The Values Sort

Let’s talk about my heritage. Let’s talk about booze. For thirteen weird years alcohol was prohibited in these United States. It was a master class in the foolishness of attempting to legislate morality. You might be shocked to learn how much alcohol was still produced, transported and consumed under the pious noses of a government tasked with guarding the purity and upstanding character of its citizenry.My great grandparents, my mom’s mom’s folks made bathtub gin. Which I’ve always been a little curious about. Bathtub Gin is how people colloquially referred to all manner of garbage-liquor containing cheaply produced grain alcohol diluted with water, juniper berry juice and even glycerine.They would have been experts at procuring this grain alcohol, probably legally produced for medical or scientific uses and, umm, diverted for domestic consumption. They would have used their metal or porcelain bathtub(s) to blend the final beverage, bottled and distributed throughout the community. And they would have known their way around distilling, even if “bathtub gin” didn’t typically involve the actual distillation process.When you distill liquor, you start with grains. Grains soaked and boiled in water, often with herbs and spices and other goodies, until the mash is separated from the feedstock. The feedstock is the alcoholic liquid that will be distilled into whatever spirit you’re distilling. And the remainder, the porridge-like grains mixture that’s been all boiled up is called the mash. The spirit is what you’d be going for in this scenario. That’s the marketable material. But in the end there’s a lot more mash than there is spirit.Many years after prohibition ended my great grandparents, the gin-runners, would come to visit us in Oregon from time to time. When they came, they drove their sedan, and in the trunk of said land-yacht they had a special suitcase. Ornate and beautiful, it contained a full bar. Or, a travel sized bar. But a fairly complete bar.I do not really even drink. An occasional summertime beer. A neat whiskey from time to time with a good friend ‘round a backyard autumn fire. But this is my heritage.One of my family’s love languages is firearms. We share them, we hand them down through generations. There are some old guns rattling around in this family. And some very neat old pieces of engineering they are.I grew up around guns, and I’m not afraid of them. I’m not unfamiliar with them, with their operation and function, and I’m not oblivious to their power and allure.Once, when I was learning to shoot larger firearms, we had a series of vegetables which we were invited to compare to the texture of our own bodies. Does the pumpkin feel softer or harder than my stomach? Does it seem more or less impervious to a bullet’s piercing power?And then of course, we shot the vegetables. And they were obliterated and I was convinced—guns were not toys. They were tools, in my home, for hunting. But I am not a hunter; I bear neither the need for a winter’s meat, nor the sporting desire.The world has changed, and I will not hand guns down to my children. My parents may not like reading this. My grandparents would not like reading this and my deeper-forefathers are likely rolling over in their graves. I will not hand the weapons themselves down to my children, but more than that I will not work to hand down a value for them.It’s not that they’re not beautiful on some level, but they’re powerfully destructive and have become representative of an ugly culture that’s grown up around them in recent years. There is a part of me that laments the loss of this culture of hunting and sportsmanship. It is largely overshadowed by aggressive fear-of-neighbor and protectionism, and I am repelled. Love of craft engineering, sportsmanship, these things are the spirit of my heritage. The rest is just mash.My dad’s mom is in assisted living now. She is old, and she is in need of community and care and she’s able to find both in her current living situation. But it’s required her to downsize, and so we have begun, as a family, the process of sorting her life like so much tonnage.Who gets the rolltop desk? Who gets the Ray Eylery paintings? Who will be responsible for these things moving forward.kI have her biscuit bowl. Her fried chicken-flipper. I have the rolling pin she received for her wedding and a very well-used potato masher with a lot of life left in it. These things are tonnage. These things are mash.The spirit of my relationship with my grandmother is the time she excitedly told me I had a baby sister. And later a baby brother. The spirit is not the biscuit bowl, it’s the memory I carry of her making the biscuits, and the recipe I contain within my brain today.Grandma is the grandparent I have been the closest with throughout my life. Her husband died when I was just about five, and my other grandparents were somewhat distant. I wrote about my grandfather in craftsmanship.But grandma was normal. She took us on errands. She watched us on regular days. We knew which of her phone books worked best for sitting up a little higher at her table for predictable meals of green beans and iceberg salads and, yes, fried chicken and biscuits. That’s the distillation of my relationship with her. The normal.My other grandparents were exotic and different and unknowable to me. Grandma was everything knowable. I treasure my memories and I treasure her.What is this value I feel for my own past? My family’s past? What’s that about? I wonder. There is so much in the present I don’t understand. So much about the future that I cannot predict. They say if you don’t understand your past you’ll be doomed to repeat it. I’m reaching into my past, not for tonnage, but for meaning. For a thread linking things of worth and value from the past to my future.One day in the not too distant future my grandmother will go on to the next thing. And she will exist only in memories. My dad and I will both carry the tonnage of a childhood lived alongside that woman. But what will my kids remember? Hands knurled from arthritis. The same few stories told over and over. Oil of Olay. All mash.I have grandma’s biscuit bowl. But one day I will let it go. Because it is also the mash, and not the spirit. I have already decided. One day I will have a ceremony, and I’m not yet sure how it’ll look. Maybe when I’m about sixty years old. Or seventy. Or fifty. I’m trying to think it through now. I will let the mash of my heritage go. I will let it die, and be done.I will encourage my kids to remember their grandparents! I will share stories while I yet may. I will encourage them to harvest my belongings for items that might have some meaning to them.And then I will take the rest and perhaps I will have a cleansing fire. I will write a story for my children, I will contain the past for any of my grandchildren who care to observe it. I will attempt, like my ginny-forefathers, to distill and refine, only my refined spirit will be an attempt to send something of value forward into the future.I will dig a hole, while my body will still dig, I will gather my grandchildren and hand them shovels, and I will tell stories about the biscuits of my youth, the subtle, and not-so-subtle racism that existed in my childhood and will doubtlessly exist still, the deaths that came too soon, the fried chicken, the appreciation for fine engineering, and together we will bury the past and allow it to die.Because our heritage isn’t the mash, it’s the distilled spirit that’s rendered at the end. 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I’ve been stalling on this one for the whole series. It may be my most dearly held value. It’s not in the cards, but it is in the fruits. It’s kindness.I’m stalling because I don’t know where to start. I have established that I’m not necessarily kind naturally. I am also not always kind today, now, in my life. I want to avoid claiming kindness as a central part of who I am, intrinsically. I’m certainly not kinder than average and maybe less.I am prone to road rage. Nothing too out of hand. No roadside fisticuffs, (except, umm, that one time with my brother…)It’s often, but not always, a sense of justice. How dare you?! Cut me off? Go faster than me? Slower? The gall!There’s a clogged-bowel of a stretch of highway near my home. The road goes from one lane to two, but only for a couple of miles, and then back down to one lane. It’s one of these classic places where wine-tasting tourists do 20 miles per hour lower than the limit and it just makes locals insane. Some local jackass is ALWAYS trying to pass nineteen cars in that passing lane.I am often that jackass.Once, some time back, on that stretch of highway, a man wouldn’t let me merge. We yelled at each other through open windows. Horrifying my wife.Once, several years ago, I had a word-battle with a man in the worst place in modern lawlessness, the Costco parking lot. Again making my wife shrink with embarrassment.These are examples not only of unkindness toward strangers, but inconsideration toward my wife, which is a certain kind of unkind in itself.It’s fairly easy to talk about unkindness. It’s more difficult to talk about the consequences that sometimes present themselves. My wife shrinks. And in that shrinking a little distance is caused between us, a little rift. And the rift requires energy on both our parts to close.And sometimes we don’t have the energy to heal quickly. Sometimes it stays awhile, and festers, it begins to be poison that sinks into our bones and into everyday conversations. Everyday life. Everyday decisions.I’m a lucky one, because every single time this has happened in our lives we’ve chosen to do the hard work of coming back together. But this unkindness is the stuff of divorces. All the damned time. We’ve all seen them unfold.Sometimes it’s some great unkindness like infidelity. But often it’s little things, left unchecked and unmanaged and un-apologized-for. Unrepentant unkindness that spins itself into rancorous hatred that begets even greater unkindnesses.When I think of kindness, I think of my friend who I took $250 off of. But it wasn’t just him, you know. It was his wife, too. She was there, it was her money, too. And the whole reason I knew the pin code for the card was that they lived their lives so very open handedly.I shared in their electricity, and didn’t help with the water bill. I used their internet with abandon. I brought big, dumb, wet fish tanks into their home. I shared their awesome huge apartment watching town go by from an old fire escape. An exciting, city-boy experience for a farmer like me.Eventually I shared in their musicality. I love Jackson Brown and Mike Scott and The Barenaked Ladies to this day because of them. And I shared at their table, they fed me and even clothed me. Our lives had been so differently informed up until that point. I moved in with a cocky, political swagger. A dismissiveness of other people and their ideas. I made dumb jokes and messes I did not clean up. I was a child. But I was old enough to grow the heck up.You may recall the story. I was about eighteen-ish, I was living with a family who had taken me in. I knew of no other place to go. And one day I got wild and I grabbed the debit card from the countertop, and I walked downstairs and across the street to the ATM, and I pulled $250 right the hell out of their account. I do not know what I was thinking. To say I wasn’t thinking is letting me off the hook too easily. I knew what I was doing and I did it.And you know the rest of the story. A little bit of humiliation, and then immediate grace. Mercy. Forgiveness. These things came not only from my friend, to whom I played sidekick for a good part of my late teens and early twenties, but his wife as well.She taught me to move the heck over and make room on the bench. Even when it hurts. She taught me that move. He loved me because he’s got a soft spot for long-shots, embodying some of those traits himself. She had her s**t together and loved me for no really good reason. Her kindness, (and his), has remained, all of these years. And now I have them as a prize. Our love for one another is the prize of their kindness, I get to be a winner, and I’m grateful.Shouting impotently alone in my car notwithstanding, I am pretty kind, most of the time. And that’s because I value it, largely because of them. I value having kindness shown to me, and more and more every day I value being a source of kindness to people in my life.Today I crave it. Now I want to practice it and do it better. Like anything it requires practice to do well.Part of what makes kindness complex to talk about or even think about, is that it gets confused in my head with niceness. And they’re not the same thing.Nice invites for dinner. Kind scrapes food off its own plate and onto yours.Nice was inviting me into a home. Kind was not kicking me out when I stole.Nice makes a gesture. Kind makes a sacrifice.Nice is nice. Kind is deeper. Kind is stronger. They’re similar. Nice, I guess, is like kind junior. They can be confused for one another but they’re not the same.Today the bench belongs to me. It’s my turn to make room on the bench, as often as I can. As much room as I can, for as many people as I can.I have mentioned the small person living in my home who is not my native-born child. This experience is providing me many opportunities to be nice through gritted teeth, and many opportunities to choose kindness. And I can report that broadly and generally speaking, I am choosing that kindness.It’s difficult to write about. Today, as I write this, their future with us is unknown. Perhaps by the time this publishes they will not be with us anymore! It is currently unknowable by me, and unknown by their mother, who is working her way through childhood traumas herself; traumas I can also not really understand or comprehend.This situation is requiring me to make room on my bench. And it’s comparatively easy to make room for a child. A young child, who’s endured tough breaks and hard knocks in their short little life.But I find a need to make room for others. Others who are easier to forget. To take for granted.My bench is getting full! But I can make room. I can make space for my eldest child, who is becoming an adult and who needs me more than ever to take up the slack in our relationship, no matter how tired I am. No matter how much I wish they’d meet me where I think the middle is. I want to remember my own eighteen year old self, and work hard to draw that line in closer, even as they begin to pull slack out. It will require me doing the moving. I will need to follow their dance steps instead of expecting them to follow mine. My bench is getting full! But I can make room. I can observe how confusing this life, and this specific situation with the young child is for my middle child. I can see them where and for who they are, and I can take steps to build up and encourage, even when I’m tired and it might be easier to allow the entropic universe to drag us closer to apathy.My bench is getting full! But I can make room. I can still be soft and tender with my youngest child as they admit quietly that they’re not really okay through this whole thing of life. I can put my elbows out and I can guard our relationship, I can never let go.My bench is getting full! But I can make room. I can show my wife compassion and love, I can do the hard work of seeing things from her perspective. I can sacrifice for her, and give my own so that she has enough. I can pile my plate full in life so that I have plenty to scrape onto others’.My bench is getting full! But I can make room. I can make room for this child, who right now just needs me to be the nuts and bolts of a dad in their life. Not the dad, not your new dad. Just a dad. Here, now, today, I will perform that function. They don’t need to know that ten years from now, by hook or by crook, I will still be there for them. Nice is me making breakfast at 6am every day. Kind is answering my phone in a dozen years and driving to wherever they are to pick them up from an unsafe situation. My job, my kindness now, is simply proving that I’ve got good dad energy.Look, it’s not easy, and I’m no paragon of kindness. I yelled at the Costco guy. I did that and I have other examples.But I do think that the first step is at least wanting it, you know? The first step is cultivating the willingness to do with less, repair what’s broken, make room on the bench.My friend’s wife didn’t have to make room for an 18-year-old thief. My wife doesn’t have to forgive me when I rage at strangers. My kids don’t have to keep showing up when I’m tired and distant.But they do. And that’s the mycorrhizae. That’s the network underpinning us all.Kindness isn’t niceness. It’s not always easy, and it’s certainly not always clean. It’s the choice to keep making room even when the bench is full, even when you’re exhausted, even when you feel the person doesn’t deserve it.I’m still learning. I still rage on that clogged-bowel of a highway. But I’m trying. And maybe that’s the first step—wanting to be kinder than you currently are. We try, we fail, we try again. We reach into our roots for the strength to try it a different way.My bench is getting full. But I can always make more room. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

​Let’s talk awhile about Repair.I am at work. I am looking around at the things I have repaired over the years, just here, in this room, and it’s a pretty long list.​I broke a stainless bolt off the foot of my effluent scrubber. I was so frustrated. It happened while I was uncrating it. It was brand-stinkin’-new! And I broke the foot off.I had to drill it out (no small feat, it was stainless!) and then re-tap, re-cut threads, and manufacture a new foot with all-thread I found at the hardware store.I did that.​I have patched holes in the roof. I have re-soldered circuitry on my bag filler.I have repaired and maintained my roasting machine a number of times. Everything from replacing burners to rewiring for data-logging software.​And this is my current roaster! A beautiful San Franciscan SF-25, built by hand in Nevada of largely American made parts and pieces, which I prefer and appreciate mostly because of the easy availability of replacement parts. The machine I began my career on, the machine that built this business, is resting in pieces in a storage unit.I will not go into great detail here and now, but it was also built by hand, a one-off fabrication some dude built in a garage in Olympia. I repaired, and repaired, and rewired, and rebuilt that roaster endlessly.It was maddening in its need for attention. Like a toddler, that thing demanded my constant supervision. And like some toddlers I’ve known, if left to its own devices, that roaster would surely have burnt the house down. That thing knew how to throw a proper spark. ​I have repaired espresso machines and I have repaired coffee brewers from various manufacturers and with varying degrees of competency. I’ve been to trainings and I’ve learned on the job. I’ve glued things back together out of sheer need, and I’ve paid dearly for new parts to swap in.​I think of my home.My tractor won’t start right now. It’s a fuel issue, I’m fairly certain, but I haven’t cracked into it yet. It’s cold out there! But I’ll get to it, and it’ll run.​I am, in truth, stalling.Right now, here, as I write these words.The toilet and shower are backed up in my home. I know exactly what the problem is—it’s a way the pipes were set up improperly in the first place, and it’d be a monumental challenge to tear them out and replace them properly now.So when I get home, I will address the issue, without fixing the underlying cause. C’est la vie. ​When I think of repair, I think of Thrift.And I think of the why behind repair.It’s not just money. It’s not just that I couldn’t possibly afford to buy my way out of a given repair project in my life.It is, for me, a value.​A value for avoiding superfluous resource spending, and a value for having my hands on my life.I do not want to go under my house today. I do not want to get the contents of my sewer pipes all over myself.But I do want to have the job done, and I want it done correctly, and I’d prefer it be done expediently. And, as we established in capability, I am capable of many things. So I do them.​I appreciate people’s work and I appreciate people who work with their hands.Because look at the alternative.​We live in a world of cheap consumer goods. We live in a world of inexpensive landfills. I just put stuff in a special can and a person comes and makes my hassles disappear into nowhere.We live in a world where we ship bales of fast fashion castoffs to faraway locales for people to sort through endlessly in their quest out of poverty.We live in a world where children in other countries work at sorting our e-waste, scrapping for bits of conductive metals to sell back to us in the form of even more cheap consumer goods.​And I am repulsed. I am alarmed.I am making choices in my own life that hopefully reduce my impact on these systems, but I feel so small. I feel so insignificant.​I buy durable shoes. I have my blue jeans repaired when they tear. I attempt to buy high-quality shirts, preferably ones produced in a responsible fashion in a country with high standards of laborer compensation.This means I spend more money on fewer t-shirts. I spend money on jean repair. I spend more money on shoes less frequently.I am not sure I’m saving money. And I know I’m not personally saving the Earth.​So why am I doing this stuff?It’s something about Agency.It’s something about living a life that I can be proud of and satisfied with. For and within my own self. ​(...A few hours later...)​I have taken a break from writing and fixed my septic backup.It was a relatively disgusting and straightforward procedure, and one of my kids helped me.​We learned how to do it better next time, and discussed strategies for managing the problem with the plumbing in the future.We did save a little money.But more importantly to me, we lived our lives together.We were not on our phones. We were not sectioned off from one another. We were knee-deep in the problem, together.​I showed my kid that a thing could be done, and in the process, I learned the same lesson myself.It makes us feel brave. We can do hard things.We saved money, we saved the gasoline needed for a repair person to come deal with the situation, and we saved a lot of time.We were in and outta there in less than an hour. We might’ve waited for days to get on somebody’s non-emergency schedule.​I reflect again on my pickup truck.I’ve chosen repair. I’ve chosen to upgrade instead of replace.Because when you repair something, you aren’t just fixing a machine.You are building a relationship with the physical world.You are telling the entropy of the universe: “Not today.” Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

My grandfather was a craftsman. He was an accomplished woodworker. The president of our state woodworking guild, he had multiple lathes in his shop, and numerous heavy tools that he built himself, sturdy, out of wood. His bandsaw, wood. His router table, wood. Drum and spindle sanders, wood.He had a lathe on which he could turn huge columns for the Elks Lodge. He had a tiny lathe on which he could turn intricate, delicate ornaments for the Christmas trees at our state house and even the United States Capitol Building!He built Governor Atiyeh’s desk. He was known for unique, one of a kind spinning wheels. He built a carousel quality rocking horse for us, his grandchildren and he filled his home with ornate woodworking details. Hidden compartments in the mantel. Secret stereo cabinets. That sort of thing.His shop was warm and eclectic. In addition to his original creations he restored antique furniture, which is a skill beyond. It’s one thing to make something beautiful. It’s quite another to fix something beautiful that someone else built with their ways and their tools and make it literally as good as new.There was a whole wall full of custom jigs that he had built for various pieces of antique furniture. The workshop smelled like a hundred kinds of wood plus his cigarettes—which he didn’t think anyone could smell.A cork board in his little office was covered in business cards, the currency of a businessman of the 1970’s, the 1980’s. It also had a hundred little pins in the shape of a drop of blood. One for every time he had given blood to the Red Cross over the years.A laborer by nature and a dairyman by trade and training, my grandfather was, for his last decades, a craftsman. I didn’t know him nearly well enough. There was tension in our family relationships and we never found each other’s deepnesses before he died.My first graphic designer is a craftsman. He’s out there, crafting still. He and I became fast friends shortly after I began as a businessman, and as a result of our friendship I have always had an outsized graphical presence as a company. Even now, he’s moved far away, took a good job, I know what graphic craftsmanship looks like because of him. I know who to hire. And who not to. He taught me what to look for. I have had exceptional graphic design, right down through the years.Which is a handy skill, because I am not a Craftsman. In some ways I wish I was. I have certainly tried to be over the years, but you guys, I’m just not.I do crafty things. I am not an unskilled person, not by a long shot. No self deprecation here. I can be honest and not betray my value for humility.I have built things out of wood that are functional as well as lovely. I have an eye for odd materials and how they might look with other materials.I can, after twenty years’ practice, make a mean cup of coffee. I can steam milk and pour beautiful latte art. I can do stuff.But here, now, I can admit that I am a generalist. I am a jack of all trades.Personally, my own sense of craftsmanship lies in spotting and managing craftsmanship. I’m a good collector of things, and I often know what things complement a company, a product, a recipe, a design project. And I think admitting that I’m not really a craftsman is the first step to developing it as a part of my personhood.And I do want to develop a greater sense of craftsmanship in my life. A greater value for it.A builder I know builds tract homes. Endless, boring, cheap. He would say that he’s providing a product for which there is demand, but if I’m honest I’m very sorry that there’s a demand for such a thing. I’m sorry for the place we find ourselves in as a society where cheaply built equals good.Malvina Reynolds sings a song, Little Boxes.Little boxes, on the hillside. Little boxes made of ticky-tacky, little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same. There’s a green one and a pink one, a blue one and a yellow one and they’re all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same.My granddad, the accomplished woodworker, used to sing that song.It’s about the devastating sameness of modernity and the boxes we find ourselves in. The boxes we put ourselves in, sometimes, but often times the boxes we’re expected to climb into by others. And the people in the houses all went to the universities, where they were put in boxes, and they came out all the same.It’s a critique of society’s willingness to default to the path of least resistance. It’s a song about settling.Another builder I know is a craftsman. He builds structures that are lovely and customized to their use case, and more importantly, structures that will stand up to the test of time. They are more expensive, though not unreasonably so. The biggest difference between these builders is the thought that both they and their customers put into the spaces they create and dwell in.So. Here we are at the end of my first free-wheeling essay with no card. No anchor. And which is it, I’m still sort of wondering? I have spent the essay telling you I’m not a craftsman and have now convinced myself that I may be.I am naturally a generalist, a tradesman, a doer. A collector of craftsmanship. Like my grandfather’s corkboard I have amassed a huge team of people upon whom I can call.My espresso machine was purchased new in 2012 and has essentially been on for 24 hours a day since then. Day in, day out, it is warm and ready to produce. It was built by hand in Florence, Italy. I am astounded at how little maintenance and repair it’s required over the years. Craftsmanship. Quality. It’s ended up being much less expensive than a cheaper machine would have been. The countertops in my coffee shop are concrete. With help from a couple of friends, my wife and I built them by hand. We designed them, we formed them, supported them, we poured and polished them, all us, all on our own. They have survived daily commercial use for thirteen years!Our signage, hand painted, classic, colorful and simple and strong. No backlighting, no plastic. Just aluminum and paint and good natured craftsmanship from a local sign painter.We have a four panel mural that is wholly our own. Again, produced by someone wonderful and local.The list goes on. I am a collector of craftsmanship. My collection is rich. It takes someone putting it together. It takes the farmer drawing lambs into the barn, the gun shearer gathering wool, it takes the person laboriously sitting at my grandfather’s spinning wheel, spinning carded wool into yarn. And it takes the weaver, mixing colors and textures to create patterns. A tapestry is not usually made by just one person.Devaluing our contribution is a trap. Devaluing others’ is a trap. One I seem almost eager to fall into at times.As has become a theme in my writing I must again acknowledge the benefit of community participation. The joy of teamsmanship, even over craftsmanship. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

Another central theme. Of this project. Of my life. A sense of belonging can encompass so many of the ideas we’ve talked about. Or at least it weaves, mycorrhizae-like throughout.What are we without a sense of belonging? Family security, humility, social recognition. They all intertwine with a sense of belonging. Forgiveness, equality, a world at peace. It’s all tied in. True friendship. Loyalty. Enjoyment of life.And card number 57–sense of belonging, feeling that others care about me– connects us, in my head, anyway, back to the beginning, card number 1. social power: control over others, dominance.Because in the times of my life where I’ve needed to reach for dominance, or control over others it’s always because I don’t feel a sense of belonging. I don’t feel a sense of security within my community.If we fall out of one, we may slip into the other.This gives me a tremendous sense of compassion for those mean people in the world, and that’s an impulse I could stand to follow a little more often. Default to compassion. Default to understanding.I cannot change the world alone. But I can change myself. I know–that’s a little “ABC Afternoon Special”. Forgive me. But it’s true.A sense of belonging is a lot of the why behind my values choices. Behind the hard work I am, (and sometimes I’m not) willing to do for my people. It’s the reason I subdue my sometimes overwhelming violence and bring it to heel. I have a high value for others feeling a sense of belonging.I lament the way many men feel the need to assert control and dominance. I care. About you. Others care about you. You are enough, you are large enough and strong enough. You have enough. We can have enough together.I reflect on all of the ways I feel a deep sense of belonging and I lament the rarity it is in some folks’ lives. I measure it in a hundred ways. I measure it in the hidden keys I know the location of. I measure it in the beautiful child I’ve been made godfather to. I measure it in manatees made of yarn and wire. I measure it in coffee customers and I measure it in the questions my friends know they can ask me about sex or poop or money. Or anything.I am blessed. I am the bearer, again, of an absolute embarrassment of riches. I am wealthy beyond comparison. I wish it was appropriate to list my riches, name by name.I have a sense of belonging in my space. I belong to a community, a large family. I am loved and cared for. I am a local business owner. I am a water board member.Belonging often isn’t a feeling you get, but the bench you’re sitting on. I’ve talked about “making space on the bench” a number of times. A sense of belonging is made real with the act of scooting over. It’s for family, it’s for friends, it’s for the weak and the marginalized, it’s for everyone, together.I left my church. Let’s talk about it a little bit. Perhaps that’s my keystone story as it pertains to a sense of belonging, and I’ve mentioned it, but I’ll talk about it a little bit more here.Thirty years. I began engaging this community when I was about nine years old and I only left in my fortieth year here. I believed everything. I contributed. I engaged. And there were times when I felt a sense of belonging in that context.But really, there were people, many people with whom I felt a sense of belonging, and it wasn’t about the church at all, it was always about the people.The structure failed. The structure claimed to be that mycorrhizal network. The church claimed to be the trellis that we could grow on and when we grew to a certain size, it broke under our weight. There was no room left on the bench, and no more was made. Men failed.It’s not okay. Some days I’m not okay.There have, nevertheless, been many people over the years who have scooted down, made room for me on their benches. Many of them have been in church, and I am heartened by the benches still available to me. I think of the number of people whose houses I would let myself into, I would eat their food and drink their coffee, I would take off my shoes and pick up their children and take apples from their trees. And I am glad. For everything. I am here. I belong where I belong.I also know how to make others feel that sense now. I reflect on the little person living in my home. I reflect on my own children and my nieces and my closest friends. And I believe all of my experiences in all of the years have stacked up and culminated in our ability to make room on the bench. I believe in our ability, my family’s and mine, to be a trellis upon which other people can hang and grow.Belonging is the mycorrhizae. It’s the network of love and affection that transfers information and nutrients between different organisms. Belonging is the key to someone else’s home, hidden in a place where the right people can find it. Belonging is the trellis. Belonging is not just the bench, it’s the act of shoving over. Belonging forks half its food onto your empty plate.I will end here with a bible verse, as has become my way. It’s one you doubtlessly know, or maybe you’ve just heard of it. Or maybe, like Tolkien in your forties this will be your first brush with First Corinthians 13. Here it is, paraphrased by yours truly. May it live a little bit within us.Love is patient and kind. It’s not jealous or envious. Love doesn’t boast or burst with self-pride. Love’s not rude and it doesn’t look out only for itself. Love doesn’t get drawn into fruitless fits of anger, and it forgets wrongs done quickly. Love doesn’t quietly root for evil to be visited upon others, but it does rejoice in the true things in life. Love is protective and trustworthy. It’s constantly hoping for the best and it stays the course. Love doesn’t fail.This is it! Card 57. The end of the deck. It feels like the end of something, but I feel like I’m just getting started. Stay tuned if you feel like it. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

​Another one that’s hard to pin down.​”Clean living.” That’s what my dad says.The old man who smokes all the days of his life and dies peacefully in his sleep at 93?“Clean living,” my dad might say with an eye roll.​Health is an honest value to choose. Health for me and for you. Healthy foods, healthy habits. Healthy minds and bodies.At least we have our health. I can lose a lot and still have a lot if I have my health.​But boy, that can go sideways.​I think of my friend the artist. She lived her life clean. She avoided sugar, ate healthy, and walked fifty miles for her fiftieth birthday.And then she got cancer and died. Quickly.​I think of my cousin, the Forester.He finished his course of study and found a job in the woods somewhere. He got married and had a pair of real nice kids.Then he got the flu and died of complications.The flu! You hear that it kills people every year, but you don’t think it kills the strong.It killed my strong, healthy cousin. He was an ox. He was a gem. He was beautiful and strong, and he died because of the flu.​My parents are all sick and beginning the process of moving on to the next stage.For one, it’s dementia. For another, it’s chronic leukemia. For the others, it’s heart disease and diabetes.This life can be cruel.​Oh, that we might all live to old age and die in our lover’s arms.“We walked in and found them together, peaceful and gone.”​My friend Johnny lived until he was old.He mowed the lawn one sunny morning. He came up on the porch and half-drained a glass of lemonade, and then he sat back in his chair and went to be with Jesus.That is the dream. Death by lemonade. He died of too much satisfaction.But we don’t get to choose.My middle child was born with complications. They spent a month in the NICU in Portland, and then came home with us.Their young life was punctuated by appointments and checkups, blood draws and urine samples and renal ultrasounds.They are healthy and strong today—essentially no residual effects.​But years later, when our third child was nearly ready to be born, the doctor reading the ultrasound (who was also involved in our middle child’s birth) stopped and looked at the chart.She asked if the older one had survived.Survival is apparently uncommon for kids with our middle kid’s condition. And survival with no meaningful consequences is essentially unheard of.We rolled the dice and won. We had the dice rolled for us. We did little more than blow on them.​And of course, my own wife is a cancer survivor.We do not take our health for granted. Or if we do, we do so in folly.​I have experienced acute mental health issues in my lifetime. I think they’ve been with me all along, but it wasn’t really until my wife’s cancer diagnosis that they became untenable. Unmanageable. I am not a stranger to the darkest of thoughts.Thoughts of how my family might be better off without me.​But my family rose to that occasion. My wife, my closest friends—they surrounded me and chained me to a deeper reality of our mycorrhizal connections.I sought help and found it.I am more attuned now to my mental health and more conscious of its delicacy.​Be well! Stay healthy!As we’ve established o’er and o’er in this series, we have but one life for sure. And we don’t even know the length of that. ​Live your life fully and chew on the bones.Drink in love where you find it and give as much as you get. Give a little more than you get.Mind the mycorrhizae.They are the only things holding us up. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

