I never got to meet Glen Hansard, never had the good fortune or happenstance of two bodies occupying the same little bit of space at the same little fraction of time, but I’ll miss him all the same.

I don’t know why this passing, this headline I woke to yesterday morning in a sea of other bad news about this poor planet and it’s confused inhabitants, affected me as much as it did, but I have ideas about it.

I think the quote above says it plainly, the final bit of monologue and the response from the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town. I think it gets it right.

Human beings don’t realize life while they live it. Not every, every minute, some not even a second of their days. Too busy living it, too busy concerning themselves with things that they’ll one day see never mattered at all. Too lost in distraction, in desire, in mistaking constant movement for meaning, acquisition for understanding.

Do any humans ever realize life while they live it? Stage Manager says no. Single word, definitive, sure. Then adjusts a bit, just a bit, then adds a line that means everything to me:

The saints and poets, maybe they do some.

Glen was both, and I think that means he realized double.

The flood of remembrance that came yesterday, and continues today, floored me. The posts popping up like new clover after some Spring rain, scattered over Instagram and Threads, Substack, YouTube, and everywhere else we silly humans distract ourselves. Only this time, the Internets proved their worth, the social medias proved their value.

What a wake the world was giving him.

Grainy videos shot on mobile phones of two dozen different models, bits of him busking somewhere else on this spinning ball of light. Videos of his interviews, little gems of wisdom that fell out as though effortless, as though wisdom was a universal thing, and the sharing of it somehow natural. A thousand songs shared in a thousand places, it’s what we get to keep, it’s what we are so graced to hold now that he’s gone.

This is what happens when a life is spent in kindness, I cannot help but notice. This is the consequence of a legacy of compassion, of open-heartedness, of a gentle spirit. This outpouring, this bathing in shine.

All this got me thinking, and more got me looking closer at the way I live, at the realizing I am, or am not doing at this magical life while I’m here, living it.

I hope I’m doing it right, I hope I’m a fraction of the poet that Glen has always been, though I know I’ll never be the saint.

All I know is I hope I’m doing it right along the way. I hope I’m giving more than I am getting, I hope I’m showing up even when it’s hard. I hope I’m charming, like Glen is, I hope I am gracious and quick to forgive. I hope I have hope, even when it’s hard, and I hope I, like Glen, like the Irishman he is and the long line of Irishmen I come from, turn my sufferings into songs.

We’re here such a short time, some shorter than they deserve, than we deserve, and this often makes me tremble. I do not know what will come when I lose the ones I love, I do not know what will be whenever it is that I go. When my time in this body, with these hands, these words, these thoughts, is through.

I just know I’ll keep trying to do better, to be better, to offer more, to complain less. I’ll hope to charm but never swindle, to offer stories freely, and tell them with passion, the same he sang with every single time he performed.

I’ll look with kinder eyes, I’ll soften, I’ll learn more of grace.

More than all things, I will realize this life while I live it. Every, every minute. Like the saints do. Like the poets do.

Like Glen.

Travel well friend, though we never got the chance to meet.

Travel well.

I love you all.

Be good.

Become a Firekeeper

The passing of an artist I’ve loved, admired, followed, and cherished for a long time. Glen Hansard, the Irish singer, frontman to The Frames, solo-artist from busking Dublin to winning an Oscar for his song in the film Once, passed away after a motorcycle crash outside of Dublin.

We’re heartbroken, and wanted to just briefly offer a tribute, a thank you, to a man that brought so much beauty, gentleness, and music, to our lives. Thank you Glen, and all our love and best wishes go out to your family. We will listen and listen and listen and be so lucky for your voice in our ears.

I hope you enjoy the Inside Signal Fire today, and I cannot wait to hear your answers below to the questions I ask.

Before we get into the poem, I do have two to ask all of you that so generously support this community, so do take the time.

What time of day is best for the upcoming Fireside Chats that will be held live on Zoom or Google Meet? And are weekdays or weekends better?

Now, listen to some Glen Hansard today, and enjoy the poem below.

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Become a Firekeeper

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Few things in this fragile life are more challenging, than allowing ourselves to be truly, authentically, completely Seen.

Or so I’m told. I’m delightfully and, for some, distractingly unaware of anything OTHER than being seen as I truly am, so I sometimes forget that others aren’t. Recently, I was reminded of this, which brought me to today’s life reaffirming, life adjusting, prompt.

Let’s do this…

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Heating up frozen berries for oatmeal a few weeks ago, something strange happened: The timer went off, the berries sufficiently melted, I opened the door, grabbed the bowl, and then the microwave turned back on and started microwaving again. With the door wide open. Sarah and I clearly and desperately need a new microwave.

The next step was taken wi…

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As I said, June was chaos, it was movement, it was busy, it was family, it was full.

You’ve seen 2 weeks worth of photos, so it’s time to wrap it up, to show you how June ended, after all that frantic motion.

Buckle in, enjoy, and see how this beautiful month finally winded down.

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The night before the big Gregory Alan Isakov concert, we had the unbelievably fun Thrift Store Fancy Dinner. Everyone had to go to a thrift store and completely source their entire outfit for the meal. Originally, it was supposed to also be kickball in our outfits, and we all had specially chosen “Walk Up” songs that we each got to pick to represent ourselves. Again the heat caught up and instead of using the songs for Kickball, we used them to do a runway fashion show. Each person got their lap around the entire little soaking pool to do whatever they wished to do in their outfit. It. Was. Amazing.

