal out of your own garden versus heating up a pre-packaged, ultra-processed dinner of Lord-knows-what from Lord-knows-where made by Lord-knows-whom. In close relationships, as anyone who has been married knows, you can’t hide as easily; they offer a beautiful and terrifying invitation to be real and authentic.

The truth, as Matthew Crawford has pointed out, also reigns in the realm of craft and skilled trades. When I’m working in my wood shop, I’m bringing something real into being, something that has dimension and heft, something that embodies raw natural materials transformed by design and execution. The made object itself is a witness to my skill and attention or the lack of them. The mitered joints come together, or there is a gap. The cabinet door fits properly, or it binds. The made object, in other words, speaks the unvarnished truth (OK, it actually is varnished in this case, but you know what I mean).

The truth I hope it tells is, I hope, one of care. Good craftsmanship, like all right action, is rooted in care: caring enough to bring my best self and best effort. Care is a form of love, and love is the ultimate truth. Love cuts through all the BS we might sling and insists that this world is ferociously good, made to be lived in. Love insists that however broken and fallen we may be, we are good, and we belong to each other, to the world, and to the divine Source of it all. Love beholds this messy wounded world, beholds our messy wounded selves, and says the one true, necessary word: Yes. Love’s only demand is that we be real, with no pretense.

Tending to tangible, near-at-hand things and relationships with great love and care seems like a small and insignificant gesture in the face of our current deluge of inauthenticity and unreality. There’s no guarantee it will turn the tide or prevent us from drowning in a sea of dangerous delusion and untruth. How things turn out is, ultimately, out of our hands and beyond our ken. But as the waters rise, it’s not beyond us to create islands and archipelagos of clear-minded authenticity. There, with hands and heart holding on to the really real, is where I hope we might choose to live and die.

P.S. I am trying to make a living from my writing, but I also want to make these essays available at no cost to all readers, in the spirit of the gift. Paid options are available for those who are able to support it financially and want a few extra perks – thank you! To all my readers, another great way to support this writing is to do some shopping at Eden’s Heart Collective (www.edensheart.com), our intergenerational family business, where you’ll find a variety of beautiful handmade artistic products that will, I hope, make your heart sing.

In his classic work, The Soul of a Tree: A Woodworker’s Reflections, master craftsman George Nakashima describes his deep and profound connection to the natural world. The woodworker, he writes, must begin with reverence for the tree then apply all her skill and effort to create an object that honors the sacred uniqueness of that tree. In this way, the tree lives on, now embodied in a new form, shaped by human hands, that continues to invite respect and reverence.

This may sound lofty and even quaint, and it’s true that Nakashima was writing in a simpler time, decades before the internet, smart phones, social media, and global capitalism came fully into their terrifying power over our lives. But despite that fact – or actually, perhaps because of it – I think Nakashima’s philosophy offers an essential antidote for the many maladies of modern western culture.

* * *

There are plenty of good reasons to be nervous about where we have arrived in these early years of the new millennium. We are more anxious, depressed, angry, polarized, lonely, harried, and distracted. AI threatens to take our livelihoods, destroy our environment, and maybe even eliminate our species. We’re dominated by screens and isolated from each other and from the rest of Creation. Our attention is manipulated and monetized for the benefit of mega-corporations, their shareholders, and their oligarchic overlords. The list of woes is long and discouraging. One might rightfully opine that we have lost our way, perhaps even lost our minds. Underneath all this, however, I wonder if we, collectively, have lost our soul – and if Nakashima might offer a way for us to find it again.

Narcissism and generic, abstract homogeneity are hallmarks of a soulless culture. We are sold a story of our own individual agency and uniqueness, and we’re offered infinite (usually monetized) ways to fine-tune the world to our preferences and to signal our own individuality. Online algorithms provide us tailor-made content, and social media help us document and advertise how fascinating and special our lives are. All of it reinforces the fallacy of the spotlight effect and serves up a double helping of egocentricity.