This is another weird one. People don’t tend to choose it, and they often need help understanding it.Here’s how I explain it, imperfectly, when I’m sitting with someone doing the sort:Imagine I bring you a cup of your favorite beverage. Out of nowhere.What do you feel?Do you feel loved and cared for?Or do you feel a sense of urgency to reciprocate? Do you feel a sudden, heavy weight that you now “owe” me a beverage?Do you have a value for returning the favor? Or do you simply let love do the talking?I’m not rightly sure what I think about this card. Or what my level of value might be for this concept. Let’s explore it together.I guess in the worst circumstances, this value could produce anxiety.Every time something nice happens, it’s as though a burden is laid at the feet of the giftee. That would be heavy indeed.If I buy you lunch, and you spend the whole meal doing mental math on how to buy me a dinner of equal value to “settle the score,” we aren’t having a meal. We’re conducting a transaction, and I hate the ledger.I hate the idea that relationships are a balance sheet to be zeroed out.That feels antithetical to everything I believe about grace.But... let’s look at the flip side.Let’s say you make good on that promise to bring me a box of Island Punch Spindrifts.I would not probably feel like I needed to rush right out and buy you something of equal or greater value.What I would feel is loved and thought of.It would make me think you were paying attention to my words and my likes and you wanted me to feel seen.That, in turn, would endear you to me. And naturally, organically, I’d be on the hunt for a way to love you back.Is that Reciprocation of Favors?Yes, I suppose so.But there is a nuance here—The ledger vs. the echo.* The Ledger says: “I owe you.” (Definition: Avoidance of indebtedness). This is about me. It’s about clearing my name.* The Echo says: “I heard you.” This is about us. It’s about keeping the connection alive.If you shout into a canyon and there is no echo, the sound dies.If you pour love into a person and there is never any return—never a nod, never a thank you, never a mirrored kindness—the relationship eventually withers. Not because you were “keeping score,” but because flow requires a circuit.I think back to the Mycorrhizae from the last essay.The fungi give nutrients to the tree. The tree gives sugars to the fungi.They aren’t sending invoices. They aren’t worried about “indebtedness.”They are just living in a state of constant, fluid reciprocation. If one stops giving, the other dies.The danger, as established, is in putting things on the backs of another person in expectation of reciprocation.“I did this for you, so now you must do that for me.”That is manipulation. That is a trap.But the beauty is when the reciprocation is involuntary.When you love someone so much that you can’t help but return the serve.I don’t value “Avoidance of Indebtedness.” I am happy to be indebted to the people I love. I am happy to owe you my time, my ear, my heart.But I do value the Echo. I value the back-and-forth. The volley. The dance.So, if you bring me the Spindrifts, I won’t pay you back.But I will probably write you an absurdly long text message telling you how great you are.And that, I hope, is a melodic echo. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

We choose our families. I believe that more deeply than ever.My wife and I have chosen one another time, and time and time again. Through thick and through thin, up times and down times. It’s been conscientious and it has not been either easy or automatic.My kids and I, also. We didn’t choose to be specifically who we are, they didn’t choose to be born. But staying in tight with one another is a choice and it’s one we keep making.We don’t start out choosing our families of origin. But at some point we must begin choosing them.I have not really asked my family about these essays, I have not really asked for advice or input from them on the content of these writings. But today at our shared table I did. As I cracked my brain open for family security I asked simply “what I should write”, and my wife said connectedness without performance. Right off the dome like that. She should write her own essays. I’d read them.Connectedness without performance. A sense of belonging, (that card’s coming up), without expectation of reward or even always reciprocation.I have talked about my family throughout these essays. I have talked about my brother whose love for the soil and the land make me love mine more. I choose him.I have talked about my wife and kids. They’re everything to me. They’re my sun and my moon, and they rise on me daily, newly, brightly.I have talked about my grandmother’s values and her biscuit bowl. I have talked about my nieces for and with whom I would walk to the end of the Earth. I have talked about my aunt, the chef, who never had children of her own but loved us eternally and even in death is knit tightly into the fabric of this family.Something funny happened this week. My brother and his wonderful wife, who is a sister, (drop the in-law, if you please), to me, and their five beautiful daughters were in my home. It was not an event–it was a morsel. It was the stuff futures are built up upon. The pylons supporting our forever-structures.My middle niece has eyes only for me at this time. She thinks of me. She made me a manatee, (one of my favorite animals), out of wire and yarn for Christmas. She didn’t show up with gifts for my wife, for my kids or for her grandparents. Just me. I am honored and love her so very much. We spent a good part of Christmas day drawing together with her new paper and pencils and I gave her two Blackwing Pearls for her collection.When I saw her a few days after Christmas at my house she did something nobody’s done for me since I started my Values Deck adventure. She grabbed my deck and asked if she could do my values.I think I mentioned at some point that though I’ve thumbed through the deck countless times on countless mornings, I have never been presented with the deck and property done the exercise since my day in therapy so long ago. She grabbed hold of my hand and the deck and presented each card to me in turn, reading them aloud.It was a beautiful expression of love for me. She knows how much this means to me and she wants to be a part of it. We are choosing each other.I have talked about my parents. I have probably hurt their feelings at some point in this project and for that I’m sorry. They’re imperfect people who have done imperfect things, and some of them have affected me negatively. This is normal. I know because I talk to other people and I now have an adult child of my own; I am no different than my parents. I am not better or worse, and besides, they have done so many wonderful things as well. They made me who I am and I am grateful.We have to choose our parents, too. Once we become adults we have to choose them. Even if we stay connected, there’s a certain level of relationship that just won’t happen on its own.One person I have not mentioned is my sister. I have one. Not a lot of people in my life know about her.She is far away from me. I believe she is physically far from me–living in another state and another state of mind. She is insecure in our family and has chosen to withdraw for her own sense of self preservation.I am bereft. There is a piece of me that will always roam a stretch of wilderness longing for her. But I am not angry at her for withdrawing. I understand some of the reasons and I think there’s probably a lot more that I don’t understand.I think about her nearly every day, and there’s an element of family security that is dashed because of the great weight of knowledge that this estrangement brings—I say it again, we must choose our families. And sometimes we don’t choose the ones we’re biologically connected to. And sometimes that hurts.My sister is quite savvy–I have not blocked her on my social media apps, nor have I changed my telephone number in the last twenty-five years. I email her on an old email address periodically, when something big happens in my life. I assume she reads my words but I do not know. I wish to be a person with whom she might feel secure one day, if ever she wanted to. It’s entirely possible that she’s reading these words now. Nevertheless, I am overwhelmingly blessed in my life with relationships. The people I’ve married, the nieces who adore me, my children to whom I’m so devoted. And my closest circle of friends who care for me.And I am compelled to learn from their example. To be a better friend, a better husband and dad and uncle. To foster and be ready to expend father, uncle, friend energy for anyone who might need it. Any time they might need it. That requires me to be deeply and firmly rooted in family. In community.On my little Values Tree our roots are the representation of our Values. They’re fed by the rain and the sun and they’re informed by the mycorrhizae of community.Mycorrhizae are symbiotic partnerships between fungal networks and plants’ root systems that benefit both organisms. In fact they blur the lines between organisms. They allow plants to share water and nutrients and even information. One tree can talk to another. Mycorrhizae make this community possible. It’s such a very beautiful thing!Family security is really just connectedness without performance. It’s connectedness for the sake of itself and I am insurmountably endowed with a deep sense of security in my relationships. I am glad. I am satisfied.And I feel the missing mycorrhizae of my sister acutely. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

Stability of society this card says at the bottom. Man, I feel like no matter where you land politically there is a tremendous instability in our society.On the heels of national security, the inclination is to see this as a very broad, national conversation. Maybe a global conversation about police and guns and the National Guard moving between communities. But I’m going to think small. Real small.I am water insecure. Which is an insane thing for me to say out loud because it’s currently raining buckets outside. Just dumping.I moved onto this land a couple of years ago. We have two sources of water on this property, which makes my statement about insecurity sound even sillier. But I’ll lay it all out for you.There’s a well. I was told by a neighbor that “the wells around here are brackish”. I didn’t know what that meant, so I did what any country boy like me would do, I went out to the barn and had a long drink from the hose. It tasted fine to me. But to be honest I have a high tolerance for weird water–that’s another story.I bought one of these water testing kits on the internet. They send you some little bottles and some instructions and you follow them just so, and fill the bottles and send it all in to a lab. And then they email you a report.I got mine and there were a bunch of green line items on there, and a few yellows and a couple of reds.“That doesn’t seem great” thought I, but my life is pretty wild and free wheeling, and I moved on. I figured I’d have to pay that piper at some point, but we have another source of water for our home, so I didn’t pay it much heed.Well, I should have paid heed, friends. My plants did poorly. I watered a little patch of grass all summer and it didn’t do very well at all. And my chickens—their stool was loose and watery. Watery stool!With some trepidation, I fed my water report into AI, and it basically threw a bunch of red flags that explained all of my symptoms.I switched our chickens to our other water source and—good news folks! Firm, solid stools! I know you were worried. So basically, without giving you more detail than is necessary for this, I’m looking at a very expensive reverse osmosis system if I ever wanted to do much of anything with the water from the well. Not much else to to with it. Rats.The other source of water is municipal water from a nearby larger city. We have a meter on a small water utility. I had lived here about six months when my neighbor roped me onto the board of our small utility and so now I have access to and am privy to information that is openly and readily available to all, but which I may not have paid attention to if not for being a member of the board.Our water comes to us in a single 4 inch PVC line running nearly ten miles from its point of distribution. That line, until recently, had no isolation valves making leak identification complex. We had two separate water outages in 2025, one lasting a week, (and we got lucky—it could have been longer).The system was installed in the early 1980s, the same time I was installed into society. And it’s just in disrepair. We’re doing our best with the resources we have, but honestly, we live in a fairly rural area, there’s not a lot of money sloshing around here, and federal grants for this kind of thing are harder to come by than they once were.It is entirely plausible that the cost to maintain this system will, in the future, outstrip public ability or willingness to do so. And this, so far, has been all about me. About My family. About my property and my specific scenario. The reality is that our little water utility serves only about 85 households in my area, and there have to be 300 households more who would benefit from this clean drinking water.Because remember my neighbor, who told me the wells ‘round these parts were brackish—he knew what he was talking about. They’re pretty much all brackish. The salts come from a time many years ago when my piece of the world was covered in the sea. Salts settled and were sealed in by the thick, sticky grey clay that is so prevalent where I live. And there the sodium sat for thousands of years, untouched, until someone disturbed the aquifer. And now our wells are salty.So that’s the situation at my home. And it makes me feel insecure. Not for tomorrow or the next day or even next year. But in the broad, uncertain future.And that makes me feel uneasy. Because I remember a time before the internet; I could go back. I remember a time before the ubiquity of handheld screens; I could go back. I can imagine a time, (though I don’t remember one) without electricity or speedy, efficient travel between towns and cities and counties and states. But I understand that I could go back.My family and I are adapters. We could do without a lot of things. Yours could too.But we can’t do without water.We cannot do without basic foods and clean drinking water. So what do I do if, in ten or twenty years’ time my source of water dries up? What do we do if we are faced with an impossible situation?A man once told me, right to my face, that if it came down to it, some terrible, nightmare scenario, if society had collapsed to the point that a loaf of bread could buy a bag of gold, that he’d shoot me and my family dead before he shared.He wasn’t even being threatening. He wasn’t an enemy of mine or in my estimation a particularly hateful person. He was just a guy. With a plan. And an iron jaw, set against the world.I worry about the order of our societies. I worry about not having enough. I worry about what I might do then. And I think there’s a certain healthy wisdom in thinking about these things.Not obsessing, not making them the central focus of your life. But sitting, as I do, in my morning chair, coffee in hand, (what a luxury), and staring into the middle distance. Letting ideas and thoughts wash over the various bits of my brain and allowing them to tumble about, picking up context from my life and, yes, from the values I’ve chosen along the way.I’ll tell you what I want to do. I want to build a big-assed cistern. Really big. My friend, the beautiful musician—I’ve mentioned him before—lives far away on a tropical island. He was born there, moved here, and has moved back. We made fast friends in an instant one day and have just stayed that way. I have been to his home to visit, it is utterly lovely in almost every way.One challenging thing about his island paradise is that there is no fresh water. Zero. Zilch. One well on the whole of the island and it’s brackish like mine. My salt is from the Eocene era, 40 million years ago. His saltiness is because the well is like a hundred feet from the ocean.There is a single, diesel powered desalination plant on the island which serves the main downtown core of the small main town with piped water, and water is also available for sale via tanker truck or barrels in the back of your rig.Other than that, (and there’s a lot going on other than that), all of the fresh water on the island is collected rainwater. It is ingenious. It is a kind of elegant beauty. And it is an inspiration to me in my beloved western Oregon, where we routinely receive a full four feet of rainfall every year. A tremendous amount of fresh water falling out of the sky.My plan is, as I mentioned, (when I can put funds together), to build a huge cistern, and collect the rainwater from the roofs of my buildings. I have built on my piece of land a garage with modest living quarters for my parents-in-law. The structure totals about 2000 square feet. If I were able to collect four feet of rain from 2000 square feet of roof, that would total 8000 cubic feet of water. Now, a quick burst of mental arithmetic, (or a quick trip to Google) will tell you that’s very nearly 60,000 gallons of fresh, clean drinking water with only minimal need for further processing. That’s a lot of water, friends. With some specific lifestyle choices, (that who are we kidding–I’m excited to make anyway), like a grey water system installed and mindful showering, that could be more than enough for my family to live on for the year. Plus, the hope is to add a little more roof in the future. I’ll spare you the details. Plus, I have a barn! A huge piece of roof. More like 5000 square feet. That’s enough water to feed critters. It’s enough water to drip irrigate crops for food. It’s enough water. If I can store it…From there my mind wanders to the wanderer. What will I do when there are people around me with no water? How can I make choices now that put me in a better position to share later?Look, maybe none of this will come to pass. Hopefully! Hopefully our little water utility will find the funds and the community support it needs to upgrade and provide that water for all. Hopefully society never collapses this way and a loaf of bread will remain simply a thing to be shared. And as an aside, hopefully, as a culture, we’ll stop being so obsessed with gold anyway. This whole “end of the world” scenario I play out is mostly just a mental exercise in kindness. How can I prepare for kindness to my family, to my loved ones, to my neighbors. Because I’ll tell you right now, in the end, when a loaf of bread will buy a bag of gold, you will have a place at my table. We will drink water together until the end. Maybe the end comes quicker that way? But we’ll be together. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

I grew up American. All the way American. I know all of the songs. I know the old ones, like our National Anthem, The Star Spangled Banner.My country ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!You’re a grand old flag, you’re a high flying flag, and forever in peace may you wave, You’re the emblem of the land I love, the home of the free and the brave.I know the new ones too. Like the post 9/11 Toby Keith classic, Courtesy of the Red White and Blue, also colloquially known as The Angry American. Perhaps my favorite lines of the tune:Oh, and justice will be served and the battle will rageThis big dog will fight when you rattle his cageAnd you’ll be sorry that you messed withThe U.S. of A.‘Cause we’ll put a boot in your assIt’s the American wayThere is a kind of a perfection of toxicity in those lines that hammered hard when I was young and teases at amusing today. We’ll put a boot in your ass. Is that the American way? Is that your way?Alan Jackson sang:I’m just a singer of simple songsI’m not a real political manI watch CNN, but I’m not sure I can tell youThe diff’rence in Iraq and IranBut I know Jesus and I talk to GodAnd I remember this from when I was youngFaith, hope, and love are some good things He gave usAnd the greatest is loveKinder words for sure, but I do think perhaps all of us could have spent a little more time learning the diff’rence in Iraq and Iran. Faith hope and love. I am an American. I travel with an American passport and I consistently pay my taxes. This has presented more and more conscientious challenges for me as I’ve gotten older, and I think, if we’re honest, it presents them for many of us. We border on sociopathy when we hide our eyes and our minds from the American Way of putting boots in asses.And listen, I was there, I remember 9/11. I was young but I was awake. I was living with my grandmother at the time, because I was awesome. My friend was quietly staying there with me because he was also awesome.We both came downstairs that morning and my grandmother was weeping in her armchair. Sitting not comfortably back into her chair as was her way, but perched up on the edge, hoping she wasn’t seeing what she was seeing. We watched the coverage of the first tower, then we watched live as the second was hit. The loss of life was senseless. The cruelty was on display in a way we’d never experienced in this country.Except. I mean. We did know our way around cruelty, right?Approximately 13 million Africans were shipped like cargo across the Atlantic ocean. An estimated 10.8 million actually survived the journey. Of those, most were landed and were enslaved in the Caribbean and South America, with a comparatively small percentage making it to North America proper.But statistically all of them were bought, sold and traded by people that look like me. That’s just what’s real. Our whole society is built on globalized poverty, those systems were institutionalized and propped up with enslaved people. Sugar, (and rum) and tobacco to feed our insatiable appetite for vice brought in from the Caribbean.Importantly, the slave trade didn’t end there. In 1808 after we outlawed the international slave trade, (partly to clean up our act, thanks, Quakers, partly to present ourselves as more virtuous than we had any right to to the international community, but mostly to protect the economic interests of southern plantation owners), a robust internal slave trade took root, displacing families and individuals at an unprecedented scope and scale. God damn it. Damn it all to hell. Slavery has been a part of human history for millennia. But we, white Europeans and Americans, perfected this most barbaric, treacherous evil. Nobody enslaves like we enslaved. Also I skipped past the atrocities committed against the people living here before Europeans began arriving in force. Forced displacements and starvations literally designed to eradicate in the name of our Lord.The card says “Protection of my nation from enemies”. I have seen the enemy you guys, and it is us. It’s me. It’s my fathers and theirs.What then is our response. What’s the big, white, traditionally Christian guy’s response to such heinous history? Such ugliness?I must protect my nation. I want to protect my nation. And the only way I can do that, the most subversive act I can think of is making room on the bench for others. It’s using my girth, as I’ve said before, to hold the door open for others. It won’t end up being apologizing, (though that probably couldn’t hurt), it will be demanding equality, loudly if necessary. Only then will it be a brighter tomorrow. We cannot blot out the stain of the past, and our past is filthy and stained. Don’t listen to anyone still peddling American Exceptionalism, still peddling Manifest Destiny. Get your head right.It’s not about a guilt trip. That’s what they want to make it. They want to say that the blacks and the browns are pissed off and they want the whites to prostrate themselves before them. They’re coming to GET us! But it’s not about that. It’s about a brighter, better, coequal, loving, caring, generous future that considers everyone and leaves nobody behind.Look, I’m happy to be an American. I love my lovely valley and my mountains high. I love many cultural aspects of America. I love the ingenuity that has been shown by the people here from time immemorial. How else could the first Americans, (the ones who knew the place before there were roads or bridges or pubs or muskets or AR-15’s or horseless carriages or Christianity) survive and thrive as much as they have? Ingenuity! Constant personal reinvention! Admirable qualities that we could all aspire to.I’m not advocating for anyone to go home. Europe wouldn’t know what to do with our Chick-fil-a’s and Ford F650’s.We are all Americans now. The least we can do is all be Americans.I will end this essay with the entire text of Emma Lazarus’ consummate piece of Americana, The New Colossus. May we read it over and over until it’s burned into our souls, and for once in our history may it be true for us. Now, you read it. I mean it. Read it all and read it twice. Don’t you skip this ending. Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,With conquering limbs astride from land to land;Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall standA mighty woman with a torch, whose flameIs the imprisoned lightning, and her nameMother of Exiles. From her beacon-handGlows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes commandThe air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries sheWith silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

What the heck with this deck. I just finished the last essay… ummm.. The way I finished it. And now it’s cleanliness. Neat and tidy. The deck wills it, let’s do this.Cleanliness is another card that doesn’t make it to people’s top five often. I think it’s because in a deck with Mature Love, and Family Security, cleanliness feels a little out of place. Neat and Tidy. Is that a core and central human value?Now, fifty-one cards deep, seems like as good a time as any to mention Shalom Schwartz. Dr. Schwartz is a social psychologist and along with what I’m sure is a massive team of researchers and assistants and friends he’s the man behind the Theory of Basic Human Values, from which my Values Deck is derived. This research is no slouch-effort. Dr. Schwartz has been working on the job continuously since the late 1960’s. Now retired, the man just won’t quit.Research has taken place across many countries and cultures over the course of decades, It’s really a pretty impressive body of work.So what the heck is cleanliness doing in there?Well, these values are universal. They’re cross-cultural in their very nature and they reflect people’s responses and research over those cultural lines. Cleanliness is in the deck. So be it.When I think of cleanliness I think of a few things. First, Harold.You will recall the brown shed between the barn and the house. Out my back door there is a path to follow; you pass the firepit, you cross a little bridge over what I would very much like to think of as a stream or a brook or perhaps even a creek, but is, in fact, a ditch.Nevertheless it is a quaint bridge. You pass the apple tree I cut down and also the one I didn’t, and you find yourself in front of Harold. There you encounter my deep shame. The mess within.The problem with Harold is that it’s an island–disconnected from the rest of the farm. My home, (I do not wish to brag), has both electricity and running water. Similarly, my barn is fully electrified and lit! I even have a faucet back there!Harold, in contrast, boasts neither of these things. It’s cold and damp. In the wintertime water drips through some leaky spots in the roof. Really, Harold needs to be thoroughly addressed from top to bottom. Its posts are solid, its rafters true. But the roof could be replaced, and a simple summertime ditching project would bring the power of light.That would still not address the bitter chill of the wet Oregon Autumn and Winter, the cold air laden with moisture working its way to your bones. I don’t want to be in Harold. I don’t want to spend time there.As it is, it is a mess. But by God it’s mine.Where we lived before I had a beautiful and proper shop. It wasn’t the biggest shop you’ve ever seen but it was warm and dry and clean and cleanable. It had a concrete floor; Harold’s is gravel.My old shop had electricity everywhere. I could, and did plug in my woodworking tools anywhere it was convenient and off I’d go. Here, where we’ve lived for a little more than two years, I have yet to regain my woodworking stride. There’s just nowhere to work!My barn is fairly full of barny things like chickens and their necessary accoutremon. My tractor is stored there. I have a welder in the corner and a space for hay storage for the cows. There’s a tack room, (this used to be a barn for horses), but we keep feed and dry storage in there, and anyway, it’s not very big. Not big enough to store tools, let alone woodwork.I must make due with Harold, at least as storage. And it’s a mess. And it is a steady drip of stress and pressure in my life. All winter long I move things around and try to keep them from getting wet. I would like to hope I might take up any number of projects I’ve been carrying around for these adult years of mine. But not if they’re moistened. Then they’re no good for anything but to be cast away and forgotten. So I keep moving things and I keep fighting Harold.I blame Harold and its lack of services. But it’s really my value for cleanliness that is the source of my stress.After all, I’m exaggerating its interior wetness. It’s not really that bad. A lot of the moisture is condensation rather than open drips. And after a couple of winters I know what goes where for safety.I love a place for everything and everything in its place! I’m just not very good at making that a reality in my life.I also think of a broader kind of cleanliness as it pertains to our natural environment. We are so prone to extraction, so prone to taking and using-up that we hardly notice when other people’s trash and refuse and waste becomes our problem.I reflect on my desire for a clean, pure expression of land management and stewardship. I have a few acres here. It is a little pocket in the middle of a million acres of ryegrass and hazelnuts and enough vines to romantically refer to our part of the countryside as wine country.These are monoculture crops and to a large degree monoculture crops require intensive chemical inputs in order to maintain. And I am the owner of, (I mentioned) a stretch of ditch. I wish it was a river, a proper waterway. But it is a ditch. There are no fish. There is the occasional duck, seeking refuge from the nearby hunters hidden in blinds this time of year.I have plans for my land! To improve it, to beautify it. To improve the soil quality like my brother’s doing on his piece of the Earth. I’m so proud of him. I’m so impressed. So inspired.Beyond Harold is the barn, and beyond that are three pastures, about 90 feet wide each and about 500 feet long each, totaling about an acre each.Here’s my plan: I’d like to rip the fences out between the pastures, making it a larger open pasture area of about three acres. I’d like to ring the whole thing with a five-foot-wide hedgerow constructed of species endemic to my area. I’ll plant taller trees and cut them partially down, laying them into the hedgerow and allowing new growth to take off upward from the fallen trunks. I’ll plan Red Osier Dogwoods, (Cornus sericea) and Oregon Grape, (Berberis aquifolium), and Pacific Snowberry, (Symphoricarpos albus), and other species that will grow in tightly together. This hedgerow will be a wind and visual break in the landscape and will stop invasive seeds from blowing into the main pasture.Then, I’d like to carve some shallow swales that follow the gentle topography of the land, allowing for more water to be retained and used by some gentle copses of native trees planted on the high side. I’ll plant a mixture of forage species on the land, oats, crimson clover, vetch and initially, tillage radishes which are huge rooted brassicas that are meant to grow long, heavy taproots deep into the clay soil and then rot, aerating the soil and providing organic matter as the roots decay.I’ll rotationally graze as many as three species on the land. Cows for a few days, then a few days of rest followed by sheep for a few days, then a few days of rest before chickens for a few days, then a good, long rest before cows again. By grazing multiple species I will exponentially increase my soil’s microbiome and the health and fertility of the soil. It will take more hooves for a longer season. I learned this from my brother.Neat. Tidy. Somehow this speaks to cleanliness to me.But as I said, our land is an island in a sea of monoculture. My ditch will continue to run with petrochemical runoff no matter what I do. All I can do is take responsibility for my little bit of earth. I can steward what I have. And not swim in the ditch. I can avoid swimming in the ditch.Finally I think about my own inner cleanliness. This is where inner harmony and self discipline meet up and marinate together and sometimes create friction with my sense of self worth.It is my own sense of inner cleanliness that calls me back to Harold. “Fix the roof” it calls to me. “Perhaps a door that closes properly”, it whispers in my ear as I pass by.Inner cleanliness is another central theme of this whole project–a central theme of my adult life. I am reminded again of the man who married my wife and me, and his childhood farm, and the spring of clean water that fed the whole farm, its animals and people, its gardens and crops. The spring required maintenance and part of that was a thorough yearly cleaning. We must clean our springs, we must maintain our water sources for ourselves and for those we wish to care for.In the end I do have a value for a sense of cleanliness. I want to live clean. I want to be clean of heart and intention. I want to wake up to a clean kitchen–my wife loves it and so do I.And I want to contribute to a greater cleanliness for my children and yours. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