To say everyone brought it would be an unfair understatement. Everyone put everything they had into their little 30 second to 1 minute time in the spotlight. I don’t know if 14 people have ever laughed hard, longer, and shouted support more triumphantly. My family is an odd one, and I really do chalk so much of it up to the bizarre way the original 5 Gregsons grew up. We were all we had, and we lived all over the United States being each others only best friends, confidants, and partners in crime. That bonds you, and plants a seed of deep unseriousness to bigger things that really shouldn’t matter. Seek fun, seek silliness, and seek connection. That’s what we’re about.

Above you can see the outfits our little fam rocked. Yeah. We delivered.

After this, we went over the pass to Jackson, as we were staying just outside in Victor, MT because we’re not billionaires and we also don’t like crowds. We wandered for the day, Sarah and Addie got matching insanely rad jean jackets, and then we rode the big gondola up to the very top of Snow King Mountain to watch my best good buddy, Gregory Alan Isakov perform for a huge crowd of adoring fans.

He always puts on such an unbelievable show, and it was so fun after to finally introduce the entire rest of my family to his band. They’ve all known Gregory since our wedding in Scotland, but they hadn’t met the band yet, his amazing group of musicians that Sarah and I have been lucky to know for just a hair under two decades. His music was stunning, the Tetons in the back were breathtaking, and we all had a magical time, truly.

Made our way back down the gondola, this time at that final fading hour before the sky goes all the way black, and got to see the lights of Jackson shining like little stars sticking earthbound. The next morning we got an early start and ventured back home, stopped by cows that were blocking the road, landscapes that looked like a Windows 96 wallpaper, and storm clouds that would prove, by the time we got home, to be much more than just threatening.

Addie got positively drenched on our walk, we all did, and it felt so good to not run from the rain, but just sit inside it. I think far too often we try to avoid getting wet, rather than just embracing it like we used to when we were kids. We do this for so many things, don’t we?

The month ended with Berto having her two new friends from California come up to visit. They all are roommates at Cal Poly, and they hadn’t been to Montana before, so we spent the afternoon showing them around.

All in all, a month to remember, a month for the record books as far as furious and feverish motion. One I’ll treasure for a long, long time.

I think we all will.

I love you all.

Be good.

Become a Firekeeper

We’re back, and today I discuss some rad and sweeping changes, I ask YOU some questions, and I lay the groundwork for what this beautiful little Wednesday tradition will become.

There’s a lot of radness ahead, including, Monthly Zoom Gatherings, LIVE poetry readings, and a lot more building of this amazing community that just couldn’t be better. I think Nicole said it best, when she said this about being a Firekeeper here, one of the few that helps keep Signal Fire burning:

Anyway, thank you all for being here, for being part of this. It means the entire world. If you’d like to help keep it alive, and be around for the monthly Zoom gatherings, the Live poetry readings, and the best community on the Internets, you can do so by clicking the button below.

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Poems of the day below!

I love you all.

Be good.

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There are movies about saying Yes to everything, there are self-help books, podcasts, and endless chatter about FOMO and how it’s best to avoid it. What if, what if, they are wrong?

What if NO is courageous? What if it’s bravery in refusing to acquiesce to everyone, about everything? What if, indeed?

Let’s do this…

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I was probably fourteen years old the first moment I picked up a camera with purpose, with intention. I remember the Canon AE-1 and the way it smelled, the sound of the film advance lever when you pulled it to ready it to make another photograph, the little light meter that bounced and danced inside the viewfinder when you tried your damndest to get the manual settings of aperture and shutter speed just right for the film you were using. I remember the mechanical click when you finally pushed the shutter button.

I remember Doug, the guy who owned his own photography darkroom here in Helena, MT when I was just a teenager, and I remember his kindness when he offered to teach me how to do it, when all I called for was to see if he’d develop a few rolls of film for me. I remember going around town with him and him letting me use his large format old-fashioned camera, those strange beauties that sit on tripods and come with a hood to look inside. I remember the smell of the chemicals and him teaching me that the red light you see in darkrooms in movies only work for black and white photographs, they ruin everything else.

I remember falling in love with photography the moment I first saw an image I made come to life in that bath of chemicals. I remember the clothespins that hung my first image up on the line to dry, a photograph of my dog Clancy on the back deck of the home I’d spent the last decade growing up in. Something I couldn’t possibly bear the thought of losing.

We photograph what we love the most.

In 30 years of making images, I see this in the thousands and thousands of pictures I’ve taken of Sarah, from the first on November 12, 2009, to the ones I took last night on our routine walk after dinner with Gilly. I see it in the way she’s aged, the silver that spread like slow moonlight over the wavy surface of her hair, in the laugh lines that are emerging from almost two decades of directly laughing at some stupid nonsense I’m engaged in.