A great irony of our culture’s narcissistic emphasis on individualism, however, is how homogenous much of our existence has become. A big-box store, strip mall, or Cracker Barrel look the same and sell the same products whether you’re in South Dakota or South Carolina. Most of our food comes from monocrop fields and Tyson feedlots. Streaming services and large studios provide – and therefore dictate - the bulk of our entertainment. Most of our stuff comes from faraway factories, efficiently churning out millions of identical products. Even setting aside the fact that achieving such consistency and uniformity requires destroying local economies and paving over paradise with parking lots, these products are also generic, bland, and boring. Unlike Nakashima’s trees and furniture, they have no soul.

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In times like these, when so much that is precious is being threatened or lost, I believe we’re called to be radical – to get down to the deep roots of what is most real and most precious, and take our stand. We may lack the power to stop The Machine in a full-on frontal assault, but we can, at least, stop believing its story, stop aiding and abetting its machinations. We can start telling a different story about what it means to thrive as a human being – hint, it has little to do with being a “consumer” – and start manifesting that story in the way we choose to live our “one wild and precious life,” as Mary Oliver puts it. In this, George Nakashima offers some sage advice.

Nakashima began with reverence. To him, the trees he worked with were sacred, living creatures; they had, as the title of his book implies, a soul. Anything that has a soul – which comes from the divine and retains a divine spark – deserves reverence. But for Nakashima, to revere something was not to set it apart for worship. Certainly, some objects deserve such treatment. Some lands should remain fully wild. Some sacred trees should never be cut. Holy relics should be enshrined. But Nakashima describes a more practical form of reverence. If we need to make things out of wood, which is a beautiful, strong, environmentally friendly building material, then we’ll have to cut trees and use their bodies for our purposes. But we can still do so with reverence.

For Nakashima, reverence meant honoring the unique characteristics of the trees he worked with. His furniture often featured live edges, knots, burls, cracks, and other imperfections that would never pass muster in a factory, whose required inputs are not idiosyncratic trees but uniform “lumber,” stripped of soul. Nakashima’s pieces retained the soul of the tree, resurrecting its life into a new form that had both exquisite beauty and practical function.

To accomplish this required not only an honoring of the sacred materials Nakashima worked with, but also an extraordinary amount of patience and a high level of skill to reshape a tree into its new, soul-filled form. Nakashima had a worshipful gaze and a keen eye for design, but he also had the ability to wield tools wisely and well, in faithful service to that vision of what the tree had been and what it could become. He, and the others he trained to work with him, were masters of their craft, with talents equal to the task. I don’t think it’s heretical to consider them as priests of a sort, mediating the divine presence in material objects – just as the Catholic priests in my tradition confect the Eucharist, which is both a gift of God and the “work of human hands.”

Nakashima’s way of seeing and working was a complete contradiction to the logic of The Machine of unfettered, consumption-hungry capitalism, which has desacralized our world and turned it into a strip mine of raw materials, to be processed efficiently into goods and energy then sold for as much profit as possible. Nakashima resisted the temptation to scale, knowing that to do so would drain the soul out of his work and the trees he worked with.

But, you may rightly object, who can afford to buy bespoke, handmade furniture made like this? Are the fruits of this kind of soulful artisanship reserved only for the wealthy finance titans and captains of industry who are running The Machine in the first place? Are the rest of us plebes relegated to the soulless, particleboard world of IKEA?

It’s a good, important question for those of us who want to live toward a viable alternative to The Machine economy and its soulless culture. I struggle with it myself as a craftsman, trying to find price points for my products that are within reach of my customers while still earning myself a living wage. Here are a few attempts at answers. None of them are entirely complete, consistent, or satisfying, but they’re the best I’ve come up with so far.

First, unless you’re wealthy, soulfulness requires sacrifice. This isn’t a bad thing; our religious traditions understand that the spiritual path requires renunciation, fasting, and various forms of ascesis. To embrace the kind of soulfulness that Nakashima limns, it may be necessary to give something up. Maybe it means skipping a fancy vacation in order to pay for a handmade kitchen table. It might require having fewer things (especially, frivolous things), or less luxurious things, so that the things you do own can be of higher quality. Perhaps you’ll have to save a little less for retirement, forgo the daily mocha latte, go out to eat less – whatever it takes to free up resources so you can invest in soul.