In some ways this entire project has been about my own self discipline. It has come up time and time again–it’s at least a central focus of the project.I have had to exercise tremendous self discipline in my life. Ever since I was young. Don’t get me wrong–I often fail in my disciplines! Emphasis on the word exercise.I have regularly been called upon, in many forums, to be less. “Half as hard, half as fast” my mother would repeat to me in my youth. And who could blame her? I consistently did things twice as hard and twice as fast as the people around me, and not always with favorable results either for me or for my loved ones.“Your greatest asset is your greatest assache” is something that’s been a constant refrain in my life. Two sides to the coin. It’s a never ending battle to stem the tide of internal negative self-communication. The things I say to myself sometimes.. You’d be shocked. You might even feel defensive of me. How dare myself?Feeling twice as hard, twice as rough, twice as much of a liability to myself and others is a great weight to bear, though, and it can be difficult to flip that script; I have great capacities for kindness and love and care. And I don’t give myself credit for them because… I must restrain myself!I’ve already alluded to the idea that I’m sometimes too much, even in a positive way, in my relationships with people. Too much text! Too many cookies! Too much praise offered without enough perceived merit.I again reflect on what this card means to and for me versus another person. Surely there are as many interpretations of this card as there are respondents sorting through the deck. I cannot be the only one to struggle in life with self restraint. With self discipline.The card also says resistance to temptation.I will eat the whole box of shortbreads. I will stay up past my bedtime and write essays knowing I’ll be tired and grumpy in the morning. I will let the thing that need not be said escape my lips.Words are something I’m tempted by always. It comes from a desire, I think, to be heard and seen. And it comes across, (often) as a desire to dominate or relegate another person into wordlessness. I call names. I level judgments. I put my mouth out for the world to hear and not everyone likes it. I don’t always like it.And vices! I’ve known a few and we’ve discussed some of them here in this series. But it’s been far from an exhaustive list! There is barely a vice on this good Earth that I would not, have not dipped a toe into. And the remedy is very nearly always some practice or method of other-centric thinking. Observing how my behaviors, thoughts and actions affect the people around me. Thinking beyond myself. Maybe that’s my motivation for self-discipline.Is that okay? Is it okay for my motivations to come from a place of community rather than from a pure, deep well of personal integrity; an integrity that cannot be bought or sold? God, I hope so.I would like my motivations to be pure. I would like them to be from me and for me, and benefiting others only inasmuch as they’ve already benefited me. But I confess, I am sometimes motivated to self-discipline by a quiet observance of my behavior’s effect on the ones closest to me.Sometimes I struggle with knowing the right thing to do. Life is not always black and white! Life does not always present its challenges with clarity of reason and cause and effect and consequence. Sometimes we must suss these things out for ourselves and that can be a challenge.And how do I discipline myself toward greater love and communal affection when I don’t know what’s right and good? And what about the times when a lesser of two evils presents itself as the only option? When there is no good outcome for everyone? When someone, by my hand, by my words or decisions, by my vote, will be harmed? How then do we discipline ourselves?It can only be our best. The core discipline must be our intentions I guess. But that leaves room for play in the steering. “I was doing the right thing for my family”. “I was just following orders”. It’s a paradox to wrestle with.I would like to make this concept land with a big story about self discipline in my life. I think we want a movie montage here. We both want to see me getting up early and running hard up a flight of stairs with a rucksack on. We want to see me drinking raw eggs and pumping iron and getting into fighting shape and waking up tomorrow and doing it again. Right? We both want that?I have accomplished things! I did quit smoking. Twice, actually. I have cut back on and even eliminated bad habits that don’t bring life. But those are largely events, and self-discipline is about smaller choices that take place over a longer time.I am here to tell you, as a man who has roasted coffee for a living since 2009: The soundtrack never plays.There is no soundtrack for 4:30 AM on a Tuesday in November. The bed is warm. The floor is cold. The business I run is a giant beast filled with moving pieces that do not care if I am tired. It does not care if I am inspired. It only cares about heat and airflow and time. It cares about espresso and customer service and repetitive motions. If I don’t get up, the coffee doesn’t get roasted. If the coffee doesn’t get roasted, the customers don’t get their drinks. If the customers don’t get their drinks, my family doesn’t eat.So I get up. I put my feet on the cold floor. That is the entire story.And I think that’s all of our stories regarding self discipline. There are moments in our lives, probably, where we are either literally or figuratively getting up at 4:30 and body-slamming life’s challenges to the ground. But more often, more consistently, it’s about consistency, and it’s about recognizing our place in the great web of life. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

Another tricky one for me. Let me say at the outset that I love my parents and elders. I crave their approval. Less so now, in my forties, but the craving is still fresh in my memory.Let’s start with another heavily paraphrased bible story!Near the beginning of time there came a great flood that killed every man, woman and child, every beast of the land and every bird of the sky and presumably every saltwater creature of the seas, all except a man and his family and two of every animal in creation residing on a dubiously sized boat. After weeks afloat, landfall was made and the hard work of being fruitful and multiplying began.Noah apparently had brought vines aboard the craft, for after a while he became a farmer and planted a vineyard and promptly became a drunk. Classic.His son, Ham, in all probability pissed off at being named Ham, found his father passed out drunk and naked lying in his tent. He ran to his brothers, Shem and Japheth, and made light of his father’s circumstances. Shem and Japheth did the honorable thing, going into the tent backwards so as not to even SEE their father’s nakedness and covered him with a blankie to sleep it off.I have a friend who is younger than me by about fifteen years or so. I think he respects me, I was kind to him as a little guy and now he’s kind to me today. We were sitting around another fire, (I love a good fire), some years ago. And I made the analogy of walking around a big stadium outer-ring. You know, where the bathrooms and concessions are? You can walk and walk and finally you’re back where you started.I said it was as though I was walking just barely ahead of him around the ring-road. I could see the future—it’s true. I could see further ahead than he could and I had a little more time under my belt. But really, just barely. In the scheme of our lives the differences in my wisdom in comparison with his were really pretty incomprehensible and even then should only be brought to bear for our edification. And besides, he can see further back than I can! I know a little better about what lies ahead. And he knows a little better what is happening now, today.I have examples of this going every which direction in my own life. I certainly have examples of elders demanding their due respect. I also have my friend. My mentor. My coffee guy. Yes, it’s the guy I took $250 off of. He appears again.He is really the first one I can recall showing me the respect of an equal. The theft incident was a great example of this. I had to make it right. I had to make amends. And in truth, he’s had a bit of fun at my expense on the issue over the years. But I can never remember him lording it over me. I never remember him typecasting me. The opposite, actually.I was naked like Noah, black-out drunk on dumb choices. And instead of grinding me into a powdered form, he honored me, he chose to cover my nakedness and filled in my weak spots. He treated me with respect and dignity and very soon we were back on that ring road, he was just ahead of me. Still looking out for me.Respect for parents and elders cannot, in my understanding, come at the expense of respect for the young. And sometimes, oftentimes, it does just that.It didn’t feel great when I was young, and now that I’m aging up a little bit it’s my honor to love and respect those coming up on my heels the best way I know how.When people respect and honor one another intergenerationally it is almost cosmically lovely. It is a kind of beauty to behold. And I have beheld it.When respect is demanded from one direction, any direction, it is ugly and unproductive to say the least.What profit is there in demanding a high place of esteem? What good is the respect of the youth if it is coerced on traditional or religious grounds?By contrast, what good does it do to discount the lives, the work, the sacrifices of those who are a little stretch ahead of us in this great ring-road of life?Now is the time of my life to put my money where my mouth is. Now is the time for these concepts to be made real in my life and in my experience. I am the elder. I have elders. I am an elder. I am middle-aged. I have an eighteen year old child. They are–you will be shocked to hear it–not making all of the same choices I might make for their lives. I will turn out, in the sweet by & by, to have been correct about a great number of my ideas and thoughts. They will come around to some of them and we will look back together and sigh. And I will always have been pure in my intentions toward them. That’s my way as a dad. I will cover their nakedness and fill in their weak spots wherever I can. And I will not demand a power differential that does not need to exist. That’s my promise. Because at the same time, the rubber meeting the road as it is, I must acknowledge that father does not always know best, and there will be a second great many things that we look back on and see that they were right in their assumptions, correct in their thinking. That they were the master of their own fate, captain of their own vessel and they were simply sailing a different direction. Much to my immediate chagrin.I want to harness this. I want to foster this belief in my life. I want to remind myself that the youth are alright. That they’re worthy of honor and respect and that respect is, now perhaps more than ever, a two way street Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

The next four cards all fall under the heading of “Conformity”. Here we go. Let’s get this deed done.You will not be shocked to learn that I can be quite an impolite person. I have that capacity. But in truth, as I sit and reflect on what on Earth to write about this idea, I do think I am quite as polite as I can be. It’s a learned behavior, maybe for all of us, but certainly for me. My mother taught me the value of politeness.When I was young we were but simple country folk. Still, my mother taught us which fork to use in the correct order. She taught us to use our napkins efficiently and sparingly, to keep our elbows off the table.I was apparently the last human being to address my elders by Mr. & Mrs. and I did so until I was a teenager. Sometimes I still do, and it really seems to weird some people now. Not a very polite practice at my age I suppose, actually.When we answered the rotary phone on the wall we’d say “Hello, Walton residence, this is Nick speaking”. What a nerd.I did grow up with a value for politeness, but I think it’s one I easily trump with other values. It didn’t make it very far in my sort because, much like the last card, it can feel, (in today’s society), cloying and inefficient. And that bothers people. It bothers me.It feels like politeness can also be weaponized and used as a blunt object with which to subjugate others. To put oneself on a morally superior footing. “At least I wasn’t rude about it”.If we’re not vigilant and watchful, politeness can cover all manner of sin. Politeness can even cover abuse or in the worst cases crimes. I am thinking of a crime now in my head, covered up for years and hidden under the guise of politeness. I am gratified that this seems less common now than it was when I was younger. Politeness often demands silence. “Don’t make a scene”. Many people today are more willing to make a scene. Perhaps not enough people. I think the complex part of politeness to me is that it seems to often fly in the face of kindness, a value that does not have its own card but is nevertheless among my own personal central values. Politeness uses the correct fork and then quietly slips its sharpened handle between your ribs. Kindness shoves over and scrapes half its food onto your plate–there’s enough to go around. Polite is nice. Kind is kind. In the end I find politeness suspicious at best. It does feel too-often antithetical to kindness and in a binary choice I know where I land. I know I land with kindness and it alarms me to feel like I’m in a world where not everyone shares this hierarchy of values. I will be polite until it is untrue. Until it is unkind or harmful. And then I will let the chips fall. I will try to be polite. But I will not be silent. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

I placed the photo upside-down on purpose. Just to be difficult. I thought it would be funny to start by disrespecting the 45-essay-long tradition of putting a normal photo atop each post by making you crane your neck around.I really ain’t got much. I do not actively respect very many traditions. As I’ve aged, I’ve become less conservative—in that there are fewer and fewer things from the past that I see a substantial value in conserving. It always feels like we end up conserving the wrong bits, anyway. We can’t be trusted to be conservative. (This is not necessarily a political statement. Don’t get weird).When I think of tradition, I think of people trying to shoehorn their loved ones into doing something “the way it’s always been done,” despite the world changing, the sands shifting ‘neath our collective feet. I find the traditionalist’s perspective to be primarily one of a head buried in that sand.What customs are important to me? I’m really wracking my brains. I like that we gather, but I never really care about doing it on Christmas. I’d much rather have sporadic, randomized gatherings. I love receiving gifts! But I don’t need them concentrated together. I’d prefer to be thought of when I’m thought of, and never for you to feel a sense of urgency or obligation. (Seriously though, about those Island Punch Spindrifts... that’s a tradition I can get behind).As I sit and reflect on Respect for Tradition, I see that I’m actually somewhat antagonistic toward the concept. I get barby and short-tempered when I’m forced to participate. To me, traditions often feel like Peer Pressure from the Dead. Or from those who refuse to live into the future. At best, they can be stifling and boring. At worst, they feel toxically rote and obligatory. And as we discussed in the Responsibility essay, obligation is the enemy of care.But then. Then I look at the 5-year-old child in my house.We have a little child living with us now. They came from a place where things were not predictable. For me, a man who has had safety and stability for 40 years, “Tradition” feels like a cage. But for them? Tradition feels like a floor.“We always wash our hands before we eat.” “We always watch a movie on Friday.” “We always say goodnight.” “Bath, Books, Bed.”I am realizing that while I hate the obligations of tradition, I deeply value the rhythms of tradition. Because Rhythm can create Safety.When my friend and I shared a Schnecken (that espresso split for two), we were building a micro-tradition. It wasn’t a law handed down by an elder; it was a recurring kindness we built for ourselves. When I take a photo of every single person who does the Values Sort with me, that is a tradition. It is a ritual of honoring the moment. And I do love that tradition.Perhaps I have been looking at this card wrong. I thought “Respect for Tradition” meant worshiping the past. But maybe it just means respecting the infrastructure that holds us together.If a tradition is a wall that keeps people out, I hate it. I will kick it down. But if a tradition is a trellis that allows a new vine to climb up out of the dirt and find the sun... then I can respect it. I can get behind it. .I am building new trellises now. I am building a trellis for my family. I am building some trellises for my friends. I am respecting the necessity of doing the same good thing, over and over again, until it becomes a part of who we are.So, I will leave the photo upside down. Because that is my tradition now: To question the way things are done, and to only turn them right-side up if they actually serve the people I love. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

We’ve left my five chosen values behind and these are getting trickier to write. I feel like we’re back at the beginning again writing about “Wealth” or “Social Recognition”. I feel awkward and ham-fisted. Because indeed I am, and anyway, we are very near the beginning again because as I’ve said before these values are arranged in a great wheel; spoiler alert, the last card in the series is #57, A sense of belonging, (feeling that others care about me), which is, if you think about it, strikingly connected to card #1, Social Power, (control over others, dominance). Let the circle be unbroken.Let’s DO THIS.This card is moderation, the photo for which I took on the backdrop of a box of my favorite commercially produced shortbreads, Walkers. I will, left to my own devices, eat this entire box in one sitting. Cup of coffee, nervously read the news, I’ll blow right through them. Some of these cards feel made just for me because I guess I was really made for them. Some of these cards are so difficult for me to get my head around as to be laughable. I laugh at this card. I snort, snicker. I LOL.I am not naturally moderate. I am naturally obsessive. I am positively addictive in ways. I must be mindful of the vices I allow a foothold in my life lest they take me over completely. And sometimes they do. Sometimes they do.I have discussed some of these things here in these essays; To my great disgust I smoked cigarettes. I will drink Spindrift, (Island Punch if you’re feeling gifty), until my blood is carbonated. I am currently obsessed with these essays and I am more than a little nervous about what might come next, once I do reach card #57. Where is #58? What will I do? It’s actually not a small anxiety in my life. I feel them coming to an end and I’m already sad.I am also full throated in my love and my care for people. I am not moderate in my fondnesses. I have, on more than one occasion, utterly overwhelmed someone with the depth of my affections for them. It’s too much! They haven’t felt they’ve earned it! But it’s honest and it’s true. If I decide I like you there’s little you can do to keep me from liking you.On my road to 200+ values exercises I have written, let’s say, 175 absurdly long text messages. I overwhelm people with my words, I overwhelm them with intended-kindnesses that can even, I imagine, seem disingenuous. I love people as I’d like to be loved. Immoderately.Is there time in this life for moderation? I guess I don’t really know if I believe there is; not in relationship to people, to loving them and liking them and vying for them. There’s not enough time to love people as much as I’d like to. Why measure out my love as if there is some hard limit on the amount I have? I have not reached it yet, and I don’t imagine I will. I am also sometimes immoderate in my rage. This, we’ve discussed as well. Try calling my children names! Disrespect my wife, be needlessly unkind to my friends. I’ll have a difficult time moderating my response to you, and it will not be laden with kindness. Is there time in this life for moderation? I guess I still don’t really know, not when it comes to the defense of the weak or the loved or the defenseless. I defend people as I wish I’d been defended at various times in my past; viciously and thoroughly. Immoderately. So. Moderation. Is it worth even pursuing?Well, yes, probably so. Because in my immoderate justice-rage there is very often collateral damage, and anyway, it’s not always righteous in its origins.Sometimes I am caught in a shameful situation and I react badly. I react in a way that feels taken over and I’ll fight with someone for no reason, over nothing, for too long. There is value in the pursuit of moderation. I have admitted to the capacity for dishonesty. It is a terrible feeling to be caught in a lie–a feeling I know. It’s a kind of a self-wounding to wound someone else that way. A double edged sword by which we’re all sliced way open, our insides showing. And to respond immoderately in that place of pain is damaging for those around me. I smoked cigarettes. At one point I drank too much beer. I eat shortbreads like pacman. Nom nom nom.Forget about keeping a bag of gummy worms in the middle console of the car. Those things are gone. Yesterday.These displays of my great lack of moderation catch up with me. Sometimes quickly like the distance and sadness I feel between me and a friend when I’ve been unreasonable. And sometimes they’re longer term. Will I pay the big price for my smoking? Will I develop diabetes as is a hereditary potential for me?Will my relationships with those I’ve perceived as wrong doers ever recover? Can they really be that bad? And what of my family? If I’m not careful I make unilateral decisions about who we do and do not relate to based on my immoderate judgments.How then shall we live? Moderation in all things, friends! Even in moderation. The answer I think, for me, is discipline in my proclivities. Mindfulness of my tendencies. I can grow! I can change! I can become a better version of myself by observing my values and rejecting the things I find to be harmful.I can be justifiably angry and not wound others unnecessarily in my anger. I can be mindful of the collateral damage I cause. I can choose peace instead of violence. I can decide not to always choose the path of extremes. I can choose a moderate, measured response and I can enjoy the benefits and rewards.Like the last essay on humility, perhaps, for me, it’s not really about moderating myself in relation to anyone else, but simply about moderating myself. Full stop. Being willing to hold things in my hand and prioritize my responses to them.I can rage for injustice! I can make room on the bench even if it means using my weight to shove some boorish inconsiderate oaf off the other end. But I must always be aware. Mindful of the boor as well as the weaker one. I can be aware of how my actions and words and responses will affect the whole group in a situation. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

I needed to look up the word effacing. I could use context clues—I got what it meant the first thousand times I thumbed through the deck. It means what I imagined it would: To erase. To make oneself smaller or less conspicuous.I am not humble. I am loud and somewhat boorish, and I can be rude and perfectly monstrous the better you get to know me. I can be outlandish. Just far, far too much sometimes.I would like to be more humble. I would like to be more modest. But I think “self-effacing” gets into complex territory. I am willing to shine less so that others may shine more. It’s part of the job of humanity to lift one another, to float all boats. But if I’m taking up all the space in the harbor... well.I reflect on this very thing we’re doing together—here, now, as you read this. I have told more than one person something to the effect of: “This is for me. I do not need anyone to read my content or validate me in this.”But. I mean. I want people to, right? The truth is—I’ll share it now, 44 essays in—I hope there are people reading these. I do hope people are gathering value from my words. I hope people “like, share, and subscribe.”I’ll go further, friends. I am hoping this turns into something. Which precipitates something else. Which generates interest and energy for something more. I hope I look back at the second half of my life, when I am very old, and see that the day I discovered the Values Deck was the day my life changed. The day something new began. I want to build a website. I want to write a book. I want to use this big mouth and my propensity for communication to benefit the people around me.That’s what I want. Is that humble? Am I humble?There’s the rub. In truth, I don’t just want to help you. I don’t only operate from a place of purity and altruism. I am beset by the needs of the one. And for me, for now, that means validation and comfort. It is to be known and beloved and appreciated.What does this say about me? It is a flowing gradient. There are moments when I can honestly say it is all about the other. When I’m sitting with someone doing their values sort for instance, it’s very nearly always this way. I do feel my best when I’m looking out for others.But there are other days when the gradient shifts, and I am lowly and in need of validation—more than validation sometimes, praise. I lost a good friend once because of this.He had been, for a time, my very closest pal. We worked together and we played together. We invented the Schnecken together. It’s a German word meaning “snails,” but commonly refers to cute little sticky buns. I’ve used the word as a stand-in for any kind of tasty treat since I saw the incomparable Nathan Lane use it in The Birdcage. “When the schnecken beckons,” Lane says, sampling a second treat at the corner bodega.In our context, a Schnecken was a double shot of espresso, split into two 5-ounce rocks glasses and topped with a little water. (And a little cream if ya nasty). The point was a single pull of espresso shared between two people. It was our way of encouraging people to come and spend time together, and my friend and I did just that.But at a certain low point in my life, I cried out to him. I was flailing and thrashing about in need of validation, love, and preferential affection. It was too much for my friend to bear. It was too much for him to shoulder, holding me up in this time of great sorrow. And we drifted. Just like that.I was not modest. I was not self-effacing. I sucked all the air out of the room. My lack of humility—my inability to see things from another person’s point of view—was the death knell for our friendship. The Schnecken is meant to be shared. I drank it all.I reflect on my marriage. It requires near-constant re-calibration to humility for both of us. We would call it “preferring one another in love,” which comes from the Bible (Romans 12, if you’re taking notes).I think the thing I dislike about “self-effacing” is the implication of disappearing. The goal, from my standpoint, is not ultimately to become less, but to make space for others to become more.I reflect on my place of privilege in this current society. I’m large. I’m white. I’m ruddy-cheeked and ruggedly built. I generally get along in this life just fine wherever I go. Nobody hassles me. Nobody stops me and asks for my papers. People usually trust my words. I do not walk around under the weight of strangers’ suspicions. I have so far enjoyed the privileged position of not having to care.And I reflect on my wife the woman. My friend the Black man. My friend the trans man. What of them? Do they also enjoy my place of position? Or are they standing lower on the ground they were given?How can my modesty—perhaps even my self-effacement—make more room for them at the table? I am physically incapable of becoming small. But I am capable of moving over. And I am capable of blocking the door open.I have chosen to care. To try, anyway. It takes a choice—an endless series of choices—to give a s**t about others. To root out any stem or seed of tokenism. To stop trying to earn my high place, and start using it to pull others up.Maybe that is humility for a loud man. Not silence. But amplification of someone else. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

I visited with a college professor yesterday. He taught that biology class series that changed my life. Yesterday I had the opportunity to tell him so.The class was environmental science, and it was a required class for my course of study, (forestry). I have already told you that I did not finish this course of study–I am not a silvaculturalist today.This biology class was part of the reason I quit. The comparison between the things I was learning in the class with the things I was learning in and about the forestry classes and industry were so stark. And I found myself drawn into a fuller and more beautiful observation of the natural world and away from the extractive practices of my youth and of my course of study.Of the classes I took that year I do not retain very much mensuration, (the branch of mathematics focused on calculating lengths, areas, and volumes of geometric shapes, like tree shapes), I could not easily, if called upon, estimate the board feet in a stand of timber today.But I still happily keep and occasionally refer to my copy of Pojar and Mackinnon’s Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast as well as my Oregon State dichotomous key. I’ve added to the list the Sibley guide to Trees and more recently, (and perhaps more delightfully), Pete Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees. I entered the program thinking of logging. I left the program thinking of the preservation of our natural world. Not that the two are necessarily mutually exclusive! This is not a political statement. Don’t get weird. My house is made of wood. I went into that class very dubious about its value in my life. I spent a year measuring logs both standing and lying, and counting insects, and learning about the impacts we have on our natural world and learning lessons about hairbrushes broken too easily.I could not have articulated the change it made in me at the time. But in hindsight I see that it was a point of inflection and it changed my perspective. Which did in turn affect my values, which catalyzed beliefs in my life, which had forever impacted my vision and mission.Many of my actual behaviors and thoughts and actions in life have ultimately been affected by this class and I’m grateful.When I visited my professor, (the first time we’d seen one another in more than 20 years), it was as though no time had passed and I remembered why I liked him and his class so.One thing he showed me as we sat and ate gingerbread in his living room near his warm fire, was thirty years of data he’d collected on bird species present on his 28 acre property. It was delightfully nerdy and reminded me of a dataset I’m collecting.I have done this values exercise with over 200 people. And at the end of each one, (with permission), I take a photo. A beautiful photo of the respondent and their choices. I do not publish these photos or share them with the world, but I do look at them myself. I will flick through the album on my phone, land on a person, observe their values, check the date and think about their lives in the days or weeks or months since we sat together. It’s really been a fascinating experience in addition to being a beautiful one.Interestingly, in the times that I’ve done this, only two people have had a matching set of five values. This says nothing, really, as they are unrelated in any meaningful way and both people will have landed on those choices for different reasons. In fact, out of 57 cards, it’s remarkable that I would even have had a full match at all in only 200 samples–a big number for me, but not a particularly huge dataset.It’s also notable that there are several cards that are chosen only very seldomly. Preservation of my public Image. Social recognition.One of my favorite tasty little mysteries, one card has been selected exactly one time.Acceptance of my portion in life. Submitting to life’s circumstances.One time. One person. Sitting crosslegged on her living room floor with me. One time. Now what do you make of that?What does that say about my friend who made this selection, I asked her after the exercise? And what does it say about over 200 other people?I reflect again on my professor. He does not try to count all the birds in Oregon. He accepts his portion. He accepts his 28 acres and has a beautiful, ring-bound volume of collected data as his reward.Do you not yield? Do you not submit? Do you not accept the circumstances of your life?Obviously I’m making a mountain out of a molehill here, because as I have noted these are five cards, five choices in comparison with the compendium of human experience. There are fifty seven cards. There must be 57 million things that we could value as humans. Things with words like Kindness or Generosity, or things that are beyond words like a baby’s warmth or a long love in the same direction.Still, it’s a value that, far from discarding flippantly, I wrestle with. Submission to life’s circumstances.I have bent my knee to life’s circumstances. Is that always the right choice? Can we value it and still fight, still rage against it? The submission? Or is the fight itself a lack of submitting to the slings and arrows of this life? And is approaching submission as a defeat a sort of defeat in itself?For what of positive circumstances? Do we submit to those as well, or do we expect them and take them for granted? Do we deserve all that we have? All that we get? All that happens, how it happens and when?I often think of my college professor and the things I learned in that year. Not just mensuration and dendrology and planned obsolescence. But the things I learned about my own self. It was, as college often is, one of my first experiences outside of my parents’ sphere. I had lived on my own for some years by then. I was accustomed to that Lucky-Charms-and-cheap-beer lifestyle.But everything I was and wasn’t in those fresh, crispy years of early adulthood was still measured against who I was within the context of my home and family.And environmental science was a breath of something new. I often wonder–what if I’d stayed in? I make the comment, I’ve made it here, that there’s probably a place where a guy with a big mouth and a big love for people could have made a home with a forestry degree. I could be something really neat, like a park ranger. And instead I am not. I am a coffee roaster, an occupation I have already admitted I do not have a particular passion for. I must accept this. I must let go.And besides, if I had not followed the life path I did, I may never have developed my dataset, my 200 people, (and counting), I may never have married my partner, I may never have done and seen a million wonderful things.Not everything is perfect in my life. Not everything is always peachy-keen for an entrepreneur. My business struggles in this post COVID era where people make buying decisions very differently on some levels. Not everything is perfect in my family; my own children are growing up and pushing against boundaries I don’t even know that I should have set in the first place.In my recent essays I have discussed my faith. Out of something and into something new. Metamorphosis. But what does it mean for the caterpillar? Is there any sense of loss? Probably not for the caterpillar. But for us? As I continue a life-long transformation it is necessary to accept the circumstances of that transformation.My portion is my portion. My portion is indeterminately good and indefinably difficult. This is true for us all I think. For every choice we make there are a million more we do not. And we can spend our lives, if we’re not careful, regretting those paths.What does it mean to submit now, today to the circumstances of my life? Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

You may recall that I grew up in church. Perhaps you did, too.This card is funny because people have one of three responses, and maybe it’s actually this way for all fifty-seven cards. But I’m reflecting on the triad of choices now. It’s either a shoe-in, no contest, a definite value, OR it’s an easy card to toss in the “no” pile on the first round, OR, it is deeply wrestled with; compared and analyzed alongside other cards like a spiritual life or meaning in life. It all sort of depends on where you came from and where you’re going. I am, you may have guessed, moving away from organized religion in my life. Except…I’ve started going to church. About six weeks ago as of this writing I was sitting with my friend around a nice backyard fire. We were sharing a whiskey and a moment together and I was becoming animatedly enraged, (as I do), with various church leaders from our shared past, their abuses and untended wounds. He listened quietly, gave me space to feel and be myself as friends do, and then suggested I try a church he’s been attending with his wife for a while.It’s a very different kind of church than I’ve ever attended before, and I’m not going to make this essay a comparative side-by-side, nor am I going to give you a list of reasons why I’m still in church at all. We are all on our own paths.In this series I’ve admitted to being disillusioned with the church of my youth. I’ve tried to be fairly diplomatic about it, but if you’re paying attention it’s there. In this series I’ve admitted to stealing in my youth, I’ve admitted to my own capacity for violence and malice and dishonesty. Now here’s another admission. I am still on what I weirdly call a “Jesus flavored path”. No matter how much I grow weary of the church, all her rules, all her dominions, all her hate-dressed-as-love, I do not seem to grow weary of the words of Jesus. And I do not tire of wanting to be more like him. I think. I grew up learning a certain set of facts regarding Jesus, regarding his place in the larger story of the Bible, regarding our appropriate responses to those facts.Do you remember POGs? It was a fad in the 1990s. A game played by stacking cardboard disks, (the name was taken from the name of a Hawaiian beverage, Passionfruit-Orange-Guava, and the acronym POG printed on the cardboard bottle lids). You’d stack up your POGs face down and then use a heavier disk, a Slammer to, (as the name would suggest), slam the pile. The player would “win” any POGs that flipped face up. In my personal experience, I rarely ever played the game, instead I collected POGs. I had a binder with special plastic pages in it that was made specifically for displaying and protecting the little disks. I did have a SLAMMER though; a huge, heavy piece of acrylic plastic affixed to a metal disk that said the following, (this is why I’m telling the POG story):The Bible says it—I believe it—That settles it. I grew up believing in the Bible as a set of literal facts collected for my benefit. I grew up telling myself, (and almost believing it), that the very word Bible, stood for Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth. In reality the word “Bible” obviously comes from the Greek biblia (βιβλία), meaning “The Books”, itself stemming from biblos (βύβλος) which means papyrus and refers also to the Phoenician port city of Byblos where it was commonly traded. But you already knew that. But in my little-guy brain, that’s exactly what the Bible was—specific instructions for living. If it wasn’t in there, it didn’t exist; it spoke, if you read hard enough, to every potential eventuality this life could throw our way.This is how I grew up. This is what I believed. I memorized various passages of scripture and performatively recited them to Mrs. Kennedy in order to win the 10¢ goldfish she’d bring in as prizes once each year for the good little boys and girls who’d done their memorization. I won my fish. I named him Clyde. He lived for many years and only died in the house fire I mentioned in the Privacy essay. He was six inches long living in a 20 gallon aquarium at the time. It was too small a habitat. I believe he’d still be alive today if not for that ill fated end, teaching us lessons about growth. And over time my beliefs have changed; I have already admitted that I no longer believe in a place of ECT, a real acronym used to shorten Eternal Conscious Torment, the specific kind of hell we believed in. The cracks began to form in that doctrine many years ago and they continued until one day I just… didn’t believe that way. I couldn’t. I couldn’t make myself see what some people see in the texts and I couldn’t unsee or unlearn some of the things I’d seen and learned that countered that narrative.And as I mentioned in the Spiritual Life essay, without hell, without consciousness in torment, evermore, evermore, what were we even left with? For me, I’m left with invitation. One of Jesus’ most often used words was come. He was invitational in nature, that guy. He was always speaking with authority the religious leaders didn’t feel like he did, (or should) have to forgive, to invite to repair. And those are things we can do, too! I cannot, (as I have already stated many times), speak to the afterlife. I do not know.But I can invite you into love, into kindness. I can look for the fruits of the spirit of God in my life, the Love, Joy, Peace in my life and I can foster and foment those things in my life. I can share good news with you—the good news is that we have this life. We have now, today, together. We can be heaven or hell for one another—indeed we will be heaven or hell for one another. We may have no other way. A few years ago I started tuning my ear to Rainn Wilson. Hopefully you at least know of Wilson and his character from The Office, Dwight Schrute. He’s hilarious and a treasure. He was born and raised into the Baha’i faith. I am compelled by his messaging and his stories, and I’ve thought, privately to myself and apparently publicly on the internet, that if I had it to do again I might dig a little deeper into the Baha’i.A few years ago I received my introduction to Buddhism. It was simple and a little silly, but it was mine. I was wandering Powell’s Books and picked up, almost at random, James Norbury’s The Journey: Big Panda and Tiny Dragon. In it two friends embark on a beautiful journey out of and into. They leave a comfortable home they’d made together taking only Tiny Dragon’s teapot as luggage. They face various beautifully illustrated trials and finally lose even the teapot before finding a new place, a new life, a new home, and yes, a new teapot. In the end all is different but all is well. So, I feel it going for me. Perhaps in another life I’d have pursued Buddhism. Perhaps I’ve had made a terrible monk somewhere. Am I devout? The question here is am I devout? Do I hold to a religious faith? And the answer, which still, after all this time, after all these words, is hard for me to write, is no. Not to the faith I know—not to the faith I knew. I have left the way I knew. I can no longer hold to a religious tradition. That word ‘hold’—as in grasp tightly, clutch, refuse to let go—that’s carrying a lot of weight here. Because I’ve let go. Not of Jesus, not of love, not of invitation. But of the structure that said there was only one way to understand any of it. But am I devoted? Yes, I think so. Devoted to continuing to sojourn on, continuing to identify those fruits in my life, continuing to discipline myself in the way(s) of love. A word used to describe people in my situation has been Deconstruction. As in, we’re de-constructing our faith. But I don’t like that term very much and I don’t actually feel like it applies to me or maybe to very many people at all.I do know folks who want to just tear it all down and walk out of the rubble—I’ve met them, I’ve known them, and I’ve even felt like one of them. But I see now that, (as I mentioned in a previous essay) that I am simply evolving and growing. I am going from one thing into another, quite naturally, quite natively. Like a caterpillar I am entering my pupae state; closing into myself for a quiet liquid metamorphosis into something different. If I had to guess I’d guess I’ll never become a Buddhist or a practitioner of the Baha’i faith. If I had to guess I’ll keep walking this Jesus flavored path all the days of my life growing less sure and not more sure that I know what I’m reading or what he was saying. I’d guess I’ll die the way I was born; unsure. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