I see it in her ease with herself, the version of her she’d been waiting to grow into but life and fear and self-consciousness held her back from. I see it in the beauty that comes with a settled heart, the peace of being accepted as you are, as you wish to be. The images tell the story of her growth into this woman, this world-wandering whirlwind of a woman who holds more in her heart than I ever knew could fit. She of mountaintop or jagged-ragged coastline, of ice cream held up to mouth like trophy, of arm around those she loves, of smile that beams bright enough to over-expose the images I try to make. Slow growth, slow settling into a hum of heart-sound and gentle song.

There was the man I captured mid-prayer in some cathedral we wandered into. Stained glass light behind him, leaned over with what felt like grief, hands clasped together and eyes-closed. He looked up at the cross on the far side of the apse for a moment or two like he was looking for answers to questions I knew I’d never know, but somehow, understood. There are the workers cleaning windows or painting signs in small coastal villages in Scotland and Ireland, living lives I’ll never live, knowing things I’ll never know. The mid-prayer man, the woman smoking the cigarette outside the pub, hell, the horse on the windswept western edge of a tiny green island in a huge sea of blue, all these looking beyond me to something I cannot see. All these, carried home time and again in a little square of shine, still alive, still asking those secret questions.

Thirty years chasing the light, naming a company for it, building a life around this seeking. Thirty years looking for it, watching it shift and morph and pass slowly over green hillsides and grey mountains, over the faces of those I cherish, over strangers after seventeen years of doing this professionally. Thirty years of light chasing only to come home, to sit down to write poetry or essays, haiku or letters, and without fail it’s the shadows I always reach for first. The heart of the seeking, the opposites that live quietly next to each other, but it’s shadow that pulls me in, the dark I long for in image, in words, in life. The softness of a stormy morning instead of blinding sunshine that overwhelms my autism, the rumble of thunder and the blanket of grey clouds that roll in from the west. The parts of me that feel like the minutes after twilight, not sunrise.

These contradictions, in art, in life, in me.

These that live in the in-between moments, not the posed moments at weddings we work or at family gatherings where all say cheese at the same time. Not those that feel planned or thought out, not those of attempt and curation, but those when someone thinks the camera has turned away, that the finger has been lifted from the shutter release. The accidental frames, the blurred edges with light leaks. These I save more than all others.

I am still learning to see. After thirty years with a camera around my neck, I think that’s the whole point.

Scattered across this office, this house, the great big cloud that exists somewhere my mind still wants to say is Up, there is a photograph of a dog on a back deck, probably overexposed, probably slightly out of focus, taken by a fourteen year old boy who didn’t have any idea what he was doing. Who didn’t know he was learning not to make images, but to pay attention. Who didn’t know that was the same thing as learning to truly love.

Somewhere are ten thousand thousand photographs of Sarah in every single state of grace between first meeting and last night’s walk with soft sprinkling from an early Summer storm.

Photographs of something I couldn’t bear to lose, so I pointed the lens at it, pushed the button, and saved.

I love you all.

Be good.

Become a Firekeeper

Song of the Week

The drive to Spokane is a gorgeous one this time of year, things were finally green (though we know it will not stay) and the 4.5 hours flew by. We’ve found, and I wonder if you’re the same, that if we try to listen to podcasts instead of just music and talking to each other, the drive draaaaaaags on forever. I don’t know what it is, time just goes so slowly in the car when we try podcasts, no matter what they are about, so we mostly just talk each other’s ears off, then remark about how insane that is after knowing one another 17 years and being together so long. How do we never run out?

Anyway, let’s get onto the photos of what happened, the stories behind them. Why not?

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Pulled into Spokane on McGraw’s birthday, bought her a balloon that said “Another Birthday? No Big Dill” and it was rad. We all met at the downtown thrift stores so we could shop for the Fancy Thrift Store Dinner we were going to have once we all got together in Jackson, WY the following week. To say we all nailed it is an understatement.

The following day we had to prep for Griffin’s big graduation party with a friend. They had it at my sister Rian’s house, and they rented a 24 foot tall bouncy waterslide for the event. It was fast as F even without water, as Rian sliding down can attest to. Sarah and I both tried it, and you’ll see her photo below, just to get a real sense of the “Holy shit this is steeper than we thought” sensation it gave you.

Party was a rousing success, and graduation was HUGE compared to Addie’s. Their graduating class was double the size, so the entire thing had to be held at this massive sports facility downtown. Somehow though, the entire thing was about 45 minutes shorter than Addie’s little one. Wild.

It’s a strange thing to watch your nieces, nephews, and children (step, or otherwise) grow up and grow older and stop being kids, and start being little adults. It’s strange watching them do the things you swear you just did yesterday, until someone reminds you it was actually almost 30 years ago. I do not understand how time moves the way it does, so swiftly when you wish it slow, so slowly when you’re in any kind of pain. I don’t know if we’re meant to know, in truth. Just go with it, just forward, just breathe and listen to everything.

We all caravan drove down to Jackson together, as there are too many to fit in less cars, so we had this funny little train of people all related to one another careening down the highway headed for the first big reunion we’ve really had since Sarah and I drug everyone to Scotland in 2019. We stopped a few times along the way, sometimes to take photographs, sometimes to get people Root Beer Floats at the Frostop which looks like it’s straight out of a 1970s Western film, and I even spotted my all-time dream car: El Camino. It was pristine, and I gave it all the attention it deserved.