The fun flip side of such sacrifice, however, is the satisfying adventure of finding and coming into relationship with the makers who create with soul. A lot of the artwork in our home, for example, comes from artists that we know and wanted to support. Having their work in our home reminds us that we’re part of an interdependent web of relationships with real people, which is far more meaningful and satisfying than supporting a faceless, behemoth company ironically named after a rainforest.

A complement to supporting artisans is to do and make more things yourself. Lest you protest that you don’t have the skills, remember that your work doesn’t need to be fancy or high-end to be soulful – it just requires attention and intention. On the other hand, I’ve done some of my finest woodworking when I wasn’t on the clock. When I don’t need to be reasonably efficient with my time, I can experiment and add nice touches that I would go broke doing in my production work. Making things for your own household or to give (not sell) to others is like walking through the looking glass into a wonderful alternative economy where money doesn’t matter. You can stop looking at the clock and simply make something magnificent.

When it comes to supporting a more soulful economy and culture, perfect purity isn’t possible. Neither is it necessary. Most of us will make plenty of compromises – I certainly do, every day. But even a single choice that resists The Machine is a reminder that such choices are possible – and that the rewards are worth it.

* * *

The Machine is certainly winning and may end up crushing those of us who are trying to resist it, though it will be a Pyrrhic victory that takes us, itself, and the planet down with it. The Roman Empire certainly won – until it collapsed under its own weight. In times like these, I don’t think victory or defeat are the right criteria. Faithfulness is: faithfulness to the good, the true, the beautiful, the soulful – in whatever ways we can, at whatever scale is possible. For George Nakashima, this faithfulness looked like revering trees as sacred creatures and using his vision and skill to give them new life in the form of fine, soulful furniture. All of us, whatever our skills or our station in life, can cultivate a similar reverence for the world. All of us can notice and preserve the sacredness of things, whether we’re making a Windsor chair or a family dinner. As we honor the souls we encounter, whether in trees or anything else, the soul we save may end up being our own.

P.S. I am trying to make a living from my writing, but I also want to make these essays available at no cost to all readers, in the spirit of the gift. Paid options are available for those who are able to support it financially and want a few extra perks – thank you! To all my readers, another great way to support this writing is to do some shopping at Eden’s Heart Collective (www.edensheart.com), our intergenerational family business, where you’ll find a variety of beautiful handmade artistic products that will, I hope, make your heart sing.

Recently I experienced a series of minor disasters in my woodworking shop, while making a large segmented bowl. After spending many hours cutting and gluing over a hundred small pieces of stock into the rough shape of the bowl, I then chucked it up on the lathe to turn and sand it into its final shape. A mistake I made in the glue-up had caused the rim to be significantly out-of-round, so I carefully parted off the upper section of the bowl, smoothed and squared everything back up, and re-glued it so it was more on-center. Project saved. Then, when I had the bowl almost fully roughed out, a portion of the base gave way where it was being held by the chuck, and the bowl flew off the lathe. Fortunately, the damage was minor, and I knew I could repair it, so I re-chucked the bowl and continued to turn it. Project saved. I had everything sanded and looking beautiful, and my only remaining task was to make those minor repairs.

Then I made my final, fatal error. I ran the lathe too fast, and the bowl flew off the lathe again, this time exploding all over my shop. Hours and hours of work, and a gorgeous, complicated bowl, ruined. I sat down in stunned silence, and, somewhat to my surprise, I cried.

* * *

I’ve been thinking a lot about why I took the demise of that bowl so hard. After all, I’ve had plenty of other projects fall or fly apart. I realize now that I wasn’t just crying about the lost bowl, the lost time, and my self-castigation at making some avoidable mistakes that led to this string of mishaps in the first place. I think, somehow, this particular defeat pulled back the veil on so many other painful things in my life: failures, wounds, losses. My mom died a few months ago, and I’m still raw from that loss. I’ve recently been diagnosed with a chronic autoimmune disease and I’m fearful of how it will change my life. I’m still adjusting to the letting go of my career as a nonprofit executive. Though I love the life of a craftsman and writer, I also struggle with the learning curve and I wish it were more financially secure. So, on some level, I think the broken bowl was a stand-in for other griefs I’m experiencing.