I am in a time of flux. I am in a time of transition. I am in a time of metamorphosis. When we were all younger my wife and I started a coffee shop called Chrysalis Coffeehouse. Do you know what a chrysalis is? Maybe you do, but if not you should because it’s beautiful. Before about 2012, if you would have asked me how a caterpillar became a butterfly I’d have said something about going into a cocoon and maybe one leg grows up into a longer bone, (insects have bones, right?), and then maybe the wing sort of webs down from that, and presto-chango, it’s a butterfly or something!That is not how it works, friends. Moths form cocoons, silk structures into which they envelop themselves and out from which they emerge. A chrysalis by contrast is fully the insect itself. The hard outer shell is a part of the critter, and on the inside, far from growing into something it actually changes into something new. Metamorphosis. The whole of the animal liquefies into something magical, reforms, reconstitutes and regrows into a different animal altogether. It’s a beautiful, and I’ll say it again, magical exercise in nature’s way. So it goes, we decided, with coffee. We were a metamorphosis point in the life cycle of a coffee bean, taking a hard, barely edible, waxy green coffee bean and, through the application of heat and pressure, transforming it into something palatable and even more than that, pleasurable.At that time we also saw ourselves in that imagery. I can look back now and see that we’ve pretty much always been at the beginning of some new change, some new way. It is the blessing and the curse of being us. I look around and see that not everyone is so lucky to live this way. As we did business it became increasingly clear that not everyone knew what a chrysalis was, and certainly not everyone knew the beauty of how they worked, and the name presented more challenges than we’d intended. Eventually we changed again, rebranding and becoming something different. So, I feel, it is going in our lives today. I can feel the winds of change. They have ebbed and flowed in our lives often enough that I’m no longer particularly afraid of them, though I know they almost always bring pain along with new life. I am turning to liquid. Again. I will not discuss all of these things now; I have revealed some of them already. My children are growing. My business is changing. Things never stay the same for long, and they will continue on that trajectory I think. The most important thing I do now, the most important thing to me, is this values exercise. It never gets old and I could do it every day. In the beginning I did the exercise with everyone—I was ravenous. You could not be on my doorstep for long before I’d ask you to “do a fun values sort with me.” I have my electrician’s values. I have my old babysitter’s values. I have my friend’s son’s girlfriend’s values and I have my former life coach’s values. It is what I would like to be doing with the rest of my life. It’s not the cards, though, you know that by now. It’s my love for people and my belief that we do have this life! We are more than we know, more than we think we are. It’s about coming up under the people around me and giving them something, anything that gives them hope or a little more of a vision for their own futures. For their children’s futures. As I write this it feels self aggrandizing. Oh, that I could be a benefit to others! Who am I that I think I could? But I’m here, I have these cards, I have these ideas, and I’m not losing heart or interest. I’m continually discovering meaning in life. As part of this pursuit, I have begun developing my Values Tree which I will describe again here, briefly for your reference. Our Lived Experiences happen to us. Around us. Without our command or request. They’re the sun rays and raindrops falling on our faces and we cannot control them. We cannot even predict them much of the time. Our responses to those experiences inform our Values which in turn inform our Beliefs, which I believe are really just crystalized, (or calcified) values. Our beliefs and values inform our Vision, the “what success looks like”, and Mission, the “how we’re going to do it” of our lives. For me, these things are fluid. More fluid than I’m altogether comfortable with. But here we are. Our mission informs our Goals, the things we’re trying to see made real, our goals inform our Tasks, and our tasks inform our Time Management. So you see, there’s a line of continuity between our lived experiences and our time management, (the things we do with our hands and think with our minds and say with our mouths. For me, for the purpose of these essays, I see meaning in life in relation to our Vision and Mission. What are we going to do. I grew up with a vision for the next life. Everything was viewed and filtered by the coming age. And now I don’t know! I literally, honestly, just don’t know what to think about the future. I don’t know what to think about next week, let alone the split second after my final breath. And as I’ve said numerous times in the course of this project, we know only this life for sure. We know we have our next breath, our next minute, our next day. What will we do with them? What does success look like for us?For me, it looks like continuing to dig deeper here. Continuing to try to identify what’s making this work in my head. It’s something about people. It’s something about you. It’s something about us, and about making tomorrow brighter. We’re the only ones who can. It’s something about helping people know themselves better. This writing project is specifically to help me get to know myself better. I hope people read these, I’m gratified that some people seem to be. I’ve gotten some positive feedback which feels nice. I want people’s kindnesses. I love them. But ultimately this is an exploration of my own thoughts surrounding these cards and the ideas they stir up. And ultimately success looks like you being more mindful of your own values in life. Which is nearly impossible to measure. Classic Nicholas. Setting unattainable goals informed by an immeasurable mission in life. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

In my last essay, A spiritual life, I identified that many times people struggle with a binary choice. Is it this one or is it more that one? Is it capability that’s driving my choices, driving my thoughts and behaviors, or is it ambition?So this one goes for me. I sat and looked at mature love and true friendship together for a long while. Which one is it? If I’m not able to walk in mature love, how can I be a deep, true friend? But.. Isn’t true friendship the highest form of love? Ultimately, as I revealed, True Friendship won the day in my sort.But I often tell people, you know, this thing we’re doing, (the values card sort), isn’t a game. It’s not a game because you can neither win it nor lose it. I suppose you could lose the exercise sort of if you failed to take it even a little bit seriously. If you were only sorting the cards for my sake or to get me off your case. But assuming you think a little and choose five cards honestly, then it’s been a success and you’re a winner. So forget what I said before… You can both win or lose this thing. But it’s not really a game. I have also established that the big secret, as I’ve found anyway, to this sorting exercise is that they’re all important! They’re all valuable. I say to people, “as a marginally well adjusted human adult, you probably have a value for all 57 of these concepts, there are no negative values listed; there’s no punching babies card.”I tell people that if, in two weeks time, you’re driving down the road or sitting in your chair and a value card you didn’t end up choosing pops into your mind, and if you let it linger there, if you let a concept like social recognition or wealth or preservation of my public image pops into your mind, why, then it’s been a double success because it means you’re beginning the process of thinking of your values more holistically! Everyone’s a winner here.I have spent a lot of time driving down the road thinking about mature love. When I think of deep, emotional, spiritual intimacy I do think of my wife. There is simply nobody else whose relationship I can compare ours to. I revealed in True Friendship that I am utterly surrounded by friends and more than that, surrounded by friendship. I cannot escape it, I could not if I wanted to. If I ran away they would follow me. If I hid around corners or under beds they would find me. Friendship follows me.But there is no friend I have like her. We have been married for twenty years! Which is not forty! But it’s not five! We have weathered many storms. Big ones like her cancer and my somewhat rocky mental health over the years. We have been there for one another, and when we’ve found ourselves not there for one another, we have mindfully redirected our attention back toward our chosen togetherness.This is not the right choice for every couple, not the right choice for every situation. But it’s been the right thing for us and while we have many years and many trials and many successes waiting for us up around the bend, I am more committed than ever, I am more resolute and more in love.I am resolute in my steadfast love for her, yes. But in that love I have discovered a resolution to a kind of steadfast love for myself that wasn’t familiar to me at the beginning. I am realizing and learning that almost always, the thing I can do for her is to mind myself. To care for the life I have to live and to be the best version of myself.You know, at the beginning I was sold a belief system that was self-sacrificial. Which sounds excellent! It sounds loving on some levels. And certainly, in this life, there are times when we’re able to be self sacrificial and “take one for the team”. But very often, much more often, that resulted in a patriarchal sort of martyrdom that was at least intellectually dishonest. If I am always the one sacrificing for you, then I am the hero and you are the burden.By not caring for my own self, by not putting on my own oxygen mask, by not observing and spending adequate energy addressing the log in my own eye, I was free to condescendingly and paternalistically “make room” for the speck in hers, in a show of false magnanimity.And it all came so naturally to us, you know? Until it just didn’t.I still want to be self sacrificial. I would still spend mine to conserve hers. But now it comes with a realization that she feels the same. Would do the same. Has done the same. Is still doing the same.Today we’re both looking out for each other in this life. We’re both minding ourselves, walking into growth opportunities and developing postures of learning, awareness, curiosity. For ourselves, for each other.The love we shared in our youth said “I am here for you”. The more matured love, (though not as mature is it shall be!), that we share today says “We are here together”. It is a subtle difference, perhaps. But one I wouldn’t trade for anything. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

**Fair warning, this one gets a little churchy. Buckle up, but keep reading.**I’ll tell you an interesting thing to observe about this values exercise I do with people.People often find themselves struggling with a binary. A duo of cards that, for them, represent something so similar so as to be nearly indistinguishable. Or at least inseparable.How can you have one without the other? How can you choose between these two?They’re not always the same for everyone, but this card, a spiritual life is one such card. I am delighted to watch people struggle through this exercise-within-an-exercise because that’s how real muscle is formed, right? Tearing of muscle fibers, pain, exhaustion, and finally the growth–the building back of something stronger.A spiritual life is often, (not nearly always), compared with a card coming down the line, Devoutness: holding to religious faith and belief. That’ll be a weird one to write. One at a time, Nick, one at a time.I like the descriptor for this card; emphasis on spiritual, not material matters.My dad used to express that some folks were “so heavenly minded they were no earthly good”. I can see what he’s talking about. I can see what he was saying. Or, at least, I can see what I’d be saying if I were to repeat the phrase, (which I may do).I have had a long and winding religious road. But as I reflect, I feel like my spiritual life has been a fairly straight line.I learned early that Christ was the true vine, and we were the branches. And that the one the Lord loves, he prunes. He clips little bits off of us that aren’t helpful or aren’t producing fruit in order that we may grow as an organism, and recognize our connection to the oneness of himself.I learned that the fruits of the spirit of the living God are as follows: Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Gentleness, Faithfulness and Self Control. I further learned that against these things there is no law.Nine things to look for in my life. Nine things by which to measure my need for pruning, my need to be a part of the long, slow, laborious work of loving the other people I have access to.I do not worship the way I once did. It all looks and seems so different now. There was a time when Devoutness would be a tippy-top value choice of mine. That would have been a choice made out of obligation, or, more probably, fear.When I was young I can remember asking Jesus to come into my heart regularly. Weekly. Monthly. I can remember moments alone, in my room or in my woods, dissecting my foul humanity, laying every ill deed out on a stone table to be sacrificed and done away with in order to make room for a holiness that seemed completely out of reach in the best of times and something completely undeserved in the worst.So many of my young patterns were, I see now, based on a fear that God would smite me. Would strike me down. He was looking for an opportunity to give me what I deserved, and I kept providing them. And I just don’t think that now. My spirituality has—dare I say the word?—evolved.So much of how I practice my beliefs, so much of how I see my values intersecting with others has changed. And yet… And yet it still feels familiar. What did I ever believe? What did I ever know? What did I ever even hope for in my younger days laden with ecclesiastical burden? How much really has changed?One thing has changed, and it’s substantial for me, anyway. This is the big reveal: I do not believe in hell. I do not believe in it conceptually in the heart of God—whatever cosmic oneness awaits us, (I hope) after our time here is complete. And what’s more I do not even believe it to be a concept fairly borne out of scripture. The idea is anathema to what I’ve come to think about God, and as further evidence in my mind, it’s directly on brand for what I’ve come to believe about men. And it’s always men. You will note that women are rarely mentioned in the Bible and none are, (at least credited with being), responsible for its written contents. I believe it to be a tradition of men, heavily influenced by the second-century church and beyond that, by literature—fables and fictions written in the most generous of assumptions to delight or, in the worst, (and sadly more likely) case, to deceive and control.That may sound heretical to some. To others, it may sound obvious. But for me, letting go of hell changed everything. Without the threat of eternal conscious torment, my faith stopped being about avoiding damnation and started being about pursuing love. It became about allowing love to slowly grow and activate and unlock itself in my life. The fruits of the spirit aren’t a checklist to escape hell—they’re just... the whole point. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness. Against these things there is no law. Not because they save you from fire, but because they are salvation. They are what it means to be fully human, fully alive.I think I knew the fruit. I think I was born to spot the fruit in others, to draw it out and gather it up and put it by for a time when it’s needed. I think I was born into a knowledge of Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Gentleness, Faithfulness and Self Control. I think I’ve known it since I was young, and I think I know it now and I wonder if I’ve known it as part of a cosmic oneness since before the dawning of time. “Hidden in the heart of God”, we’d have said.In many of these essays I have shared some specific truth or nugget or anecdote from my life. I fought with my brother. I blew my hand up in a binge of freedom. I stole, I repaired, I learned, I grew somehow.And so it goes with my spiritual life, so why am I having trouble deciding on or even coming up with an anecdote to make this land? Perhaps it’s that it feels so very raw, so very alive to me just now. It feels so very going, and in-the-process. I am not done being worked out. I reflect on another song from my deep childhood.He’s still working on me; to make me what I ought to be. It took Him just a week to make the moon and the stars, the sun and the Earth and Jupiter and Mars. How loving and patient he must be; he’s still working on me.Now, I’m not claiming that tune quite the way I did the last one. The one about the “river of life” flowing out of me. Still, I do feel that I’m a work in progress, and nowhere is that progression more evident than in my religious beliefs.I did say, though, that something feels familiar. I see that the familiarity is myself. My inner life, my inner hunger for truth and more than that, love, which in the Bible is called “The greatest”. The greatest of these is love. In fact, it says that God is love. What do you make of that statement? Perhaps I’m interpreting it incorrectly, but I do continue to believe very deeply in Love. I have shed many shackles. I have done away with some childish things. I have come to grips with some realities of a world which does not often value life or love over profit and gain. And I am still shedding. I am still gaining understanding. May it be so for all the days that I live. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

In 1998 a movie came out that I love. It was called Waking Ned Devine. Maybe you’ve seen it, too? It’s a beautiful film, literally and substantively. It follows the inhabitants of Tulaigh Mhór, (Tullymore), a small Irish village. I won’t give everything away. The community, small and tightly knit, commits to an attempt at community-wide Lottery fraud, (as you do), when Ned wins a substantial sum in the lotto and dies of shock.When the Lotto man comes to town to interview Ned, a second man, Michael O’Sullivan, is reluctantly installed in Ned’s place, and the whole community pretends along—the goal being to split the massive lotto winnings among the whole of the village.On the day of Ned’s funeral, the whole village turned out. But unfortunately, the Lotto Man showed up at the exact same time. So, in a panic, Jackie O’Shea pivots. He delivers the eulogy not for the dead man, but for the man sitting right in front of him.Michael O’Sullivan was my great friend. But I don’t ever remember telling him that. The words that are spoken at a funeral are spoken too late for the man who is dead. What a wonderful thing it would be to visit your own funeral. To sit at the front and hear what was said, maybe say a few things yourself. Michael and I grew old together. But at times, when we laughed, we grew young. If he was here now, if he could hear what I say, I’d congratulate him on being a great man, and thank him for being a friend.And of course, you will recall it was Ned who was the dead man, and Michael was himself sitting in the front row, hearing his friend’s words for him.It’s a little quirky, but it’s a beautiful moment of friendship in cinema. It’s really a fabulously beautiful film. The hills and dales, the wee village of Tulaigh Mhór, and even Michael O’Sullivan, careening naked down the byways on a motorcycle.For a year and a half I’ve been doing this exercise with people and often I’ve said, (including, I believe, at least once in this series), that True Friendship is my very favorite card in the deck. I have made it a little joke, (not joking), that I’m allowed to pick favorites, you’re allowed to pick favorites, and this one is my favorite.If you’re keeping track, that completes my five. Protection of the Environment, Wisdom, Helpfulness, A World at Peace, and now, True Friendship.I have already admitted that I value all fifty-seven ideas in degrees. I have learned to value values. And I think I’ve identified to you that there is no love card. No kindness card in the deck. You will not see an essay, at least not with a photograph of a card, on generosity or vulnerability. Because these cards aren’t in the deck. (Stay tuned for some bonus episodes).These five cards still seem right to me, and I’ll hang my hat on them. I could spend my life discipling at the feet of these five things and never reach the end of my study.I have another deck! It’s the Animal Kingdom deck. It’s the same words, the same phrases, same numbers and value categories. But there’s an animal on each one, along with a fact about that critter that exemplifies that value.And very apropos to the situation, the animal for True Friendship is the domestic cow. Isn’t that nice? I love cows. My dad milked cows and raised cows and now my brother owns many cows. I do realize there’s a bit of a sticking point between cows and my value for Protection of the Environment, but regardless, I feel better when there are cows nearby.The card says “Cows love to spend time with their best friends. Being near their best friend lowers a cow’s stress level.” I love that. I love that it’s true.I am blessed with extraordinarily good friendships. It’s a struggle for me not to make this post a list of named names. Give a series of shoutouts to people whose love and affection for me has been a salve against a wearying world. Of course I will not do that. Probably.I have known friendship all the days of my life. I am a good friend. I have been a good friend. I can be a good friend. I have the capacity for good friendship. I suppose I have not always been a good friend in every circumstance, but if we get what we give, I have strong evidence of my willingness to give. It’s the only real explanation for the blessed, miraculous place I find myself in now, in my forties, well supported and surrounded on all sides by friends new and old.I have already told you that I have performed two marriage ceremonies. I have been called upon for three more, my name given out by the county clerk as a possible officiant. I have politely declined; this thing I do I reserve for friends.My wife is my closest friend. We share finances and foodstuffs and plans for the future until our very old age. We even share sweatshirts.My brother—whose nose I bloodied on the side of a freeway in the middle of the night—is perhaps my oldest friend, though I regret not realizing it sooner.I am still close with the friend who stood as best man in my wedding. I am friends now with his kids. He is a treasure to me.My friend, the beautiful musician, allows me to know him deeply, an honor he reserves and guards. I will apparently allow myself to be known by most anybody who shows even the slightest interest. It’s no great trick to know me. But for him to let me into his heart is a deep honor indeed.I have so many friends, and of such varying quality and character that it’s now totally impossible for me to name a best friend. I would be lost without any of them. One day, (indeed it’s already started happening), we will all begin dying and I do not know how I will bear it. I do not know if I can bear it. A piece of me may well continue to die with each of them until at last I go on to the next thing which I am almost unmanageably unsure of but in which I hope we are all together.There is, apparently, a great dearth of friendship, especially here in America, and especially among men. I have read about this, and I have thought a lot about it and why it could possibly be so. I have many thoughts, and many of them are either loosely or tightly bound to machismo. Bound to self, many men seem incapable of defining for themselves true masculinity, which is actually just a piece of true humanity.And so they take up their time with manly pursuits that do not yield good fruits in their lives. I’ve seen it a million times. You’ve seen it a million times. We endlessly pursue a sense of worth at the expense of honesty and truth-with-self. Capability and obligation very often trump vulnerability and kindness. Value is ascribed to an ability to be a rock; an island.I am again the subject of an embarrassment of riches. I cannot contain them all; my storehouse overflows and I will spend my life being grateful for the love I experience. I still want to make this a greatest hits list of my friends.My friend who I’ve loved since youth group and who sang in my wedding.My friend the thoughtful, well-read intellectual who nevertheless saw fit to make me godfather to his child. His wife who I’ve known for much less time but who still somehow seems to know me as if we were children together. She speaks my language. She knows me. We are deep friends, too, in our own right.My friend from whom I stole $250 and who has loved me as a father would do for more than twenty five years. His wife who loves me as one of her very own and has since those early days. Their children whose affection I treasure. The $250 thing is an interesting story to tell but our love is built on a hundred trips to Seattle to pick up bags of green coffee in a Peugeot wagon, a thousand small construction projects done together, a million uneventful events of life.True Friendship is my favorite because in it I find contained a multitude of the values-of-life. True friendship with my spouse, with my kids, with my family, with my friends. True friendship with my dogs and with the sheep of the field, with the natural world. Perhaps even true friendship with the God of my childhood?Each of these essays has been beautiful to write down, to let my fingers linger over the keys awhile and decide what I will say and what I won’t. And often I have changed my mind about a value once or twice or three times just in the course of writing it.I started this one with the idea that true friendship was my favorite and I expected to be convinced otherwise. But in the end, it remains my favorite, and perhaps is more firmly rooted as such. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

Ahh, responsibility. That’s in the eye of the beholder I suppose. I think people think I’m quite responsible. I could be wrong.You know those graphs, negative correlations? I bet the longer people have known me, the less they think I’m a super responsible guy.That sounds defeatist. Negative self talk. But maybe that’s just true for everybody. The better you’re known in the context of a community, the more the community knows your secrets. The more they know your downsides, the ways you are, in fact, irresponsible sometimes. Because we all are on some level. Irresponsible. We all neglect to make the best choices in some circumstances, and we’re often remembered and known more for our negative traits than our positive ones. Isn’t that sad and unfair?We move out of our parents’ house and live on a steady diet of off-brand lucky charms and cheap beer.We buy a bicycle, (two bicycles), and allow the rubber tires to deteriorate before the little rubber injection molding (“vent spews”) wear off.We run our dad’s pretty nice 1985 GMC Jimmy all the way out of oil and burn that engine RIGHT up.I can speak to all of these choices with the authority of experience.Still, I grew up with a high value for responsibility. I grew up believing responsibility to be a thing worth working hard for and attaining. Which I suppose would be a responsible way to approach responsibility.I have spoken at length about my creativity and my value for capability. Those things are parts and pieces of responsibility I think.I reflect on lambing season. For a time when I was growing up we had sheep. Sometimes many sheep. In the spring, lambing season would begin. In the winter, actually. The ground still saturated and difficult, sheep would begin bringing about new life in about February. And it was my job to bring them all into the barn, because it was still awfully cold and early in the year for them to be out in the field alone. I have been told this is no longer common practice?But our practice was this; my siblings and I would go out to the field and scan for sheep standing firm over a newborn lamb. While the rest of the flock would meander and scatter away from us, the new mother would stand vigilantly by her offspring. Our goal was to tenderly retrieve the lamb and hold it low so that the mother could keep contact with it. Too high, too fast and she’d be liable to get feisty. And a feisty ewe is no small threat to a 70 pound boy.Slowly and deliberately we’d draw the mother ewe into the barn baited by her own lamb until she was safe in a lambing pen; a small enclosure of about five feet square.We’d then use a pair of scissors to snip the umbilical cord and dip the remaining bit in a special splash-less cup of iodine. Finally we’d reunite mother and child and put a heat lamp on one side of the pen in order to give the lamb it’s best possible chance at thriving.Later our technique changed slightly. We’d take a three wheeler out to the field, grab the lamb and hang it off the back and book it into the barn as quick as we could get the mother to follow. I am a little ashamed of this, thinking back. I don’t know that anyone knew the better of it at the time. But looking back, I think there was an invitation to tenderness and care that the three-wheeler obfuscated. We still had a our moments in the barn, clipping a clean edge off the umbilical cord and treating it to prevent infection. There were moments of feeding and bedding and warming that were kindnesses I suppose. But the whole matter was treated as a chore rather than an honor and I regret that now. To have animals in our care should be an honor. It can be. It should be.Responsibility can probably be overshadowed or over-informed by obligation. A sense that some things just must be done, like it or not, by hook or by crook, come hell or high water. And that can be a dangerous thing. We stay in friendships that are toxic and untenable. We carry on working for a boss who is cruel or abusive. We endlessly stick by a partner who is no partner at all. Obligation speaks of our present age to me. It’s almost a virtue signal to be heavily obligated today and in this society. How much better would it be to take responsibility for ourselves in order to better care for others?I think now of responsibility alongside the word “stewardship”. And I think of the things I have in my life to steward. Chiefly my children. Have I stewarded them well? Perhaps. In part, at least.My oldest child is taking their first breaths of the free air of adulthood and that is a bitter pill to swallow for me. Not because they are in any particular sense irresponsible, but because they bear the same haste of youth that I did, and because it is a demarcation of time passing; I can no longer be responsible for them the way I have been in the past. The piper has come to call, and I am receiving my rewards and consequences. Gone are the days of my making responsible choices on their behalf and all that is left to do is to be responsible for myself. For the choices I made during their short period of childhood. To own my mistakes and revel in our shared victories over the last eighteen years or so.I think of the land. I think of the land I grew up on, and the land I live on now. I think of this land I love, this broad and good land where I am most at home. Responsibility and stewardship again raise their tall flags in my heart as I think and wonder how I might best be a steward of this land.I get angry thinking about the choices of men who care for extractive profit and gain over the land we are meant to love together. I cannot do this alone. I cannot care for this place all on my own, saving it and improving it for my children’s children’s children. And sometimes I feel very alone in these concerns. I know I am not; there are many who are concerned like I am about the future of our copse, our county, our valley, our whole world.But, it seems, not enough of us, as the hastening trudge toward a much more desolate, much emptier future goes on. Irresponsible, that’s what it is! To think of today alone. To think of self alone. Me and my family alone.Obligatory behavior can hardly be called responsible, and as I write this I am reflecting on the fact that while they’re often confused one for the other, they’re really polar opposites. Responsibility takes care of it. Obligation gets it out of the way.The responsible thing to do may be to root out obligatory narratives in our lives opting instead for, as I said, care. Care for ourselves, care for our loved ones. Care for the good soil beneath our feet.Did you know my brother has ten species of forage on his land? It is his land in a daily and a legal sense, but it is our land by tradition. It’s the land where I made my memories and retrieved lambs and wept over fallen trees. My brother is intentional and directive about his stewardship of the land and that’s an inspiration to me. We are never together for very long before he’s talking about soil health and I love that so much about him. Tomorrow is slightly better because of his choices and values.I want to look at all of my modern choices with an eye on those lambs. How good it is to go out on a brisk morning, boots and coat, and walk quietly in the dew or the rain, to avoid the deepest pools of water in the fields where I’ve made my home, to search quietly for the small, the innocent and the needy ones. To mindfully draw them into a warmer, drier place. It may not be altogether natural, but it is a kind of kindness. To think ahead. To frugally prepare.And that brings me to those modern choices. So much of my adult life has been obligatory and I’ll tell you the truth–I don’t know how much more of it I can take. I have been so guilty of dressing obligation up in the fancy clothes of responsibility. I have admitted that I did not enter my industry as most do–from a place of passion and commitment. But it feels too frightening to make a change sometimes. What would I do? What else could I ever do, I wonder.These essays themselves–they are not obligatory for me, perhaps the opposite. They’re bringing me life, it’s fun to explore these values that have become so important in my life.But that sentiment, that whole statement was all about me and my needs. I reflect on some of my confessions and admissions in recent essays. Are they honoring to the people around me? Is it responsible to speak so candidly into an internet so devoid of care?I hope so. I hope I am holding these stories low to the ground. I hope I am walking slowly. I hope I am bringing them into the barn, and not just booking it on the three-wheeler. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