Once arriving at the Airbnb we were going to all share, yes, all 14 of us under one roof, we were blown away by the views of the Tetons around us, and the space in the house to all be together. Hilarity usually follows my family, and we all were given inflatable costumes to wear for a family photograph, and originally to play kick-ball in, but it was so hot outside, and even hotter inside the suits, we decided heat stroke wasn’t a cost we were willing to pay, so we just goofed around in them awhile. I’ll say this about us: We don’t shy away from being silly.

The Tetons were breathtaking, the time with family so monumentally valuable. To be together, all of us, was beautiful, and we had more silly fun than we even knew what to do with. You’ll see more of it in the next post, but the first few days were just spending time, long conversations in sunset light, and finally a hike up into the forest to catch a special glimpse, a lot closer up, of those magical Tetons that loomed around us the entire time we were there.

The French fur trappers named the mountains Les Trois Tétons, which literally translates to The Three Breasts, and I’m guessing because 1) they might kind of, if you’re really reaching, resemble breasts, but mostly B) Because they were far from home, far from their spouses, and all horny and lonely. To commemorate the occasion, the name of them, and their splendor, I flashed my own Tetons to theirs.

I think we bonded.

More to come, a final installment of June through my eyes and my camera’s lens.

I hope you like them.

I love you all.

Be good.

I read a book when I was a kid, “Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff” and it really, really stuck with me. I remember reading it in a bathroom in Los Angeles and just finally, for the first time, understanding that “it’s all small stuff” like the book’s subtitle said.

Saying that, I want to prompt something a little bit different today, a twist on that old adage above. You’ll see.

Let’s do this…

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If you were to stack every Typewriter Series poem I have ever written, all those on tattered old scraps of paper, the receipts from Irish pubs, the free hotel pads they leave next to the bible on the nightstand, the centuries-old sketchbooks I was given by friends who know antiques, that stack would reach almost four feet high. If only you could keep it from tipping over.

Take the un-mailed letters I wrote to Sarah in all that time I spent waiting to finally be together, fold them up like letters fold up before they get slid into envelopes, and make another stack beside it. That stack would tower over it, a hair over 19 feet tall if my back-of-the-napkin math is correct.

This is time and its passing.

This is the accumulation of the days I was sick, those I was worn out, exhausted, saddled with sadness, defeated. These are those of such longing, of ache. These are days of travel, of stillness, of rainfall, blizzard, boiling heat, or thunderstorm. Each poem, each letter, a promise I was making to no one, every morning I woke and felt the weight of all those words pressing on the inside of me.

I do not know why I do this, and I have never known. Sarah has stopped asking too, accepts it as one in a long line of unchangeable things about me that are either charming or chaotic, depending on the day. These stacks, imaginary representations of very real things, are the shape of me pressed into something organized, something tangible, though I’ll never hold them. Not really. The poems are in binders, the letters never actually slid into envelopes, but they still hold the precise textures of every single day I spent creating them.

There are the mornings in Edinburgh, the light just peeking over the crow-stepped gables of the Royal Mile, when I woke early and left Sarah sleeping in the little cupboard bed off the kitchen to write a haiku on the back of our grocery receipt. The poems typed during rainstorm on a typewriter made almost a century ago, the little dimple that matched precisely the shape of my ass in the computer chair I bought on clearance from a Staples I didn’t even know was still in business. There is the cycling on and off of our central heating, the aging of Gilly as he sat beside me over the years of my writing. I wake and I write, I eat and I find scraps to jot down the words that rattle in my busy mind. I do these things, over and again, these invisible acts, these nothing moments that no one would ever ask me about. These moments, these promises, are closer to who I am more than almost anything I’ve ever published.

I have done this so long, so very long, that I cannot possibly remember ever being a person who didn’t.

The Typewriter Series poems, over 3,310 of them, on all those discarded scraps of paper that were destined for some landfill. The haiku, good lord the haiku, almost 4,500 days in a row writing seventeen syllables onto a tiny piece of paper before I’d even had a bite of breakfast. So many haiku that 5,7,5, is tattooed on my inner-right wrist, a reminder to that strange unnecessary dedication. The letters to Sarah, all those I wrote in the ache of what felt like an eternity of waiting, when she was someone I was hoping for instead of sleeping beside in the quiet hours each night. All these shadow missives to a woman who hardly knew I was even writing to her. Even the workouts, those boring things no one wants to ever hear about, all those I refuse to skip unless it feels like Death is quietly knocking on the doorframe to my body. 11am almost every day of the week, the days I tell myself “THIS TIME it’ll get rid of the headache,” and then hope it doesn’t make it worse.

The part I keep forgetting?

Almost all the time, no one really knew about any of it. No one really had to, no one held me to anything. The letters still aren’t sent, no one would have cared or even noticed if I didn’t post a haiku some morning, the Typewriter Series poems could have stopped, restarted, or disappeared without a trace and I guarantee maybe only three family members would have asked why. The workouts were almost all done in my old dank basement where the ceiling was so low I couldn’t lift my hands above my head, and the pullup bar was in the doorway to the kitchen. I knocked myself out cold on it one day, running in to answer a phone call and forgetting I had it hung up. I still have a lump from it on my forehead. All I created, all the promises I made to myself, and no one really knew.

