The Values Sort

Card number one is Social Power. People hardly ever choose it because it feels like a villain’s card. The caption on the bottom says: “Control over others, dominance.”

Yeesh.

It’s not a card that made it to my top five. To be honest, it feels like the closest thing to a “negative value” in the deck. My instinct is to flick it off the table.

But that would be dishonest. Because Social Power has affected my choices. It has been central to my thinking, usually in times when I’ve felt out of control.

It’s easy for me to dismiss this card because I already have it. I am six feet tall. I am a man. I am a business owner. I am generally kind and broadly well-intentioned, but I cannot deny that I walk through the world with a backpack full of privileges I didn’t earn. When I walk into a room, I am often assumed to be “in charge” or at least “safe.”

That is Social Power. And it is a luxury.

I have people in my life—people I love deeply—who do not walk into rooms with that same luxury. I have friends who have to calculate their safety in spaces where I just breeze through. I have employees who look to me to handle the difficult conflicts because I have the “weight” to move the obstacle.

If I pretend I don’t have Social Power, I can’t help them. If I deny I have it, I can’t share it.

Social Power, it seems, must be tempered. When I think of the “Dominance” definition, I think of teenagers in high school, pushing and shoving to find their place in a community that feels scary. They stomp their way to the top because they are terrified of being athold the door open rather than letting it slam behind us. We can use our weight to scoot over and make room on the bench.

May we all grow in love for one another. May we stop pretending we don’t have pow the bottom. I watch this happen.

But there is another way to hold this card. We can hold it like a shield. We can use our power not to control others, but to protect them. To open doors. To absorb the shock so the people behind us can rest. We can use our weight to hold the door open rather than letting it slam behind us. We can use our weight to scoot over and make room on the bench.

May we all grow in love for one another. May we stop pretending we don’t have power, and start asking better questions about who we are spending it on.

I do have a very high value for fitting into nature. It’s why I’m an avowed “environmentalist” now. To me, that means maintaining a value for our natural environment, as the name would suggest, but it feeds and bleeds—as these values tend to do—into other things. Like Conservation and Frugality. My love for the natural world informs my desire to not buy new things that require extractive and exploitative methods of production, here at home or abroad.

And it extends to plants and animals. This card was photographed with my best friend, Chuck. My love for him is informed by my belief that he has value and worth as a creature. I am not concerned about his level of consciousness. He is a part of the world and I am a part of the world and we fit together.

I grew up on a farm and I spent a lot of time in nature. Really a pretty idyllic place to grow up if you saw it. About 50 acres with a creek running along the west side of it. The creek was lined with Oregon Ash (Fraxinus latifolia), Bigleaf Maple (Acer macrophyllum), and some truly large Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii).

When I was young, my uncle built us a treehouse that was so far from our regular people-house that we rarely even made it down there. It was in the most beautiful, magnificent maple tree you ever did see. The northwest corner of the property (I’d guess 15 acres or so) was almost entirely Oregon Ash and accompanying shrubbery, my favorites being the Nootka Rose (Rosa nutkana) and Cow Parsnip (Heracleum maximum)—both beautifully fragrant. I know those woods so well I could walk out there with my eyes closed.

(Yes, I went to forestry school. Learning the names of things is a form of intimacy, I think. You treat a “tree” differently than you treat an Acer macrophyllum that you know by name).

We heard coyotes, but I never saw one on the place in twenty years. Nutria and Himalayan blackberries were common invasives.

Once, we saw something black skimming along the top of the water and we shot it with bullets until it died. It turned out to be a mink. I regret that choice deeply. We killed it for no reason. It was fitting into nature and I wasn’t. It was unified with the greater whole, and we killed it.

But as I grew, the relationship changed. There was a maple tree in my woods that was five feet around at the base. It was a giant. A sentinel. When it finally fell, I didn’t see it as firewood. I wept. I cried for a tree because I had finally learned that we were part of the same community.

There was an island in our creek we called “Bugball Island.” I spent whole afternoons on Bugball Island, building forts and bridges that would be washed away in the inevitable wintertime floods.

We camped every year at Waldo Lake in Oregon. Remarkably clear water. Remarkably clear views of heaven. We would literally go up there for a month at a time sometimes. My mom would drive us up in one pickup truck, and my dad would stay home and go to work. On the weekends he’d come up in a separate pickup and we’d go adventuring to Taylor Burn or Wickiup Reservoir or Odell Lake.

But during the weeks we stayed close to Waldo Lake, canoeing, rock-hopping along the shore, or swimming either at the deep hole or the beach. My mom whittled old men out of bits of wood, prepared meals for hours, and we all did a great deal of reading.

There was a snow cabin at Waldo Lake. The door was padlocked, but it was meant to be accessible in the wintertime via a hatch built high up in a tower, above the snowline. That door was not padlocked. I do not know why. So we’d scale the building and sneak down inside to explore the tins of meat and firewood and old issues of Reader’s Digest contained therein.

I swam in rivers. I swam in lakes. I rode bicycles and crashed on red volcanic gravel at Camp Sherman.

Once, in Forestry School, I saw a raccoon that was as big as a small pig. It was the largest raccoon I’ve ever even heard of. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It looked like it was the size of a small bear. In fairness, I was across a small ravine. Google says the largest raccoons in the wild approach 70 pounds and up to 55 inches long. Which is much smaller than a bear. But Google wasn’t there. It was a portly, sizable raccoon. Nature!

Later, when I was a young married guy, we bought and remodeled a small home. Once, during the remodel, a woman came to the door and said she’d lived there as a girl, and could she have a look around? I happily showed her around and we talked awhile, and in return, she emailed me some photos of what the place looked like way back then.