Loyalty is important, right? The card says faithful to my friends, group.I am deeply faithful to my friends. Particularly in recent years, as mortality has become so very real to us, a lot of priorities and things I thought were important have fallen away. But not so with friendships. The opposite! I’m loyal and faithful and defensive and ready to do battle. Building on recent essays, it’s often a deep sense of loyalty that informs even my feelings of violence toward perceived violators.I have the capacity for peacefulness. But I can be vicious. My tongue is generally tied down pretty well, but as I reflect, there’s little that animates me more than a friend in need. And I think I’m leaning into that as I age. It’s always been this way, I come by my love for my friends honestly. But I think I’m learning to want it. And I’m learning to tame it.My violence and my judgement can be, (is not always), loyalty off the chain. Out of alignment with my values more broadly.Because remember, our lived experiences often just happen to us. We can no more control their happenings than the sun or the rain which falls on the just and the unjust alike.Our lived experiences affect and shape our values, which inform our vision and mission, which inform our goals, tasks and time management. Again we can see that pivot point between our experiences and values, and our behaviors and actions and thoughts. This time it’s the mission. It’s the “what we do to get there”. If I’m living my life in tasks and time management, I’m liable to be reactive and my sense of loyalty will be informed by that reactivity.If my sense of loyalty is unchained, unharnessed, unattended, I am like a mob boss. Exerting power and dominance for The Family. My sense of loyalty will bowl anyone over, I’ll bring down the whole theater to protect my own.But there’s a kinder way. By observation of my values, consistently, internally, reiterating their supreme importance in my life, I calm myself and I see my actions and behaviors in real time, or even ahead of time, allowing my values and beliefs to inform them.When my value for loyalty is brought into tow, when I am observational master of it, I can render it as love for my friends, my family, my people. It’s ultimately all about the people around us.When my value for loyalty is observed and honored, I am able to honor the people around me with my clearest self and be a benefit to them rather than a liability.I have two stories involving the same friend which I will share now. This friend has been a good friend for many years now. We are about the same age and we are very different kinds of guys. Where I am loud, he is quiet. Where I am reactionary and action-focused he is contemplative and thoughtful. These are the friends I attract in my life. These are traits that are weirdly common among those closest to me.The first story. I’ll skip many details to protect the innocent. And also the guilty.I was once a part of a group, (along with this friend of mine), and we were once planning a grand new venture. Lots of moving pieces. I was not a particularly welcome member of the group for reasons I won’t go into here and now. But as we’ve established, my friend was the opposite kind of guy; he was the right kind of guy for the group. He was welcome, I was not, but we both had a lot of skin in the game.The short end of the long story is that there ended up being a deeply inappropriate show of machismo and a gross power imbalance involving all the male members of the group. I’d gotten on the wrong side of the wrong “leader” and he was going to let me know about it. I had stepped over a leadership-line. I’d had the wrong idea and it couldn’t be allowed to pass unchallenged.And this young man friend of mine, (we were both so young then), was the only one–The ONLY one–to stand with me. He didn’t even “take my side” on the issue at hand. I was ugly-crying in front of most of the men I’d come to adore and admire, (plus a number of their pubescent sons who’d been invited for the dressing-down); my world was beginning to shatter. I was learning how unwelcome I was and my heart was breaking. The cracks begin to show.And my friend sat at the table next to me and held my hand. I got angry. I got defensive. I was young and I understand now that I was being inappropriately attacked by older men who were meant to have loved me and looked out for me. And they weren’t–they didn’t. And there wasn’t a damned thing my friend could do about it except hold my hand. I was positively writhing in my seat. I know I didn’t respond well. I often didn’t in those days.That’s it. That’s the story. A friend loyally held my hand in a time of pain and humiliation. He showed loyalty to me by being there for me, even when it may have cost him something socially. It was love and loyalty as a shelter.Next story. Same friend. A year or two later. You may recall my “kitchen floor moment”. It was in that era of my life. Early coffee career. We had a couple of kids by then, little tiny things. Couldn’t do anything for themselves. Couldn’t feed themselves. Couldn’t wipe their own butts or play by themselves. Really a profoundly needy time in their lives.I planned a getaway for my wife and me. I found this cute cabin up on the McKenzie River. I thought it was perfect! We were right on the river, Friday night, Saturday and Sunday! We didn’t have to be back until Sunday evening. It was, as I mentioned, a very stressful time in our lives and we needed the getaway. But my wife is a deeply responsible person and was very conscious of the burden watching kids for a whole weekend could be.This friend of mine had gotten married, (I stood in their wedding), and they’d offered to watch our kids while we were away. But there was a miscommunication and they were under the impression that we’d be home more like noon on Sunday. It’s a long story but the end of it is that there was a conflict, as sometimes happen, even between friends. Our beautiful wives had brief words and my wife was devastated. She hadn’t intended to take advantage, and my friend’s wife, (also now my friend, for the record), had felt taken advantage of. And as young men do, my friend came to his wife’s defense and aide, and went on the warpath. Just a little bit.My unchained sense of loyalty kicked in. Like a mob boss with an axe to grind, I held my wife for a moment or two and then joined him in battle, blades drawn, ready to vanquish.I will not tell you the things I said to my friend who had held my hand under the table. In truth I probably can’t remember most of them. But I remember the feelings I had. I am ashamed.It is possible, probable, that my friends, newlyweds, childless, used to their time being their own, could have benefited from a broader, gentler conversation about how their words had affected my wife.But we didn’t make space for that. We attacked. Like a dogs with a bone we attacked and we very nearly killed our friendship entirely. We certainly wounded it deeply.We are friends today–good friends who love each other with a deep love that would hold hands under the table again. But I think we did not speak for a year. Or two. And it was another year, or two, before we started becoming friendly, and a few years more before it felt like there was some water under the bridge.That’s the second story. My untamed sense of loyalty for my wife very nearly killed a wonderful friendship that we enjoy today. This was loyalty as a weapon. My untamed desire to protect my wife nearly cost me a friendship and did nothing to actually protect the ones I love.The card says: Faithful to my friends. I am learning that sometimes, being faithful means holding their hand when they are hurting. And sometimes, being faithful means holding my own tongue when I am hurting. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

I value forgiveness. I need forgiveness. I feel a weight in my chest when I do not forgive. I feel a weight now. I have wrongs to forgive. I know I do.Recently I started dreaming again after a long time of not. One of the first dreams I had, I think, was ultimately about forgiveness. I’ll skip some details, but essentially I was in a dilapidated old theater. Ceiling tiles were water stained, and it was musty and grimy. But the place was packed. It contained many of the people I’ve ever known. Almost all of my life was represented there. And a guy with a microphone was sort of communicating from the front—he was in charge and had been for a long time.At some point in the dream I got hold of the microphone and started ripping into some specific people that I felt had done corporate wrong. Big, chunky, life altering wrongs that affected the lives of the people in the room and beyond. I was angry, and it was a righteous anger. It was a justified anger, or so I felt. I named names, I told stories, I brought receipts.The more I talked the more the chosen few leaders in the room got nervous and fidgety. I pulled no punches. I spared no detail. I was looking for justice and as I looked around the audience and saw faces of people who had been hurt along the way, I was going to get it.People who weren’t as strong as me, or who weren’t as loud as me or who didn’t know all the stories like I did. People who hadn’t been paying close attention. People who were cut out of community because of other people’s choices. People who’d just drifted off one day. They should all be avenged.And as I kept talking, I kept attacking, the ceiling tiles began to fall in on me, and the musty curtains started to fall down in great heaps on the floor, I could hear the “whoomp” as they landed, and I could see the musty dust cloud over my people.And some of the people escaped the building as it collapsed but many people stayed behind and began to choose sides. And I perceived I was on the side of the maligned, the victim, the small, the weaker. But some were on the side of the strong, the powerful, the appointed.And my rage grew stronger and stronger until the walls themselves were falling in and crashing down on people. And the wind outside blew so that the roof was carried away in great big chunks. I could see the clouds swirling like a hurricane and finally it was so inhospitable that everyone dispersed and fled and found shelter.And I was carried away to a place of peace, gathered up by some precious friends who live far away, out of the bedlam and the fracas of my past, but who know me deeply and love me unendingly in spite of that fracas.And I looked around and that man with the microphone was there with me. But I was unmoved by him, and I was focused on my friends who brought me lovingly out of my rage and into a place of kindness. And together we built a new, good thing that built up and sustained the people around us instead of extracting and taking. And the man with the microphone went his own way. And I wasn’t angry anymore.What do you make of that dream? I have been thinking about it for a few days now. And I think it might be about forgiveness.The truth is, I think I know who the man with the microphone is, and I can imagine I know who the people in the audience are, and I believe I know what the dilapidated theater represents. They’re all aspects of my past that I have strong feelings about and I’ve been wrestling and working hard on these feelings for years now.If you are strong, I will hold you to a high standard and I’m not sure if that’s fair or not. If you attack the weak or even if you simply do not extend yourself out to protect them, my anger will rise within me and I’ll become an adversary to you. I’m not sure if that’s an altogether positive personality trait—was I created to be the arbiter? Am I the judge?This sounds good, perhaps, to some on the first pass. But it all hinges and relies on my own personal judgment, and I can be judgmental. If I’m not careful in my judgment I get wise in my own eyes, as I’ve previously condemned in others.In my last essay I was in need of a pardon. I stole money. I told lies. And in my dream I’m the pardoner. The bringer of a great reckoning for the weak and the defender of the mistreated.That’s the tension maybe; I can’t be both in the same moment. I have to choose, and it has to be intentional. Because I may default to one if I don’t systematically encourage the other in my life.The card says willing to pardon others. That word, pardon. It’s kind of loaded. What’s it mean to pardon someone else? I suppose, in order for there to be a pardoning, there must have been a wounding or a wrong-done in the first place. In my dream, there was a sort of a pardon for the man with the microphone at the end of the dream. I would like to be a person who is able to pardon others. I would like to think that I may be pardoned.But justice! The righting of wrongs! It’s all so important! The world is filled with genuine wrongs, how can we not be a part of righting them? It’s easy to live in a retributive posture, ready to butter the wrongdoers’ scalps and swallow them whole. Somehow we must do both. It’s one thing to forgive the accident prone, the nonsensical. It’s another to forgive the wrong-doer. But if we cannot, I think we will be eaten alive from the inside out. Unforgiveness, even of the unforgivable, will rot in our bones.Perhaps forgiveness is about a different posture; one that says “It’s not okay, but you can be pardoned”. One that says “you have no power over me, go in peace”.* Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

Honesty. It’s such a lonely word. Everyone is so untrue. So says Billy Joel. So say I. Do you suppose that’s right? Everyone is so untrue?I have been untrue. I have betrayed those I love the most. I have told small fibs and I have told damned dirty lies. Most of all I have massaged the truth for various reasons. I have told people what I thought they wanted to hear, and I have withheld information from people because it seemed expedient to me at the time.We have already established that we live but once that we know for sure. Anyone speaking with certainty is manufacturing and selling certainty. So why would we spend our precious time on dishonesty? On telling someone the Earth is flat or that the sun don’t shine? Why do we spend our time creating intricate webs of deceit of which we must try to keep track and for which we will eventually, almost always, at least in the best case, be held to account?It’s difficult to talk about honesty in personal terms for a couple of reasons. First, it’s humiliating to tell the world, (or at least several readers) about some of my more debased activities. I have admitted to being foolish, being a thief, being violent. Must I now admit to being a liar as well?I suppose I must. And I will. But I also do not want to implicate others in doing so, and that’s the thing about dishonesty, it touches others. It is told in the context of a great arc of humanity and it’s always one thing leading to another. Lies beget lies. Once upon a time, years ago, I smoked cigarettes. I knew it was bad for me, I knew they caused cancer, and I knew that it was not something my wife would approve of or a behavior she would appreciate. So I tried to hide it. Which I see now is foolishness on the highest order. Especially if you knew my wife. She’s a super taster, she tastes things in coffee and other foods that I can’t. And part of that is her olfactory system. And another aspect of that is that if I fart on a Tuesday she’ll still be suffering the following Saturday.I was 0% able to hide my shameful secret from her and yet I tried. I guess I didn’t want her to be disappointed in me. I’ve heard that excuse before, I’ve used that excuse before.The adult thing to have done would have been to square up and take responsibility for my actions. “Yes, I smoke cigarettes. Wise or not, it’s the course of action that I’m choosing.”And then, also as an adult, I would have the opportunity to square up with my consequences. She may in fact be disappointed in me. She may in fact find my decision unsatisfactory. But how much sweeter, how much healthier would it have been for us to have been on the same page all the while.As it was I lied to her by omission often, and then sometimes I lied to her outright. She is my closest friend. I remain ashamed. There is a certain life force that comes from putting a thing in your hand and looking hard at it and deciding if it’s something worth prioritizing. Smoking cigarettes. Starting a family. Learning a language or practicing an instrument. What you do is, you hold out your hand and you imagine the thing. A guitar pick. A cigarette. A lifetime of child rearing.You look at it and say to yourself, “I’m not going to prioritize this thing”, and you pick it up and set it aside. Literally or metaphorically. And then you sit there with your empty hand and you decide if it belongs in a prioritized place in your life. Or not.I’ve mentioned my friend and mentor. The guy I stole $250 from. In addition to my theft, I lied to him! He asked if I had taken $250 from his account. Point blank. And I only confessed when he said that he was going to go down to the bank and review the camera footage. I think he was prepared to believe me. I don’t think he was calling my bluff. But I had not considered that ATMs have cameras built in. It was not some magnanimous strength of character that forced me to come clean. It was the threat of an even deeper shame.We remain very close to this day, and we periodically laugh about that incident.What allows us to laugh is not that the incident was inconsequential or otherwise unimportant. It’s the growth that we’ve both experienced in the intervening years. I believe he would share his PIN number with me today.And, here’s the other thing I believe, we are all implicated. We’re all guilty. We’re both dirty baby, that’s just the way it goes.Are you not guilty? I’m not asking if you’re a habitual, filthy, narcissistic psychopathic liar, bent on consistent deception for your own exclusive gain. I’m asking if you always tell the truth. And the answer is almost certainly no.The truth is very often inconvenient, and sometimes it even hurts people. Sometimes the truth is painful to open our eyes and look directly at. Sometimes we’re unable to square up and look at it ourselves and so we tell a lie to avoid the discomfort. And sometimes we can see down the road a piece. We can see how the truth will hurt the one(s) we love and so we fabricate an alternate reality that we think they may be more comfortable with. This is foolishness. But it’s what we do. Every lie I’ve ever told has eaten a piece of my soul. It’s eaten away at my fabric, and the fabric of our souls is like bone density; very difficult to re-grow. And the closer the lie is to our own core, our own most-cherished loved ones, the uglier it is to retell.I think also of the lies we tell ourselves. What a waste of time! What a powerful waste of our one precious life. The fibs, the half-truths, the dishonest reframing of our past.It comes down, often, to the difficulty we have in facing our own bad choices, our own bad intentions, our own internal lazinesses. And so we reframe these things and blame others.Memory is a funny thing, and not one I can pretend to understand. But I’ve read a few things, I’ve listened to a few podcasts and I’ve experienced enough to know that our memories aren’t always accurate. They don’t always tell an honest story of our past.We tell ourselves a story about an incident with another person, (it’s almost always involving another person), and we tell it again, and again, we retell it to ourselves and maybe we repeat the poorly or dishonestly remembered memory to others, and pretty soon it’s our truth. We cannot even distinguish the lie anymore. It simply is as a part of our history.How sad that we’re able to lie to ourselves and rob ourselves of the good lessons life is attempting to teach us. Every bad choice is an object lesson waiting to happen. I think of the stories I’ve told about my business, about my occupation and how I found myself here. I keep the high points honest–it’s too complicated to lie about the high points. But all of the in-the-middle bits have sometimes been up for interpretation. The way I share the story, the bits of the story I choose to tell and omit. And how can I be wholly honest with the Chamber of Commerce Greeters on a Friday morning anyway, I ask you? I can’t tell them all the details. So which ones do I prioritize? My memory gets foggy after twenty-ish years in this business and I spin a yarn.There are also lies of omission. The things we don’t say. We don’t tell. And I guess it’s a sort of a gradient for each person. How honest are you? How honest do you want to be?As I get older I desire greater honesty. The honest truth is that I come from a long line of people who struggle with honesty. I won’t name names–that would be unkind and inappropriate for this venue. But I’m the one now–I’m the middle aged man, soaring high through the prime of his life. I’m the one with kids in my home learning how to be in the world. I’m the one who at least some people are affected by.When I was young I could lie to my parents and maybe they’d know my deceit and maybe they wouldn’t. Sometimes it had a negative effect on them, but often it was a buzzing gnat in their lives; an annoyance more than an attack.When I’m very old, what will the point of lying be, anyway? Nobody will be there listening and clinging to my words in the way they do now. I won’t have children in my space, I won’t have employees or an employer. And everyone will assume, (potentially correctly), that I am simply addled.So, this is my time for modeling good behaviors. And for me, Honesty isn’t about never lying. I am human. I will slip and fall and bust open my own lip. Honesty means modeling the walk-back.Can I do it gracefully? Can I return to the scene of the crime? When I snap at my wife, or massage the truth, or tell an outright falsehood... do I have what it takes to stop the car, turn around, and say, “I was wrong. That was a lie. Here is the truth.”I’ve learned that dishonesty is nestled down deep in the hearts of humans. It is in us all. The question is not whether we have it. The question is whether we have the courage to correct it. To look our loved ones in the eye, admit the fault, and pursue goodness. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

When I was young there was this book that came out, The Five Love Languages. It was a decidedly Christian book, but the concept made its way into broader culture. Perhaps you’ve heard of the book or the idea. It doesn’t matter.The five love languages concept was introduced to me early, and it’s stuck in my brains. They’re Physical Touch, Words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, Receiving Gifts and Quality Time.Acts of service rates very high for me, and it’s number one for my number one. My wife’s primary love language is me cleaning the kitchen. She also loves cleaning the kitchen herself. Tidying up is a thing for us. It’s a kindness I know I can show her to get the place tidied up before bed. “Nothing nicer than waking up to a clean kitchen”, says she.That’s not exactly helpfulness though, is it?I have a pet peeve–it’s when dads say they’ll “babysit” their own kids. I want to smack them. I want to shake them by the shoulders and tell them to get a hold of themselves. Grow up. You don’t babysit your own children, you’re just with them. I don’t even like babysitting my friends kids. I like to just be with them.That’s also not exactly helpfulness.I am a worker. I get things done in my life. I feed the chickens, and I collect eggs. I figure out why my tractor won’t start. I am slowly preparing a 1987 Cushman Truckster for its next life. I use tools and I don’t cut my fingers off.These things are also not quite helpfulness.It’s one of my top five values. So why am I having such a hard time writing about it? Why can’t I think of any examples of me being helpful in my life?Maybe I value it because I feel like I need it in my life. My wife is a great help to me. Too much, in truth, sometimes. She overextends herself in order to help me stay on top of life. I mentioned in a recent post that my brains are sometimes like a cat holding firecrackers. Just bedlam. And that woman holds me down.You know in truth, I think that’s probably it. Especially right now. In this season. Because there’s a lot going on in my life right now. And I sort of feel like I’m drowning if I’m honest. I need help. I need all the help I can get.I wish I could be a greater help to the people around me but right now it feels like I need to take. I need to withdraw. I need to call in favors. And that’s uncomfortable for me. I want to be the one doing favors. I want to change your oil for you. I want to fix your computer. I want to write these essays and feel like they’re moving someone’s needle a little bit. Helping. I want to do the values exercise with everyone I meet. And I want it to be helpful. But really, the writing of them is primarily a help to me. A cry for help.I am familiar with helping. I think of small things I do or have done to benefit the people around me. I make jam. I wake up at 6am and make spritz cookies with someone I love. I run errands and pick up supplies and I use AI to research how to fix my wife’s turn signal switch.I have done this card sorting exercise with a lot of people now. And I think it’s been genuinely helpful in some people’s lives. It’s precipitated new patterns of thought for them and new conversational avenues for us together. Usually when I do the exercise with someone I snap a photo of them with their selections and text it to them. And then I stare at the beautiful photo of my beautiful friend and their beautiful choices and I almost always am filled with love for them and kind words. I hope they’re kind. They’re meant to be kind. They’re usually just observations. But sometimes that can be a kindness I think. To just sit with someone and report what you see. Repeat what you hear. Tell of what you observe.And right now, just now, in this time of life I’m feeling deeply unhelpful. I’m feeling slow and exhausted and empty. All my wells have run dry. I feel like I have no best to bring to the table, and that makes me feel inadequate.There may be an unhealthy aspect of helpfulness for me, too. If I’m not careful I’m helping in order to secure the love and approval of my community. That’s certainly been the case in the past. I know that. I have spent a lot of time feeling like I’m not a valued member of my community and it’s a feeling that rots in the pit of my stomach. It’s awful and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.And I guess, to me, maybe that’s what helpfulness is? It’s about inclusion on some level? When we help one another along we show one another that we’re loved. Loved enough to sacrifice for.When I think of sacrificial help, I think of Buduburam Camp. Buduburam is a displaced people’s camp about 25 miles from Accra, the capital city of Ghana, a country in west Africa. Initially established in the early 1990’s as a response to the influx of refugees fleeing Liberia’s ghastly civil war.I was there once. I will not share all of the details of how I arrived there now, but I was there unexpectedly, and for a short time I felt very alone indeed. I was far from home, in an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar people and unfamiliar food and a completely different system of accessing toilets than I’d ever experienced before.I met a man who made room on his bench for me. Look, it was a refugee camp. I could describe it in great detail here but that risks making a show of someone else’s circumstances, and that feels gross. But it was unfamiliar. And it was hotter than the hinges of Hades. I asked how hot it was at one point and all they would tell me is “very”.This man with room on his bench also had room at his table, he fed me and showed me the way around. But he had no room in his home. He lived in humble quarters with his family, and so the only place for me to sleep was nearby with an eighteen year old boy, (his wife’s brother), who I will never forget. He had seen things with his own eyes I will not describe here. War is hell. War is hell. War is HELL.He slept in a weird little concrete shack exactly the size of a twin mattress. His belongings fit neatly on a shelf hung on one wall, and mine fit neatly in a backpack hung on a hook. During the day he walked alongside me and at night we slept together on the twin mattress, me gasping for oxygen in the humid atmosphere, him hugging me.At first it was weird—annoying even. Give me some space, man! Give me some air!I came to realize after a while that he was comforting me. Far from taking, he was giving everything. He gave up half his small bed. And he hugged me because I was far from home and he knew I was afraid. He hugged me at night because at night I cried. I may never have encountered a heart of helpfulness like his before or maybe since. Who was I that he should comfort me?He had nothing. His parents, killed in front of him. His journey to safety, arduous and treacherous and long. His eventual safety, a refugee camp where there was no money or space or opportunity. In the long run he was blinded by an accident and later on he was killed because someone thought his life was cheap. This is the story of the boy who loved me without a good reason.I am wondering if that experience has affected me more than I realized at the time. Because when I strip away the tractors and the kitchen tidying and the competence... that is what remains. Working for the welfare of others. Making room on the mattress. Holding someone while they cry.That is Helpfulness. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

When I was a child I was diagnosed with ADHD. That will come as a great shock to anyone who’s met me. (I kid.)Chaos has been inside my brain for as long as I can remember. The stiller I try to be the more I notice the cacophony. I don’t know what it’s like to be inside anyone else’s brain and I never will. But I am an unceasing stream of thoughts and ideas and impressions. All the time, you guys. It never stops. They’re not all good thoughts or bad thoughts or any single kind of thing. They’re mixed, often mixed together at the same time. Bringing myself into order is a challenge for me.I watched a Netflix special a few years ago with a couple of my favorite comedians, Martin Short and Steve Martin. They’re gems. I imagine it’s this way with my brother and me; they’re great alone and much more than twice as good together.At one point in the special Steve Martin sits down with his banjo and plays a tune from The Long Awaited Album entitled “So Familiar”.I was already watching a pair of great collaborative comedians working together and ultimately loving each other. So I was prepared for the feels to hit me. And when he played that tune they hit me like a ton of bricks.I think listening to bluegrass music may be the closest I come to calming down. I will listen to that song in particular on repeat. It’s now very familiar.I am not a bluegrass aficionado. It’s not even that it’s my favorite music, though I love it so. Don’t engage me in a tête a tête on bluegrass deep cuts, artists or albums. I will not know what you’re talking about. It’s more that the music makes me slow down and listen to my own heartbeat for a moment.I have thought a lot about this, and I think it’s the banjo in particular that calms me. I can’t explain it except to observe that it is, from my perspective, a chaotic instrument. Part of what makes it work is that it’s so dissimilar from anything else. Half string and half percussive instrument, the banjo is often played with specialized picks that fit around the end of your fingers like little “claws”. These picks are made of brass or other metal, and help give the notes their distinctive twang. The banjo is not pretty. Not in comparison with a violin or a clarinet or even a guitar.Steve Martin makes the joke, “The main difference between the banjo and a guitar, is that the banjo has only FIVE strings, and the guitar can get you laid”.I own a banjo now, it sits there mostly, near my bed, bidding me pick it up and live. I have complied a little. I can forward roll. A little. My thoughts, my mind are a forward roll–a series of notes played in rapid succession. For me, harmony is attempting to play those notes in a concordant key. Can I make those notes sound nice together? I think the key to the key is allowing my values to inform me. To inform everything from the top down, instead of letting the chaos of unkempt tasks and time management rule the day from the bottom up.I always seem to have a chaotic excuse for not picking up my instrument and digging deeper into what makes me calm. My apathy is idiotic I realize, as I type this and think it through.My best buddy, a gifted musician, swears we’ll play together one day. I hope with my whole heart that he’s right. To make music would, I think, do a lot to calm my soul. Momma tried! We had not one but TWO pianos in our home growing up. She tried to get me to take lessons, to pick up a guitar, to learn to play the drums, but I wouldn’t listen. I should have listened. I thought it was performative. I thought it would only be for others. But I was wrong. It would be a lifeline to me now.I have had a hard time deciding what to write about Inner harmony. To write with any wisp of authority in my fingertips would be disingenuous.The word that sticks out to me on this card is harmony. That’s the bit that evades my capture. I have a deep, wide, rich inner life. It’s the harmony that is unfamiliar.A harmony is a series of notes that are played all together to produce a chord. And a chord is a musical term for two or more notes played together to produce a pleasant sound.Ironically the banjo is often not harmonious at all! Usually it’s singular notes played in succession. In a roll. A lot to unpack here. My brain is a roll. Forward, backward, it’s a million little plucks of strings and it sounds pretty bad some of the time.I am reaching for inner harmony, for my dissonant notes to come together into a life-affirming, life-giving chord. But maybe I need to embrace the roll and make the music I can make with the tools I have.Sometimes, (not always), my life is a beautiful music. It draws people in and soothes them.And sometimes I do get glimpses of harmony. Sun drenched summer days, whistling tunes in peach orchards. Sitting around a fire that’s built well with friends who know how to love well.Moments when I remember that it could all fall apart; everything I’ve become and built could be taken away and it would not affect the love my children, my wife, my closest friends have for me. These moments are like honey in my mouth.My old friend and mentor, (the guy I stole $250 from), has identified that in times of my life when I’m sweet, there’s hardly anyone sweeter.But my greatest asset is my greatest ass-ache. There are two sides to every coin, and so when I’m not sweet, when the chaos leaves my mind and enters my active behaviors and actions and words, I can be salty indeed. Too salty. So salty that nothing can grow in the soil where I’ve been. When violence rules my thought patterns. When I do not allow my values to inform my time management.I long for inner harmony. Perhaps we can act our way into a new way of thinking. Perhaps consistent, disciplined, love and care for the other would yield the kind of kindness, the kind of sweetness I crave in my life.We live once, friends! We don’t know what was before this or what will come after. I can only know for sure that I have today to share with you. I want my insides to be harmonious, I want my outsides to be harmonious. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