But I knew. I always knew. I kept a strange little ledger in my soul I think, a little old-fashioned one that maybe General Store owners would keep during the pioneer days, and every time I made another entry. If only to stop that feeling from creeping up and creeping in that not doing the thing, that breaking that promise, would make a ghost of me.

I think a secret that no one ever says out loud about a long personal project, and I do use the word secret intentionally because the moment you announce it the spell weakens, is that the project isn’t even the point. Not really, not at all. The Typewriter Series poems weren’t the point, the haiku weren’t the point, the letters to Sarah, the boring workouts that should never be a topic of conversation, absolutely not the point. The point was just the person that you become in the room when no one else is watching, when no one is there to hold you to the promises you made. The accumulation of all that time, but more, the day that comes and you realize that it all added up, all those invisible secret mornings, to a self that you can live inside. A soul you’re proud of.

I’ve got a four foot stack of Typewriter Series poems, I’ve got a 20 foot tower of letters beside it. I’ve got a chair that knows the exact curve of my buns, and I’ve got a wife that now sleeps beside me every night, who won’t ever hold those letters in her hands most likely.

I’ve also got all those mornings in Edinburgh, Scotland or Boerne, Texas, or Middlesex, New Jersey or even simple little Helena, Montana.

I’ve got the closest version of myself I’ll ever reach. A little tiny spiritual movement of one.

The storm rolls in, the storm rolls out, Gilly sleeps and chases bunnies in his dreams beside me.

I make a new promise to no one again. Again, this is enough.

I love you all.

Be good.

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June. My goodness, June. I don’t know if we’ve had a month as packed, as chockablock, as stuffed to the absolute gills, in a long, long time. June was chaos, it was madness, it was motion, more than anything. Non.Stop.Motion..

Two graduations, a family reunion in Jackson, WY, and almost 20 hours of driving, all stuffed into just the first three weeks. Full, in every single sense of the word. Time, heart, soul, stimulation, all of it.

Here is part 1 of 3, because there were just too many photographs of too many things, and I want you all along for the ride.

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Onward.

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June began almost instantly with a bang. After Sarah spent time planting more things, as she absolutely adores planting things, we wrapped up the absolute final high school sports things for Addie. A tennis dinner to celebrate the end of her first, and last, year of tennis let us get a cool view of our downtown that we hadn’t really gotten to see much before, as it was held in a brewery, and neither of us drink haha. We also found 3 4-leaf clovers in our yard, and then I found a FIVE leaf one, which I’d never, ever seen before and think it must be even more luck than 4. Right? Hopefully it’s not a bad omen hiding that I don’t know about.

Fam cam into town to celebrate Addie’s high school graduation, all the way from Spokane, WA, and we got to give McGraw her birthday gift from her husband, Pat, early. She’s now officially a member of the Fuij club, as I helped him find a fantastic Fuji x100f all the way from China. Berto also surprised us by getting in early, and then did a bunch of henna art on everyone the night before graduation. Rad.

Graduation was emotional, as per usual, but luckily we had to host the big graduation party for Addie and her two friends immediately after, so Sarah didn’t have as much time to get overwhelmingly tearful. I think she was appreciative of needing to keep her hands, and heart, busy. Addie also surprised ME during the ceremony, by having them add Gregson to her name when they called her out to walk across the stage. My whole family cried, as both my older sisters no longer carry Gregson as their last name, so this was a first in all the years of hearing kids names called out at sports or anything else. Yeah. I cried.

Sarah looked beautiful, as usual. No surprise there.

I found a crazy giant cicada that had the most iridescent wings I’d ever seen on one of our nightly walks, and then, before I even understood what happened, we were back in a car and driving to Spokane, Washington. Time to repay the favor my family did for Addie, and attend my nephew, Griffin’s, graduation.

The trip was magical, and it was so wonderful to have the entire family together again. A little preview of sorts to the weekend that would follow it, where we all, and I mean ALL, hit the road together. You’ll see. Plenty more magic to come.

I love you all.

Be good.

We cover a gamut of weird stuff today, from Gilly rolling in dead animals, to Addie gagging from it, to being interrupted reading the poem by a crow that wanted for us to go back inside to avoid aforementioned lightning strike.

Just the good stuff, really.

Ask us more questions so we have more to answer, cause the 3 today were FUN.

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Poem is below, as per usual.

I love you all.

Be good.

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Yesterday, dearest of friends, I turned 45 years old. I’m halfway through my forties to my fifties, which makes me feel so bizarrely old. 50, while still five years away, just seems so close now. Sarah said “You’re almost 50!” which helped hahaha.

It’s wild getting older, and as you all know my feelings on birthdays, this time around, I wanted to flip the script and give YOU something. *Pssst…SHOP DISCOUNTS too!!*

Let’s do this…

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Today is a day sandwiched between two of greater importance for me, for my little life. Yesterday was Independence Day, the great 4th of July that is celebrated with fireworks and revelry here in these United States, one that feels somehow sadder this year than in any I can remember. Tomorrow, is my birthday, and I will somehow be 45 years old, halfway through my 40s, and it just doesn’t feel real.

