The Values Sort

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.

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It’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.

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.

*

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.

*

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 weak

Who 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.

*

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.

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.

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.

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.

​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).