File SettingsDoneTitleDescriptionThumbnailWill be cropped to a 3:2 aspect ratioUploadScheduled for Mar 5 at 2:16 pmSend email to everyone ∙ EditIt’s difficult for me to talk about a world at peace. Partly, maybe, because I don’t know if it’s a real thing to be valued. Can it even be a thing? Can we even wish for this in good faith?I know for sure it can be a chosen “top five” value, because it’s one of mine.That doesn’t mean I believe in it. Or that I understand it. Or that I can write about it with any measure of eloquence.The first year I was married the dishwasher we had was a piece of crap. It was second hand and built in about 1996. It was a dishwasher, but it wasn’t a good one.One of the things I found frustrating about the dishwasher was that the drawer wheels were sticky and always caught. You’d try to pull it out and unless it was aligned juuuust right it’d just stay locked in there.Also we had a small house and it felt like I was always kicking the open door on accident and banging up my ankles.Plus, (and this cannot be overstated), I was a newlywed and still processing childhood rage really inefficiently. My life was changing dramatically and while the changes were overwhelmingly for the better, they were still difficult transitional times for both my wife and for me. We were so young, and so unprepared. Maybe that’s always the story.One night, I do not remember why, perhaps my wife or my best buddy who was living with us at the time could remember, I was hopping mad about something. I was stomping around the house and making my displeasure widely known, as I am wont to do.When it was time for me to interact with the dishwasher and the drawer inevitably locked up on me for the 900th time, I lost my cool. I grabbed both drawers and ripped them out of the machine with a powerful force. I stomped through the house to the front door and threw them as hard as I could out into the driveway.The effect this must’ve had on my partner, I cannot even imagine. You’d have to know her, know her parents and her upbringing to realize how jarring and awful this behavior must have been for her to witness. She knew I was strong, and powerful. I don’t know if she knew I could be awful.I am no stranger to rage. I am no stranger to violence.Once I slammed a door so hard it split the doorframe. The door never closed correctly after that. Our actions have consequences.One time in 2001, (I was twenty full years old), in the days before I was married, my nerdy brother and I went to a midnight showing of Lord of The Rings. We took a couple of his little buddies with us. Those movies were long! So by the time we were driving north on the freeway toward our home we were all exhausted and it had to have been 3:00 in the morning.Sitting in the passenger seat of my mom’s Toyota Corolla I adjusted the heat. Sitting in the driver’s seat, he adjusted it back. I adjusted. He adjusted again and so I reared back and punched him in the shoulder as hard as I could. While he was driving. At 3am and at freeway speeds. With someone else’s sons in the back seat.He swung back, swerving the car into the fast lane, and we took turns exchanging blows in the moving vehicle.He stopped the car and we got out and we wordlessly drew blood from one another on the side of the freeway while our friends wept in fear in the back seat of the car. Eventually tiring out, we returned to the freeway and finished our journey home.A mildly amusing anecdote to tell today, particularly with the backdrop of the extreme warmth and affection I share with my brother now.But the nuts & bolts of that story are of needless, unwarranted violence. My brother drove the car. I drove the violence. It was not in his nature.I am no stranger to violence.The card says A world at peace, and then at the bottom it summarizes the concept, Free of war and conflict.And this world is not free. It’s not free of war or conflict. In my first writings about a world at peace I meandered softly from World War II through to Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine. These are conflicts I do not understand. I have strong feelings about them, but I do not pretend to know all of the factors that precipitated the conflicts, nor do I know how we might find our collective way out of them. It’s tempting to go on a raging rant, here, now, about war. It’s honestly the word I connect with first on the card. War is hell. War is hell from the outside. How much more must it be from within?My grandfathers both fought in the Korean War. I thanked one for his service before he died. I remember how confused he sounded on the phone. I imagine now, knowing a little more about him, that he was deeply conflicted about his involvement.Instead I will focus on peace & conflict. Because as a coffee roaster, a dad, a husband, a guy who likes this values exercise I’m doing, I think I can have an effect on these things. I can work toward peace in my life, and I can work against conflict in my life, and anyway, the end of all of my writings on this subject have been “It begins inside of us”, which I think is how this one will end as well.I am natively a man of violent tendencies, as described above. There are many other things I’ve done and said over the years that could add to these proofs. Most people who know me well or especially who’ve known me since I was young can remember a time when my violence has caught them off guard.To be honest, I’m aging out of some of those tendencies. I can feel it within myself. It’s partly because of choices I’m making, choices toward peace. Choices that supersede and circumvent my baser violence. And it’s partly the wake of broken relationships I see behind me. And it’s partly just getting older. Maybe a little wiser.Thankfully my violence toward the dishwasher and my brother on the freeway are among my only stories of physical violence. But my words have wounded many people over the years. And my thoughts have, at times, been very dark indeed.I am the father of a child who’s not mine. It’s a long story and not one I’ll tell here. Suffice it to say I have a deep well of love for a child not born to me.In my love for them, in my darkest moments, I harbor thoughts of violence toward their biological dad based on his behaviors and choices. I feel violence toward their grandfather. I would betray my value for a world at peace, and it’s only discipline and age and breathing techniques and the good friendship I enjoy with my wife that brings me to a place of calm and rationality. Hurt people hurt people, even children. Even their own children.Conflict. It’s like violence-lite. Or maybe it’s the precursor to violence. To a lack of peaceable relations between people.Today, I am an immigrant to peacemaking. And as my dad used to say, there’s no patriot like an immigrant. People who choose a thing are almost always more committed than those who come to it naturally.May it be so for me. May it be so for us all.So, as promised, this essay ends the way my other attempts have ended. A world at peace starts within us I think. It starts with us choosing not to rip the dishwasher apart because you’re angry at life’s little circumstances. It starts with choosing love and deference for all as a matter of course and not as a last resort.Maybe I’m a peacenik. Maybe I’d be a conscientious objector. I do admire people who stand on a conviction bent on peace very much. I could name names. Floyd Schrock. Wendell Berry.It starts within us. Observing our own violence first, and eradicating it from our thoughts and motivations. Because we’re all something. We’re all moms and dads. We’re all coffee roasters or truckers or teachers or Presidents of the United States. And we have to start there, right? We have to use our tools and our jobs and our relationships to promote peace and to thoughtfully reject violence in order for the world to be filled with it. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

Equal opportunity for all. How about that?Women? Transfolks? Racial minorities?God, I don’t even know what to write about equality. My mind only goes to my sweet partner, my dear wife.Yesterday we were cleaning the house, the whole family, and we came across our wedding video. We were married in 2006, and we got a poorly shot wedding video burned onto a DVD. We hadn’t paid for a videographer, (just a pair of weird photographers demanding predictable shots of my groomsmen and me looking into the lens like badasses). Someone from the church my then-fiance was attending used his camera and made it happen for us.It’s a hilarious time capsule for me. My mom’s haircut, the really ugly suit my fiance’s mom picked out for me. My wife spent hours on her hair that day, and we spent at least forty five minutes just pulling bobby pins out of her scalp that evening.The memory of being so young, and taking on something that we didn’t understand. I see myself back then, and no exaggeration, I’d RUN into that decision again. But we understand that commitment more every day, and it’s been a lot of days since then.Later in the video the guy who married us spoke in loving terms about our responsibilities to one another and to the world.He said our love was like the spring of fresh water, nestled in the hills above the farm where he’d grown up. Once a year the family would hike up to the spring and do various maintenance chores in order to assure the family & it’s livestock a supply of clean water for another season.And then he said that we were to love and care for one another. Everything seemed very equal. In reality, the marriage arrangement we were married into was anything but.I was told I was the “head of the household”, and my wife that she was a “Help-meet”.We were taught about Adam and Eve, how God made all of creation and it was good, but then decided that it was not good that man should be alone. So he put Adam to sleep and took a rib out of his side and formed a woman for him. She existed to complete him. God made Adam whole-cloth, forming him from the dust of the new Earth, and he made Eve from Adam.Man, that screwed with us for years. Probably it still does on some levels. How can there be equality in a setting like that?Now, you may be hearing some defiant rage from me. You may be hearing that I hate my roots or the way(s) I was taught. And you’re not 100% incorrect. Both of us felt that pull, especially in our early years together. And the problem is that unlike some of our peers, our mentors, our elders, we were never very good at that arrangement. I could give you many examples of ways we don’t really fit that mold, and haven’t really ever been able to find value in it. But man, we tried. We tried.When I think of equality I think of the ways in which her life had been largely decided for her, and the ways in which mine had been laid out for me. I think of the ways we told ourselves that we were equal but not the same.Men are larger! Stronger! More violent. Women are maternal, softer, kinder. And so it often goes. Is that nature or nurture, do you suppose? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?We live differently now. But those old paradigms still rear up and shine a light on our truest selves.Most often, for me, this comes in the form of needing constant adoration and attention from my partner. If she’s not happy with me, if she’s not making her delight with me obvious, then I must be doing something wrong. I feel inadequate. I’m not able to summon a sense of being enough from within myself.I have observed the inequality in my own marriage, in my own community, in how we treat and think of those of the weaker sex. At least we can read the scripts we were handed and begin to reject and rewrite them.I think of my close friend. He’s black. You can tell right away that we’re different colors, but our friendship is not based on or really affected by our difference in skin tone.But our lived experiences certainly are. He’s not from this country originally, and we’ve talked about some of the ways interracial relations came as a shock to his system when he first arrived here. And in the years since.We see it together now. Or at least I’m trying to see it with him. We see some of the ways we’re treated or approached differently. And it’s not all massive, ugly racial slurs, (though he’s endured them). Our relationship has exposed quiet, microaggressions in my own life! Not necessarily toward him, but my deep love for him has opened a door to a greater level of empathy and I see that I have room left to grow.Last week we went for lunch together at a local divey little hole in the wall that delivers on a promise of a regional-class burger. We’re not talking life changing here, but it was a very, very good burger—no question.Our waitress was so kind! So friendly. Introduced herself and made polite conversation. We reciprocated and gave our names, (both easy to pronounce). There are other black people in my community—he is not exactly an anomaly.But what I noticed was that nearly everything she said was directed at me. Also, she told him his name was “lovely” after mispronouncing it three times. Hell, I don’t even know what that all means. What am I saying about this waitress? I don’t bet she went home and said mean things about the black man who came into work today. Probably the opposite. But it was a subtle reminder that we were different, though in truth, we really, really aren’t.We have similar and dissimilar interests and skills, and we get along really well. We love one another quite deeply. He was there for me during a time when I felt particularly small, weak, incapable. He was strong and filled in the gaps. I only hope I can be that same energy for him. What else is friendship I guess? What more can we be for one another beyond filling in the weak spots?In my heart we are equal. In the world we are living in we are not. That breaks my heart, and it opens my eyes and I want to be very quick to turn that perspective inward. Because I know I’m the source of various inequalities. I’m doing my best to be mindful and aware. Dare I say woke?There are the observed inequalities in my life, and then there are the inequalities of which I am an active perpetrator.In this series we have discussed my occupation—coffee roaster. What we haven’t discussed is the very ugly side(s) of this industry I’m in. It’s rife with heirloom racism and colonial undertones. Where there’s coffee there’s poverty, and globally speaking, to a large extent, where there’s poverty, there’s coffee.Coffee is overwhelmingly consumed by people in the global north, and to a similarly overwhelming degree, produced by people in the global south. Brown folks produce it and white folks drink it. Largely.And coffee production is no joke! It’s difficult, hot, laborious work performed by people who are paid far too little. And I have receipts to back that up! In 1980 the global “C-market” price for coffee, (the price paid on the New York Commodities exchange), came in at $3.14/pound. Which equates to a little over $10 in today’s dollars.Today the C-market price is $3.41. Which equates to $3.41 in today’s dollars.So the purchasing power produced for a pound of coffee has essentially dropped by two thirds in forty years. Meanwhile, I’ve been in this industry for a little more than 20 years, and there are places in the world that are no longer habitable for coffee production, in the span of my career thanks to the effects of global climate change.Climate change is real, it’s happening, and I don’t need to say that out loud to many of you. But there’s a uncomfortably high number of decision makers for whom that inconvenient truth is unpalatable and not worth addressing head on. So in order to protect the incomes of people like me, in countries overwhelmingly responsible for the climate disaster we’re facing, people in producing communities around the world are paid substantially less in terms of buying power than they were a few decades ago.It is patently racist. It is ugly.Can there be equality? I know it has to start with us. It has to start within us. What can I do? I have thought of abandoning this industry a hundred times. And perhaps I still will. I have chosen, for now, to expand into products and services that build rather than take, and I’ve chosen to pour new energies into similar pursuits that engender fullness of life and equality for all. But I don’t really know if I’m doing it right.I want solutions! I want answers! I want a Star Trek future where we have learned what we need to learn in order to eliminate the culture of taking and extraction that requires ever more. More growth, more profit, more efficiency requiring less human interaction.Pie in the sky. Farting in the wind. That’s what I’m doing. I’m farting in the wind. But I know we can be a part of small things. We can make small choices that contribute to global justice and equality. We can choose how we interact with our families, our friends. We can choose to love everyone we come in contact with, as well and as fully as we can. We can choose to be friends with people who don’t look or seem or act like us not because we’re special little helpers and deserve a gold star, but because they bring perspectives that make us more fully human. And very simply, we can demand equality and justice in our own lives.* Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

There’s a whole book of wisdom in the Bible. It’s called the book of Proverbs. There are, conveniently, 31 chapters in the book of Proverbs, reading one chapter a day makes for a tidy month of wisdom. And that’s what I did, a lot of times.Solomon, son of King David, was approached by God in a dream and offered anything. God said “Hey, tell me what you want me to give you, and I’ll see what I can do”.And famously, being apparently wise beyond measure already, Solomon ignored the opportunity for greater wealth or long life. Instead he asked to be even wiser still. An absolute glutton for wisdom.God was pleased and granted his wish because that’s how God do, and along with it gave Solomon long life and riches to boot.Now what do you think of that story? It’s sort of like wishing for a million wishes.I grew up with a concept of wisdom that was largely human. I looked to men to be wise in my life. Sometimes women. Mostly men. And as I got older I realized that in almost every case, they had prioritized wealth or power or secrets over wisdom. One by one most of them fell in front of me, and I was bereft. I felt angry and I felt betrayed. They were, as the Proverbs would put it, wise in their own eyes.I am not angry. Not exactly. But I am aware and I am mindful of my own quest for wisdom in my own life.I have been wise in my own eyes. I know what it feels like. It feels like conceit. It feels like a certain knowledge that my choices or beliefs or even my values are somehow better or higher than others’. It’s ugly to me. I grow in vigilance as I get older. I think that’s natural. It’s happening naturally and it’s why those we find wise in our life tend to be older, and it’s why wisdom exhibited in the young is so unique and special. And a little tiny bit suspicious…When I initially did this values sort for myself I very nearly cast this card aside. In the end, it made it to my top five.It’s not that I wouldn’t have had a value for wisdom in the way I understood it as a young’n. But I didn’t know if I felt like it was affecting my choices. Affecting my tasks and time management. I don’t necessarily feel particularly wise. I certainly wouldn’t bill myself that way. I can think of many unwise choices I’ve made, certainly. I’ll refer you to the daring essay for a fuller accounting.But do I value it?And then I looked, again, at the little description on the bottom.A mature understanding of life. And something about that clicked for me. Really resonated.Oh, how I want a mature understanding of life. How I wish I had a mature understanding of life.There’s so much I do not understand. There’s so much pain and hurt and awfulness in the world that I can hardly bear to look sometimes. I wish I could understand starvation in Sudan or senseless wars of aggression and taking and expansion extraction and empire. I wish I could understand the things we’re willing to do for sex or money or power.There’s so much about our lack of response to cultural wrongs, planetary-sized injustices. How can it even be? How can we allow these things? I want to scream. I want to shout. Oh, my soul.What does it take to develop, or discover or find a mature understanding of life? How long must we wait to feel it in our bones? I am not young, and I am not old. When will I be wise? When will I understand?I look around at my own elders and I do not often see wisdom anymore. I catch fleeting glimpses and little ghostly remainders.I’m starting to feel like wisdom is a choice. Or a set of choices. Or a posture that says “I’m watching! I’m listening! I’m not there yet, but I want to be!” I’m starting to feel like a mature understanding of life is an understanding of how hard everything is to understand.I’m starting to feel like wisdom is a series of small choices that open and expand the roadmap. We don’t understand every road, every tree, every barn in the county. But as we root into a community we slowly start to know our way around a little bit.And maybe that mature understanding of life feels so far away and so elusive because it’s different for every person. A mature understanding of your life will be different from mine. Maybe we’re meant to share maps, and overlay them on one of those cool light tables that my friend the graphic designer uses. I lay my understanding down and you lay yours down atop it, and we gather as many friends and relations together as we can. We collect them like Pokémon. Gotta catch ‘em all.We compare wisdoms, and we compare all of the successes and defeats that have brought us to where we are and we gain a broader collective sort of wisdom that is less of a hill for us to conquer, and more of a mountain to be climbed together. Maybe we’re all meant to act as guides for one another. You guide me and I’ll guide you and we’ll get there together.Maybe that’s the whole point OF life. Perhaps the most important thing is to learn to gain wisdom in the context of community. Helping one another. Bearing one another’s burdens. We make it across the finish line of wisdom together, or we don’t make it at all.* Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

Folks I feel strongly about this one. I’m about to come on strong. You ready for some strong? I’m feeling strongly.I do this values sort exercise with everyone I can. All the time. Ask anyone who hangs around me and they’ll tell you, I’m basically a one-trick-pony at this point in my life. I don’t care if you’re a Republican or a Democrat or a Solarpunk Revolutionary. I want to know your values and I want you to be more in tune with them, allowing them to affect your choices and behaviors.And sometimes, people find certain cards objectively objectionable based on their worldview(s). Some folks do not care for this card. They toss it to the side without a second thought. I like to gently push back when that happens. Not to force a value on them, but to challenge a flippant dismissal.It’s true the term “Social Justice” has a certain political bent today. Say it out loud and you immediately get a response, sometimes positive… and sometimes not.Many people feel like the idea of social justice has been weaponized by the left-er side of the spectrum. They might feel like social justice speaks to a particular ideology they may not agree with, or it might speak to government-run community welfare programs that they believe are either mismanaged or morally in error.In my last essay I pushed back against the little description on the bottom of the card. In this case I lean all the way in.correcting injustice, care for the weakWho among us could fault the correction of injustices in this world? And there are so many to go around, right? Who among us could balk at caring for the weak? I sincerely hope the answer is none! None among us. Breathe deep.I’ll say this for myself and definitively: It’s a joy and an honor to defend the defenseless, feed the hungry, to clothe the naked. To care for the weaker ones among us—regardless of the source of their weakness.The thing is, most people, when pressed, do agree that injustice should be corrected. That the weak should be cared for. And so it becomes a conversation about degrees.Exactly how weak does one need to be in order to be worthy of our help? And how gross must the injustice be for us to act? And precisely how much help do we render to the lost soul who’s been found in true need?I was born into a set of ideas that lauded these concepts of caring for the weak and correcting injustice… in theory. When the rubber met the road we bristled at the practice.And friends, I’ve changed my mind. I’ve changed my position. I don’t wake up in the morning thinking of my self as a social justice warrior. But I think I kind of want to.In my youth I saw a value for social justice as a weak position that made allowances for perceived inadequacies or faults. But now I see that it’s a position of strength. The people I admire most are those who live from a place of service. But you already knew that.I cannot tell stories from my own life without being self aggrandizing. I cannot “prove my point” here, and tell you the ways I’m trying to scoot over and make room on the bench. All I can say is that it’s a heart position, and it’s a joyful discipline, (but a discipline for sure), for me.Because my baser instincts are generally toward self preservation. My baser instincts would step on you in order to save me. I see it in myself, I recognize the ugliness that I bear. In the old days I would have called it a “sin nature”. And now I see it as a fear response.I’m afraid I won’t have enough. So I don’t live my life in a way that makes certain that others do. I’m afraid that I won’t be good enough, or accepted for who and what I am, for how I am, and so I will step on you to get up a little higher out of the fray. And the decision toward justice on a societal level is a series of choices. It’s about seeing and believing that I am enough. I have enough to share. I can give freely and not be worried that I will be left with nothing. I can feel assured that we are in this together and that in the areas where I’m the weaker one, that you will be there to love me and fill in my gaps.Important in this conversation, (and probably what separates me from being a true SJW), is that I must contextualize my actions and behaviors, and by that I mean that I must personally approach my life as a series of concentric circles with myself in the center.I must care for myself and my own health, my physical body and my brains, my spirit and my guts, I must care for these things because I have a second circle that’s important to me—my family. I need to care for me so I can care for them.And there’s a third circle! My friends, my closest people. The people who come in my home and eat my food and ask to do the values thing over and over. And there’s a fourth circle, and a fifth and a sixth, and more.You’re somewhere in those circles. My parents, my old heroes, my customers and employees, the mayor, high school thespians, the person living under the bridge in my hometown—they’re all in those circles. And it’s tempting to see this as a situation of running out or of having some leftover. But I believe the opposite to be true. I’m observing the opposite to be true in my life.The healthier I am, the more justice is served in my own life, (by that I mean the more I demand that I walk justly and be a source of just behaviors in the world), the more I have for my family. For that second circle.The more I’m able to influence and lead my family into places of unselfishness, the more we have to give to that third circle. And so on. And so on.It’s not about leftovers, it’s about overflow.* Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

Now look at those peaches, won’t you? There’s a farm near my home where you can still U-pick. Blueberries, cherries, raspberries apples and yes, peaches. We go there several times each season. This used to be a part of people’s lives—picking and choosing their own fruit. Flowing with the seasons. People would know when it was a good year for green beans. A bad year for apples. I can think of few things more beautiful in my life, few things that ground me in my natural environment more than retrieving a harvest of fruit or veggies from my beautiful valley. Every summer I stand there among the peaches and cherries and I am in wonderment, and I hope it will never end. I hope it’ll always be this spiritually awake for me. I am lucky to live where I live. Perhaps we’re all lucky to live where we live, but I feel lucky to live where I live. Standing in nature, in the summer, in the golden late afternoon hours with a mouth full of sun warmed peach may be as close to heaven as we get in this lifetime and I’m committed to drinking those experiences in as often as I can. My favorite song is a tune by the incomparable Macy Gray. It’s called “Beauty in the World”. Maybe you’ve heard it? If not, stop what you’re doing, right here, right now, open a browser window or the youtube app and go listen to Beauty in the World. “Shake your booties, boys and girls, for the beauty in the world. Pick your diamond, pick your pearl, there is beauty in the world.”That’s what it’s all about. Picking our diamonds. Picking our pearls. Recognizing that there’s beauty in the world, and what’s more we can bring it! We can build it! We can be the source of so much beauty. A world of beauty, to me, is more of a concept to be believed in than a product to be found or owned. We can find beauty in the smallest things. Once, when I was young, I read about someone who sectioned off a 1-meter square of forest. He drove stakes in the ground and strung string and he got inside the square and stayed there for as long as it took for him to fully appreciate the fullness of the square. He eventually began to recognize individual blades of grass. He watched insects go about their lives, scooting over and making room for them. I think that’s profoundly beautiful—to register attention in our lives. I want to bring that attention to the beautiful everywhere I go. I have a beautiful relationship with my brother. My brother is like me but larger and kinder. He’s five years my junior and I wish we’d always loved one another the way we do now. I wish we’d known better. I wish we’d known that two are better than one, and together we’re more than the sum of our parts. People, I think, genuinely like having either of us in the room, but not nearly as much as having both of us in a room. We’re funnier, and we’re friendlier when we’re together. Perhaps the most beautiful thing about my brother is the way he loves my family. The comfort my children feel with him and his. We could, if pressed, live under a single roof, I have no doubts. There would be a little friction, sure. That’s people. But we would thrive together. Our childhood was a childhood. It was beautiful and awful and frightening and comforting and clean and dirty. And we are, to one another, ones who can be trusted to hold one another up. I have a beautiful relationship with my wife of twenty years. We have been through the deepest valleys and we’ve been through the coldest storms. And our love for one another has been like a blast of sunlight in my life. Over and over she’s had opportunities and good reasons to allow distance to come between us and consistently she’s chosen not to. She is so beautiful. I have beautiful friendships with people who love me and care deeply for me and say encouraging things to me on the internet when I do writing projects. I am a baker, and there’s nothing more beautiful than baked goods made with a heart of kindness and love. Have you smelled beurre noisette as it’s cooking? Really spent time smelling the changes as it deepens in color and clarifies? Have you experienced victory in the kitchen? Attempting something just a little bit outside your skill level and reaping the reward of realizing it’s very much within your skill level? And I have a beautiful sense of importance for cultivating kindness and love in my life. Not everyone has these things. I am, again, the bearer of an embarrassment of riches.There is obviously ugliness in the world also, and we’ve talked about some of those things. There is myopic hatred and fear and darkness and there are all of the ways we can treat one another when those things are guiding us. But as the very wise and kind and beautiful Martin Luther King famously said:Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.We cannot out-hate the hate filled. I know; I’ve tried. We can only out-love them. We can not out-ugly the ugly things in this life. We can only fight against them with real beauty, whole-cloth beauty woven on the loom of our experiences and choices. So shake your booties, boys and girls. There is beauty in the world. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

I don’t know if I’ve made the mechanics of this exercise clear. Probably many of the folks reading this have done the exercise with me and do not need this primer. But for the rest of you, here is how it works.There are 57 total cards in the deck. We are discussing them one by one here, in this project. When you “do your values” with me, we sit across a table, or on a couch, or at the sidebar of my coffee shop. I tell you to imagine the last “timestamp” of your life. The year since your divorce. The five years since you got married. The time since you started a job, or retired, or lost a spouse. I remind you that the goal is to identify the values that have most affected your choices in that specific season. You sort the entire deck into three piles:* YES: Core and central to your thinking.* MAYBE: Important, but perhaps not driving the bus.* NO: Not resonating at this time.Once the deck is sorted, I take the “Maybe” and “No” piles away. Then you take the “YES” pile and do it again. And again. And again. Until you end up with just five. Five central values that represent your life right now.I am telling you this because Card #24 is the first card we have discussed that made it to my Top Five.I’ve gone back and forth on whether to disclose my own choices. But I’ve decided that I will, because my choice serves as a lens through which to see this value. I first did this exercise in August of 2024. And when Protection of the Environment came up, I was surprised to see it survive the first sort. Then the second. Then the third. Until it sat there on the table as one of the five most-currently-important concepts to me.This was surprising because I did not grow up around environmentalists. I didn’t grow up around conservationists. The truth is, in the community where I grew up, the prevailing belief was: “This is all going to burn.” Jesus was on his way back, and when he got here, he was going to torch the place. So what was the point in saving anything?Compounding this was a political culture that viewed stewardship, (at least in the way I understand it now), as a little suspicious. There were several outbuildings on the farm where I grew up, and in each of them was a clock radio, or an old dusty boombox tuned to the local conservative talk radio station on the AM dial. Rush Limbaugh literally flavored my young life. Milking cows, feeding sheep, calves, chickens, rabbits, dogs, all under the thrall of the Golden E.I.B Microphone. I learned so much in my early life from that program, and the net effect was that I grew up not only not an environmentalist, but quite the opposite. I was an Enviro-Antagonist.There are actions I took back in those days that I can now only describe as vindictive toward the planet. I have been present for the burning of countless pieces of plastic. I know how to play with burning styrofoam in a way that’s fun and destructive. I know exactly what sound batteries make in a burn barrel. I know a guy who buried multiple vehicles in a single hole just to get rid of them. It was like a great middle finger to Mother Earth. My dad, whom I love, would save old motor oil to pour down fence posts to preserve them. At best these acts were lazy and inconsiderate to anyone who may be living on this planet in the future. At worst it’s a hijacking of our children’s & grandchildren’s and great grandchildren’s good lives. The cracks in that worldview came from two places. The first was the mentor I mentioned in the last essay—the guy who got me into coffee (and from whom I stole $250). He and his wife were Christians like me, but a different flavor. They represented a perspective that said, maybe we are supposed to take care of this garden. Differently. The second was Biology 131, 132 & 133. This was a three-term course required for my ill-fated Forestry degree. I went into that class ready to get my “C” and get out. Instead, it changed everything. It forced me to look at the complexity of the biological world, and ultimately to appreciate and even love it. I learned the hydrological cycle, I learned about nurse trees, I learned about fungus and decomposition, and I learned that the smoke from my burn barrel goes somewhere. I learned that going away is a myth. I am deeply grateful for that professor’s methodology that didn’t scorn or humiliate or disdain my past, but instead simply brought us along. And we learned that not all logging is terrible, not every use of a natural element is patently negative. But that a culture of extraction and profit will end up being problematic, for us or for our children. But the moment it moved from my head to my heart was 2020. You may recall the world came unglued. Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. George Floyd was murdered. Belarusians protested. And COVID shut us down. And then, the West Coast burned.We experienced some of the worst wildfires in modern local history. 47 people died directly. More than a thousand died from smoke inhalation. We all downloaded apps to track the Air Quality Index. We huddled inside, taping up windows, building air filters out of box fans.And I became enraged. We were smoked in for over a week. Orange skies, all day, every day. I look back now and see that was the moment I crested the mountain. I had been slowly learning about climate science for years, quietly changing my views. But in 2020, looking at that apocalyptic sky, I realized: The “It’s all gonna burn” theology came true. But it wasn’t Jesus doing the burning. It was us.I believe in climate science. I believe we ignore it at our peril. I believe there are real consequences to a culture of extraction combustion and taking.So, yes. This card is in my Top Five. I used to feed the fire. Now, I want to help put it out. I want to do more than not hurt, I want to make better. I want to leave it better than I found it in every situation that I can. So I avoid spraying chemicals on my land, and I develop water retention and soil micro-biome building strategies for my pasture, and I have a plan to mitigate the damage caused by this damned Emerald Ash Borer Beetle. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