That’s not all, though. When I was making that bowl, the Iran war was much on my mind, as America was busy bombing that country “back to the Stone Age.” Whatever you may think of the Iranian regime (I personally find it odious) or America’s reasons for military engagement (I find them unclear and unconvincing), here is the undeniable fact: in this war, as in any war, so much gets broken. Ordinary Iranian citizens, already oppressed by their government, suffer and die, as do some American soldiers. Infrastructure, all of it created at great environmental and economic cost, is destroyed, using up ordnance and military hardware that itself embodies great environmental and economic costs. Our government is willing to put such costs on its credit card while neglecting to provide adequate healthcare and social services to its citizens and while continuing to shower obscene tax breaks upon the ultra-wealthy. I think my little broken bowl was also, somehow, a portal into my grief over America’s global belligerence, perverted priorities, and destructiveness. I grieve that we’re now the bull in the world’s china shop, and as a patriotic American citizen who loves this country, I feel both implicated in this and helpless to stop it.

Even that’s not all. So much in our world is fragile: our relationships, our personal health, the health of our communities and governmental structures, the integrity of our air, water, soil, and ecosystems. It is all so precious, yet any and all of it can be – and is being – broken so easily. We are living in a time of unprecedented recklessness and destruction. Our federal government seems to take pleasure in breaking things that took decades or centuries to build. Silicon Valley oligarchs continue to pedal technologies that are clearly risky and dangerous, with inadequate regard for the harm. Our entire economy could not function without predation of vulnerable people and the environment. In crying for my broken bowl, I think I was also crying for all that is broken and breaking in this current age – and that grief can be overwhelming.

* * *

Sometimes I feel like Frodo and Sam, J.R.R. Tolkien’s vulnerable little hobbit characters, despairing and seemingly helpless in the wasteland of Mordor. But I know how that story goes: even when things were at their blackest, goodness prevailed. As a Christian who recently celebrated Easter, I know how that story goes, too: death and destruction never have the final word; Love does. Love can rise from the darkest tomb. Love can light the way when all seems lost. Even amidst collapse or potential collapse, goodness and beauty can still emerge – scars and all.

After my bowl blew up, my family and I took a walk together. I needed to be away from the shop, out in the sunshine and the budding springtime, which began to work its own little miracle of healing in my soul. When I finally returned to the shop, I took another long look at the carcass of my bowl. The upper layers had completely shattered, and there were dings and wood tear-out in what remained. But the more closely I looked, I realized something amazing: part of this bowl might actually be salvageable. So without much hope, I put it back on the lathe and very, very carefully reshaped it.

By whatever miracle, I was able to create something new from the wreckage of the original bowl. It is smaller, shallower, and not anything like I originally intended, but it still has a humble beauty (and is, I admit shamelessly, for sale on our website). And the very next day, out of the blue, I received a generous commission to make – wait for it – exactly the kind of bowl I had destroyed – as an anniversary present for good friends I’ve known for decades. Talk about a divine consolation prize!

To be clear: I still wish the original bowl hadn’t blown up. Likewise, I wish that those running our government and our economy would take seriously how hard it is to build things compared to how easy it is to break them. But when things do break, I don’t want to give up hope that some form of resurrection may be possible, some kind of new life, however scarred – if we can be stubborn, patient, and wise enough to look upon the wreckage with the eyes of Love.

P.S. I am trying to make a living from my writing, but I also want to make these essays available at no cost to all readers, in the spirit of the gift. Paid options are available for those who are able to support it financially and want a few extra perks – thank you! To all my readers, another great way to support this writing is to do some shopping at Eden’s Heart Collective (www.edensheart.com), our intergenerational family business, where you’ll find a variety of beautiful handmade artistic products that will, I hope, make your heart sing.