A lot has changed in the 23 years since I began writing publicly on the internets, even more in the 14 since I began the Typewriter Series that brought most of you here. I’ve grown, I’ve learned, I’ve changed, and I’ve allowed my priorities, my pressures, my entire outlook on this world and where it’s going, to shift. I’m not the same me that I was, and I feel more rebelliousness in spirit than ever before. In so many ways I feel like this world has become so much more tyrannical, in some ways subtle, in others overt and glaring, and, like the founding fathers before me, I feel the need to fight against it.

To declare my independence from that tyranny.

This is what that is, this is my own Personal Declaration of Independence from the tyranny of should, and have to, and the dictatorship of all things suffocating—online or off. The refusal to bow a single day longer to social media, to algorithms, to simple going along to get along. Tomorrow is my birthday, but I shall not wait until 45, I shall begin now, here, today. Here is what I declare, here are the words I shall pen:

When in the course of a single, simple human life it becomes necessary to refuse to acquiesce to the unwritten and unagreed upon contracts bestowed upon us, certain declarations of truth must be made.

I hold these truths to be self-evident:

That all human beings are created equal and as such deserve equal access to the freedom from the tyrannical rule of a life of quiet suffocation. That our worth is not earned through our exhaustion, nor defined by our output or optimization. That we not obligated to perform or curate our existence for the approval of strangers, of systems, of screens.

This freedom shall forever include the right to rest with zero guilt, to create without conformity or collusion with artificial intelligence, to speak freely without polish or perfection, to decline without apology, to choose purposefully a smaller, simpler, and more deeply connected life over a louder, fancier, emptier one.

For far too many years we have unwillingly submitted ourselves to the whims and whips, the terrifying tyranny of Should. These the relentless screeching decrees instructing us on who be, what we shall desire, what holds worth or value, and how we should appear. A thousand thousand mandates we’re given and held to by invisible strings connected to invisible hands, we the marionnettes that dance, the Pinocchios wishing to be real.

We should do more.
We should be more.
We should want more.
We should keep up.
We should surpass.
We should buy.
We should compare.
We should perform.

Years we have endured this silent dictatorship, years we’ve suffered under the endless occupation of our precious time and attention. Years we have called our hands devil’s workshops should they fall idle, years we have held ourselves to the unreachable heights of bars we set for ourselves and imagine them universal.

We have long bent the knee to algorithmic royalty, measured our humanity in metrics, convinced ourselves that visibility is value. Long we have bowed to strict posting schedules and analytics of our audiences, mistook followers for friends. We have scrolled endless scrolls and paid tribute to the false gods of the next thing to emerge before us.

We have turned ourselves, we collective group of companions weary of these ways, into mouths that speak Yes when our souls plead No. We have spread the lie that busyness of existence holds some secret to success, that people pleasing is kindness, that compassion is a commodity limited and commercially backed. We are governed by a set of rules not of our making, an urgency and chaos not of our design, and held to standards we did not set, expectations we never agreed to carry.

This is not, and never has been, Freedom.

Therefore, on this day, I declare myself independent.

Independent from the Tyranny of Should.
Independent from social media standards and pressures.
Independent from the false rule of productivity.
Independent from pressures to apply branding to a human life.
Independent from saying Yes to preserve comfort over truth.
Independent from dimming my light to protect other’s eyes.
Independent from shrinking to fit spaces I have long outgrown.
Independent from seeking validation from strangers.
Independent from going along to get along.

I shall henceforth:

Reclaim the independence of my own attention.
Reclaim and defend the borders of my precious time.
Reclaim the right to move slowly through this stunning world.
Reclaim the courage to refuse expectation.
Reclaim the quiet bravery of a very honest No.

Let it be known, let it be shared widely that I will never again trade depth for distraction and display, sacrifice presence for the promise of something more exciting, confuse the creation of noise for purpose, the static of settling for music. I will never again kneel to any system that profits from my great discomfort.

I choose only a life of directed meaning, of soul soothing harmony. I choose alignment, not algorithm, patience over productivity, peace over divide.

I choose freedom.

I pledge myself to this independence, to this clarity of inner nature, the simplicity of this truth.

I choose freedom.

Signed proudly on this day before the celebration of my birth,

I love you all.

Be good.

Tomorrow I turn 45. If you’ve read this far and felt it land, the greatest gift you could ever give me is simple: Come inside. Join the paid community. Be part of what we’re building here. Not for me, For You. This is where the Declaration becomes a conversation.

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I am lucky.

In the years I’ve done what I do, written poems, taken photographs of beautiful things in beautiful places, sometimes I’ve been afforded opportunities to do really weird, cool stuff.

A few years back, an amazing guy reached out and asked if I’d be willing to write him not one, but 12 different custom poems, one for each month of the year, to give as gifts to someone he loves. He told me a huge array of stories, from skinny dipping in mountain lakes, to listening to music under the dark and starlit sky.

I wrote him 12 poems, and after watching my best good buddy Gregory Alan Isakov perform live outside atop Snow King Mountain in Jackson, WY, one of them just felt too perfect, like even though I wrote it for the gentlemen who ordered the 12 poems, it was also for me, too.

Maybe they all were, in the end. Pieces of me, shining out of stories from him.

Here is the poem I wrote that felt too perfect after the concert we went to.

The spoken word is below, for those who love it.