This is the last card in the section labeled “Self-Direction.” And honestly? I have big feelings about it.None of my five chosen values were found in this “Self-Direction” section. And having taken some time to reflect on them, I think that fact checks out. I am not a very private person. I am happiest when I’m a part of a larger whole.There is nothing—nothing—I can readily think of that I wouldn’t discuss with a friend if it seemed beneficial. Sex, poop, money. I’ll open up and be honest with you if you need me, and I’ll do it with a happy heart. So it’s hard to write about privacy because it’s not really a language I speak very well.But again, I am led to think of others. Do I think people should have the right to a personal, private sphere? I do. Very much. I can keep someone else’s confidence. But I think “privacy” is often used as a code word for “secrecy.” And that gets very sticky for me. Secrets are, in my experience, like TNT. They are powerful, they build pressure, and eventually, they explode.I’ve carried secrets. Things I’ve done or said that make me ashamed now. When I was young, I stole. Once, I stole a KitKat bar. My parents drove me back to the store to confess. I was humiliated. Once, I stole $250 from a friend. I just picked up his debit card off the counter, walked to the ATM, and took it. He trusted me enough that I knew his PIN. Here is the kicker: It was the friend who would eventually set me on my coffee path. We laugh about it now (he got his money back), but it was a core betrayal.The betrayal wasn’t just the theft; it was the secrecy. It was the hiding. That is the toxic side of privacy.The most toxic elements in my marriage, without question or hesitation have been the moments when I’ve had a secret and not shared it with my wife. I am ashamed that it’s happened at all, and it’s taught me what I said before—secrecy is like TNT, building pressure, getting ready to blow up in my face. But certainly there is another side. Sometimes, privacy isn’t about hiding a crime. It’s about the right to be unobserved. It is the right to be “unfinished.” To have a bad haircut, or a weird thought, or a clumsy moment that belongs only to you, and not to the public record.I carry a unique benefit that my children do not have: I remember when life could disappear. When it just did disappear. What if my stealing from a friend was available for viewing on YouTube?When I was 21, the home I grew up in burned to the ground. I was away at the time at forestry school discovering that I didn’t like mensuration, so I had a few belongings with me. But everything else—everything my family owned—went up in a puff of smoke.My Dad said it took ten minutes for the whole place to fall in on itself. He was working in the barn. The UPS man discovered it while my dad was working in the barn. He came tearing up the driveway, honking his horn. They sat there in the ditch together and watched it all burn. I imagine them weeping and I imagine the UPS man holding my father tenderly as he watched everything go, (I do not know that that happened, I only hope it happened). Dad’s wedding ring. The tank of goldfish my mom and I kept. The game closet. The antiques. The new furniture my parents had finally purchased for themselves. And every printed photograph of my entire childhood. Gone in a moment.My childhood is now known only in my memory, and in the stories we tell. There are precious few existent photographs to even prove I’m not a Highlander. To prove that I had a killer bowl-cut.The fire and the bowl-cut were both tragic in their own ways. But they were also private. Big chunks of my history were erased. I was given a sort of a clean slate, whether I wanted it or not. I used to bleach my hair until it was wispy and white and corpse-like. And then I’d mix kool-aid with KY-Jelly and use that to dye it multiple colors. You’ll never see that. It doesn’t even exist anymore. Maybe a 4x6 photo in some former youth grouper’s scrap book? Somewhere? But you’ll never see it. I watch my children growing up now, and I realize they will never know that kind of impermanence. Most of what is important is stored digitally now. Files, documents, photographs, and hundreds of video clips of them riding bicycles are all on the internet. They are on my phone, on my laptop, on your laptop. I think about what I’d take out of the house with sixty seconds’ notice. I believe I’d get my family and my dogs outta here and call it a loss. Every move my children make, every bad haircut, every poorly chosen outfit is potentially braided into the foreverness of the internet. Their “house” can never burn down in the same way. The record is potentially permanent.My kids are affected by the weight of that potential. I think it interferes with their sense of self-direction. How can you figure out who you are if the audience never leaves the room?So, while I am an open book—while I will tell you about my theft and my shame, my poop or my money—I am realizing that Privacy is a form of grace. It is the grace of the unrecorded moment. It is the freedom to make a mistake, to be unfinished, and to let it drift away like smoke from a burning trailer house, rather than being stored in the cloud forever. It’s the reason I try not to mention their names or show their faces on the internet. We need the right to be unobserved. Because a seed needs a little darkness to sprout. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

Do I have a value for independence?Look, I hate to make this a trilogy, but I gotta build on the last two: Freedom and Choice of Own Goals. We have established that I value Freedom (the environment) and Agency (the action). But when I pull this card—Independence—I find myself pausing.I guess my question is: What the heck is independence good for? What is it used for? You can’t live in it. In fact, it feels like a myth to me.Are you a mountain man? Are you a recluse living in a cave-hovel? Are you a holy woman living out her days in a hermitage tucked away in a corner of obscurity? Who among us can even comprehend true independence, anyway?I read once about a family in deepest Russia who’d had a belly full of society and moved, right and properly, out to the woods. They were called the Lykov family. They are my best guess as to how “True Independence” works. They fled into the Siberian wilderness to practice their religious beliefs without interference. They achieved near total independence.And the result? They essentially starved to death. The mother died of starvation to save the children. The sons died of illness because they had no medicine. The lone survivor, Agafia, eventually had to accept help from geologists and the very world they tried to escape just to stay alive. Independence cost the Lykov family everything.I pause to think of Independence Day. The day we celebrate independence from Britain. We claimed to be self-sufficient, self-reliant as a young nation. We’d had enough of being taxed without representation, so we declared independence.But in that independence, did we not discover newer and higher levels of interdependence? Wasn’t the issue ultimately not King George in particular, but our devastating voicelessness in the relationship? Perhaps this is an oversimplification. But think as I may, I cannot find a way for Independence to be a virtuous value in the face of so much loneliness and isolation in the world.This may be among the most objectionable cards in the deck for me. Because I see the people who value their independence above all else, and it always seems to come at a great cost to themselves and others. It always seems to come from a place of fear. And it is difficult for me to square that up with my chief value—a value not even found in this deck: Kindness.My own foray into independence, thankfully, lasted a very short time, and I was not really that independent.When I was seventeen I moved out of my parents home, off the farm where I’d grown up. It was time, it was decided, for me to be a man, and to grow strong and independent. It was time for me to stretch my wings and, hopefully, time for me to fly away. I slept in my car. I slept at friends houses. I moved in with the son of a childhood babysitter. Three of us lived in the house and we all worked on a grass seed farm. One guy was the farm foreman. He oversaw the whole operation, and he was strong and independent. He didn’t date the entire time I lived there. He ate steak every single night. He was kind and friendly enough, but he was distant and distracted and did not show an interest in me, personally. That was an example of independence to me. Steak and silence.The other guy who lived with us was a whole ‘nother level. He and his dog split the year into quarters. For one season he fished commercially in Alaska. Another season he spent farming grass seed in the Willamette Valley. He spent a third season commercially fishing in the gulf of Mexico, and the fourth season he laid on the beach and engaged in all manner of debauchery and spent the totality if his erstwhile earnings. He was mean. He was cruel to women, and ugly in his words. He was as much an island as any person I’ve ever known. He drove his pickup truck from Alaska to to Louisiana and back every year, stopping off in Oregon. But his dog was with him at all times. The dog sat on the beach and drank beer with him for three months every year. The dog rode around in farm implements with him. The dog had it’s sea legs, it knew how to behave on a fishing boat. The dog slept with him, and went into the bathroom with him. I’m not joking. Even he wasn’t independent when it came to the dog. I, for my part, tried my hand at independence as well. With roommates like these it was relatively easy to get my hands on as much cheap, garbage-beer as I could drink, and so that became the staple of my diet—that and off-brand Lucky Charms. I think they were called “Marshmallow Mateys”. Nothing says “I’m a grownup now” like Marshmallow Mateys and the Champaign of Beers. And Totino’s pizzas. I’d buy two of them in the morning first thing, and throw them unwrapped up on the hood of my car on my way into the warehouse. And by noon they were hot and covered with bugs, and I ate them. Because I was nasty. My job was sacking seed for twelve hours each day. Trucks would roll in and dump seed down into a grate over a big hopper in the driveway. And the seed would be conveyed up, up, up to the top of a series of seed cleaning apparatus. The seed would gravity feed back down the building, cycling through various machines designed to clean it and separate weed seeds, etc. until finally it landed at the bagging machine, where I stood, filling sacks and stacking them on pallets. It was long, dusty, hot, mind-numbingly boring, miserable work. But the worst part of it was the loneliness. Because when you get up at 5:15 to get to work at 6:00 in the morning, and you sack seed for twelve hours, and then you get home at 6:15 and gorge yourself on garbage and then pour yourself into bed, and when the morning light comes streamin’ in, you get up and do it again, you lose yourself in the loneliness. I did. And eventually the summer ended, and I escaped that season. And I bounced around some more, and eventually that’s when I landed with my friends. The ones I stole $250 from. (More on that later.) And their home was more than a spot to land, (though that’s what I was accustomed to, and for a while that’s what I tried to make of it.) It was a home though, a family, and I wasn’t alone anymore, and I wasn’t independent. I began to live. We need each other. And more than that, we are fools not to want one another. We’re better together. Better in pairs, in groups, in community.We’re better when we’re able to go through life circled up like lady elephants.Recently, a friend sent me an article about how female elephants protect one another. When a female is giving birth or suffering an injury, the others circle up around her. They face outward, creating a wall of protection, while the vulnerable one rests in the center.It was beautiful. And it was a picture of community that I’m carrying forward with me.I don’t know what else to say about independence. Am I functionally independent? Yes. I am self-sufficient to a degree, I suppose. But I see that independence as a liability more than an asset most of the time.In a cultural moment that values the One over the Many, I am wary of the person who wants to stand alone. I would rather stand in the circle. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

​This one is vulnerable for me to write. I thought “Freedom” was the zinger, but this one hits closer to the bone for me on some levels.​I did not choose some key parts of the life I have.I have made choices along the way, certainly. And it’s not as though I live in a swirling eddy of regret. I am not unhappy. The opposite, in fact. But I am here, in my forties, newly embracing an awareness of how my life was shaped by hands that weren’t always my own.So many of my choices in my teens and twenties, and certainly even into my marriage were influenced by a desire to be a part of things. In our case a very large church community with many tentacles. Many ways in which it reached into the lives of it’s parishioners. I was asked to do things I had no business or experience or expertise doing. By the tender age of fifteen I was called an “evangelist” and sent on “crusades” in faraway places. Christ Jesus forgive me.Early in our marriage we planted a church, (that’s fancy Christian-speak for “started”), in a specific community of people who were WAY out of our depth, especially at the time. We’re talking people twice and three times our age who had been struggling with addictions I couldn’t even comprehend for longer than my parents had known one another. Single parents. Bereaved widows. Real adults with real problems just trying to get by. At least today I’d know to float along with people instead of pretending I knew how to backstroke. At the time we were handed a standard-issue Savior-Complex and sent out. We got a little curriculum, and we were going to get them properly saved. ​Here is a story I’ve told before, but it seems germane now.​In 2008, when the bottom dropped out of construction, I started a coffee shop alongside a few friends. I had no startup capital and I didn’t know what I was doing. We used someone else’s money; he was willing to spend it for his own private reasons.We gleaned labor from our church. One guy made art. Another guy textured the walls with his bare hands. Left literal fingerprints everywhere. I worked in the cafe daily.In mid 2009, just about nine months later, a friend of mine, (who roasted coffee), hatched a plan with my church-chieftain. This guy wasn’t a pastor per se, but at the time I would have followed him into the very belly of hell. (As an aside: beware of that level of commitment. I’m not saying it’s always unhealthy, but I’m saying be conscious and aware).My wife is Canadian. We went to Canada to visit her mother for Mother’s Day. We turned our cell phones off and kept them in the glove box so as not to rack up international roaming fees. We’d been burned before, you see.​When we returned, I was met with a half-dozen messages. While I was offline, these two guys had hatched a plan for me to buy the coffee roasting operation.And so I did. That’s how I became a coffee guy. That’s the story. Now, mine is a dissimilar story from many in this industry.If you know me, I may look quite flashy. Expensive cars, fine suits, platinum watches, etc. (That is a joke).But generally speaking, the people who stick around this industry are people who love it. Deeply. They’re not here for the money.​I was not that person. Nobody asked me if I liked coffee. Or loved it. Or even if I wanted to be a business owner. It just sort of happened. Just like that I was running hard on the treadmill of finding personal value and a sense of worth in entrepreneurship.It was a moment in my life when someone might have offered me a Choice of My Own Goals, and didn’t. Instead, they handed me a script. That happened in my life over and over. I don’t think I’m unique in this. And responsibility must be taken! Nobody forced me to do anything! But nobody thoughtfully offered an alternative path, either. ​I think that is why this card matters so much to me now.We could pause here and talk about my wife. My partner. What choices was she ever handed? I won’t speak for her here, in this forum. It’s not my place. She should write her own essays. I am, as established, a big white dude. How is the story different, (or the same) for women? I shudder. ​As I’ve grown up, I’ve begun seeing my goals not as scripts handed down from a leader, but as a hinge point in my understanding of life. ​As we’ve discussed, our lived experiences inform our Values. Our Values inform our Vision.Goals exist in the in-between place. They are the pivot-point where we take the ethereal thought-work of our values (and our beliefs, which are really just calcified values anyway), and we reformat them, alchemy-like, into the hand-work of our daily tasks and time management.They’re where we go from thought to action.​If you don’t choose your own goals, someone else will choose them for you, that’s my experience. And they will generally, naturally, choose goals that serve their vision, not yours. And if you’re particularly unlucky they will tell you, (and they will believe), that their vision is actually GOD’S vision and that can be pretty hard to argue with.​In the old days, I had goals that were informed by my community. They were big. They were very Christian. They were life and death. They were about saving the world. Being a part of the action. Teaming up with God to get some s**t DONE.Today, my goals are simpler.Actually, let me rephrase that: My goals are finally mine.Take my truck. I own a 1971 Ford F250. It belonged to a grandfather figure of mine—not my blood grandpa, but a grandpa person in my life. He was a chicken farmer. And now that I am starting to raise chickens myself, keeping this truck running feels like keeping a promise.But the original engine—a 390 Ford-Edsel big block—was old. It was worn out, tired, and drank gas like it was angry with me. The “Script” says you restore a truck like that. You keep it pure. You respect the Ford heritage. I didn’t do that. I chose my own goal. I wanted a truck that started every time and could work for another 50 years. So, I committed a little heresy. I had that 390 pulled out and I swapped in an “LS” engine from a wrecked Chevrolet Tahoe.If you are a car person, you know that putting a Chevy heart in a Ford body is a kind of a sacrilege. It upsets the purists. But I didn’t build it for the purists. I built it for me. I saved a piece of iron from the scrapyard by grafting a modern heart into it. It runs nearly perfectly, it is positively efficient in comparison with it’s original equipment. It honors the chicken farmer who owned it before me, but it runs on my terms.That sounds like a small thing compared to “saving the world.” But it is a goal I chose. It comes from my value of stewardship, my value of reuse, and my value of rejecting the shiny new thing.I am learning that a small goal that is truly yours—even if it’s a Frankenstein truck made of mixed parts—is infinitely better than a big goal that belongs to someone else.I am finally in the driver’s seat. (And this time, it starts on the first turn). Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

Freedom looms large in my life. Let’s get into it.When I was a child, we sang songs about freedom. I grew up in the land of the free and the home of the brave! Let freedom ring, baby! When I was growing up in church, we sang songs about the things we were free from, and freed into. We talked about ourselves in terms like “freedom from bondage.” We looked to Jesus to “Set the captives free.”When I was a child, the 4th of July was a major holiday in our house. We hosted a party each year, and for a while, it was a pretty happening joint. We made literal red, white, and blue foods. We ate barbecue. We had various lemonades and beverages. We invited everyone, and a lot of them came. In the evening, we’d pile into cars and head for the local fireworks display. We’d “ooh and aah” with a thousand other people on the banks of the mighty Willamette and listen to the Knox Brothers sing old gospel tunes.That evening was always magical because, from a pretty young age, we experienced a sort of freedom we weren’t really used to. Harrisburg, Oregon is a small town with a bank and a Dari Mart. We were allowed to basically walk up and down the streets and get into various mischief that generally consisted of nothing more than choosing our own candy purchases. We decided to walk over two streets and look at the tee-shirt stall or the wind-chime guy. We decided to go check in with our folks when we needed money or a can of soda. We decided to walk around in circles until we found someone we knew. And we always found someone we knew. Freedom was quiet and gentle. I was young and it was for the enjoying. Later, our freedom rang closer to home. My brother and I discovered that with some slight—umm—modifications, simple, legal, safe fireworks (purchasable at any marginally reputable church with a plywood stand out front) could be crafted into a much more powerful expression of patriotism and American ingenuity. And that’s when the explosions began.We blew everything up. We blew up a dead chicken. We blew up countless bean cans, shredding their ends open. We made cannons and we blew garbage cans 40 feet off the ground.Once, I even blew my thumb into my hand. I’ll spare you most of the details, but we essentially, (accidentally), built a pipe bomb and I essentially decided to hold onto it, and it essentially turned my thumb and hand into meat putty. I am lucky to have kept them at all.Was that freedom? Am I free yet?Today I think of freedom in very different terms. Today I think of freedom in terms of all that I have. All that I enjoy. All that I contain and express. I think of freedom in terms of the places I can go and the things I can think.And I think of my freedom contrasted with others’ lack. I think of freedom in terms of all we have and how we got it. Freedom is under attack in ways that are clear and obvious for anyone looking. Who’s allowed where and who’s allowed to do what, and who’s allowed to be. And while some of those threats seem fresh and new, we could, (we should), ask marginalized communities about this. They have a voice and a perspective worth noting. Worth considering. Worth remembering. Worth hearing over and over, and as loudly as necessary. We would be wise to listen to voices who know our collective future based on their collective past. Today I think of the types of freedom I enjoy and I wonder, genuinely, if my children and grandchildren will know freedom of thought, freedom of action. Freedom of opinion and freedom of idea.I think of my religious upbringing, and I reflect on a song from my childhood that still means a great deal to me. I promise not to get too preachy, but stay with me here.I’ve got a river of life flowing out of me, it makes the lame to walk and the blind to see, it opens prison doors, it sets the captives free, I’ve got a river of life flowing out of me.Spring up, o well! Within my soul! Spring up o well! And make me whole! Spring up o well! And give to me, that life, abundantly.I love every line. I believe every line. I believe we have a river of life that can flow, uniquely, out of each of us. I believe that we can have real impacts—real, tangible, positive effects on the people around us. Positive effects that can only come fro the river of life flowing from each of us, uniquely. The lame walking and the blind seeing are references to specific miracles Jesus is believed to have performed. But we can do great things with our actions and our words, our money, our votes, our ideas, our labor. Moreover, I don’t know that we can even be whole without that well springing up within us. What does it mean to advocate for the freedom of others? I suppose I’m not arguing for the broad opening of prison doors and the freeing of all captives. But what if we looked for ways to set people free from the bondages and captivities in which they find themselves ensnared? How can we be a part of freeing people from addictions? Or from debilitating beliefs that hold them still and stationary? That rob them of pleasure or creativity or curiosity?A favored tune that comes to mind is Bob Marley’s Redemption song. Marley paraphrased Marcus Garvey;emancipate yourself from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds. And so I say, here, now, in this essay: Spring up, o well, within my soul. Make me whole. Give to me the fullness of life that comes from fighting for the freedom of others.A few thoughts I’ll pepper in here at the end. Freedom is not, can not be a personal possession, held Gollum-like in secret, underground perpetuity. For our very own.Instead, it’s important to remember that most of what we enjoy as freedoms—safety, mobility, speech, work, dignity, et cetera—these are all things that depend on shared systems and mutual restraint.“My freedoms don’t end where your feelings begin,” the somewhat aggressive and unkind bumper sticker slogan goes. But I suppose it is so. However, this is important, if others are silenced, if others are marginalized or excluded, the very systems that supply your freedoms become brittle and unreliable. If freedom is robbed from them today, it will be robbed from you tomorrow.Freedom is not the same as power over others. Freedom is freedom only if all are free.Freedom don’t come free. What is the cost? The cost can be death, it’s true. Many men and women have fought and lost their lives on the altar of freedom. Their sacrifices should be honored. They should be remembered. Some have died for freedom.Can we also live for freedom? Can we work toward systems of justice and kindness that protect the freedoms we enjoy for all to experience?“For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” —Nelson Mandela Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

Curiosity is easier the older I get. I think that’s because when we are young, we are terrified of looking stupid. I was. I still am, sometimes. But less so with every passing day. We pretend to know things when we’re kids. When we get older, we realize nobody knows anything, and it becomes a lot more fun to just ask, “How does that work?”I shot this photo on a moving blanket. It’s symbolic to me of movement and change and adjustment. And so much of that starts with a sense of Curiosity. Walking through life with a sense of “What is it?”. “How’s that work?”.We ask how high something goes. How deep it could be. We find all of science nestled neatly under the Curiosity card. When I was young, (and sometimes still) I wanted to be the guy who knew everything. I wanted to find all of my value in Capability, in the value I add to a community. Now I am more easily able to rest a bit easier, to ask questions, to not know the answers. To cultivate an okay-ness with being uncertain. But still curious. As I watch my country and planet undergo some of the most formative and pivotal societal adjustments of any of our lifetimes, (I see you there, grandma), I am struck with the great lack of curiosity exhibited by many people. Many people around me. Many people in leadership, making decisions that will affect my grandchildren. I have enjoyed the work of an author, Pete Enns. Our trajectories are not identical—I ain’t no clone—but I’ve drawn solace in these last years listening to his words on podcasts and reading them in some of his books, including one called “The Sin of Certainty”. I will not give a full book report here. Suffice it to say the “sin” in question is, in my words, a gross lack of curiosity. Often brought on by a fear of the unknown and unknowable, the sin of certainty seems to have infected even the most secular of us in this age. I have been so very guilty of being certain of my ideas, my ideals, my beliefs. So certain of certain things. And I guess here, as I embark on the second half of my life, I want to do things that encourage curiosity in myself and in others. What are you curious about? Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

This card covers a lot for me. When you do the exercise, you have to sort concepts down from 57, all the way down to five. And as I’ve alluded here before, it’s not about finding THE FIVE, the ones that define you and box you in. It’s about identifying some of the things that have affected, are affecting your choices in your recent life, in order to better understand your position. It’s about allowing the thought processes surrounding your values to affect your vision and mission. Eventually to affect your choices and the work of your hands and your mind. So, one of the ways you do this is by “nesting” concepts. People often end up looking at some binaries. Some either/or’s. For instance, people will sit and hold “True Friendship” and “Mature Love”. Which is it? They look at the little descriptions on the bottom of the cards, and I encourage them to ignore the little descriptions, preferring their own conceptions of what the words on the cards mean. Is it more this or is it more that?And then they’ll “nest” one concept under the other. For me, personally, I ended up “nesting” Mature Love under True Friendship. Because True Friendship is obviously the best card in the deck. Everything wonderful can fit neatly under its banner. I digress. Creativity is important because there’s no Painting card. No Sculpture card. No Poetry card. No Essay Writing card. Not even a Musicality card. And for each of us, I think there is a creativity available for us to pluck out of the darkness of our guts and present to the world. Some people don’t feel creative. But I say to them, I think they probably are. I have always felt creative. And I’ve always expressed that creativity somehow. I am good at building coffee shops. I’ve done two, and the second one was better than the first. I’d really like to do another one. In this economy!?I like to draw plans. I find a space we might move or expand into and I draw it over, and over, and over. Graph paper everywhere. I have developed a comprehensive plan for a home I’d like to build for my wife and me to live in one day. It’s called “The Aggregate House” and it’s about gathering and warmth and solidarity into the future. I’ve thought out many details and I really think it would be a special place.I am converting horse stalls into chicken pens. I am a very poor watercolor painter. And I love to write. I think this project—these essays you’re reading are some of the most creative, generative things I’ve done in years and years. I have, as of this post landing in your inbox, completed 57 essays—one for each of the cards in the deck. They’re releasing slowly over time, but they are complete now. I am proud of this accomplishment and frankly, a little shocked. I have been moved by the experience of doing this card sorting exercise with so many people over the last couple of years, and I have wondered how it might morph. How it might change. And one day I just sat down and began. I wrote one essay, and then another and another and now I’m making lists of other things to write about. I feel like I’m cracking into a little treat that I’ve held onto for a long time. I don’t even know what it will bring about. But I hope this creative venture never ends—it’s been so beautiful. I want to refine. I want to hone. I want my hundredth essay to make my first look positively amateur, because that’s how these things go. We start, we botch, we reframe, we start over. Eventually we share. That’s how baking goes for me. Woodworking. Anything creative I’ve ever done, or certainly that I’ve ever succeeded in has begun. Somewhere, sometime. It has a beginning. Why not now? Why not today?In my youth creativity was ancillary. It happened or it didn’t; I had no intentions. In my younger adulthood I attempted to tie creativity to vocation or obligation. “If you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with”. These essays are expressions of my creative energy blasting out through the cracks formed in the mundane. Roasting 20 batches of coffee in a row. Making payroll. Changing oil and household chores. It takes me a minute to get rolling, creatively speaking. I have to break free from something external that limits and hinders creativity. It’s all the pressure to do and produce, you know? It’s finances and the speed of life. Creativity feels like such a waste when productivity is on the table. We must be mindful. We must decide. We must break free. This world can be bitter. It’s cold and it’s inhospitable, a lot of the time for a lot of the people. And creativity, generating something lovely—whatever it is—from nothing is one of the kindest, freest things we can do for and alongside our fellow humans. I have a profound sense of value for creativity in its various forms. It’s my joy to sit down with people and be present when something creative unlocks within them. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

We are moving from a Varied Life to an Exciting Life. They sound similar, but I think there is a crucial difference.If a Varied Life is external (the things that happen to us, often without our consent), an Exciting Life happens within.For me, excitement is fuel. It’s a rocket booster. I crave it. I can’t always control the variability of my life. As I wrote in the last post, lived experiences often just collide with us. But I can plan for stimulating experiences. And more importantly, I can cultivate excitement within myself to change the way I approach that variability.When I look at this card, I think of the things I’ve chosen to do. I’ve traveled to Europe. I’ve traveled to Asia and Africa. I’ve never been to Antarctica, or south of Mexico. One day. One day.But the real excitement isn’t on a map.I chose my partner. And she chose me. And that has been overarchingly exciting. We have lived a life of constant change and adjustment, and through it all, we have not left one another behind. We have not grown tired of one another. We have kept up.I am (cheese-alert) more in love with her today than I was last year. Or the day we got married.We have done everything by one another’s side. For years we’ve worked together on our business. We’ve discovered new layers of each other. We’ve witnessed success and failure in one another. We have lived out our vows—the “better” and the “worse”—and I find that really exciting. I daydream about what the future might look like with her, and I get a spark.And I think about the children we’re raising. We chose to have kids; it was all in the master plan. Certainly, we didn’t plan for every twist and turn. But we knew from the jump that we wanted to be parents.I think about how wonderful and whole they each are. So different from one another, so different from us, and yet distinctly US.I find them exceptionally exciting. We hear the reports. First it was, “Your kids are my favorite to babysit.” Then it was, “Your kids are my favorite in class.” People long for the affection of my children, and it’s not just because they’re special (though they are). It’s because they are whole creatures unto themselves, and adventure seems to follow them. They are attractive in a world of media consumption and intrinsic self-service because they are present.I suppose my wife and I have something to do with that. We’ve been responsible for setting the tone and culture of our family. But increasingly, that tone is being shared around our common table. We’re all setting the tone now. And that is very exciting.I will be a dad to them for many years as adults. But precious are these days of mundane excitement.I’ve already talked about Daring, which feels connected to this card. I have done daring things. I have learned new definitions of daring. But “Excitement” is the internal result of that daring.It has been exciting to live a life open-handed and open-hearted. I value an exciting life. And looking at my family, I feel so grateful to have one. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