The biggest difference I keyed into was that the backyards were all open to one another in those days. It was a great, well-kept orchard with grassy areas and garden plots throughout. Kids could go out the back of their homes and straight into the back of someone else’s, and they did. Community was more open to itself and more open to the natural world. I looked at my fence, I pondered the distance I felt from my neighbors, and I was sad.

After that, we moved to a beautiful place on three wooded acres that overlooked a sort of narrow creek bed that ran year-round. There were some small fishes in there, and many salamanders and all of the migratory birds in the whole world if you sat long enough to see them. I once, from my dining room, counted twelve egrets.

And now I live on a little farm of our own. We have a small gully that does not run year-round; it runs about half the time or better. We have no fishes, but we occasionally see ducks in season. It is a fairly developed property with defined fence rows and outbuildings. But I have plans. Plans for re-wilding, plans for multi-species development. I’ll bet you in a few more years we’ll see deer. A few years more and perhaps the nesting birds will come and stay.

A neighbor swears they saw a beaver on their land. A baby black bear ran across the road in front of my wife not three miles from the house. There is beauty in the world.

I am deeply affected by the coming of the Emerald Ash Borer Beetle. My wife is from a part of Canada that endured a beetle-kill. All of the spruce, just... gone. It took a dozen years or so, and it was gut-wrenching. The same is happening now, here, in our valley with our Ash trees. It won’t be long—they’ll be gone. I’m making plans for soil retention and species replacement. But the Ash trees will be gone and I am despondent when I think of it.

That is what this card means to me now. It means knowing the names of the roses. It means respecting the portly raccoons. It means looking at Chuck and seeing a peer, not a pet. It means being wise to invasive management and thinking about the future—not just today.

I have not always been an environmentalist. I have not always been kind to the wild things. But I have always been in love with the outdoors. And slowly, over forty years, I am learning how to stop conquering it and start fitting into it.

2026/01/30

This podcast will be a companion to my series of essays on basic human values.

It’s time to talk about the Values thing.

A while back, I found a tool called The Values Deck. It’s simple: fifty-seven cards. Each card has a basic human value printed on it, like “A World at Peace” or “True Friendship” or “Health” or “Family Security.”

You sort the cards. There’s a method to it. You sort and you sort until you get down to the five cards that represent the values affecting your actual life and your thinking processes right now.

I tell people: These are not a tattoo. They aren’t meant to be inked on your arm forever. They’re a window into your recent thinking, that’s all.

I sorted them myself and it was a neat experience. Then I sat with my kids, my friends, and my wife while they did the big sort. I felt honored to be present as some of them really resonated with the exercise.

So, naturally, I took my fun little deck of cards to a big campout and shared it with a few dozen people. Then my employees. Then customers. Then randos that work in production at my friend’s pie company.

And now? You.

The deck and the experiences I’ve had with it have changed my life. I want to know my own values, and I want others to know theirs. But when I try to explain why it matters, I usually get blank stares.

So, I’ve stopped trying to explain it. Instead, I’ve started drawing it.

I see our lives like a tree.

Our Lived Experiences fall on us like raindrops and sun rays. We’re no more able to control the things that happen to us than we are the wind or rain. They splash down into the soil of our existence.

That soil feeds our Values—the Roots of our tree. To say ‘Our Values’ is really just to say our deeply held observations of the human experience.

But roots don’t grow alone. They’re connected underground by mycorrhizae—fungal networks that link tree to tree, allowing them to share water, nutrients, even information. One tree feeds another. Your values are shaped by your experiences, but they’re also fed by your community, your relationships, the network that holds you up when you can’t hold yourself. We grow together. The mycorrhizae make it possible.

Those roots feed the Trunk: our Beliefs. Beliefs are what happens when our values crystallize into structure. When they’re healthy, beliefs give us stability and shape. When they calcify, they keep us from bending with the wind. This is where we begin to answer the questions our lived experiences keep asking.

Hidden from view, beneath the bark of our tree, we hit the cambium layer—the xylem and phloem. The lifeblood. This is our Vision and Mission.

* Vision is the Why.

* Mission is the How. Most people think these are just corporate buzzwords. But in our tree, this is where internal processes turn into action.

Finally, we get to the Crown. The leaves and the Fruit. This is our Goals, Tasks, and Time Management. The things we actually do with our hands, think with our minds, endorse with our choices.

Here is the problem.

On Sunday nights, I like to “attack” my week. I plan ahead. I open Google Calendar. I open Google Keep. I get psyched and synced. I focus all of my attention on the Fruit: Tasks. Time Management. To-Do Lists. If we’re really effective people we spend whole weekends just setting Goals.

But we almost never tend the Roots.

We don’t think about our Values. Many of us are afraid to even touch our Beliefs. So our Values grow unkempt and wild. Our Beliefs go stale and harden like an old toenail. And we wonder why the Fruit tastes bitter, or why the tree feels shaky in the wind.

I think there’s a better way. It starts not by polishing the fruit, but by watering the roots. By pruning branches, by minding the whole tree and looking out for diseases or pests that may undermine our beautiful structure.

I’ve done this little exercise with a bunch of people now. My old grandma. My young nieces. Friends and strangers. And everything indicates that people have a much better idea of what to do with their Time (The Fruit) if they’ve spent adequate time thinking about their Values (The Roots).

So, I’m starting a project.

The cards in my deck are numbered 1 through 57. I’m going to take some time to think and write about every single one of them.

Maybe it’ll be interesting. Maybe it’ll help me understand the exercise better myself. And maybe it’ll help you be more observant of your own roots and the mycorrhizae connecting you to everyone else. Welcome to the woods.