A couple of weeks after that morning, I was in Freeport with my friend David.

We were walking and talking about Project Little You and why it needs to exist. Somewhere in there David said something that made me think a bit differently about it.

Identities are what put us in the boxes that keep us from living as our whole selves.

Identities are a tough nut to crack. No one necessarily forces them on you. They get presented to you. By people. By culture. By your lived experience. You should be tough. You should be self-reliant. You should be quiet. You should not feel your emotions.

We essentially choose what identities we accept as “ours” and how tightly we hold onto them. And while that sounds simple in theory, it is very complicated in practice.

We’re wired to belong. For most of human history, belonging was survival. Get pushed out of the group and you don’t make it. So, when life presents identities we often accept them out of fear. The fear of not belonging and the fear of not being able to survive.

And those identities might serve us for some time. But if we let them define us too strongly, we can lose who we are. And the desire to just survive prevents us from thriving.

David and I ended our walk standing in front of the MET, a coffee and art house in Freeport. We were wrapping up, and both of us really excited. We didn’t know exactly what we were going to do, but we were going to do something about this together.

Then a guy walked up to us.

“Fuck Starbucks. There’s a fucking local place right here.”

And we said it right back. Fuck Starbucks. Support local.

He was an interesting guy, and he shared a lot of his story. He told us he was from Vermont and came up here for the first time ten years ago. And now he comes every year. He said he should just move to Maine. This place does him well. He loves it here.

He said he was a Navy brat. Moved all over as a kid. New base, new school, new everything, over and over.

Then he told us what that gave him. A high level of emotional intelligence. He said you must have it when you’re a Navy kid.

He wasn’t bragging. He stated it as a fact. It was an identity he held very strongly. I am emotionally intelligent.

And then the conversation took an odd turn. The next thing out of his mouth was that he had just left his “bunk bitch.”

He asked if we knew what a bunk bitch was. We had no idea.

He said she ended up not being worth it. He couldn’t deal with her anymore. So, he just left. She asked him how she was supposed to get back.

He told her to take a bus. “Take a bus, bunk bitch,” may have been his exact words.

He talked a little more and then he went on his way.

David and I walked away and looked at each other.

I want to be careful here, because the easy move is to make this man the villain of the story, and he isn’t one.

He wasn’t performing for us. He walked up to two strangers on a sidewalk because he wanted to talk to somebody, and that is not a small thing for a man to do. He told us he’s good with feelings and he meant it. He told us about the bunk bitch in the next breath and he meant that too. Both of those things live inside the same man. And he didn’t seem to see how they rub against each other at all.

So why is this a continuation of a story about a two-and-a-half-year-old boy who walked up to a stranger and showed him, with pride, his baby?

This man had just turned sixty-seven. He told us so. His birthday was a few days before.

Two males walked up to strangers on an ordinary day and led with what was inside them. One of them said “my baby.” The other said “bunk bitch.” Sixty-five years apart in age.

I have a hard time believing that man was calling women bunk bitches when he was two and a half.

Something happened in between.

Nobody ever handed him an identity called the guy who says bunk bitch. That’s not how it works. He got handed pieces. Be tough. Don’t need anybody. Handle it yourself. Don’t get attached. A woman is disposable.

He took the pieces. The way we all take what we’re presented, because that’s how you stay in the group.

Sixty-five years of that. The box closed a long time ago and he’s still standing in it, telling strangers on the sidewalk that he has a high level of emotional intelligence and following it by calling a woman a bunk bitch.

After the man went inside to get his coffee, David and I started walking to his car. We looked at each other and essentially said, “Wow, what we are talking about with Project Little You is really needed.”

As I was reflecting on the whole situation, I couldn’t help but think about something I try to always keep top of mind. I believe that life is continually presenting us open doors to what we want. And little signs that the path you are on is right, or maybe wrong.

I can’t help but think that these two people, one little and one big, were brought into my life to let me know that I am on the right path.

And the path is starting to get much more real. In late March or early April, Heart-Strong is launching our next major initiative. It grew out of a children’s book I am working on. It’s called Project Little You. The mission is to help people hold onto, or find their way back to, the courage to be fully themselves.

We’re launching the book and the larger initiative with a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. Since Kickstarter is all or nothing, we’re asking for pre-pledges first. This helps us set a goal we know we can reach. It also helps us plan for how much we can accomplish with Project Little You over the next year.

If this story made you curious, I’d be so grateful if you would take a look at our pre-pledge page.

https://www.heart-strong.org/project-little-you-pre-pledge

And if you think the world needs something like this, we’d love to have your support.

This Substack is a production of Heart-Strong, a nonprofit centered around a simple belief. The world works better, for everyone and everything in it, when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear. Learn more at www.heart-strong.org

A mom was sitting there as well, with her coffee. Her son was playing on the floor. He looked about two.

That corner has a little of everything in it. Trucks. Blocks. Dolls. Toys you might call boy toys and toys you might call girl toys, all in the same pile.

The little boy was immersed in the toys, and he kept looking over at me. I could tell he wanted to tell me something. So, I took my headphones off. He walked over holding a doll and looked up at me.

“My baby.”

Here’s the part I love. He didn’t show his mom. She was two feet away. He wanted to show the man he had never met, and he showed it to me with pride.

Nobody had told him yet that a man might be the person you hide it from. There was no shame in him showing me the doll.

I’ve had mornings with random encounters and connections. This didn’t seem to be one of them.

I turned to his mom and told her what I was sitting there working on in that moment. A children’s book about the messages we send kids that quietly tell them to put parts of themselves away. How somewhere along the line boys learn that boys don’t play with dolls. Girls learn not to get dirty. None of it is natural, but it sticks with us.

She said she tries to encourage him to do whatever he wants. He loves to color. He loves stuffed animals. He loves dolls. It’s just what comes natural to him.

Then she told me he’s two and a half, and he has eight younger cousins. He’s the nurturer of the group.

That’s her word. Nurturer. At two and a half.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the Scene on Radio season on Men. In episode 10, psychologist and therapist Terry Real describes what he calls the halving.1

“You take a whole human being, you put a line down the center, you say all the qualities to the right of this line, we’re going to call masculine, and all the qualities to the left of this line, we’re going to call feminine. And we all know what goes on which side.”

Then he says what goes where. Strength, competence and aggression on the masculine side. Dependency, expressiveness and nurture on the feminine side.

Nurture. The exact word his mom used, with pride, about her son. It’s on the other side of Terry Real’s line.

Real says that line comes down on boys as early as three.

“Before our children have entered kindergarten, they show demonstrable disinclination to be emotional. They’ll feel it, but they already know better than to express it on the playground. They’ve already learned the code. I say before our kids have learned to read, they have read the code of patriarchy.”

Before they can read books, they can read the man code.

Sit with that. When I do, it’s just plain heart-breaking.

So that boy might have 6-months. A couple of years if he’s lucky. Then he starts reading what it means to be a boy, and what a boy shouldn’t do or feel or love.

My fear for him isn’t about a doll. A doll is a doll. My fear is that a boy whose first instinct is to take care of things gets slowly steered away from that instinct. Not by anybody being cruel. By kids on a playground. By adults who think they’re helping. By what’s on a screen. By what nobody says out loud. They’re just handing down messages they’ve been reading.

But here’s what really hit me that morning at Reverie.

I was that boy. I was the boy who loved playing with dolls. The boy who loved and nurtured his pet rabbit, Cupcake. The boy who cried every time he heard “We Are the World.”

So where did he go?

I don’t necessarily have an answer. I know I put things away. I know I don’t remember agreeing to it. Nobody sat me down and explained the rules. It happened in pieces small enough that I never noticed any of them leaving.

The code that got me was a boy’s code. But there’s a code on the other side of that line too. Real says it lands on girls closer to eleven or twelve, and it teaches them what Carol Gilligan calls the tyranny of the nice and kind. Be agreeable. Be accommodating. Put the rest away.

Different code. Same cut.

We’re all meant to outgrow things, and plenty of what I left behind I have no interest in carrying now. Outgrowing something and hiding it are two different things though. One is growing up. The other is putting a piece of yourself away and calling it growing up.

That’s why Heart-Strong is building something called Project Little You.

It’s a collection of children’s books about the parts we learn to hide. The first one is mine. It’s called Little Jeremy’s Heart-Strong Adventure, it’s me at five years old. The second one is Becca’s, about the creativity and the joy she set down along the way. They’re written for kids who haven’t started editing themselves yet.

But every adult who has read a draft has told us the same thing. They saw it in themselves. That’s the whole idea. Reach kids before they start putting parts of themselves away. And invite adults to look back through the curious eyes of their younger self, at what they already set down. We believe that if we do both, we can give people the courage to live as their whole selves.

More to come on Project Little You. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a question.

What part of the little you did you put away and want to let back in?

This Substack is a production of Heart-Strong, a nonprofit centered around a simple belief. The world works better, for everyone and everything in it, when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear. Learn more at www.heart-strong.org

There was just one problem. We don’t necessarily have a lot of money flowing in right now. I’m stewarding a nonprofit and working on a few children’s books. Becca is pursuing work on how we can help all people, all beings, and our earth flourish as we make the transition into AI and AGI. None of it pays. And we’ve stepped away from most of our paid work to focus on these things.

It’s forced us to scale back. Less time at coffee shops. Less eating out. And the hardest hit of all, less travel.

We wanted to find a way to make the trip work as it felt like such a gift to be invited to share such a special weekend with Tom and Aviva. We got creative. It helps when you have a lot of airline miles. But that would only get us back and forth. We still needed places to stay.

Once we booked our flights, we started to reach out to people to share that we would be coming their way. We wanted to plan what hotels or Airbnbs we would book based on who we could see. As we started to reach out, something cool started to happen. Our relationship wealth started to show itself.

It started with Blair.

Blair and I met 2 or 3 years ago at an online event for impact-oriented CEOs. We’d had a lot of conversations since. But we’d never met in person. So, I reached out and told him we’d be out his way and would love to get together.

He said, “You and your wife are welcome to stay with me. I have a separate guest suite. Can’t wait to meet you!”

We were staying with Blair the first night of our trip. He was going to be out when we arrived. He sent us the door code so we could let ourselves in. This was before we had ever met in person. The next morning, he had to fly to New York. His instructions were simple. Stay as long as you like and just lock up when you leave.

Blair extending that level of trust may seem surprising, but it made more sense the more time we spent with him. For 14 years, Blair was the CEO of a highly regarded and respected B Corp. He jokes about it. “What type of company is hiring me as a CEO? What’s wrong with them?”

He got to the point in his career where he realized the best leader he could be was just being himself. Who he is at home is who he is at work. He doesn’t have to change that. The guest suite and the door code were just Blair being Blair.

Next, it was Brian and Malia.

Brian, Malia, and I went to Bowdoin together, but we didn’t really know each other back then. We met through our mutual friend Matt.

Most of our time together over the years has been Zoom calls and quick catchups. But now we actually had time. And the time we had with them was amazing. It didn’t hurt that one of the cannabis delivery services in their town was throwing a 10-year anniversary party at the iconic Sweetwater Music Hall.

The one thing that has really stayed with me from our visit was how refreshing it was to see how similar Brian and I are. I think we knew that. But I don’t think we’d have fully understood it without that time together. Brian and I went on two different 3+ hour early morning hikes. Our conversations felt like we’d been best friends from childhood.

The afternoon after we left, I received this text from Brian.

Just wanted to say how wonderful and refreshing it was to spend time with you and Becca. It was so great! I’m not quite sure if I’ve ever met someone quite as similarly insane/lovely/perfect/thoughtful as me before, but I think the similarities are pretty wild.

Malia just texted me this:

“You and Jeremy together felt like twin stars vaporizing the galaxy around you through nuclear fusion - it’s just an amazing amount of energy, enthusiasm, connection and curiosity for learning, living and growing. Please tell them that they are missed already!”

Wow!

And then, the reason we’d come. Tom and Aviva.

Tom was 19 when he started interning for us at Atayne. We’ve stayed close ever since. The relationship has developed and changed over time, but in all the best ways possible. Now he’s in his early 30s, about my age when we first met him. I think the one thing that has stayed consistent in our relationship is that despite the age difference, Tom and I have about the same maturity level. Wait, who am I kidding. Tom has always been more mature than me...

The whole weekend was beautiful. Everything was so intentionally designed. You could really see their personalities and love in every little detail. One of my favorite parts was the recessional song. Tom and Aviva walked out to Ray LaMontagne’s “You Are the Best Thing.” It’s the same song Becca and I walked out to about 16 years earlier. We looked at each other with huge smiles and teary eyes. Relationships have a way of circling back.

Then there were Duncan and Emily. Theirs was a relationship of a relationship.

We met them earlier this summer, back in Maine. Some friends of ours were visiting and staying in the guest house at Duncan’s father’s place. We went out to see our friends and got to talking with Duncan and Emily. They have a place nearby in Maine, but they live in the Bay Area.

We mentioned we’d be out their way at the end of August for a wedding. They said, “Well, you’re welcome to stay at our house.”

We might have met them before. I don’t know if any of us remember. But we knew we were all there around people we deeply respect and admire. That was enough.

So, on the back half of our trip, we stayed at their place. They weren’t even going to be there. They were back in Maine.

The airline miles got us to California. The relationships are what made the trip. We’ll take sharing a meal and an extra bedroom in someone’s home over the Four Seasons any day.

It got me thinking about abundance. And how contextual it can be. What is it that people actually want abundance of? Experiences? Relationships? Things?

For me, abundance starts with enough to live comfortably. And our standards for comfort are pretty low. We rent out our house and live in an apartment above our garage. We drive a basic Honda Fit that does an amazing job of getting us where we need and want to go. From there, the abundance comes from relationships and experiences.

Earlier this year, I sat with another Tom Haslett for a Campfire Conversation.1 He shared a question I’ve come to think of as one of the real assessments of wealth. Who in your community knows and loves you, and who do you know and love in your community? If the answer is not many, then you might not be that wealthy. No matter what your bank account says.

By that measure, this trip showed us just how much abundance we have.

There was a lot of relational flow toward us on this trip. And we don’t take that lightly. So, we tried to thank people in ways we could. We brought dehydrated peaches from this year’s harvest to share a little taste of Maine summer. And we sent everyone a calendar from the FROM WITHIN art show.2 Each one comes with a postcard of a painting we picked especially for them, and a note about why it reminded us of them.

Now, giving people a place to stay in Maine is a bit harder. Our apartment above the garage is 650 square feet. Not the greatest place to host.

So, earlier this year we decided to set up our Airstream as an Airbnb. Yes, people can pay to stay there. But more importantly, it will be a place for friends to stay if they come to Maine. And while we hope to have some financial flows coming our way from it, we know the real return will be relational.

I’d love to hear from you. When you think about abundance, how do you define it for yourself?

This Substack is a production of Heart-Strong, a nonprofit centered around a simple belief. The world works better, for everyone and everything in it, when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear. We have an open invite for anyone curious about what that world could look like. Learn more at www.heart-strong.org.

When I’m considering doing something, I list every possible outcome. Then I sort them into good and bad. Whatever share of them are good, those are my odds. All have equal probability. So, 3 good outcomes out of 4 means 75%. And I’m always looking to add good outcomes to increase my odds.

Last time I walked you through this, I had just emailed Matthew McConaughey to ask if he’d sit by a fire with me. Initially, I saw 3 outcomes and only 1 of them was good. Then a sunset walk on a beach in Costa Rica turned up a 4th, and then a 5th, and by the time we got back I was at 60%.

My wife Becca runs a different system. Hers involves actual probability. We have agreed to disagree.

That email is still out there, but I am 99.9% certain someday I will sit by a fire with Matthew.

I recently ran the math again. This time on Sara Bareilles.

Since July I’ve wanted to reach out to Sara. And for 2 months I couldn’t figure out how. Not because I couldn’t find an address. Because every approach I thought of felt like I wanted something. I’d start with the thing I actually wanted to say, and somehow it would turn into a pitch. I have a book. I have a podcast. I have a nonprofit.

All true. All beside the point of me reaching out.

That’s the part I kept getting stuck on. I had something real to tell her and no honest way to say it. So, I didn’t do anything.

Let me take a step back to where the idea to reach out to her was birthed.

In July, I was camping. It was dusk and I was enjoying some solitude looking out over a lake. I was listening to music, and She Used To Be Mine came on. It’s a song Sara wrote for the musical Waitress.

I’ve loved that song since the first time I heard it. I have listened to it a lot. This time, I heard something in it I hadn’t heard before. It isn’t just a song about a waitress who doesn’t like where she ended up. It’s about grieving the loss of who she was. The parts of herself she put away somewhere along the line.

She looks back at the girl she used to be and wishes she could rewrite an ending or two.

Since February, I have been working on a children’s book about exactly that. Sara and I wrote similar stories. Hers in a song, mine in a book.

I wanted to reach out to share that. I just didn’t have a plan for how to do it in a way that felt honest. That didn’t feel like I was trying to sell her an idea.

That changed on September 9 when I went to the first night of her Good Grief tour in Boston.

Partway through the show, she started playing voicemails.

Not her voice. Everyday people. A woman talking about losing her father to pancreatic cancer and what her grief has been like since. A man in his 80s sharing how lonely he is since losing his wife of 50 years.

I realized this was an initiative connected to her new album, Good Grief. A phone number people could call to share their story. As Sara writes in the song Home, “Tell me your story, I’ll tell you mine.”

And with that my problem of how to reach out went away. I wasn’t going to reach out to Sara Bareilles. I was going to answer her invitation to share my story.

Here’s the message I left her. I recorded myself as I was leaving it.

So, here is my math on this one.

There are a few outcomes I can see happening.

• Nobody ever hears it. It sits in a queue with thousands of others and that’s the end of it.

• Somebody on her team listens, decides it’s not what they’re looking for, and moves on.

• It (or parts of it) gets played at a show. Which means a few thousand strangers in an arena hear a guy from Maine talk about the boy he put away.

• Sara hears it herself.

• Sara hears it and reaches out.

5 outcomes. 3 of them are good. That’s 60%, which has the odds favoring a positive outcome.

And then there’s the move I pulled last time. I’m writing this post. Which creates a 6th outcome, where the post finds its way to her and she reaches out.

4 out of 6. 66%.

But this one is already at 100%, and it has nothing to do with whether she ever hears it.

It took me 2 weeks and a lot of walking to figure out what I was going to say in the message. I’m a verbal processor. I talk it out, transcribe it, read it, and then write.

Somewhere in that messy process, the thing I’d been circling for months finally connected.

Back in June, I sat with Jonathan, the father of a friend of mine going back to high school. He spent years as a minister. I asked him how he defines suffering.

I told him I wasn’t sure I’d really suffered. I’m a tall white man born in the United States. Next to what other people carry, my life looks easy.

He didn’t let me off the hook. He pointed at the 40 years I spent with parts of myself put away, hiding the sensitive side of me because guys aren’t supposed to be soft. And he said that’s suffering too.

I sat with that for a long time. I wrote a story about it.

What I didn’t see until I had to tell the whole story in one sitting is that it’s also grief.

Grief is the response to losing something that matters. Those parts of me I put away mattered. I lost access to them for 4 decades.

And once I saw it there, I saw it everywhere.

When Jonathan read the book, he told me it made him remember how much he missed being that boy, and how hard it was to hold onto him. He told me he liked my book. And I think by saying that he was also telling me that he saw his own grieving in it.

Becca read it and it cracked her open. She started asking about the parts of herself she’d put away. Then she started writing her own story.

An executive coach told me he wants every CEO he works with to read it. He sees it as a powerful tool for helping people heal.

I had been collecting these reactions for months and filing them under “people like the book.” That’s true and it’s also more. Every single one of them was a person recognizing their own grief and finally having somewhere to put it.

That’s why the book works. Not because it’s a good story. Because it gives people’s grief a witness.

There is a song called Home on Sara’s new album. It’s about a podcast conversation she heard between Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert. Colbert says something in the conversation about what happens when you keep grief to yourself. On your own, it’s a cave. Shared through story, it becomes a tunnel. Something with another side to it.

That’s also what Rob Reider meant when he told me grief needs a witness during our Campfire Conversation. It’s what Sara built with a phone number. And I think it’s what can happen when we write our stories through a different lens. Through the eyes of our curious younger selves. In a children’s book.

And that’s what Project Little You is for.

I have been describing it as a way to help people hold onto, or find their way back to, the courage to be fully themselves. That’s still true. But I understand the mechanism now in a way I didn’t 3 weeks ago.

You don’t find your way back to those parts by deciding to. You find your way back by grieving them out loud, where somebody can hear you.

And it isn’t only children’s books. That’s where it started, because that’s the form my story took. But a little you story could be a novel. A short story. A poem. A song.

The form doesn’t matter much. Finding the right way to tell your story does.

When I wrote about the McConaughey email, I stuck a line in near the end that I didn’t think much about at the time. So many great ideas never leave the room they were born in.

Here’s the version of that in this story.

So many stories never leave the room they were born in.

We carry them around for decades. We decide they’re not big enough or not sad enough or not the kind of thing anyone wants to hear. So, they stay in the room. And a story that never leaves the room can’t do anything for anybody, including the person carrying it.

I left a specific ask of Sara out of the voicemail. It felt like the wrong place for it. She asked for a story, so I gave her a story.

But this is my Substack, so I’ll say it here.

Sara, if this ever finds you. I’d like to sit with you around a fire and have a Campfire Conversation about love and fear and grief and what it takes to hold onto who you are. No script. No agenda. Just two people and a fire.

Tell me your story. I’ll tell you mine.

That’s your line. I’m just taking you up on it.

The previous line was the original end to this story.

Then a few days later, I was driving and I got to thinking. And that can be dangerous. Not the driving. The thinking…

And I realized the story wasn’t finished.

What if this post makes its way to Sara.

What if she sees the connection between what we’re doing and the work she’s doing around mental health. She knows what storytelling does for a person carrying something heavy. She built her whole tour around it.

What if she reaches back and says I love what you’re doing, I’d love to get involved, how can I help.

And what if I said, funny you should mention that.

We’re launching Project Little You with a crowdfunding campaign. What if one of the rewards was a chance to work with you to help someone turn their story into a song.

What if?

That’s another good outcome. Which puts me at 125%.

I’m aware that isn’t how percentages work. But it’s my math and I’ll calculate it how I want to.

