Posts

What a Community Reveals About Itself

Image
What a Community Reveals About Itself You can judge the true character of a community by how it treats its most vulnerable—the injured robin gasping on the sidewalk, the stray animal dragging a broken limb, or the person quietly breaking in silence. The measure of a society is never how it fawns over the powerful and successful. It is how it responds when something small, fragile, and unable to speak for itself lies bleeding at its feet. Recently, an injured songbird exposed the rot. Instead of compassion, the reflexive cry was cold and immediate: “Just kill it.” Not “How can we help?” Not even a pause for mercy. That casual death sentence—offered so quickly, so thoughtlessly—ripped away the mask. It revealed what lies beneath the Sunday smiles, the pious talk of stewardship, and the empty slogans about “life” and “community.” If we truly believed we are responsible stewards of creation—if we valued real compassion, environmental responsibility, and the sacredness of li...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Spaces Between: What Estate Sales Taught Me About a Life That Matters

Image
The Spaces Between: What Estate Sales Taught Me About a Life That Matters This past week I helped with an estate sale for my family's business. It was the first one I've been able to make it all the way through in the past two years. I was heavily medicated, and I still don't know exactly how I feel about it. It's not my thing. It's just a thing I know how to do—and how to do well. People see me moving through the chaos, talking to buyers, organizing what's left of someone's lifetime, and they assume this must be where I belong. I'm a good salesman. I'm good with people. That competence gets mistaken for calling all the time. But ability and purpose are not the same thing. You can be extraordinarily skilled at something you would never choose if someone handed you a blank page and said, "Build the life you actually want." I'm just a hustler, to be honest. And estate sales make me sad in a way I'm not sure I have lang...
Post a Comment
Read more

We Have Turned People Into Magazine Covers

Image
We Have Turned People Into Magazine Covers We scroll through faces like we're flipping pages. Each thumbnail is a promise. Each caption is a story we're meant to believe. We tap, double-tap, and move on—consuming human beings at the speed of a thumb flick, absorbing curated fragments of lives we once knew in three dimensions. The quiet revolution of our time is not technological. It is relational. It is happening in the slow erosion of how we recognize one another—and how we desperately try to hold ourselves together across the fractures of a digitized existence. The Architecture of Absence Social media promised to dissolve distance. It would collapse geography, transcend time zones, and bring us closer than ever before. It lied. The person who knew your uncurated self for twenty years has become a thumbnail in the endless scroll—a ghost you pretend is still with you. We have mistaken surveillance for intimacy. We have confused information for understanding....
Post a Comment
Read more

Why I Need to Leave Pocatello

Why I Need to Leave Pocatello One of the hardest truths I've had to accept is that I got stuck in Pocatello, and I don't believe this city was ever where I was meant to rebuild my life after everything that happened with Jeff. Looking back, it probably should have been the last place anyone wanted me to remain considering the circumstances. People often assume that my struggles with alcohol and drugs were about relationships or personal failures. They weren't. Those things became coping mechanisms, and much of that came from the reality of living here. For me, Pocatello has always felt like a place centered around work, obligations, and survival rather than creativity, growth, and truly living. People who love this city may have a completely different experience, but mine has been consistent for years. Life here often feels repetitive and stagnant. There is very little sense of newness, possibility, or flourishing. It feels like the same day lived over and over again. A per...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Beauty: The Quiet Rebellion of Being Alive

Image
On Beauty: The Quiet Rebellion of Being Alive There is a lie we are told from childhood, and most of us believe it without question. The lie is that beauty is vanity. That to care about how things look, how they feel, how they resonate in the chest when you stand before them — this is frivolous. Decorative. A luxury we can ill afford in a world of deadlines and diagnoses, of bills and bad news. But beauty is not vanity. Vanity is the desperate clutching at a reflection, terrified that without it, you will cease to exist. Beauty is the opposite of that terror. Beauty is the smile given freely to a stranger who looks like they are carrying the weight of a private war. It is the candle lit in a window when the night presses close and the news cycle howls. It is the hand extended not because someone has earned it, but because they are human and hurting and here. It is the song hummed under your breath when your heart is so weary it can barely keep time, because some part of you...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Unsealed Life: A Portrait of Living in Motion

Image
The Unsealed Life: A Portrait of Living in Motion I can tolerate almost anything except repetition. Not the repetition of labor, or of responsibility, or of showing up day after day—that, I can do. I can live inside structure as well as anyone. I can work, meet obligations, exist within systems that appear, from the outside, to be stable and disciplined and sound. What I cannot do is watch the days begin to mirror each other. Because for me, repetition is not neutral. It does not feel like comfort. It feels like erosion. A slow, quiet erasure of texture. The kind of life where one Tuesday becomes indistinguishable from the next, and then from the next, until they stop being remembered as separate experiences at all. They collapse into a single, flattened loop. And somewhere in that collapse, something essential begins to go missing. Not motivation. Not productivity. Not even happiness, exactly. Presence. And for me, presence is the only thing that makes a day worth living i...
Post a Comment
Read more

I Don’t Need to Be Reinvented—I Need a Place Where I Can Finally Become

Image
I Don’t Need to Be Reinvented—I Need a Place Where I Can Finally Become There is something I have been trying to say for a long time, and it never quite lands in simple sentences. It doesn’t fit neatly into “I’m unhappy,” “I need a change,” or “I don’t belong here.” It’s more structural than that. I am not confused about who I am. I am not searching for identity. I am not lost in the sense people usually mean. What I am experiencing is something quieter, more frustrating, and more invisible from the outside: I have become internally aware of a version of myself that I have never actually been able to live inside a real environment long enough to test—not in a stable way, not in a sustained way, not in a way where it becomes real through repetition and feedback. Instead, I have lived most of my life in environments that only ever reflect back older versions of me. And that creates a very specific kind of psychological pressure: You know you are not who you were, but every...
Post a Comment
Read more