Finally, the generous support of our beautiful paid community makes these posts free for everyone. They get some groovy extras, obviously, but it’s through their patronage I’m able to keep this Signal Fire alive. I need all the help I can get, so if you’ve got it to spare, upgrading your membership goes a long, long way. Click the button below and it shall be so.

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I love you all, here’s the poem, and the spoken word version:

I love you all.

Be good.

Anyway, onto the show. We talk about Love Island, we talk about wanting so desperately to add more Domestic Elopements to our schedule, really getting to explore this beautiful country more with you, and I read you a poem.

All in all, a nice little Wednesday afternoon.

As always, the only way I’m able to run this whole Signal Fire is with the support of the Paid community, so if you wanna say Thank You (and give me an early birthday present!) to keep the lights on, just upgrade by clicking the button below. Easy peasy.

The poem I read is just below the jump.

I Love you all.

Be good.

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We can learn from one another, you know? We can share, we can reach out, across, we can understand.

We can use what we have learned to shape ourselves into something more. Something bigger, better, something kinder.

What’s more, we can help each other. Let’s do this…

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Some griefs are unnameable. Some sadness sits on the edge of definition, flirts with the terms and words we use to categorize. Some, do not.

We know the way to mourn the loss of something specific, we have learned grief when a person, a place, a season, passes on or passes by. What then of those we’ve not yet named, what of those that ache in an unreachable place? What of the grief that comes when you sense with perfect clarity that the world itself is becoming less than it once was? That something is thinning.

That something that once was, faded away forever.

When trapped in the strange limbo that is airport travel recently, I stumbled across a random post that broke my heart because it combined two potent drugs my silly mind is known to crave: Nostalgia, and Fantasy.

It was about Lord of the Rings, in a way, but more than that it was about J.R.R. Tolkien himself, the man behind the words, the story, we all came to know and love. It spoke of what happens after LOTR ends, what becomes of Middle Earth long after Aragorn rules, the Elves depart for Valinor, the Dwarves mine deeper and deeper and more and more secluded into the earth, the Hobbits live in seclusion and eventually becoming completely invisible to the world of Men. The world of Men who are all that remain on Middle Earth, all whom continue on into the Fourth Age and beyond.

Enough time passes, and those same men begin to wonder if there truly was anything before them, if all those stories were merely myth, merely bedtime tales to soothe, or startle into submission, restless children.

I know this is a nerdy post, I know I’m really really showing my freak flag here, but this kills me, and knowing more of who Tolkien was, and when he wrote it, doubly so.

Tolkien lived through the very first World War before watching industrialization completely transform the England he called home. He sat on the precipice of change after World War II, after a great evil was defeated at great cost, war spreading over the countryside that was being swallowed day by day by modernization and progress. He saw old stories being dismissed as superstition, he saw things changing, forgetting, and felt what he once described as a “heart-racking sense of the vanished past” in a letter to his own son. Knowing this, the entire trilogy changes, the entire adventure becomes reframed. Forever I was in awe of Tolkien’s ability to imagine some new world, to build it with his creativity. Now I know different, Tolkien wasn’t imagining a world, he was documenting the departure of one. Of ours, in turn.

Think of it this way, if you’ll allow me to nerd out further: The Elves sailing West forever, and all those that did not fading in both body and spirit over time? Don’t we see this happen time and again in the form of our own elders, haven’t we seen all those that know the names of the plants, the shapes of every constellations, those that carried the oral traditions down, those beautiful native cultures that knew how to truly hear nature and this world of ours, fade away as this world refused to make space for them?

The Dwarves who go underground, who retreat into a world of greed and acquisition, digging further and further for the accumulation of great wealth, those who spend so much time toiling for more, that they forget the sky above them, that there ever was a sky at all. Are they not represented all around us in corporate greed, in the having of more than we could ever possibly need, the hoarding when others stay empty?

The Hobbits, dear hobbits. Forgotten by a world of Men because they lived such small, beautiful, rooted lives dictated by seasonal rhythms, by second breakfasts, elevensies, pipe weed, and parties. They are erased because simply put, no one bothered to notice, they built no monuments to themselves, they lived in harmony with the countryside that got replaced by industry. Lost with them every folk practice, every name for every kind of rainfall or storm, bird, fox, or vegetable they grow.

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So what remains? Us. Us who wonder if any of those stories were ever real, at all. This is us, the disenchanted, the doubters, those who hear the myths and believe them false, who ask and ask again “Were they all just stories, in the end?” Yes, yes, and yes again. Myth, and only myth.

This is where magic fades. This is where we forget it ever existed in the first place. This is where the true lesson of Lord of the Rings emerges: the magic of Middle Earth doesn’t explode with Mount Doom, it doesn’t collapse in some great and terrible battle at the end of the Third Age, it’s simply forgotten.

It simply fades away.

Middle Earth is OUR Earth, only much, much earlier. If Frodo and Sam wandered their way to Mordor sometime in the Third Age, I sit here writing you in my own hobbit hole, sometime in the Sixth or Seventh. The land has changed, the seas have changed, the Misty Mountains have moved and merged and cities have sunk and burned and been buried by forests, but it’s here, it’s around us, all around us as we are lost in the disconnect from it, and from the myths it carried so far, and so long.

The tragedy in Tolkien’s story, the tragedy befalling us, is not that Middle Earth and its magic was destroyed, it’s that people just stopped believing it was ever there, at all.

I read his story now, and read it as both elegy and prescription. I read it as a testament to the power of re-enchantment, and as a dire need for it. To rediscover myth and the power behind it, to believe again, to make new stories, to pass them down again. Tolkien believed myth-making as not some childish pursuit, he believed it was the most adult thing a person could do, because it’s in creation that we reach back back back to what we were before we became so damn certain about all things. Before we ruined what could be it with what is.

We traded fairy tales for algorithmic feeds, time to create myth with perfect productivity. We’ve bulldozed forests to put up parking lots, we’ve replaced wonder with optimization, we’ve turned curiosity into a side-hustle.

Like imagination that I lamented a few weeks back, magic has been commercialized and bastardized and we convinced ourselves that the world isn’t magical anymore anyway.

The world didn’t change, friends. We did.

I just want to believe again, and I want others to do the same. Tolkien believed humans were meant to create stories, not as an escape, but as a recovery, as a prescription to SEE again. To walk this world and see ordinary things with fresh, with extraordinary, eyes.

We need Gandalf returning at “First light on the Fifth Day” and charging in with a hurricane of light and joy and hope. We need this hope, we need this light, we need to drive back the orcs and Uruk-Hai and cave trolls and evil dark wizards that are destroying all we love of this perfect perfect Middle Earth we share.

The Elves have sailed on, the Dwarves are underground, the Hobbits have long since been forgotten. But we are here, this world of Men (he meant all of us), this world of Humans who remain and still have the power to bring it all back.

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You’re here, reading this, which means some part of you still remembers, or wants to. This is the first act in Tolkien’s beloved myth-making, the first sign of true resistance about what surrounds us. This is the first step back into believing again.

Tell the stories. Write new myths. Name everything your curiosity seeks. Do as Tolkien begged and “Look at green again, and be startled anew.”

Do not abide the fading of magic, do not abide the forgetting of myth.

Fight back, the only way that’s ever worked. Making true things and passing them on.

I love you all.

Be good.

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Alas, the end of May has arrived! Also, it’s a palindromic date today, 6.26.26. Amazing. Anyways, today is the final third, the final bits of the final month before Summer (usually) arrives here in Montana and we all get to remember heat again. And smoke. And fire. And sweat. Ahh, but not yet. Not yet.

Here is the final journey through May, the closing of a chapter, the turning of a page. We saw more, did things, and I took photos the whole way through. As per usual my dudes. As per usual.

If you love these, join the family with a paid subscription. It literally is the only way I can keep doing these, and not have to get a different job that wouldn’t let me take photographs ever again. Cue Tears.

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Here goes, the last bits and bobs of May:

Click to view on the website, which lets you view these bigger and scroll through the gallery.

For the first time ever, Sarah hit golf balls. She’s a lefty, so having our niece Banks in town let her actually experience the slapping of a little white ball with a big metal stick, as Banks is also left-handed. She did shockingly not shockingly well, she’s good at all things she tries, and I wonder a little if she kinda got bit by the golf bug. I used to play, but now cannot really afford it anymore so don’t much, but I will say, there are a lot worse ways to kill a few hours of time in a beautiful place. It’s just you that you compete against, and mostly it’s trying to stay calm when you shank balls the opposite direction you were aiming. Still though, it’s good to be outside and off phones, right? We then wandered downtown, and finally ventured up to Elliston to see the family that was staying up there in the forest.

As mentioned, a massive forest fire broke out and it was eerily visible from the front steps of my folk’s forest house. Yikes. I think it’s out now that a few more weeks have passed, but it burned over 2,000 acres. That’s a lot. Also, Gilly loved being deep in the woods so much, he promptly rolled in bear shit and we had to outdoor bathe him in freezing cold water. That was fun?

Back into town for the remainder of the month, I snapped the Last Chance Waterpark because it too felt exactly like the pool in Stranger Things. Inside, and out. Trust me. More flowers, more sunsets, more crazy storms that shook the world with all its lightning and thunder.

We stopped at the cemetery at Fort Harrison on Memorial Day to meet Sarah’s folks at her grandfather’s grave. They do it every year, a thank you to a man who served, and it was beautiful to see their tradition, photograph the most insanely gorgeous stormy sunset that filled the sky with contrast and grace.

Had two beautiful run-ins with tiny little lovely things in the form of a ladybug (ladybird to my UK friends) and a big old beautiful Comma butterfly. She floated around Sarah and I for about 5 minutes while we stood still and watched her, before landing on my head and staying there for the entire walk down to my Mom’s house. Almost 20 minutes straight of just sitting on my head, watching the world go by.

I firmly believe, if you’re gentle with the world, it will respond in little connections, just like this.

Finished the month with a strange weather shift from heat to cold, from dry to rainy and foggy and more Irish than Montana is used to. It was so refreshing and gorgeous to walk through a world we usually know as so desert-like and arid, and see mist rising and puddles forming and little drops of water on everything.

Gilly loves the chilly days the most, and was in heaven running through the long wet grass.

I think we still smell him in the house from all that moisture. Time to light more incense, time to open some windows.

Thank you for being part of these little walkthrough journeys. Thank you for caring. For supporting this simple little life.

I Love you all.

Be good.