This Substack is a production of Heart-Strong, a nonprofit centered around a simple belief. The world works better, for everyone and everything in it, when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear. We have an open invite for anyone curious about what that world could look like. Learn more at www.heart-strong.org.

And so, she did what songwriters do. She wrote a song about it. It’s called Heartland. More on that song later.

First, I want to go back to a conversation between Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert that I have referenced before. Colbert says something about anger that helped me connect a few things that had been swirling around in my busy little head.

He says we often close the door on grief with anger. And then he says this.

“Anger is an armor against how we actually feel.”

If we look around our country right now, I think there is one thing we can all agree on. People are angry. Regardless of where people are on the political spectrum, we see anger everywhere.

But Sara, Anderson, and Stephen opened a door for me to think about it differently.

Maybe it isn’t anger. Maybe it’s grief.

Ask people what this country is supposed to be and the answers are not that different. Freedom. Opportunity. If I work hard, I can build a life better than my parents had.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that most people in our country don’t think that they are getting that.

Some people are grieving work that meant something and then went away. A main street where the storefronts aren’t empty. The idea that if you did what you were told to do, it would add up to something.

Some people are grieving the belief that this country was slowly getting fairer. That the direction was at least right. That their kids would be treated like everybody else’s kids.

Those are not the same losses. But they are the same promise, broken in different places.

Now here’s the part that’s going to be harder to say.

I don’t think it matters much which side of this you’re on. I’m not saying the positions are the same. They aren’t. I have my own, and anyone who’s read me for a while can probably guess them.

What I’m saying is the thing underneath the anger looks the same to me no matter where it’s coming from. People lost something that mattered to them, and nobody gave them a way to say so, and it turned into rage.

Which brings me to the thing I believe most strongly and have the least evidence for.

The moment we start ranking whose suffering counts, we are in real trouble.

I’ve watched this happen in both directions. Somebody says they’re struggling and gets told other people have it worse. Which may be true. But it’s also the end of the conversation. And a person whose grief gets ruled out of bounds doesn’t stop grieving. It just gets channeled into something that will make them feel seen. Anger.

Now back to the song Heartland.

I believe it’s being sung in the voice of our country itself. Not a song about America. America talking.

And the thing that gets me about it is that it doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not. There’s a line in that song, “I have made grave mistakes still to be known.” It isn’t a song about a country that used to be perfect. It’s a song about one that’s still being made.

“I am the woman you make of me,” it says.

And then it asks to be broken down and built back up. It asks to be fought for. It says that’s the only way any of this survives.

Here’s why I think this song is so important right now.

Two people who can’t stand each other could listen to Heartland and both hear their own country in it. Both of them grieving a promise they felt was not delivered. Both of them for completely different reasons. Both of them telling the truth about what they lost.

That isn’t a problem with the song. It’s the most beautiful thing about it.

I first heard about the idea of grief needing a witness from Rob Reider in our Campfire Conversation.

Here’s how I think that might apply to grieving our country.

Think about how many people have been grieving something with nobody willing to look at it.

A man whose plant closed after 22 years, who gets told he’s had it easy. A mother who buried her son and then watched strangers argue online about whether his death mattered. A family that has been here for generations and still gets asked where they’re really from.

All of them grieving something real. All of them told, one way or another, that theirs wasn’t a loss worth talking about.

Here’s what worries me. A person whose grief nobody will witness doesn’t quietly accept that. They go find someone who will take it seriously.

And there are a lot of people willing to do that. Podcasts, politicians, people with enormous audiences. Some of them are acting in good faith. Plenty are not. The ones who aren’t have figured out something the rest of us keep missing.

If you hand a grieving person a target, they will feel better for a little while. It feels like being heard. But it’s not really the same thing.

That’s the trade a lot of people have made, and I don’t entirely blame them. Anger is available. Anger has a community waiting. Grief mostly has a room with nobody in it.

So, here’s the idea I keep landing on.

Being a witness to somebody’s grief does not require agreeing with them.

That’s a hard sentence for me to write and I suspect a hard one for people to believe. It’s easy to be there for someone whose loss makes sense to me. It is a different thing entirely to be there for someone I disagree with on almost everything and still want to hear what they lost.

I’m not good at this. I want to be clear about that. I have opinions and I have a temper about a lot of this. And I am not writing from a position of having figured it out.

So, here’s what I’m going to try.

The next time somebody’s anger lands on me, on a screen or across a table, I want to ask myself a different question than the one I usually ask. Not what is wrong with this person.

What might this person be grieving the loss of?

This Substack is a production of Heart-Strong, a nonprofit centered around a simple belief. The world works better, for everyone and everything in it, when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear. We have an open invite for anyone curious about what that world could look like. Learn more at www.heart-strong.org.

We had tickets to the first night of Sara Bareilles’s Good Grief tour. Some friends of ours were going too. Then life happened to them and they couldn’t use the tickets. Their seats were better. So, we sold ours and bought theirs.

It was an ordinary decision. I think it led to an extraordinary story.

Our new tickets were VIP, which meant early entry and a little gift bag.

They started checking people in while we stood in line to enter the venue. They needed the name of the person who originally bought the tickets to check us in. Jason’s name wasn’t coming up. We tried his husband’s name. Nope.

The woman doing the check-in said our tickets were fine, but that she needed the name of the original purchaser to finalize the process. I told her we didn’t need to do the VIP thing. I didn’t want her getting in trouble over it.

She gave us our wristbands and asked if we could try to find the name. She moved on to the rest of the line and didn’t come back to us.

When we walked into the venue, she was at a table handing out the VIP gift bags. I looked at her with a look of, are we okay? She nodded in affirmation and handed us the bags.

Inside the bags were a few things including a concert poster.

We walked around the lobby for a while and watched the merchandise line get longer and longer. One of the benefits of early entry was early access to merch.

We eventually made our way to our seats. We chatted a bit with a couple of women on my left. Becca sat on my right, and the seat beside her stayed empty for a while.

Shortly before the concert was scheduled to start, 8pm, I went out to go to the bathroom. The only men’s room was on the second floor. As I walked up the stairs, I was a bit amazed at how long the merch line had gotten. It was up the stairs and wrapped around the second-floor lobby. I now understood the benefit of the early access to the merch.

I got back to our seats and the empty seat next to Becca had been taken by a woman about our age. Sara was late coming on, so it gave us some time to chat with her.

Within about 2 minutes she shared with us that her husband died in January.

She has 5 kids. The youngest is 7. The oldest is 18. She’s a doctor, and her specialty is fertility, which is its own strange coincidence given some of what’s on Sara’s new album. She has a serious job, 5 kids, and no husband and she is, in her words, still trying to figure this out.

She told us the album had been a big part of getting through the last 8 months. She said it had been so helpful in her grieving process.

I want to say something about that. We had known this woman for 2 minutes at most. And the conversation went straight to the hardest thing in her life before we’d even exchanged first names.

That doesn’t happen at most concerts.

Then she mentioned the merch line. How long it was. She wanted a poster. She and her husband had a wall in their house. Every show they went to, they framed the poster and hung it up.

In that moment, I realized that life had handed me an amazing gift.

I think I stopped talking mid-sentence and reached down under my seat. Becca said, “I know exactly what my husband is doing.”

I grabbed the poster and handed it to her.

She asked if I was serious. I explained the whole thing. Jason couldn’t go, we ended up with 2 VIP packages, we don’t need 2 posters, and honestly, I’m not sure we need 1.

Here’s why I think this is the making of an extraordinary story.

Jason and his husband had something come up and couldn’t use their tickets. We sold ours and bought theirs, because the seats were better. Then a woman at a check-in table decided not to turn a missing name into a problem and handed us VIP gift bags which included a poster.

That’s the chain. Three small decisions, none of them seemingly connected. And not one of them was aimed at a widow who wanted a poster for her wall. But the story doesn’t end there.

Soon after, the lights went down and Sara came out.

The first set was mostly songs from the new album, roughly played in order. 14 songs in the set, with 3 songs not on the new album. One of them was Gravity.

It’s one of her older ones. She wrote it when she was 18 and it’s about wanting to be released from the gravity of someone’s love. It’s a heart-wrenching song. As Sara sang the words:

You hold me without touch

You keep me without chains

I never wanted anything so much

Than to drown in your love and not feel your rain

Set me free, leave me be

I don’t wanna fall another moment into your gravity

I could see the woman next to Becca starting to cry. And it moved down the line. It went to Becca, and then it came to me. The 3 of us sat in a row in a dark theater with tears running down our faces and not one word said between us. But I think we knew what we were feeling.

Then she reached over and offered Becca a tissue.

I want you to sit with that for a second, because it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot.

A woman who lost her husband 8 months ago is crying to a song about wanting to be let go from someone’s love. And her instinct, in the middle of it, is to take care of the person crying next to her. I think that is beautiful!

After Gravity, Sara played Forever. It’s a song about being there with someone while they die. She wrote it about losing a close friend.

So, the first set closed with a song about bearing witness to grief. Right after 3 strangers had just done it together.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about.

Rob Reider talked about grief needing a witness in our Campfire Conversation.1 And I’ve repeated it plenty of times since. It sounds like it’s about the person grieving.

But I think it is so much more than that. Grief needing a witness is a relationship thing, and it goes both ways. And being that witness is harder than it sounds.

Because when somebody you’re sitting with is in real pain, everything in you wants to do something about it. Fix it. Lighten it. Find the sentence that helps. We are not comfortable watching someone hurt, so we reach for the exit, and we call it kindness.

The actual work is to stay there. Feel it with them. Offer nothing. Let them be seen having it.

I’m not saying that’s harder than grieving. But it’s a skill almost nobody teaches us, and it’s the reason a lot of people end up grieving alone in a room while people who love them are 20 feet away trying to cheer them up.

One more thing about that night.

Sara left a few thousand people somewhere deep, and she knew it. When she came back out for the first encore, she had a problem to solve. She needed to show people there is a light at the end of the tunnel of grief.

And she did it in a completely unexpected yet so obvious way. She instantly lifted everyone up by covering I Wanna Dance with Somebody by Whitney Houston.

If there’s one song that can get people up on their feet dancing, that is probably it.

Now back to the poster. Here’s what I think about it.

Giving it to her wasn’t extraordinary. It cost me nothing. I had 2 and I needed 0.

But a handful of ordinary decisions, made by people who weren’t thinking about doing anything extraordinary, added up to something I think might be extraordinary.

We will almost certainly never see her again. The odds are close to zero.

But there is a wall in a house in Quincy, MA with a poster on it that wasn’t going to be there. And when she looks at it, she’ll think about her husband, and about a concert in Boston, and about 2 people she cried with and never saw again.

It’s made me think about what extraordinary actually is. I don’t think it is one big thing. Rather it might be a collection of ordinary things that happen to land in the same place.

It makes me think about how many times I may have decided not to do the ordinary thing, because it didn’t seem like it would matter much.

What if we all started doing more random acts of ordinary. We probably won’t get to see where the ripples go. But remember, small ripples that travel thousands of miles are what turn into epic waves.

This Substack is a production of Heart-Strong, a nonprofit centered around a simple belief. The world works better, for everyone and everything in it, when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear. We have an open invite for anyone curious about what that world could look like. Learn more at www.heart-strong.org.

She came out and told a full theater that they were trying something. And they didn’t know yet if it was going to work.

I love going to concerts. I’ve been to hundreds. And I have seen everyone from Busta Rhymes and Bob Dylan to Indigo Girls and Guns ‘n Roses to Ziggy Marley and Tool. I have seen Pearl Jam probably 15 times, including traveling to see them in Poland.

Walking into that theater I was giddy. Just as excited as I was seeing Pearl Jam in Poland.

On the surface the two have nothing in common. A rock band from Seattle playing stadiums. A woman at a piano in a theater. Different sound, different crowd, different volume, different everything.

Eddie Vedder and Sara Bareilles are two of my favorite songwriters. I find a tremendous amount of meaning in their poetry.

What I didn’t expect was that the experience would be so similar.

It was cathartic. Both of them take you through a whole range of emotions in one night. They make you feel. They make you laugh. They make you cry.

Here’s what I think is going on.

At almost every Pearl Jam show, Eddie Vedder reads a letter from a fac. And almost every time, it’s about grief.

Partway through the Boston show, Sara started playing voicemails.

Not her voice. Strangers. A woman talking about losing her father to pancreatic cancer. A man in his 80s talking about how lonely he is since his wife died after 50 years together.

A person hands their grief to an artist. The artist holds it up in front of thousands of people. The room goes quiet. And then everyone in it remembers one of the most defining human traits. We all grieve.

One room has guitars. One has a piano. Underneath, it’s the same thing.

We are all different and we are all the same. Two opposing thoughts that are both true.

There’s a podcast called All There Is, where Anderson Cooper talks with people about grief. Sara wrote a song on the new album after hearing his conversation with Stephen Colbert.

Colbert says something in there I keep coming back to. We used to have rituals for mourning. A year of it. Black armbands. Clothing that told everyone you passed on the street that something had happened to you. You didn’t have to explain. People could see it, and they could ask, or not ask, and either way you weren’t carrying it alone in the dark.

We got rid of all that. And we didn’t replace it with anything.

Colbert describes what’s left as a thirst that everybody has, with nobody pouring water for anybody.

That’s what I think I was witnessing that night. Not a concert exactly. A room where 3,000 people agreed to feel something hard at the same time, on purpose, with somebody up front making it safe to do it.

That’s a ritual. We just don’t call it one because there are t-shirts for sale in the lobby.

When I started this Heart-Strong thing, I built a playlist. Songs I go to when I’m working, or when I’m questioning why I’m doing this at all.

I Am Mine by Pearl Jam is on it. It’s probably my favorite PJ song. I’ve listened to it more times than I could count.

There’s a line in it about sorrow.

“The sorrow grows bigger when the sorrow’s denied”

It says it pretty simply. When you deny your grieving, it doesn’t go away. It actually grows bigger.

A few months ago, I sat by a fire with Rob Reider. He and his wife lost their daughter Lila at 38 weeks. When he went looking for support, he found there wasn’t much of anything built for fathers. So, he built it.

He told me something he heard from a grief researcher. Grief needs a witness.

Pearl Jam, Sara, Colbert, and Cooper agree with this. And they are doing something about it.

Here’s the part I want to spend some time on.

Most of us file grief under one heading. Somebody died. That’s when you’re allowed to use the word.

But grief is bigger than that. It is a response to losing something that mattered to you. The feeling is much bigger than what we often enable it to be.

We also grieve the person we thought we’d become. What we think our country can be but isn’t. The body that used to be able to do the thing we love to do. The friendships that just quietly become less close. The parts of ourselves we put away so early that we don’t remember how it happened.

None of them come with a casserole or a card. There’s no ritual for them and no word most people feel entitled to use. So, it goes underground, and it comes out sideways, usually as anger.

A Pearl Jam show and a Sara Bareilles show could not look more different. Different rooms, different crowds, different volume, different everything.

And they’re doing the identical thing.

Grief works the same way. Nobody’s looks like anybody else’s. Mine doesn’t look like yours, and comparing them is a bad idea that people do constantly. And at the same time, every single person reading this is carrying some.

Over the next few posts, I’m going to write about grief from a few different angles.

Not because it’s sad. Because it’s one of the very few things that’s actually universal. And because every time I follow something I end up in the same place. I want to tell a story.

This Substack is a production of Heart-Strong, a nonprofit centered around a simple belief. The world works better, for everyone and everything in it, when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear. We have an open invite for anyone curious about what that world could look like. Learn more at www.heart-strong.org.

A painting changed that.

I was at the Returning Citizens Luncheon in Virginia, an event that honors people coming home from prison and the families who carry the weight with them. Part of it was a silent auction of artwork made by people who are currently incarcerated. One piece pulled me in. It was called “Mother Earth.” I placed a bid. I won.

I wanted to thank the artist and let them know that their work moved me. I found out I could reach them through a prison messaging app. So, I did.

It was Tremayne. He’s incarcerated at Lawrenceville Correctional Center in Virginia. He taught himself to paint on the inside, and he uses his art to work through anxiety he’s carried his whole life. He even built a program to help other men do the same.

That thank you note turned into a correspondence. The correspondence turned into a friendship. The friendship turned into an art show called FROM WITHIN1, featuring paintings by incarcerated artists. And now it’s turning into a book.

Side note. If you want the full story on the start of our friendship, check out: “A Friendship That Started With a Painting.”2

Tremayne and I are writing a children’s book together. It’s called The Heart-Strong Friendship. I wrote the story and Tremayne is painting the scenes for it.

At its heart, it’s built on a question.

What happens when a white guy from Maine who went to Bowdoin College and a Black man from Brooklyn who went to prison decide to create something together?

Some of the most beautiful friendships grow between people from completely different worlds. Ours is one of them.

The book tells that story, with a twist. We’re not our adult selves in it. We put ourselves back into the worlds we lived in at seven years old. And we imagine what would have happened if we’d somehow met back then.

Little Tremayne lives in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. He loves to draw, and his sketchbook goes everywhere he goes. Little Jeremy lives in the woods of Maine. He loves to explore and build. And they both love trees. One of them gets to see trees once a week, at the park with his grandmother. The other has them in every direction, all day long. Same love. Opposite amounts. A lost sketchbook brings the two boys together, and a friendship grows through letters.

It’s a story about what two people can build together when they don’t let difference keep them apart.

And HOW we’re making it is part of the story too.

Making a book with someone in prison is hard in ways I never expected.

Most of our back and forth happens in short chats through a prison messaging app. We can also talk by phone and do video visits. But I’m in Maine and he’s in Virginia, so in-person visits are hard to pull off. A lot of the artwork he shows me, I see over a screen. When he holds up a character sketch on a video visit, I take a picture of the screen so I can study the details later. That’s how I first saw Little Tremayne and Little Jeremy. Concepts he drew, held to a camera, saved as a picture I took of a video call.

Or that’s how we used to do it. A few weeks ago, Tremayne lost his video privileges for a month. It turns out my taking those pictures wasn’t allowed. There was no warning. We had to figure out a new way to review his art, which slows everything down again.

Not only are we working across literal walls, but there are also figurative ones as well. Neither of us has done this before. This is one of my first children’s books. I’m working on another one as well. And it’s Tremayne’s first time illustrating one. So, we’re teaching ourselves as we go. I pass along process documents I get from professional illustrators, and we figure out the rest together.

And then there’s developing the manuscript.

I can’t email it to him. I have to mail it. There’s a workaround I’ve found, but it’s not ideal. I turn each page of a PDF into a JPEG and send the pages as images so he can read them on his tablet. Each image costs 20 cents. That adds up fast when you’re drafting something together.

Mailing it isn’t a big deal on its own. It takes about a week to reach Virginia, and then it has to be approved.

But it’s not always smooth. This summer, I sent Tremayne three things. An updated manuscript. A printout of an email from Maine Inside Out. A printout of an email from ArtVan promoting FROM WITHIN. Each one was 5 pages, front and back. That’s the most I could send at a time.

A week later he told me they’d been rejected. He didn’t know why.

Then they showed up back in my mailbox. I opened the envelope. It said they’d exceeded the limit of 3 pages, front and back.

I’ve sent plenty of 5-page envelopes before. The limit used to be 5. It quietly became 3, and nobody told anyone. The rule changed, the reason is anyone’s guess, and it never got communicated down.

To resend the draft, I had to send it in 4 different mailings to stay under the 3-page limit. Any one of those envelopes could get rejected, so we didn’t really know when he’d have the full manuscript in hand to keep illustrating.

And this is just me sending a manuscript. But what if it had been a letter from his daughter? Drawings from his granddaughter? Same rejection. Same delay.

And it isn’t just paper. A while back, I bought a set of professional paintbrushes and donated them to Colorful Transformations, the art program Tremayne runs inside. A small set, but the good kind, the sort you need for fine detail work. About a hundred dollars’ worth. We did it the right way. Tremayne got clearance ahead of time, and we went through all the proper channels. Then the administration at Lawrenceville changed. The 3 most senior positions changed. And with that change, the brushes were rejected. No reason we could get. Maybe they went back to the seller. Maybe they’re just gone. Either way, a gift meant to help men heal through art never made it inside.

These are small things on their own. A paper cut here. A paper cut there. But it’s death by a thousand of them. And it makes me wonder how we expect people to heal when they’re taking these little cuts day after day, each one making it harder to stay strong.

For another book I’m writing, I’m working with a professional illustrator in France. She’s much farther away than Tremayne. And working with her is effortless. She emails me a sketch in seconds. We exchange messages at no cost.

The distance that makes this hard isn’t miles. It’s the walls.

So, why do it the hard way?

I could hire a professional illustrator. Someone who could email me files and turn things around fast. The book would come together quicker and smoother.

But I came across an idea a while back. I think it was from the Daily Stoic, though I honestly can’t remember. I think about it a lot. Some people DO hard things because they’re hard. And some people DON’T do hard things, because they’re hard.

I’ve always been the first kind. I don’t fully know why. It’s just how I’m built. Why run a 5k when you can run a marathon? Why alpine ski when you can telemark? Why pick up surfing at 40 when your strength and agility aren’t what they used to be?

Because they’re hard. And because what I learn about myself along the way is always worth more than any result or success I might have.

And so, I look at it this way. Love is doing hard things because they’re hard. Fear is not doing hard things because they’re hard.

The fear-based way to make this book is to hand it to a pro and get out of the way. The love-based way is to make it side by side with Tremayne. Because it’s our story. Two guys who honestly don’t know what we’re doing, figuring it out one paper cut at a time.

The book will be better for it. I really believe that. But that’s not even the main thing.

The last lines of the book are about how the most beautiful thing the two boys build isn’t the art show they dream up together. It’s their friendship.

That’s true for us too. Every rejected envelope. Every photo of a screen. Every 20-cent JPEG. I can feel our friendship getting deeper through all of it. The book is what we’re making. The friendship is what we’re building.

This past Sunday, I led the service at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Brunswick. It was built around our story, and my reflection was called “The Art of Falling Forward.” It was also the first public reading of The Heart-Strong Friendship. I read it during the Time for All Ages, the part of the service where a children’s book is read to the kids. The book is far from finished. What people saw were concept sketches, photos from our video calls, and scenes that are still coming together.

I was certainly nervous reading the story. But introducing it to others made it feel even more real. And the comments I received validated what I believe. We need more stories like this in the world.

If you’d like to watch or listen, you can find the service here:

This Substack is a production of Heart-Strong, a nonprofit centered around a simple belief. The world works better, for everyone and everything in it, when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear. We have an open invite for anyone curious about what that world could look like. Learn more at www.heart-strong.org.

It’s the honest, industry-standard way to describe it. I’m not going through a big traditional publisher. I’m bringing the books to life outside that system.

But the more I say “self-published”, the more it feels like a lie.

Because I’m not doing this myself. Not even close.

Here’s one small example of what I mean. For a few months I was trying to find an illustrator. This is a big decision. The right illustrator can bring a book to life, and the wrong one can flatten it.

I didn’t find my answer through research. I didn’t find it by hiring some service. I found it through a chain of relationships I never could have planned.

It goes like this.

My friend Elmer has known me for a long time. A while back, he thought I’d hit it off with a guy named Kenneth, so he introduced us. Kenneth and I stayed loosely in touch. Recently, Kenneth reached out wanting some feedback on a project. I asked if we could push it a few weeks, because I had a lot going on, including writing two children’s books.

And he said, oh, I’ve got someone you need to meet.

That someone was Justine. That conversation was amazing. And somewhere in it, Justine told me about Reedsy, the marketplace where I found my illustrator.

So follow that line back with me.

The book that will one day have my name on the cover exists, in part, because Elmer knew Kenneth. And Kenneth knew Justine. And Justine knew about Reedsy. Pull any one of those people out of the chain, and I’m not holding the same book.

I didn’t build that chain. It was built by years of other people staying connected.

That’s when the word “self-published” fell apart for me.

We love a good self-made story in this country. The lone genius. The founder in the garage. The author who did it all on their own. It’s a fear-based story, if you look closely. It says I owe no one. I stand on my own. I did this alone.

But nobody makes anything alone. Not a book. Not a business. Not a life.

The truth is quieter and a lot more beautiful. I’m held up by an ecosystem. A web of relationships, most of which I didn’t engineer and can’t fully see. Some of the people holding up my work have never even met each other.

And here’s what that changes for me. If the relationships are what make the work possible, then tending them isn’t a distraction from the work. It is the work.

I don’t mean networking. I don’t mean collecting contacts to use later. I mean the slow, unglamorous stuff. Staying friends with Elmer for years with no agenda. Kenneth being generous enough to say, you should meet this person. Justine sharing what she knew, freely. None of it was transactional. All of it mattered.

So I think I’ll keep saying self-published, because it’s the word people understand. But in my head, I’ll know it isn’t true.

So, here are some thoughts to sit with. Think about the thing you’re proudest of building. Then trace the line back, past yourself, to the people who made it possible. How far back does it go? And who’s holding it up that you’ve never even thanked?

This Substack is a production of Heart-Strong, a nonprofit centered around a simple belief. The world works better, for everyone and everything in it, when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear. We have an open invite for anyone curious about what that world could look like. Learn more at www.heart-strong.org.

Not in a sappy way. More like a question I couldn’t put down. What is the origin of wedding rings? Were they meant to face outward, a signal to everyone else that someone is “taken”? Or was it meant to face inward, a reminder to the person of the promise they made?

The reason I was thinking about this is a couple of nights before I watched Legally Blonde with Becca and my mom. So much of that story runs on landing the guy who can buy the big diamond. The ring becomes proof. Look what I got. Look who chose me.

And culturally, it seems we tend to treat the ring like it’s for other people. Someone gets engaged and the first thing we say is, show me the ring. We want to see the size of it. The rock.

So, I got curious about where wedding rings even came from. The ancient Egyptians were among the first to use them. They saw the circle as a symbol of eternity, no beginning and no end, and they wore bands of woven reeds or leather as a sign of devotion. That’s the inward version. The love version. The Romans took the ring and turned it into something else. Their rings were often iron, and they were less about love and more about a claim. A public mark that a woman was spoken for and bound by contract. That’s the outward version. So, this tension I was feeling on a foggy morning in Canada isn’t new. It’s been sitting inside this little band of metal for thousands of years.

I looked down at my ring and thought, “What is this for?”

I actually didn’t want a wedding ring. I wanted to get a band tattooed on my finger. Becca said, no. At least wait a few years. Apparently, she was still kicking the tires...

After 14 years of marriage, I did get a tattoo. But not just one ring. I got 3. And not on my finger. On my shoulder.

I got Borromean rings. Borromean rings are 3 rings locked together in a way that’s hard to picture until you see it. Here’s the really cool part. No two of the rings are actually linked to each other. Pull any single ring away and the other two fall apart. All 3 only hold together because all 3 are there.

That’s why I chose them. One ring is Becca. One ring is me. One ring is us, the couple we make together. The tattoo reminds me of something I don’t want to forget. If we lose ourselves, if Becca stops being fully Becca or I stop being fully me, the whole thing weakens. The couple isn’t held together by giving ourselves up. It’s held together by both of us staying whole. Lose one ring and they all fall apart. Lose who we are as individuals, and we lose what we are together.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love my wedding ring. I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t feel like me without it on. And when I look down at my ring, I don’t see a signal to anybody. I see a reminder of the commitment Becca and I made to each other. To keep supporting each other. To keep making each other better. To keep growing together for as long as we get.

Once I started pulling on that thread, I realized the ring isn’t the only reminder I carry. There’s the nail polish I’ve written about before. That’s a reminder too. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Be the whole, weird person you actually are. I’ve been collecting these small reminders without fully noticing. Little things that pull me back toward how I want to move through the world.

Here’s why I think I need these little visible reminders in my life. When I got home from Costa Rica, something shifted in me. Down there I felt deeply relational. Present. Slow in a good way. Then I landed back in Maine, and my to-do list came roaring back. All the things I want to build. All the things I want to get done. And I could feel myself trading being for doing. I got sharp. On edge. When I’m deep in the doing, I can easily drift away from how I want to show up in the world. Leading from relationship, not productivity.

These reminders are simple ways to keep me in rhythm. To remind me of the person I am trying to be and trying to become.

So, here’s what I’m sitting with. What are the reminders in your life? The ring, the necklace, the tattoo, the purple hair, whatever it is for you. Are they there for other people to see? Or are they there to remind you who you want to be?

This Substack is a production of Heart-Strong, a nonprofit centered around a simple belief. The world works better, for everyone and everything in it, when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear. We have an open invite for anyone curious about what that world could look like. Learn more at www.heart-strong.org.

I keep putting “cottage” in air quotes in my head. The word makes me picture something small. A woodstove and a couple of bedrooms. This is a 34-room house looking out over the ocean. For its time, the wealth and the access it represents are hard to take in. I stood in those rooms and felt the pull of two things at once. The history was fascinating. And I couldn’t stop thinking about how much suffering was happening in the world while a few families summered like this.

I didn’t fully reconcile that. I’m not sure you’re supposed to.

But the thing that stayed with me happened at the visitor center. My mom got to talking with a woman there, and at some point, the woman mentioned that people believe FDR’s spirit is still at the cottage.

I’m not here to argue about ghosts. What caught me was the idea behind it. There’s an old belief that spirits linger when they haven’t reconciled something. When there’s a piece of their life they never made peace with, so they can’t move on.

Here’s what makes that interesting to me. FDR didn’t die at Campobello. He died in Georgia. People usually say a place is haunted because someone died there. This is different. Campobello is where his life split in two.

In August of 1921, at 39 years old, Franklin Roosevelt got sick at that cottage. Within a couple of weeks, he was paralyzed from the waist down. He left the island on a stretcher. He would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair and leg braces. If any place marks the before and after of his life, it’s that one.

So, I found myself wondering. If some part of him really is still there, what’s he sitting with?

It’s easy to imagine a version of him that never made peace with it. A man who looks back and thinks about everything he could have done if his body had stayed whole. The life he’d planned. Polio took the ground out from under one of the most ambitious men of his time.

But then I thought about what actually happened next.

This is the man who led the United States through the Great Depression. Then through World War II. He steadied a terrified country from a wheelchair he mostly kept hidden. A lot of historians believe his struggle with paralysis is part of what made him. That the patience, the empathy, and the sheer will he built while learning to live in a changed body became the same qualities the country leaned on later.

So, which is it? Did polio rob him of the life he wanted? Or did it forge the person who could carry a nation through its hardest years?

I think the answer might be in a Sufi poem, one attributed to Hazrat Inayat Khan. It gets at this better than anything I could write.

I asked for strength
and God gave me difficulties to make me strong.
I asked for wisdom
and God gave me problems to learn to solve.
I asked for prosperity
and God gave me a brain and brawn to work.
I asked for courage
and God gave me dangers to overcome.
I asked for love
and God gave me people to help.
I asked for favours
and God gave me opportunities.
I received nothing I wanted.
I received everything I needed.

— Hazrat Inayat Khan, from the The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist

That last turn is the whole thing. We so rarely get the thing we asked for. We get what we needed instead. That’s the tension, sitting in a wheelchair on Campobello.

I think this is where love and fear do their quiet work. Fear looks at the hard thing and only sees what it cost. It keeps a ledger of the other life, the one that got away. Love looks at the same hard thing and asks what it might have made possible. Not because the pain wasn’t real. Because the pain wasn’t the end of the story.

I don’t know what FDR made of his. Maybe he reconciled it and maybe he didn’t. Maybe that’s why the ghost story has merit. It’s a question we’re all a little haunted by.

Because we all have a Campobello. A place where the life we planned came apart. And most of us spend a lot of time ruminating over it.

So, I’ll leave it where I’m sitting with it. When you think about the hardest thing that’s happened to you, which story are you telling? The one about what it took from you? Or the one about who it made you?

This Substack is a production of Heart-Strong, a nonprofit centered around a simple belief. The world works better, for everyone and everything in it, when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear. We have an open invite for anyone curious about what that world could look like. Learn more at www.heart-strong.org.

“How do you define suffering?”

Jonathan is the father of a good friend of mine going back to high school. He spent years as a minister at St. Paul’s Church in Brunswick, Maine. He’s thought about hard things for a living. So, I figured he’d have an answer ready.

He didn’t. He said it was a good question, and that he’d never really thought about how to put it into words.

Then he tried anyway.

Off the top of his head, he said, “Suffering is physical, emotional, or relational pain that pulls you out of the present.”

He told me not to quote him on that. Then he said I could. He just reserved the right to change his mind later. I liked that. The honesty of working something out in real time, instead of reaching for a tidy answer.

I’ve been sitting with suffering for a while now. Of all the spiritual traditions I’ve read about, Buddhism is the one that resonates with me most. It doesn’t try to make suffering disappear. It starts by acknowledging that we all suffer. Christianity, at least the way I’ve understood it, has leaned more toward relieving suffering. Toward fixing it. Buddhism just says suffering is part of being alive.

But here’s where I get stuck.

I have a hard time claiming suffering as my own.

I’m a tall white man born in the United States. I wasn’t born into a lot of money, but we had what we needed and most of what we wanted. Today I’d be considered wealthy. I live in a position of real privilege.

So, when I think about suffering, I think about everyone else’s. I see so much of it outside of me. People carrying weights I’ve never had to carry. Next to that, my life looks easy. I’ve had hardships, sure. But suffering? That word always felt too big for me to claim.

I said as much to Jonathan. I told him I didn’t think I’d really suffered much.

He didn’t let me off the hook.

He asked if I was actually addressing the suffering I did have. Not measuring it against anyone else’s. Just looking at it honestly.

And then we went somewhere I didn’t expect.

For about forty years of my life, I kept parts of myself hidden. I pushed them down. The sensitive side of me. The part that cries at sad songs and cries at happy songs too. I feel things deeply. For a long time, I was ashamed of that, because I’m a guy. And guys aren’t supposed to be soft. So, I kept many parts of me boxed up.

I’m only now learning to see that sensitivity as a kind of superpower. The range I can feel is enormous. The joy is huge. So is the sorrow. Feeling everything that deeply is a gift. It can also be hard to carry.

Jonathan looked at that and named it for what it was.

Living forty years with parts of yourself put away, he said, that’s suffering too.

I sat with that one.

And I think he’s right.

And maybe that is part of what suffering is. It’s any way you’re kept from showing up as your whole self. Through a relationship. Through what the world expects. Through a story you’ve been told about who you’re allowed to be.

The definition he gave me at the start reads differently now. Pain that pulls you out of the present. Hiding does exactly that. You can’t be fully here when half of you is locked away.

I’ve been working on a children’s book lately. I didn’t plan it this way, but it keeps circling the same thing. What it costs to leave parts of yourself behind.

Maybe that’s the work. Not getting rid of the suffering. Just stopping the hiding. Letting the parts we’ve put away come back out into the light.

That’s what I am thinking. And like Jonathan, I reserve the right to change my mind.

This Substack is a production of Heart-Strong, a nonprofit centered around a simple belief. The world works better, for everyone and everything in it, when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear. We have an open invite for anyone curious about what that world could look like. Learn more at www.heart-strong.org.

If you haven’t seen it, the setup is almost a joke. The hero, Dalton, is the best bar bouncer in the country. He’s also got a philosophy degree from NYU. So, you’ve got this soft-spoken, meditating philosopher who also happens to throw people through tables for a living.

It’s a fun movie. It’s also mostly a fight movie. Given the whole setup it could have had a lot more emotional depth, and it never quite goes there. It settles for the brawls.

But there is one line with some depth that has stuck with me.

Dalton spends his nights getting hurt. At one point he’s visiting a doctor, his future love interest, to get a knife wound stitched up.

She is looking over his long history of broken bones and scars and asks, “Do you ever win a fight?”

He responds, “Nobody ever wins a fight.”

I’ve been thinking about that one a lot. Especially as someone who loves to win.

A fight is built for a winner and a loser. That’s the whole design of it. Two people step in, and the entire point is that someone comes out on top. So, what does it mean to say nobody wins?

I started thinking about the fights I’ve actually been in. Not with my fists. I mean the argument with someone I love where I “won.” Where I had the better point, and I made sure they knew it. Or the email I fired off to prove I was right.

Did I win those?

In the moment, maybe. I got the last word. But in the long run, I’m not sure anybody came out ahead. We usually walked away with a little less trust between us. A little more distance. The scoreboard said I won. The relationship said we both lost.

Then my mind went somewhere bigger, and I’ll admit I don’t have this one figured out.

I thought about World War II. That’s about as clear a case for fighting as history offers. Fascism had to be stopped. People had to stand up. I’m not questioning that.

But did anyone win it? Winning that war still meant tens of millions of people dead. Cities gone. A generation scarred. “Win” is a strange word for that. Necessary, maybe. Right, maybe. But a win? I’m not sure.

I keep landing back on love and fear.

Fear sees almost everything as a fight to be won. It runs on scarcity. If you’re up, I’m down. If you get more, I get less. So, I’d better win. Fear needs an opponent.

Love asks a completely different question. Not how do I win this, but how do we both come out whole? It isn’t keeping score. It’s trying to stay relational, even in the hard conversation.

Here’s what I find beautiful about Dalton, that ridiculous philosopher bouncer. His actual job wasn’t to win fights. It was to keep them from happening. To calm the room. To defuse the thing before it turned into blood on the floor. The best fighter in the movie spent most of his energy trying not to fight.

I think that’s the whole thing. The only fights we ever win are the ones that never happen.

So, I’ll leave it where I’m sitting with it. Think about the last fight you won. The real one, with someone who matters to you. When you look back at it now, what did winning actually cost you?

This Substack is a production of Heart-Strong, a nonprofit centered around a simple belief. The world works better, for everyone and everything in it, when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear. Our work is focused on making love cool again. And we know we can’t do it alone. We have an open invite for anyone curious about what that world could look like. Learn more at www.heart-strong.org.

He stood in front of a wire grid filled with paintings. It was Friday, August 14, at Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick. The last event for the FROM WITHIN art show and fundraiser.

He said, “I can’t believe prisoners painted these.”

His dad was standing right next to him and he didn’t say anything.

I chimed in. “All of these men are so much more than the worst thing they have done. Right?”

That was the last real conversation I had at the FROM WITHIN art show. 3 months after it started, it ended with a kid telling me exactly what our society and culture had taught him.

The Art Show and Fundraiser

Last January I wrote about buying a painting called “Mother Earth” at a silent auction in Virginia.1 It was created by someone who is incarcerated. I reached out to thank him. His name is Tremayne Seymour. That thank you note turned into a friendship.

And that friendship turned into something neither of us could have planned. A traveling show called FROM WITHIN, raising money for ArtVan, a Maine nonprofit that brings mobile art therapy to communities and people that can’t afford it.2

We opened at ReVision Energy in South Portland. Then Orange Bike Brewing in Portland. Then The Mix on Park Row in Brunswick, which is an art supply store. Then Reverie Coffee House. Then the library.

What I Kept Hearing

Over the course of the 3 months, a few hundred people saw the artwork. Almost every one of them said a version of the same thing.

“Wow. They’re so talented.”

I heard it so many times it started to sound like one long sentence. And I loved hearing it. It’s exactly what those men deserve to hear.

But sit with their surprise for a second.

You don’t say “wow” when something meets your expectations. You say it when something breaks them. Every single “wow” had a quiet assumption underneath it. That people in prison don’t make things this beautiful. That whatever talent is, it doesn’t live inside prison walls.

Then a young boy said the same thing without the filters of adulthood.

“I can’t believe prisoners painted these.”

He’d already learned what you “should” think about those behind prison walls. Likely not all at once. Little by little, piece by piece. He picked it up from movies and TV and the way adults talk about people who are locked up. He picked it up from a country that has decided some people don’t have value to add to society.

That’s what cultural conditioning looks like when you catch it early. It isn’t hate. He wasn’t being cruel. He was repeating what he’d absorbed, the way kids do.

His dad’s silence was part of it too. I don’t know the man, and I’m in no way calling him a bad father. I suspect he’s a great father. After all, he took his son to the library on a sunny summer afternoon and let him spend close to a half hour looking deeply at artwork created by men inside a prison.

But what you don’t say is often how this gets handed down. Not with words. With silence.

The Impact of the Show

In my opinion, the show was amazing, and unfortunately, the artists never got to see any of it.

3 months of people standing in front of their work saying “wow” out loud, and not one of them was there for a second of it.

I sent them photos. I wrote down what people said and passed it along. But it isn’t the same thing. It isn’t close.

These men made the art to help people on the outside. Then they had to sit inside while it happened without them. They couldn’t watch a face change. They couldn’t hear somebody’s voice shift halfway through a sentence.

They knew this going in, and they did it anyway. Because they understand the healing power of art, and they wanted to do everything they could to help others experience it.

When everything closed out, FROM WITHIN raised $1,500 for ArtVan.

That’s art supplies for 4 months of ArtVan programs. Roughly 400 people will use those supplies.

6 men inside a Virginia prison helped to put art supplies in the hands of 400 people in need, about 800 miles away in Maine.

ArtVan pulls up in a van and brings art therapy to kids and families at no cost. No fee, and no need to get yourself anywhere. They take out 2 big barriers that keep this kind of healing away from the people who need it most.

Follow the money for a second.

These men inside a prison paint to help with their own healing. They give their work away. And the money from it puts art programs in front of kids on the outside. Some of those kids might just be on the same path that led those men to Lawrenceville.

Healing downstream paying for healing upstream. If that’s not beautiful, then I don’t know what is.

It’s Over OR Is It Just Beginning

The show is over. FROM WITHIN isn’t. A show ends when the lights go out. A marketplace does not.

That’s the next chapter. Prints, shirts, mugs, and tote bags made from incarcerated artists’ original works. A marketplace enables more artists to be brought in. More art to get out in the world. More money moving toward healing, both inside prisons and in communities on the outside.

The beta version of the marketplace is open at heart-strong.org/from-within. I would love for you to look at what these men made. And if something grabs you, buying it helps us expand. More artists and more impact.

Right?

I’ve been thinking about my own answer to that boy for a few days.

“All of these men are so much more than the worst thing they have done. Right?”

I said it to a young boy, but I was really talking to his dad. And to myself. And probably to everyone reading this.

It’s a real question, not a rhetorical one. Agreeing with it is easy. Living like it’s true is a whole different thing, right?

This Substack is a production of Heart-Strong, a nonprofit centered around a simple belief. The world works better, for everyone and everything in it, when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear. Our work is focused on making love cool again. And we know we can’t do it alone. We have an open invite for anyone curious about what that world could look like. Learn more at www.heart-strong.org.

“In that dream, I was cradling my arms like this, and there was a newborn baby. And I was trying to hold the baby, adjusting my body, but the baby was floating and I couldn’t get the baby into my arms. And I believe in retrospect, and in that moment, that was when Lila died.”

The pregnancy had been normal, zero red flags. Then one Wednesday morning at 38 weeks, there was no heartbeat. The floor didn’t drop, Rob says. It disappeared. It vanished from beneath them.

Rob told me this around a fire in the woods behind my parents’ house. He is the co-founder of Sad Dads Club, a nonprofit providing support and community for fathers who have lost a child.

Grief Has to Go Somewhere

Grieving is part of being human. So, it should be simple to say that a father who loses a child needs somewhere to put that grief. But when Rob and two friends started looking, there was nothing for them. Plenty of support for mothers, which makes sense, and almost nothing for dads.

“There is not an exclusive space other than Sad Dads Club for dads where they can come together with like-minded fathers who have been through something similar.”

That absence is not harmless. Grief doesn’t evaporate because a man was never given a place to feel it. It waits. And it comes out somewhere, usually sideways. We see it in the numbers. Men die by suicide at four times the rate of women. We talk about deaths of despair, about men in crisis, about anger and violence that seem to come from nowhere. I believe a lot of it is grief and trauma that was never allowed a door.

So, this isn’t only about grieving fathers, as much as they deserve the care. It’s about what happens to everyone downstream when a whole half of the population is handed no way to carry their pain.

The One Emotion Men Are Allowed

Rob has a theory about why the anger shows up, and it starts with how boys are raised.

“It’s synonymous for men to just like all the anecdotes of be tough, suck it up, grin it and bear it.”

The only feeling the culture reliably permits a man is anger. So, a grieving father, with no room to be sad, defaults to the one door left open.

Rob doesn’t think that road leads anywhere good.

“What’s that going to do for you if you’re trying to repress and shove down all this stuff that’s just going to then erode you from the inside?”

Here is the part that stays with me. When Rob finally built a room where grief was allowed, the anger that supposedly defines men mostly didn’t show up. Guys arrive braced for it.

“We don’t see a lot of anger. We see a lot of openness. We see a lot of compassion. We see a lot of vulnerability.”

Men who came in with no intention of speaking find themselves compelled to, not obligated, just moved, after hearing another father say his child’s name out loud.

I don’t think that anger is the truth of men. It is just what leaks out of a box with no other culturally accepted exit.

A Net to Catch You

Sad Dads Club exists because Rob got lucky in the worst way. Eleven months before he lost Lila, one of his closest friends from college had lost a daughter the same way. Eight months after Lila, the two of them met a third father who had also lost a daughter. Three men who could say everything or nothing at all and never had to explain themselves.

“I had the fortunate misfortune of having someone close to me, both emotionally close and physically. So, I had a net to catch me before I fell.”

Then they realized most men fall with no net at all. So, they built one. On a cold, rainy night when the three of them were getting together in person for the first time, Rob’s wife had joked that they’d be sitting in the dark drinking beer like a sad dads club. The name stuck, and in March 2022 it became real.

What they offer isn’t a fix. Rob is careful to say nothing makes the grief disappear. What they offer is a witness. He borrows the phrase from Dr. Kathy Shear, who founded the Center for Prolonged Grief at Columbia University.

“Grief needs a witness. We have an audience of people who are not going to be uncomfortable. They’re not going to be curling their toes waiting for you to finish telling this story. They’re actually listening eagerly and they’re taking it all in and they are there for you.”

And once a man is witnessed, his relationship with the grief can change. Rob told me about a father in the group, an avid runner, who couldn’t put his shoes on after his son died. Another dad said he’d had the same struggle, until he decided that when he ran, that would be his time to talk to his child. That flipped a switch. Now running is how the first dad stays close to his son. The grief didn’t leave. It found a better shape.

What It Asks of the Rest of Us

Near the end, I asked Rob what fires we need to tend. He said:

“Why can’t we do the emotional equivalent of holding the door for one another and just assuming that internally we are all on crutches of some sort, whether that be with compassion, grace, patience, respect, just kindness.”

His answer wasn’t directly about grief. It was about the fact that we all carry things internally. You’d hold a door for someone on crutches without a second thought. So do the emotional version of that for each other. The person who cut you off, snapped at you, seems set on ruining your day, might just be carrying the loss of a child or grandchild. What if we all gave each other that grace?

He left me with one more thing, for anyone who has ever frozen up in front of a grieving friend and said nothing because they were afraid of saying the wrong thing.

“It’s okay not to know what to say. It’s not okay to say nothing.”

Ask about their child. Say their name. Even if they can’t go there in that moment, they will remember that you cared enough to ask. What is more likely to build resentment is the silence.

Why This Conversation Matters

Heart-Strong is about the boxes fear builds, and the work of stepping out of them. Some boxes are prison walls. Some are childhood conditioning. And some are the quiet rules a boy absorbs before he can talk, like the rule that says his grief is not welcome here.

Rob and the fathers of Sad Dads Club are climbing out of that box in real time. Not by getting softer. By getting whole. And when a grieving man finally has a place to be whole, the rest of us are safer, closer, and more human for it.

If someone comes to mind who might need this, a father, a friend, someone carrying something alone, pass it along to them. Because the stories we share around the fire have always been how we change and grow together.

Learn more about Sad Dads Club at saddadsclub.org.

This Substack is a production of Heart-Strong, a nonprofit centered around a simple belief. The world works better, for everyone and everything in it, when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear. Our work is focused on making love cool again. And we know we can’t do it alone. We have an open invite for anyone curious about what that world could look like. Learn more at www.heart-strong.org.

The ribbon was for a redesigned lobby. Not a new wing. Not a new building. A lobby that had been under construction for a few months.

And there were people everywhere. People from all over the community, including many people I knew from various parts of my life. I kept looking around thinking, all of these folks came out for a lobby.

That’s when I knew I wanted to write a love letter to CML.

I rarely check out books from CML. And I’m there several days a week. That gap is the whole story. CML is a library. It’s also so much more than books, and calling it a library almost does it an injustice.

When Becca and I were choosing to move to Brunswick, walkability was key for us. But walkability to what? We landed two blocks from the library. At the time that just sounded nice. I don’t think either of us understood what we were actually moving next to.

As I stood there, listening to people talk about their relationship with CML, I couldn’t help but think about mine. It might sound weird to talk about a relationship with a place. A building. But I think that is a critical element of community.

So here is a little story of my relationship to CML, told as a love letter.

Dear Curtis Memorial Library,

In December of 2024, I sat in your fireplace room and started writing a paper called “If We Want to Heal the World, We Need to Heal Men.” I didn’t finish it there. But I started it there.

That paper led me onto the Heart-Strong Adventure. The adventure led to Heart-Strong becoming an actual nonprofit. And that has become my life’s work, although I don’t like calling it work. I like calling it play.

All of it started in a chair by a fireplace in a building I didn’t pay to walk into.

When I walk your halls, I walk through my own life. Different rooms hold different things.

The fireplace room in the winter. The outdoor courtyard in the summer. A seminar room where the Heart-Strong board recently held our visioning meeting.

A few days ago, I sat down with one of your staff to learn how to use the photo scanner, because I had a stack of childhood photos I needed to send to the illustrator of one of the children’s books I am working on. That book will come to life in part because one of your people made time for me.

I’ve come to you to hear talks. Sourcing food from trees. Unpacking Wabanaki history in Maine. I’ve come to see the art on your walls.

Years ago, when we were piloting our first WILD (Wilderness Immersion Leadership Development) retreat, I checked out a coffee carafe from you so we could have hot coffee ready in the morning.

Yes, a coffee carafe. From the library.

That carafe came from your Library of Things, which might be one of my favorite things in Brunswick.

Each winter my wife Becca and I do Library of Things dates. We check something out and build a night around it. We’ve made ravioli. We’ve made pierogies. We’ve traveled to countries like Turkey without leaving town.

And as with all healthy relationships, the flow of love needs to go both ways. So, we give back to you too. We’ve donated several things including all my beer brewing equipment. I wasn’t using it. Someone else can use it now. And if I ever want it back for a weekend, I can check it out.

I gave something away and lost nothing. That is not how ownership usually works.

Your new lobby is beautiful. Your whole building is beautiful. But that is not what I’m writing to.

I’m writing to the community of people who make you what you are. The people on your staff. The people who volunteer. The people who sit on your board. The people who show up to hear a talk about trees on a weeknight.

None of what I’ve described happens because of architecture. It happens because a group of people decided a library should hold people, not just books. Then they went and did that, year after year, mostly without anybody writing it down.

And here’s how this comes around.

For the past few months, Heart-Strong has been doing a pop-up art show and fundraiser called FROM WITHIN. Paintings by 5 incarcerated artists at Lawrenceville Correctional Center in Virginia. It’s been to ReVision Energy, Orange Bike Brewing, The Mix, and Reverie Coffeehouse.1

The closing show is August 14, and you’re the one hosting it.

When I reached out to ask, the answer was an enthusiastic YES!

I can’t get over the shape of that. You gave me the room where this whole thing started. Now you’re hosting the last show of one of the things that room helped to start.

One more thing. August 14 is Valentine’s Day’s half birthday. For me that’s a day when we can actually celebrate the true meaning of love. Curiosity. Compassion. Connection. And not consumerism.

With heart and gratitude,

Jeremy

We tend to save love letters for special occasions. Falling in love. Eulogies. Romance and death.

Those are certainly great times for them. But there are so many moments in everyday life where we could express love with a simple letter.

Most of the places and people holding our communities together will never hear that anybody noticed. But they just keep showing up. The doors unlock. The lights come on. The library opens.

If there’s a place like CML in your town, I’d love to hear about it. And if you get the chance, tell them. Out loud. While they’re still there to hear it.

And if you’re anywhere near Brunswick on August 14, I would love for you to come to the closing show of FROM WITHIN.

I hope you enjoyed this love letter, and I plan to keep writing more. Because if there is one thing the world can use more of, I think it is love letters.

This Substack is a production of Heart-Strong, a nonprofit centered around a simple belief. The world works better, for everyone and everything in it, when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear. Our work is focused on making love cool again. And we know we can’t do it alone. We have an open invite for anyone curious about what that world could look like. Learn more at www.heart-strong.org.

He needed me on his right. He’s deaf in his left ear. If I stayed on that side, he’d miss most of what I said.

I moved over, and we kept walking. And I asked him about it. Had he always been deaf in that ear, or did it come on later?

Later, he said. It happened shortly after his first wife died.

Jonathan’s first wife Mel battled cancer for several years before losing the fight in 1994. I can still remember when I found out. It was the summer before my senior year in high school. I was at Boys State.

Not long after, he came down with what seemed like an ordinary ear infection. He didn’t have a fever, and it didn’t seem to be serious to his doctor. They decided to give it the weekend.

On Sunday, he was leading the church service and went to stand up from kneeling. He nearly fell over. The hearing in that ear was gone, and it didn’t come back.

I sat with that for a second, and then I asked him what I really wanted to know.

Did he hold any bitterness about it? Because it sounded like the kind of thing that could have gone differently. A different doctor. Antibiotics administered. Some small turn that could have left him with his hearing.

He didn’t go to any of those places.

What he said instead was that he’d read many stories, but they weren’t his stories.

I keep coming back to that line.

There’s a version of his life where the doctor takes immediate action. The antibiotics come. He keeps his hearing. He could live in that version, bitter about the one he actually got, replaying the small turn that might have gone the other way.

But that version didn’t happen. The story that did is the one where he lost his hearing the same season, he lost his wife. Holding onto bitterness would mean living in revenge and regret, wrapped up in a life that isn’t his. That isn’t the story he’s choosing.

So, he lives the story that is actually his, hearing loss and all. It asks a lot of him. The hearing loss makes the work he loves harder. He loved the small group work of ministry. Especially working with children. When you facilitate a group, you sit in a circle. And in a circle, he can only hear half the room. He knows what it costs. And he lives it as his own anyway.

There are a lot of ways to end up living a story that isn’t yours. You can lose yourself in bitterness over the one you wanted instead. You can live out a story someone handed you. You can live a story that society writes for you. Either way you’re somewhere other than in your story.

I know that pull. For a long time, I was living a story that wasn’t really mine. Heart-Strong was part of my own way back to the one that is. A year of exploring where love and fear show up in the world. Listening. Learning. Experiencing. And sharing.

And now it’s growing into something bigger than just my adventure. Heart-Strong is becoming a nonprofit. Not because the adventure is ending, but because it was never meant to be mine alone. The whole point is helping other people live their own stories. Not the bitter ones. Not the borrowed ones. The ones that are theirs.

We believe that when people have the courage to live their stories as their whole selves, everything around them starts to change. Families heal. Communities grow stronger. And the world gets a little closer to what it could be.

Jonathan chose to live his story as his own. No revenge, no bitterness, no pretending it should have gone some other way. And it’s what I want Heart-Strong to help people do too.

Stay tuned for more information on the next phase of our adventure and building Heart-Strong as a nonprofit.

Learn more at www.heart-strong.org

I jumped on Gas Buddy to check out prices. Gas around there was higher than I expected. Most places were over $4 a gallon. I found a place, the Whistle Stop, about a quarter mile off the main road. Their price was $3.70. An easy little detour. So, I took it.

Glad I did!

It had a great country store vibe. They even had the old-school gas pumps. The kind where the numbers spin as the gallons go by. I went inside figuring I’d have to prepay.

The woman behind the counter told me to fill up first and come pay after. She said the pumps are always on. I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced that. I remember it being that way when I was a kid, at the little store where my parents got gas. But I don’t think I’ve ever pumped first and paid after. Just trust and the honor system.

I walked back out to my car to pump some gas. While I was inside, an older man had pulled up on the other side of the pump and started filling up his vehicle. There’s only one pump for regular unleaded.

He apologized. He thought I had already pumped and gone in to pay. I told him no worries. I said I’d assumed I had to pay first. He laughed and said that’s not how it works here.

We got to talking. I told him I love businesses that still believe they can run on trust. The farm stands where people leave their vegetables out and you just pay. The places at the end of people’s driveways where Becca and I get our eggs. The community places where folks set out their goods and trust you to leave the money.

He agreed. When he drove off, I told him to have a great day. He said he definitely would now. Said he’d enjoyed the conversation. So, had I.

Then I went in to pay, and I told the woman what they were doing felt kind of amazing. Building a business on trust. She thanked me. She said they try to keep their prices low too, just to help people out.

That stayed with me. Because about a half mile up the road, right in downtown Farmington, there’s a WIC center. Food assistance. People who can’t always afford to feed their families. The need in the community was very visible.

And then a mile or two from that little station, there was a major gas station chain charging $4.11 a gallon. I’d just paid 41 cents less a gallon. That could be a $5, $10, or even more difference. And that difference could be one more meal on the table for a family that does not have a lot to go around.

That little gas station is what I would call community-ism. An active choice to center community, not capital. Treating your customers the way you’d want to be treated. Do unto others.

I’ve been thinking about this as I look at building a small real estate portfolio. I want to approach it in a way that leads with love. Put simply, I don’t want to rent out a place I wouldn’t be willing to live in myself.

Imagine if every landlord thought that way. Imagine if every employer did. People not willing to rent out an apartment they wouldn’t be willing to live in. Leaders not willing to create jobs or pay a wage they wouldn’t be willing to accept.

I’ve worked with big companies whose leaders make millions, own second homes, and still don’t pay their people a living wage. I don’t want to shame anyone. But I keep coming back to a simple question. What if we stopped trying to extract, and actually tried to add value to our customers and employees?

I want to build things that way. Not as a slumlord. Not even as a landlord. I don’t even like the use of the term lord. The Merriam-Webster definition of lord is, “one having power and authority over others.” I don’t want power or authority over others. I simply want to provide a good place to live at a fair price, held to the same standard I’d expect for myself.

I want to think of myself more as a housing steward.

Steward is an old word. Merriam-Webster traces it back to the Old English for keeper of the hall. Someone who looks after a home or a piece of land on behalf of the people who live there. Not to hold power over it. To care for it. To leave it better than they found it.

That feels a lot closer to love. A lot closer to community-ism.

Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org

I’ve started introducing myself to people I don’t know in cafes, coffee shops, bars, and breweries. I invite them to share a snack and a conversation with me.

This is the first of those stories.

I was visiting friends in Hillsborough, North Carolina and went to one of my favorite spots in Durham to do some work. Cocoa Cinnamon. Three friends were sitting together at a table right behind me. They seemed like cool people. I had the idea for Sharing Cake but hadn’t approached anyone yet. It seemed like a great opportunity to kick off the series. And it turned out to be.

Meet Sam, Tariq, and Hannah.

Sam and Tariq are married. They’d recently moved to Durham from New York. Sam is in musical theater. She also works with a non-profit in New York that provides access to the arts for kids who don’t have it. Tariq works for a bio-data company in Durham. As he said, “He fixes the computers.”

Hannah had flown in from Bentonville, Arkansas for her birthday. She and Sam have been friends since their years together in New York. Hannah leads product design and development for women’s apparel at Sam’s Club.

Sam was the first to share a story. She told me about how Tariq had recently gone through an emergency kidney transplant. He was twenty-nine. That’s why they’d moved to Durham. It’s where he could get the care he needed.

I told them about my mom. She has stage four kidney failure and is on the transplant list. It’s been a tough journey for her. I mentioned that knowing I’d met Tariq and hearing his story was going to bring her some hope.

Tariq jumped in and shared how he got his kidney.

In August of 2024, his nephrologist told him he’d need a transplant. They did a biopsy. There was too much scar tissue to know why his kidneys had failed. Nobody could say for sure what went wrong.

Sam had posted online that Tariq needed a kidney. One of Tariq’s childhood friends, Ryan, saw the post. He’s a former Marine and a cop in Newark, New Jersey. Friends since kindergarten.

“I’ll get tested,” Ryan said.

Tariq thanked him but figured it wouldn’t match.

Tariq got a catheter put in. He did the training for dialysis. Before he’d started dialysis itself, Ryan called with some news. “I’m a match!”

1 in 100,000 chance!

Ryan was discharged from the hospital the day after the surgery. Tariq stayed longer. Tariq called the whole thing “just one weird season.” Six months from diagnosis to a new, healthy kidney. A kidney that came from a friend he’d known since they were five.

The conversation then shifted to Hannah’s work next. She told me she’d grown up in what she called Walmart land. Her family had worked for the company. Growing up, she was sure she’d never do that. She went to college in Fayetteville, then moved to New York after graduation and spent years in high-end fashion. When the chance to join Walmart headquarters came up six years ago, she was hesitant. It was a big change, and certainly not as glamorous as working in high-end fashion in NYC.

Then she told me about a trip she took to Louisiana that changed her perspective.

A few years ago, Hannah went on a shadow shop in the middle of Louisiana. She followed a single mother with five little girls through a store.

The mother told Hannah she had about $25 a month to spend on clothes for her daughters. She pointed to a dress on the rack. Under five dollars. She told Hannah the dress needed an overhaul. Better colors. Better prints. Better quality. If Hannah could pull that off at the same price, she’d buy multiples. And even better, she could make her daughters feel as cute as the girls next to them in $50 dresses.

A year later, the redesign hit the store. It was still under $5. Hannah followed back up with the mother.

“Y’all did it,” the mother told her.

Hannah said that moment was one of the biggest perspective shifts of her career. She’d come from the high end. She’d been skeptical about Walmart. The Louisiana mother showed her what the work could actually be. Now she calls it the most fulfilling thing she’s done. She gets to take high-end skill and put it in the hands of moms who couldn’t otherwise afford it. Moms who get to send their daughters to school feeling proud.

In many ways the story reminds me of my favorite Dolly Parton song, Coat of Many Colors.

I went to Cocoa Cinnamon to work. I left with three new friends.

Sam and Tariq shared their story without knowing my mom was on a transplant list. Not knowing that sharing that part of them would help give another person hope.

Hannah shared a moment that changed her perspective, not knowing I’d written about the same kind of shift with my father in a piece called Same Facts, Different Meaning.1

And then there were the people who weren’t at the table. Ryan gave Tariq a kidney, and in many ways a new life. A Louisiana mother asked Hannah for a better dress, and her daughters go to school feeling a deeper sense of pride.

We shared a cinnamon roll at Cocoa Cinnamon, but the stories were the real treat. I walked out both full and fulfilled, just like the saying said I would.

You don’t need a series to do this. You just need a snack and someone to share it with. I invite you to give it a try and experience for yourself that the saying is true.

Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org.

Carlos spent 13 years in prison. He’s an artist, an author, and someone who has given away 3,500 books to kids. He’s sold over 14,000 copies of his book, What If?, hand to hand, standing in front of the National Museum of African American History and Culture nearly every day for four years. He doesn’t hide from any part of his story. And that honesty is what makes him one of the most love-centered people I know.

This past winter, we sat in front of a fireplace at a friend’s house in Bethesda, Maryland. We talked about faith, fear, vulnerability, what love actually means, and why sharing your whole story matters more than most people realize.

The Caterpillar Story

One of the most striking things Carlos said was about caterpillars and butterflies.

“People always see the butterfly. But you have to be able to hear the caterpillar story. If you never share that story, people don’t know that they can grow or that they can become something great.”

Carlos lives this. He doesn’t skip over the parts of his life that are hard to talk about. He started with selling candy at 14, then selling drugs, then prison at 24. Not to shock anyone. He just believes that hiding your past robs others of the proof that transformation is possible. Fear says protect your image. Love says share the whole journey.

Love Is Vulnerability

When I asked Carlos how he defines love, he brought it back to prison. He talked about learning to love other men in a place designed to harden people.

“Love is vulnerability. Just being vulnerable. And when you do, it’s not a weakness. It’s a strength.”

He compared the bond to military service or a fraternity. You learn to love by being forced into proximity, then choosing to stay open instead of shutting down. That choice, made in the hardest possible environment, is what makes his understanding of love so grounded.

And Carlos doesn’t just talk about it. He lives it. He has over 3,000 contacts in his phone. When the spirit moves him, he reaches out just to say he loves them. He’s not worried about how it lands.

“I can care less what they may think. I know what they going to feel once I do it.”

Fear lives in what people might think. Love lives in knowing what they’ll feel.

A Box of Crayons

Near the end of our conversation, Carlos shared an idea that had come to him the night before while driving home.

“A box of crayons. Many colors. But the thing about it, they’re all crayons. People, different colors, different genders. You got everything going on. They’re all people. They’re all called to do the same thing and let’s get the picture done. But they all have to work together in their place to get the picture done.”

I love this because it’s so simple and so true. A picture made with one color is boring. The picture needs every crayon in the box. And no crayon gets to decide the others don’t belong.

This feels like something the world needs to hear right now. We spend so much energy sorting ourselves into separate boxes when we’re already in the same one.

Be Fruitful and Multiply

Carlos talked about the difference between leaving money and leaving impact. Money dies off in a generation. Impact multiplies. Then he reframed one of the most well-known verses in the Bible.

“God told you, or in the Bible it says in Genesis, be fruitful and multiply. It wasn’t just dealing with kids, it was dealing with ideas, thoughts. And those thoughts multiplying. But impact does that. And when you impact people, it continuously grow.”

I loved this framing. Most people hear “be fruitful and multiply” and think about having children. Carlos hears it and thinks about planting ideas in people that keep growing long after you’re gone. The 3,500 books he’s given to kids aren’t just books. They’re seeds. And those seeds will produce seeds of their own.

Fear hoards. Love plants.

Why This Matters

This conversation is part of my Heart-Strong Adventure, a year-long exploration of where love and fear show up in our world, especially in the lives of men.

Carlos’s story is a living example of what happens when someone chooses love over fear at every turn. Not once. Every day. In front of a museum. In a text to a friend. In a room full of kids holding books for the first time.

He told me that love flows through you, not just to you. And if you stop giving it because someone didn’t give it back, you cut off the flow for everyone downstream.

That’s a question worth sitting with. Where in your life have you stopped the flow?

If Carlos’s story sparked something in you, I’d love to hear about it. And if someone comes to mind who might need to hear this, please share it with them.

Because the stories we tell each other around the fire have always been how we change.

Learn more about the Heart-Strong Adventure: heart-strong.org