I have lived what I consider to be an extraordinarily varied life. I think we all probably have. Which I suppose would make it an ordinarily varied life. Who among us knew the trajectory of their lives at five years old? At ten? At twenty? Heck, even at thirty?I am now in my “sporty-forties.” And I am still (newly?) uncertain of what I want to do with my life. Where it will lead. Where I will end up. How far will I go? I know now not to expect an answer. I am learning not to need one. A few years ago, I thought I knew where I was going. Just ahead of COVID, things seemed pretty settled. Our kids were in school and doing well. Our business had lost that “new business” terror. We moved to a house that actually fit our family. I had a view. There were migratory birds. Salamanders abounded. We could canoe off the back of our property. I purchased woodworking tools. We were settling into a rhythm.I remember feeling like a tree—firmly planted in a windy environment, but grown strong and healthy. Able to withstand the rain and the wind and all manner of environmental abuse. I was, of course, wrong. Within the span of a year, our lives were utterly changed.On February 28, 2020, my family traveled to Africa. It’s a whole story. The plan was to visit coffee farmers we’d done business with. I was going to visit the film locations of the Howard Hawks classic Hatari!—a slow-moving film that was nonetheless a huge part of my childhood. It was the world’s introduction to Henry Mancini’s “Baby Elephant Walk”. I was going to stay at the ranch! Or I wanted to, anyway.Instead, COVID became a household word nearly overnight. Our flights were canceled. My family went on a day trip to an island inhabited by tortoises, and I spent the day waiting on hold, being disconnected, and calling back. Sweating bullets in the Hotel Tembo. What a profoundly stressful time that was for us.I lost a particular bit of my mind in that space. We eventually found flights home that didn’t go through fully-locked-down-Europe. The airport in Dubai waited for us not with luxury, but with weird full-body scanners and teams of people holding thermal guns. All the perfume shops were closed. Nobody was selling Haribo candies or Toblerone bars. There was nowhere to pay too much for a phone charger. We sat stock still with a million other people trying to get wherever home was. Surely everything would feel alright if we all got home. We did make it back to Oregon, but you may recall what we made it back to. I closed my coffee shop for a day, then reopened with a walk-up window, serving customers through a little porthole. We learned the difference between surgical masks and N95s. We purchased a big sheet of plexiglass to protect everyone. I consoled baristas enduring people’s stress and fear and rage. Then the social fabric started to tear. I grew up in the church. I was part of a consistent thread of relationships for more than thirty years. But when church got deeply complex and weird in 2020, we felt a need to create distance. This was a deeply destabilizing experience. I am not over it.I watched helplessly as kindness and empathy were politicized. Everything became us-vs-them. Everything required a taking of sides and a drawing of swords. My neighbor, who had always been indifferent, became threatening and ugly. I had moved onto that property devoted to neighborliness, and eventually life “handed me my ass” in that area. Not everyone wants to be friends. I didn’t know that before. I arrogantly thought I could make friends with anyone. I was wrong. George Floyd was murdered and that was a horror. Parts of my community responded with an ugliness that’s become uncomfortably common today, but I was not prepared for it at the time. Business got hard; customers dwindled. Retail was mostly dead. Regulars did their best, they paid in advance, they came as often as they could. But there were no tourists, no walk-by business, no new customers. Other people’s businesses suffered. Wholesale dropped off, my income was threatened significantly. I was frightened. Then came the smoke. I hid inside my house in September 2020 as my beloved Willamette Valley was entirely smoked in. I witnessed the aftermath of vast swaths of my sweet Cascades being burned. Big trees. Trees that had survived fires before, but didn’t survive them now. I contended with having grown up in a culture that mocked global climate change as a hoax, if you can imagine that. It had been years since I’d questioned the validity of broad scientific consensus. But for whatever reason it was then, those September days locked in with smoke, newly knowledgeable about the local Air Quality Index that drew my fearsome rage. And through it all, my children grew. Sunrise, sunset. I remember looking at photos from that airport trip in 2020, and my eldest child looked “little.” She was interested in little kid things. She was engaged in a little kid’s world. Just a year later my children seemed to have swung pendulum-like to being “big”. My youngest decided to like Taylor Swift. Sunrise, sunset. My partner and I got our yearly physicals in 2021, which led to a biopsy, which led to a cancer diagnosis. She is thankfully in remission now, having completed a rigorous course of treatment. My business continued not to work the way it used to. My marriage didn’t look like it used to. My thought processes weren’t recognizable to me.The point, I suppose, is this: A Varied Life isn’t something that we seek—it is something that happens to us. We can choose some of our circumstances. But we can’t choose not to be confronted by a deadly disease. A layoff. An abusive situation. Or a global pandemic.Even this project—these essays—is a result of that variety.One day in 2024, a friend told me about a therapist who had been a pastor for 25 years and was now helping people through “deconstruction”—a hot-button term that for me anyway, describes a process whereby applied beliefs are reevaluated. It has been deep, aching work for me. My relationship with the church had been complex for years. I was reducing my faith journey to its constituent parts, checking them for potency and future-proofing. I decided I needed to talk to him.He didn’t take my insurance, so we agreed on a short engagement: a beginning, a middle, and an end.At one point, he identified that I’d missed a season of “values setting” in my youth. He handed me this Values Deck.I sorted the cards myself. I identified five values that were affecting my choices in that time of my life. I snapped a picture and made it the background image of my phone.When I returned for the next session, I relayed my excitement, and he gave me the deck for my very own. I took it home. I did it with my family. Then my closest friends. Then others. Then others. Then others. Now I’ve done it many times with many people. Some I’ve known since birth, like my little old grandmother. Some are so young they don’t even know what the exercise is about, but they trust me, and they want to be involved. And that’s deeply meaningful for me. I love guiding a ten year old through this process. Reading the cards aloud and creatively explaining an idea like “Reciprocation of Favors” to a child. It is the most important thing I do with my hands. Not more important than family, you understand. Or world peace. But in terms of the sticks & bricks of my life, the day-to-day working it out—this is the thing I love to do with people.I couldn’t have planned this when I was sitting on hold in Zanzibar, or hiding from the smoke in Oregon. We don’t know. Our lives are varied. We can’t count on them to be static or ordinary.We can try to buy or plan our way into a life of knowing what’s next. But that will produce a life of mediocrity—and anyway, it won’t work.Life will be variable. The only question is what tools and beautiful new plant life we find in the rubble. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

I am a middle-aged dad. That is how I imagine I’ll always think of myself. “Father” has become my calling card. It’s the lens through which I see myself primarily. Husband to my wife, father to my kids. One day, God willing and the creek don’t rise, I will add “Grandfather” to that esteemed list of identities. I am no stranger to the phrase, “Get down from there, you’ll hurt yourself.”Each night I tell my kids to go to bed because it’s “damn near midnight.” It is usually about 9:00 PM. Sometimes even 8:30. I do not, on the first pass, resonate with the idea of “Daring” at this time in my life.When I think of daring, I think of my youth.I have done some things that seem quite stupid to me now. I had a lot less to lose back then, or I thought I did.When I was about seventeen, my friend Dan had a little red pickup truck with a pipe rack on the back. I would routinely climb out the passenger window at highway speeds and jungle-gym around like an idiot. I’d hang off the front of the rack and put my ass right down on the hood. I’d flip my head backwards so I was facing the wind as it rushed through my hair. I clearly did not die. But it was foolhardy, and maybe even daring.Outside Silverton, Oregon, there are numerous lesser-known waterfalls. Some of them fall into deep pools that I’ve never seen the bottom of. Some of them require strategy to jump off in order to avoid breaking all of your bones at once. Opal Pool is not for the faint of heart. I have leapt them all. Is that daring? Or just young?And then there was the Cemetery Incident. Well into my twenties, on a drive with friends, I noticed how fresh and crispy the driveway of a certain cemetery looked. Newly paved and glassy smooth, with grassy edges at least ten feet wide before any headstones appeared. I went home, fetched my longboard, and determined to “bomb that hill” without bothering to change out of my sandals and light linen pants. I didn’t even own a helmet.The hill hid a precipitous decline I was not prepared for. I carved the first two corners and felt like Tony Hawk. I fell around the third bend, mangling my arm and legs. My friends got to see my bloody bottom cheeks because my linen pants failed me so.That is the “Daring” of youth. It is physical. It is adrenaline. It is often regretful.But in more recent years, I’ve discovered a new layer of Daring.In 2008, when the market collapsed, I started a coffee shop. I didn’t even have the cash, I needed a money-person. I had no nickels. I paid myself $800/month and I had a wife and a child. It was certainly not the wisest choice of vocation. But it was, I suppose, a daring choice.And sometimes, daring is thrust upon us. When my wife received a cancer diagnosis, we embarked on a very arduous journey. And we chose the path of doing it together. That required daring from us both in order to stay in tight with one another. We faced uncertain circumstances, as a couple and alone as a result of this uninvited new aspect of our lives. I do think it takes a certain daring to believe in life after proof-of-mortality. It takes a certain daring to remain intimately entwined with one another when it would be easier to shut down and close out. I realized then that Daring doesn’t have to mean climbing around the outside of a moving vehicle. It doesn’t have to mean narrowly avoiding death in a cemetery just because you want to feel alive.Real daring is making choices that express your value for life, even when it’s scary. I have three kids. That’s daring in itself. They outnumber us.Sometimes it’s not a choice to be daring for the sake of the thrill. It is a choice to be daring in the face of uncertainty. To stay. To build. To love people who might leave. To start a business when you’re broke.I may tell my kids to get down from the ledge, but I’m still taking the leap. Just a different kind. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

Okay, this is the third and final card in the “Yellow” category. The Hedonism Trilogy.We had Pleasure (The sensation). We had Enjoyment of Life (The attitude). And now, the big one: Self-Indulgence.If the other two made me uncomfortable, this one makes me want to run for the hills.“Self-Indulgent” is almost always used as an insult. It implies weakness. It implies a lack of discipline. It implies eating the whole cake while everyone else watches. For a guy who works hard to cultivate Capability and Service, “Self-Indulgent” sounds like “Useless.”But I am holding this card, and I am looking at the definition in my head: yielding to one’s own desires.And I am thinking about my customers.I sell lattes. I sell giant, buttery pastries. I sell cookies with hazelnuts and praline. Nobody needs a hazelnut praline cookie to survive. Buying one is, by definition, an act of self-indulgence.When a customer walks in at 1:13 on a rainy Tuesday afternoon, looking tired, looking beaten down by their boss or their kids or the news, and they order that cookie... are they being “weak”?I don’t think so. I think they are being kind to themselves. I think they are buying a ten-minute vacation. I think they are using a small indulgence to patch a hole in their hull so they can keep sailing.So why is it so hard for me to buy that cookie for myself?Maybe it’s because I confuse Indulgence with Greed.* Greed is taking more than your share.* Indulgence is simply allowing yourself to have a share.I am hard on myself. I hold myself to high standards. I value “Capability” and “Ambition.” And often, I treat myself like a machine that just needs fuel, rather than a human who needs a treat.But machines break. Humans burn out.Maybe Self-Indulgence isn’t about being spoiled. Maybe it’s about Mercy. It’s the act of saying: “Nicholas, you are working hard. You are allowed to sit down. You are allowed to eat the cookie. You are allowed to watch the movie. You are allowed to turn your brain off.”If I can offer that mercy to a stranger across the counter for $4.50, surely I can offer it to myself for free.So, here ends the Hedonism Trilogy. Pleasure. Enjoyment. Indulgence.I don’t think I’ll ever be a “Hedonist.” My heart is still with the Blue cards—the values of Service and Benevolence that we are going to look at later.But I am realizing that I cannot be a servant if I am running on fumes. So I’m going to indulge. I’m going to savor. And then, once I’m full, I’m going to get back to work. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

Okay, I’ll be honest. I looked at this card and thought, “Didn’t we just do this?”Card #12 was Pleasure. Card #13 is Enjoyment of Life. They sit right next to each other under the banner of Hedonism. Full disclosure, the next card in the deck is “Self Indulgence”And frankly, I want to skip them. I want to fast-forward to the Blue cards, (just you wait). The “Benevolence” cards. The “Universalism” cards. Give me True Friendship or Helpfulness. That’s my speed. That’s where I feel at home.I don’t personally see “Enjoyment of Life” as a core value of mine, certainly not in comparison with love, kindness, generosity, or forgiveness. To me, “Enjoyment” feels optional. Service feels essential.But the deck doesn’t let you skip. So I have to ask: Why is this card here?Maybe it’s because Service without Enjoyment is just Martyrdom.And nobody likes a self-martyring servant. Think about it. If I bake you a biscuit, but I am miserable, sighing, and resentful while I do it, that biscuit is going to taste like guilt. You won’t enjoy eating it because you’ll feel the weight of my unhappiness. It becomes a transaction, not a gift. I’ve seen this a hundred times, in person, in my pwn business. The coffee just tastes better when it’s produced with a happy heart. I cannot account for it. If I bake you a biscuit and I am genuinely enjoying the process—the flour, the heat, the smell, the act of giving—that biscuit tastes like love.If Pleasure is the act of eating the cookie, Enjoyment of Life is the attitude that lets you bake it.I still struggle to prioritize it. I still feel guilty sitting on the porch when there are chores to do. I still feel like “Enjoyment” is something I should save for retirement.But I’m starting to see that if I want to be a “Safe Place” for others (which is my real goal), I have to be a relatively happy place for myself first.A miserable host makes for anxious guests.So, perhaps Enjoyment of Life isn’t a selfish detour from my values of Kindness and Generosity. Maybe it is the essential ingredient that makes those values edible to others.I’m ready for the Blue cards now. But I think I’ll take a minute to enjoy this coffee first. Just for me. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

Let’s talk about pleasure. And let’s talk about the Values Categories listed on the top of each card. This is the first one that is listed under “Hedonism”, a word which many might be unfamiliar with. You may have noticed that each of the cards we’re talking about have a value “category” on top of the card. There are ten total categories we’ll work our way through, with a varying number of concepts under each.The Hedonism category contains just three cards and I’ll drop all three explorations today. They’re linked, as all of the Values are. But these in particular seem complex and difficult for me to even hold in my hands, so we’re going to rip this bandaid off together.Hedonism is defined as “a philosophy holding that pleasure is the highest good and proper aim of human life”. How do we all feel about that?Personally, I do not hold to this philosophy, as may be evident in some of my previous posts. I certainly don’t feel like the gratification of my own hedonistic desires is the chief aim of humankind. I hope not. But the question is about pleasure. Do I value it? Do you value it?I’ve already established that I believe that a life in service of others is a life worth living. I ascribe very deeply to that idea. So is this in contradiction to a value for pleasure?I am a professional pleasure dealer. I roast and sell coffee for a living. A substance with no redeeming qualities beyond pleasure. People like to think of themselves as addicts but in truth, if it all disappeared tomorrow we’d be okay—we really would. We’d rediscover chicory root or black tea, we’d grow our own mint leaves. Here’s my industry secret: Nobody needs this crap. Nobody needs what I sell. Pastries. Lattes. Sugar and spice.I do it anyway, because it brings small joy to people’s lives.I’ve written about this before in other forums, so my apologies if this is re-heated information for you. I call it my “kitchen floor moment”. Pithy phrasing, maybe. But it’s a moment I’ve talked about a lot over the years.In 2013 we opened Chrysalis Coffeehouse, which we later rebranded Flag & Wire Coffee. We were living two counties away from the shop when we opened it. We had what we thought were good reasons for being so far away, but that was my situation. Every morning I’d wake up and silently say goodbye to my sleeping wife, and my three baby children. My eldest would have been about four when we opened our doors.My wife stayed home with them, changing diapers and wiping up messes and I drove the long road to open the shop at 7am each morning. We had a pathetic revenue picture.One day in January, (traditionally a pretty slow time of year), I returned home from a day in which we’d done a total of $82 in revenue in the coffee shop. This is not a living.I entered the house and found my wife crying on the kitchen floor because we were so very poor and so very locked into our situation. I sat down with her and cried myself. We used a point of sale system with an online portal, so my life and business partner could watch intently throughout the day as our numbers didn’t climb.We sat together on the kitchen floor, certain that we’d made many wrong choices in our lives that brought us to the position we were in. And she asked me this question:Are you even passionate about coffee anymore?I was not. But I knew I should be.The problem I didn’t understand yet is that I’d never been passionate about coffee. Ever. It’s a story for another time, but I didn’t even enter the coffee industry on purpose. It was very much something we backed our way into.See, there’s not a lot of cash involved in this business, even now many years later. I am a profoundly blessed man, but not exceptionally flush with cash money, honey.The people who choose this industry generally choose it because of passion for the product and process. And I didn’t, (don’t) care particularly about either. And that seemed at the time like a problem. I did my best for a lot of years to convince myself and others that I had what it took to be passionate about coffee. But I do not.I confessed, there, on the kitchen floor to my wife, (but mostly to myself), that I wasn’t passionate enough about coffee. But we didn’t have any other options. So it took me a while to realize that it was really the people that I could get on board with. That I could be passionate about.And people, it turns out, love coffee. It gives them pleasure. And that gives me pleasure. Hedonism at work in my life.To eat a meal quickly is efficient. To savor the same meal is pleasurable. And we have but one life for sure! It’s impossible to know what comes next and don’t listen too closely to anyone who says otherwise.I am trained to avoid pleasure for my own self and guard it for others. What’s that about, I wonder?What if we reframed the word pleasure to “Savoring”. Enjoying. Maintaining. And what if we swapped the word “Hedonism” for “Delight”. Delight yourselves in your one wild and precious life that was made for living.Service is a part of living. It’s a big part that I have a high value for.But reflecting on my recent post on Self Respect and Self Doubt, I see that personal maintenance is also key to a life of service. And part of that is pleasure in the end.The goal I suppose is to live a life and find pleasure where we may, without stepping on others in the process. Can we do it? Can we observe and enjoy pleasurable experiences in our lives without them coming at the expense of the poor or the broken or the marginalized? God, I hope so. If I’m honest I’m still deeply suspicious about pleasure.Pleasure seems carnal and base. But I think, probably, that’s a piece of my upbringing speaking. I would actually like to explore a value for pleasure and explore the things that delight me. I’m not good at that. Let me think. What do I enjoy? I’ll make a list. Sometimes that’s helpful.* I enjoy time with my wife. In this season “dates” are few and far between. Time together is something that doesn’t feel productive on some level, but I think it actually is.* I enjoy spending time with my kids. I can do that often if I’m intentional about it. It gives me great pleasure to watch them grow, to watch them change and grow and develop as genuine humans. When they were young I took great delight in them asking silly questions, in taking them for haircuts, in their little buttcracks hanging out the top of a diaper. Now everything’s so different, and I know I need to continue finding pleasure in who they have become.* I do enjoy hard work on sunny days. My laziness gets the better of me though, and I spend time indoors instead. Even on a cloudy overcast day, even when it’s chilly and wet outside in my beloved Willamette Valley, if I can break the gravitational pull of my warm chair and go outside I am generally rewarded with rosy cheeks and a reminder that I’m alive.* I enjoy this values exercise very much. I’m writing these essays and learning so much more about myself with each one. I’m getting a better sense of how I might keep exploring. It gives me great pleasure when I am able to sit with someone while they discover something new about themselves.* You know what else I love—this one’s kind of a bonus. I love marrying people. Several years ago I got ordained to marry people on the internet. Twice. First I was ordained by the Universal Life Church. After I received my credentials I learned about The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and got ordained there, too. You’re reading the words of an ordained Spaghetti Minister. Not to brag. I married some good friends of mine who have remained close friends. I spoke from my heart about things that I’d gathered up that mattered to them, and it was, (for me) a deeply meaningful experience with thier friends and family in the hills. I love them. I love their parents, and now I love their children. They’re a source of pleasure for me.A couple of years later an employee, nay, a friend of mine asked me to marry he & his fiance. We went quietly, just about ten of us to a meadow in the Ash Trees and I said the kindest things I could come up with and at the end they were married. I love marriage. I love commitment between two people. It’s a beautiful choice and it’s a deep honor to be a witness to it.Tell me what you value about pleasure. The next few cards all have “Hedonism” printed atop them. This should be an interesting experience. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

Yeesh. This one is a hot topic.I just watched a video recently and this person was basically saying that we don’t know what anyone’s thinking at any time. What they’re thinking about us. So when we think we know what someone’s thinking about us, we’re really ideating what WE might be thinking about ourselves. And it can be doubly shitty because we’re not only seeing the worst in ourselves, we’re assuming the very worst in the other person.Self respect is, it seems, inextricably linked to self doubt. For me, for certain, anyway.You ever watch “The Odd Couple”? It was a movie with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon. And then later on a television show with Tony Randall and Jack Klugman. Edgy for it’s time, both the film and TV show, (and the Broadway play preceding both) centered on Felix and Oscar, a news writer and sports writer respectively, who lived together for reasons. Hilarity ensued as fastidious Felix ran up time and again against obnoxious Oscar’s hijinx.So, I think, it goes with self doubt and self respect. I’ll leave you to decide which character most embodies which attribute.Self doubt is like smoke in the kitchen. Self respect is like warm bread smelling up the house.Do you ever imagine what you’d do if someone spoke to your kid, to your friend, to your loved one they way we speak to ourselves sometimes? I know I’d come unglued.If I ever heard some of the things I said about me…Do I have a value for self respect? I do. I do. Self respect is about stepping into the middle of that fracas that goes on in our own minds sometimes and separating fact from fiction. Self doubt would like to decide the entire vacation plan. We cannot let it drive the station wagon! Our own mental health is riding backwards in the way back seat. Safety first. We cannot let self doubt pick our direction.I know this to be true because of evidence in my own life. How many times have I just woken up in the backseat of a car with self doubt at the wheel? Many. The answer is many.And self respect is a discipline. Something to plan ahead for. Something to practice in the mirror in the morning. And the afternoon. And before bed.You guys remember Stuart Smalley? It’s a media-heavy post today. He was a character on SNL in the 1990s played by Al Franken. His tagline was “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggon it, people like me”.I think we have to be that guy. We have to recognize that, in fact, we are good, enough. Smart enough. And people do like us. Not everyone, not all the time. But we’re capable of being loved and cared for by the people around us just as we are. And when we realize that, when we really lock horns with it, self-respect opens up to us.But it has to be more than that, right? It has to be I’m good enough for me. I’m smart enough to face my own life. People like me not because they’re magnanimous, but because I’m worthy of being liked from the jump.Ultimately I’m thinking of others though. I see us as interconnected with one another. We are not islands. We do not live alone—not well, anyway. Not in a way that honors the fullest expression of our singular humanity. A life lived in service to others is a life well lived indeed. But if we’re not able to respect ourselves, our very real contribution(s) to the world around us, it will be difficult or impossible to see others as worth serving.If we’re not able to respect ourselves, our boundaries, our needs, our wants, our whole selves, where does that leave the people who would eat the fruit from our trees? Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

What’s intelligence to you, and are you intelligent? We’ve already established that my education is spotty. I missed a lot of stuff people usually do in high school. Or even middle school. I’ve never read War and Peace. That’s middle school, right? We established that I can’t do calculus. Give me a trigonometric break. I never learned a stitch of history. Everything I know about anything that happened before about 1990 is a result of me digging around and figuring s**t out. I was forty years old when I finally read The Lord of the Rings trilogy. As a side note, what a gift! To be forty years old and grabbing hold of that piece of literature for the first time! Sinking my teeth into something as tasty as Tolkien as an adult, without any of the pesky distractions or misunderstandings of deep-youth. I didn’t read it when my mom told me to. I savored it thirty years later. As a side note to the side note, I feel the same way about Rage Against The Machine. I discovered “Killing In The Name”, like, within the last six months or something. I’d heard the tune maybe? I’d heard of the band. But I was a good youth-group boy, and I wouldn’t have been able to get around the language element. And now it’s just such a morsel. Such a treat. I am intelligent. I am convinced of that now. My back-lot GED had impressed upon me that I was less than functionally intelligent for a long time, if you can believe that. It’s the false equivalency of intelligence and education. I had to grow up and realize that the world was full of people with masters degrees who struggled in various emotional or intellectual pursuits that came more naturally to me. My dad used to tell me “Nicholas, the world is completely full of idiots”. Which is kind of a shitty thing to say. I resisted it into my adulthood, and I still wouldn’t probably classify things that way. But I understand what he was trying to say. The world is full of people giving things half-effort. Full of people for whom “this” is just good enough. No further thought, no further analysis necessary. No need to continue thinking things through. And I wonder if not starting off with firm footing in this area has prepared me to keep discovering. Keep thinking things through. I got street smarts. Or, rather, I got farm smarts. And I guess I do value that quite a lot. I value my ability to think things through, to arrive at unique answers and solutions based on my lived experiences. That’s intelligence to me. It can’t be trivia. It can’t be arithmetic. It can’t even be knowledge. It’s just about got to be about processing information and using that information to identify my values, which illuminate my beliefs, which inform my vision and mission in life, which, when applied and thoughtfully observed can shed light on my goals, which in turn can help me decide on and commit to my tasks which will inform my time management. It’s a line, see? It’s like a waterfall, with our lived experiences eventually informing our nuts-&-bolts actions and thoughts and activities in life. Or like a tree, with lived experiences being represented by sun rays or rain drops. We can’t control them! We can’t even understand them, those rascally lived experiences. They just happen to us. And our roots (our Values), informed by the mycorrhizae of our community, take up those nutrients to feed our Trunk (our Beliefs). Our Vision and Mission branch out from there... It all feeds into our goals, our tasks, our time management—the fruit that feeds the people around us. I haven’t thought this all the way through. Probably there’s some way to shoehorn photosynthesis into this metaphorical tree? I’m still workshopping this. What about you? How do you define intelligence? Are we intelligent? Are we intellectually lazy? Are we thoughtful? Are we interested? Interesting? What lived experiences have informed your values setting process? Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

I am an influential person. I know this to be true. It’s been this way all of my life. It’s something I’ve learned to try to temper and make healthy for the people I love. The people who haunt my spaces.We can influence people or events in ways that are profoundly positive or positively awful—the choice is ours.The question here, for this application, is whether I value that influence. Whether you value influence.Because we are all influential people. We are like a great painting, all of our colors and hues and pigments touch and work in combination to create the larger whole. We’re all influenced by one another, and while that carries the potential of abuse or mistreatment of the other, it’s also an honor to be in relationship like that, right?Let’s talk about influencers. It’s 2025 and we are surrounded on all sides by people demanding we be influenced by them. And I suppose we are. Perhaps not directly in all cases—I am beholden to very few members of the zeitgeist of TikTok and Instagram and... I don’t know? Discord servers, probably? Snaps.Every day we are aggressively advertised to on a nearly minute-by-minute basis, right? It’s everywhere. It’s the water we’re swimming in, to the point that my kids don’t probably recognize it for what it is.I recall being advertised at on Saturday mornings during cartoon shows. Commercials were more ubiquitous back then. Advertisers, (corporate influencers), could only afford to show the world one thing at a time, it was out there, it was public. Yo Quiero Taco Bell. We all yo quiero-ed the Taco Bell at the same time. We all saw the same Wheaties commercial. We all saw the same “Where’s the Beef” ad, at the same time, on the same channel.Now everything is so ugly and crafted. So tailored specifically for us, for our own individual preferences and proclivities. It’s maddening for those a******s to be so right about what I’d be interested in so often. I am repelled by my own susceptibility to these messages honed in corporate boardrooms in order to extract an additional dollar from me.My children are less impacted by influencers than average because I closely gate-keep their involvement with social media, a sickly, filthy, untamed underbelly of society indeed. But I’m not foolish enough to think they’re uninfluenced. My middle child is watching a minecraft video on Youtube as I write this. In contrast to the TV commercials of my youth, my son’s experience is largely private, secret, quiet.I am more than just a little bit concerned that this channel will funnel him into some kind of freakish white nationalistic hellscape from which there may be no easy return. Such is the nature of raising kids today. This is the hellscape. Walk ye in it.When influence is peddled it is filthy. When influence is informed by greed or avarice. We’ve all seen it. We’ve all lived through it. It’s gross.When it just is, when it just occurs naturally between lovers or friends, it can be beautiful. Why, I attempt to influence my own kids every day. I attempt to influence my customers and my friends toward kindness and empathy and love and affection for fellow humans.We must be mindful of the ways advertisers would pretend to be friends or advocates. We must be mindful of the way(s) that influencers are coming for us. Coming for our children. The ways they will influence a fool from his money. And more than money, from his time, his treasure, his goodwill toward others.How are you influenced? And how do you influence others? Will you bludgeon others with extractive influence, designed to protect yours alone? Or will your influence be remembered after your name is forgotten?I am an influential person. I know this to be true. It’s been this way all of my life. It’s something I’ve learned to try to temper and make healthy for the people I love. The people who haunt my spaces. We can influence people or events in ways that are profoundly positive or positively awful—the choice is ours. The question here, for this application, is whether I value that influence. Whether you value influence.Because we are all influential people. We are like a great painting, all of our colors and hues and pigments touch and work in combination to create the larger whole. We’re all influenced by one another, and while that carries the potential of abuse or mistreatment of the other, it’s also an honor to be in relationship like that, right?Let’s talk about influencers. It’s 2025 and we are surrounded on all sides by people demanding we be influenced by them. And I suppose we are. Perhaps not directly in all cases—I am beholden to very few members of the zeitgeist of TikTok and Instagram and... I don’t know? Discord servers, probably? Snaps.Every day we are aggressively advertised to on a nearly minute-by-minute basis, right? It’s everywhere. It’s the water we’re swimming in, to the point that my kids don’t probably recognize it for what it is. I recall being advertised at on Saturday mornings during cartoon shows. Commercials were more ubiquitous back then. Advertisers, (corporate influencers), could only afford to show the world one thing at a time, it was out there, it was public. Yo Quiero Taco Bell. We all yo quiero-ed the Taco Bell at the same time. We all saw the same Wheaties commercial. We all saw the same “Where’s the Beef” ad, at the same time, on the same channel. Now everything is so ugly and crafted. So tailored specifically for us, for our own individual preferences and proclivities. It’s maddening for those a******s to be so right about what I’d be interested in so often. I am repelled by my own susceptibility to these messages honed in corporate boardrooms in order to extract an additional dollar from me. My children are less impacted by influencers than average because I closely gate-keep their involvement with social media, a sickly, filthy, untamed underbelly of society indeed. But I’m not foolish enough to think they’re uninfluenced. My middle child is watching a minecraft video on Youtube as I write this. In contrast to the TV commercials of my youth, my son’s experience is largely private, secret, quiet. I am more than just a little bit concerned that this channel will funnel him into some kind of freakish white nationalistic hellscape from which there may be no easy return. Such is the nature of raising kids today. This is the hellscape. Walk ye in it. When influence is peddled it is filthy. When influence is informed by greed or avarice. We’ve all seen it. We’ve all lived through it. It’s gross. When it just is, when it just occurs naturally between lovers or friends, it can be beautiful. Why, I attempt to influence my own kids every day. I attempt to influence my customers and my friends toward kindness and empathy and love and affection for fellow humans. We must be mindful of the ways advertisers would pretend to be friends or advocates. We must be mindful of the way(s) that influencers are coming for us. Coming for our children. The ways they will influence a fool from his money. And more than money, from his time, his treasure, his goodwill toward others. How are you influenced? And how do you influence others? Will you bludgeon others with extractive influence, designed to protect yours alone? Or will your influence be remembered after your name is forgotten? Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe