Yup. Stuff is changing, and it’s changing for the Better. The best-er.

Drumroll please…

Moving forward, Fireside is going LIVE every Wednesday right here on Substack so we can hang out, talk, and answer your questions in real time! It’s gonna be a shitshow, I know this, but we’ll figure it out as we go.

Inside the full video here’s what we talk about today:

• The Empty Nest Shift: How we’re coping with dropping not one, but TWO kids off at college, a bit on empty nesting, and learning to fit your life around who you’re becoming.

• Actually Solicited Life Advice: How to practice Buddhist “blanket forgiveness” when you’ll probably never get an apology.

• Travel & AI: Why relying on AI to plan your trips is a disaster and why you should probably hire Sarah instead.

• Current Obsessions: What we’re watching, listening to, and loving right now.

DON’T FORGET: Tonight at 6:30 PM MT is our first-ever Live Zoom/Meet Gathering! Grab your favorite ice cream, upgrade below to get the link, and come hang out with us face-to-face.

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Below, for our amazing Firekeepers paid community, are all the details: the link, the time, all that good stuff, as well as the poem I read today, and the weekly conversation, this time around what we’re all obsessing over.

I love you all.

Be good.

Become a Firekeeper

This world of ours is fast, it’s ruthless (often) and it’s unwilling to slow down or appease anyone. Doesn’t matter how rich you are, how beautiful, how young, if it wants to it will chew you up, spit you out, and punish you until it decides you’ve had enough for a time. This is true, not always, but it is true, and can be massively overwhelming.

How do we combat this? That is THE question. I don’t know we’ll ever have the answer, but I do know I have a simple tip that can help us feel less like we’re floating away, and more like we’re here, we’re ok, and we will be fine.

Let’s do this thing…

Read more

Sometimes in this strange little life you get to meet people that change absolutely everything. They don’t erase what you were before them, but they make you somehow forget there was a time before them at all. They just become an extension of your soul, of your brief and beautiful time here. For me, that is .

Artist, author, poet, thinker, spoken-word performer, community builder, outside-the-box-thinker, and fellow Autistic, he is one of the best friends I have ever had, and I love him with all I am. He runs the amazing here on Substack, and has created the Yellow Lamp Poetry in New Zealand, that host the most spectacular live shows, events, lit mags, and workshops. Basically, he’s a genius.

He’s so unique, so brilliant, I decided it’d be time that the wider world once again gets reminded of his existence, that they get to bask in the unbelievable shine of his spirit like I get to. That you, all of you reading this, get to find someone else to know, to adore, and to let change your life too.

We conducted a full hour long interview, and honestly if you have the time, I highly suggest you watch the whole thing. The wisdom he spills out is breathtaking, and beyond valuable. As I did with ’s Word Witch interview, I put a few of the questions and answers below, but again, the full thing is an hour long so I couldn’t put it all here.

Here are a few amazing answers to my questions, highly concised down (is concised a word?) for your reading pleasure, and to get you to listen to the rest, because it’s magical:

Q1 — You recently years ago moved from Wales to New Zealand I want to know has that geographical shift influenced your imagery or your rhythm or even the themes and things that are present in the things you’re writing now and in what way?

Ash: “Do you know what what’s strange, is me and you talk about a lot is algorithm. So when I was in the UK I was into a rhythm of the algorithm right, like post this here post this then yeah and then it’s kind of like okay if I don’t do that then no one’s gonna see my stuff and there was a pressure to it. Whereas here it kind of feels impossible to post at any good time which which sounds negative on the forefront but it kind of just became this thing where was like “Oh I don’t actually care now,” which is kind of a positive thing where I’m just kind of, I’m just gonna put out what I want to put out when I want to put it out. And I feel like it kind of relieved the pressure for me subconsciously. Since I’ve been here, I’ve been doing Yellow Lamp, which is my poetry show, which we’ll get into later, but because of that, I like stage more. And I get to be like, hey, come see the show. I’ll read you the whole poem.”

Q2 — When you read your work aloud, what is a specific feeling or thought that you hope that the audience gleans from it or feels it or connects to? Is there an overarching thing that you hope that the audience feels or connects to?

Ash: See this is this is this has evolved too because again if you asked me this probably a couple years ago the answer would have been different, but so many people like to just read a poem I’ve kind of stopped doing as many open mics because I hate reading one poem I feel like it’s not enough. I feel at minimum I need free poems now because I want to give you something that’s a range I don’t want to just go like hey here’s a sad poem have a sad day I want to have like here’s a sad poem, here’s a funny poem, here’s a gentle poem right like you got three different you got for these three different things that you’re giving out to somebody so what you take away from it is our poetry is so ranged. Because it’s also like my job we had a lamb to like kind of promote poets right it’s absolutely so poetry is kind of my job so I got to show people the range of it yep the whole thing on is like which I take on as a job. So when I do a set, I like to try and show people that it can be fun, because that’s the most vital part, I feel.

Tyler: Well, yeah, because your job is almost like the big top ringmaster, where your job is to show, look, we have strongmen, and then we have people riding on horses, and then elephants, and then we have trapeze artists. We have the whole range of it.

Ash: I’d love someone to just come back on a horse, read your poem, I feel like.

Tyler: That’s why you need to move to Montana. We know people with a lot of horses.

Ash: That’s my specialty when I move to Montana. They’re like, “Have you seen the poet horseman? He’s around here somewhere.” Oh my God. I would love that. People would come and hunt me down and be like, “Read me a poem.”

Tyler: Well, you don’t know that that can’t happen until you just finally move here.

Ash: Yeah, I got really distracted by the horse now. I’ve forgotten the questions, so we should go to the next one.

Q3 — Is there a poem either of yours or anybody else's that you feel like more than anything else kind of encapsulates or sums up what it feels like to be an artist who lives with autism rather than just a neurotypical person? Have you written one yet, or have you read one that you're like, holy shit, that's it — that's what it feels like?

Ash: I got a book on that, which I am put out — it’s called 14,000 Ducks — and it’s just a load of like… oh God, we’re gonna get weird with it. So I created this guy and his name is Jared Roy, and I imagined him after Zane Lowe, you know, on Apple Music. But he interviews me in this book, and then I answer with poetry and quotes, I feel like, because I did feel like I could — because there’s too many sides to autism, yeah, there is, to get it in one poem. I feel like I have a poem called I Have Autism and that gets pretty close, I feel, yeah, but the whole picture was this fake interviewer interviewing me and then I just answer with poems and drawings. It’s kind of a strange book, and no one likes the format, I keep putting it forward to people, and people keep saying, “We won’t publish this without changing the format. I’m like, “No, I don’t want that.” If you want it, you have to have the format. But I think people are a bit scared by it because it’s so weird. So this guy’s just interviewing me, and there’s fun poems in there.

I think it’s important to note that I think it’s dying down a little bit, but we went through a very big phase of autism where it got traction on TikTok. And the negative sides of autism became more mainstreamed. And then the good parts about it were buried.

Tyler: Unless you were like Young Sheldon who has a weird scientific or mathematical ability, or you’re some weird genius that can… it was like the only positive thing in pop culture about being autistic was like, you can remember a city after a helicopter ride and then you can draw it, or you know what I mean? It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t anything that we had, like people who you’d actually go meet. It was like the 1% of the 1% that had savantism.

Ash: Watch me throw this bag of rice on the floor and tell you how many grains there are exactly.

Tyler: No, yeah — it was either that or people rocking back and forth in the corner and drooling, you know. There was not the middle ground.

Ash: No one talks about the gentle goods, you know?

Tyler: No, that’s a perfect way of putting it.

Ash: Yeah, and that’s what we need — the gentle goods that are like… it’s not even big or negative. There’s a middle ground.

Tyler: And that’s where you and I live.

Ash: Yeah, that’s where we live.

Tyler: And I feel like that’s what we need more content on.

Ash: I don’t know if we need more content necessarily on like, “Hey, this is why it’s hard.” I think that’s an important poem to write, especially for yourself and processing. Yeah, I think what we really need is we need to know like, “Hey man, what’s your weird thing that you’re obsessed with?”

The gentle goods.

What a stunning way of saying this, saying what he and I have felt for so long but until he said it in that way, I don’t think I ever realized was this. The Gentle Goods. Not the debilitating aspects of Autism, not the over-the-top savant tendencies pop culture shows.

Another answer he gives is stunning too, and I want you to watch it to find it. He speaks of the immense creative risk of choosing yourself. I love it. Please go find it.

This video ends with me telling him quite simply that I love him with all my heart, and he feels the same. To share a planet with a man like this, to share a friendship, a love, is something I really treasure, and so I really do hope you’ll not only watch or listen to the whole interview, but go follow him everywhere you can.

Ash, thank you. For you.

Tune in, watch it all, learn. What a beautiful man.

I love you all.

Be good.

Become a Firekeeper

Song of the Week

A month of light.

How lucky I am to capture it, to carry a little camera on my hip everywhere I go. To aim it at what I see, to borrow it all. To bring it back to you.

The thing about light though, is that it needs something to hold it. Lately, this humble Signal Fire has burned a little lower than I’d like to see. Some of you, even some who have been here a long long while, have had to step back from the Firekeeper community, and I understand that more than you know. Life asks things of us all the time and we must decide when to listen.

Still though, I’ll say it simply, the way I try to say almost all things here: IF this place has ever felt like light to You, like something worth carrying home, I could really use your help keeping it lit. Not out of guilt, just a very honest ask, from me to you.

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Ok. Here’s July:

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

Kicked things off with the World Cup, complete with its very obvious advertising breaks veiled as “water breaks” and a whole lot of hype surrounding the USA team. I never got on board with Team USA, mostly due to a weird feeling of arrogance I felt from them everytime I watched them play, but still, it was fun to see a group of people all cheering the same way. Even though I was cheering for the underdogs they played against haha. After that, Sarah and I had a July 4th wedding that took place at a Clay Arts Guild here in town called the Archie Bray (that’s quite famous!) and so we went on a scouting trip/date night wander. I love that place, we’ve photographed at it many times, and the wedding was stunning. Seeing random bits of priceless art scattered about the grounds always makes me feel strangely warm, thinking that Glen Hansard’s directive to “make art. make art.” is being heeded.

Our dear friends John and Serwaa also moved back from Washington D.C. and we got to check out their new house and stunning gardens. It’ll be lovely having them back, and we’ve already spent more time together. The first bit of July was still clear air and stunning sunsets, so Lady G and I took full advantage of our nightly walks. Chaos was coming, you could feel it on the horizon.

Speaking of walks, one of those evening walks turned quite eventful, and I love the photo of my Dad in black and white as it was taken JUST before the true chaos began. The image that follows it is the aftermath, as the three of us were desperately pouring shampoo all over Gilly. He’d somehow found a squirrel that a hawk had killed, and said squirrel was rotting from the inside out (complete with maggots) and smelled worse than almost anything I’d ever smelled. Of course he rolled in it. Of course it smeared all over his entire body. It took 2 full washes and half a bottle of concentrated dog shampoo to rid him of it. To celebrate this being complete, and him being rid of the scent of decomposition, I took Sarah to get her favorite soft serve ice cream in the world: Goloso. If you’re in Helena, ever, find it.

I also celebrated my 45th birthday on July 6th. Which was low-key as I wish it to be, and lovely. Sarah, as always, made me feel so loved and held. Speaking of, you can still give me the best gift ever by joining this little family. Just sayin’. ;)

Something about the two first photos in this gallery, the porch door and the light on the garage, mean so much to me. Those two views are beyond nostaligc, as they are the door to my childhood home, and the view from the front door where my best friend growing up lived. McKenzie and I have stayed friends all the while, and I feel lucky for this. Anyway.

Birthday one (of three) for Addie also took place only 3 days after my birthday, and she celebrated with all her high school cross country and track friends. It was amazing to see some of them that I hadn’t really seen since they left for college, and the other half was a group that are just now starting their own senior years. Time moves so swiftly, and I do not know what to make of this. I do not know how to understand it.

Not a bad first third of a month, not a bad first third at all.

I hope you’re all still loving these.

I love you all.

Be good.

Become a Firekeeper

Almost every movie, every book, every cliche bit of art talks about how it’s good to forgive, but never forget. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, you know how it goes.

What if that’s wrong?

What if holding on tight to the story is what’s preventing you from healing? What if never forgetting and having the reminder of that weight is what’s bogging your whole life down?

We talk about blanket forgiveness a little today, and we talk about the power of just letting go of the whole damn story we carry after we’ve been hurt.

I also ask a question, and I hope you’ll answer it.

Give the video a watch, stick around to the end for a poetry reading.

Also…

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT!

The official FIRST ever FIREKEEPERS Live Google Meeting/Zoom Signal Fire gathering has a date! Mark your calendars now, so we can all hang out and spend some quality time together. More details will come on what bit of technology we’re gonna use, but the date is:

Wednesday, August 19th, 6:30pm Mountain Time!

We figured this gives the best chance for people everywhere to attend. It’s 5:30 for Pacific so you on the West Coast should be home from work, and only 8:30pm on the East Coast, so not yet sleeping. For some International Folk this is gonna suck, and maybe not be do-able, so we’ll try to make the next one be a time that works better for you.

Now, onto the poem I read today for all you Firekeepers that keep this place burning. Starting next week, the poem reading will just be for Firekeepers and will be a little fun perk. :)

I love you all.

Be good.

Become a Firekeeper

Sometimes I like to lead you, to guide you with my own words, my own introductions, and try to steer you into some kind of understanding. Sometimes I like to at least point you in a direction I hope you’ll get, then let you figure it out from there.

Sometimes, I do not. Today is that time.

Let’s do this…

Read more

There’s a weight to resentment, but I don’t know where we carry it. It just is. It exists in you, around you, like a weight vest but invisible, it settles into the empty spaces around your organs, it sits on your ribcage like it knows nothing of gravity. It compresses your breath, I know it does this, I’ve felt it do this. Each laborious inhale, each abbreviated exhale, each staccato breath and choking for air.

I think hands feel it too, they curl from fingers to fists when it returns, and return it can and will and does more often than you think it should or wish it could. It aches them, throbs like they’ve been used too often, like they’ve hit something hard too long. It comes back when you’re washing dishes or folding laundry, when you lift some item of food off a shelf in an otherwise empty aisle in the grocery store and you spot someone that makes you want to hide inside the boxes of mac and cheese or cereal you choose from. Old anger, the one you thought you’d let go of, the one you invented ceremony to rid yourself of. There it is, staring you in the face next to the boxes of Kraft, making hands into balls and stabbing at your lungs.

Forgiveness is not an event, it’s not a door to be walked through, a single weight to set down and never again picked up. It’s not the single crossing of a river.

I spoke at length last week about the childhoods we carry, about the courage to finally stop waiting for an apology from it that will never, ever come. Stopping the wait and truly letting go are not the same thing, and I don’t think they ever have been.

I realized this with a bit off gut-punch profundity a few months ago when Sarah and I sat down and watched the HBO mini-series called Task. It felt like the chest squish I spoke of above, it felt like the hands throbbing from curling into themselves. Hopefully it’s been out long enough that what I say below is not a spoiler, but I’ll give fair warning in case you haven’t seen and wish to see, I speak of final scenes and resolutions ahead.

At the end, there’s this heartbreaking and heartwarming scene where Mark Ruffalo’s character gives a speech in a courtroom, to the judge, but really to his son. His son who broke everything in his life, every bit of magic and joy. His son who upended all things, who stole what can never be returned. In his speech, he forgives, and every piece of me felt it when the two characters finally looked at each other and didn’t look away. Forgives. Not with conditions or if thans, just forgives. Just releases them both from the burden of something held so long they both forgot a life without it on their shoulders.

The burden of years, of time, of the astonishing reality of how much time it takes to reach this point, to truly set it down.

I see resentment cloak itself in the colors of protection, see it build castle walls around our hearts, dig a moat around those. I see the grievances I’ve held in my life sneak in wearing the costume of love, because in the end it seeks to protect me from what comes after the release. After the setting down.

It’s fear, in the end, that locks us to our own resentments, to the inability to truly let go. Fear that if we do, it’s almost like saying that what happened to us, what was done to us, was ok. It never was ok. It will never be ok.

I’ve tricked myself, too. Thought I’d learned my lesson, thought I’d finally understood the true meaning of forgiveness. I thought I’d uncovered the reality that there is such a difference between forgiving the person, and forgiving the story behind them. What of people that have gone? Those who have died, moved on, changed, repented? Forgiveness offered them, maybe willingly, maybe in the haze of no other real choice. What remains, however, what stays in the room with you, what rides on the shoulders or ties itself to the back of your clothes as you try to outrun it, is the story that’s been built around what they did. What was done to you.

The person has been forgiven, the story has not.

The story is what is clung to, the story is what is repeated so many times it almost tells itself. The same beats, the same explanations, the same breathless recounting, complete with the false resolution the arc tries to promise.

There is a peace in this, if for a time. There is a relief that comes as step one has been completed, the person has been forgiven, let off the hook. That it’s all good and no worries and water under the bridge and any number of aphorisms offered up to show how cool we are about letting things go. Until a song comes on that reminds us, until that person is spotted in a grocery store completely oblivious to the strife they have caused, the havoc wreaked. Until those fingers become fists again, the thumping in the chest returns. This is when we learn, true forgiveness is not absolution gifted to another, it’s freedom given back to ourselves.

A gap exists, and watching Task reminded me of it, between forgiveness performed and forgiveness that roots itself in the body, in the soul, in the life led. There is exhaustion in repeating the same things time and again, in the hiding in grocery store aisles, in the telling and retelling of the same stories to any ear that will listen. The gesture is not the work, the words are not the key to the door that we’ve locked in ourselves.

Mark Ruffalo’s character stood before a judge and spoke words of forgiveness that had taken years and years to grow in him. There are beats of silence after he does this, the camera refusing to cut away. A mountain of history between two people, and one decides to put it away. The other is clueless as to what to do with that forgiveness. What to do after the courtroom has been walked out of, after the returning to the home once shared. What to do when the sun rises on a new day. The work of it all. The true work.

To write a new story with all new words.

To fill our carts in aisles we no longer hide in. To drop the mac and cheese and never again look over our shoulder to see who is walking towards us, who walks away.

To breathe until lungs expand and the weight lifts and it’s not painful to inhale once more.

To uncurl our fists and let them be fingers once more.

I love you all.

Be good.

Become a Firekeeper

Song of the Week

Been a bit since I’ve rocked one of these my friends! Been a bit indeed.

I figured it was time for a Media Diet, as it’s been a long time and I’ve been reading a lot, listening to a LOT of music, and watching a few films and shows to pass the last hours of dark and forest-fire-smokey nights.

I’ll be brief so that you can make up your own minds, and I’ll give them a little ranking in Signal Fire Flames 🔥, so you know how I liked it if you’re in a hurry. 1 is bad, 5 is best.

Below are 5 things I’ve read, watched, or listened to, and a few bonus items too that aren’t media, but they Are worth talking about.

Oh, and if you’d like to help keep this Signal Fire alive, you can very easily do so by joining the fam, pledging your support, and getting a front row seat for all the goodies forthcoming, including our LIVE ZOOM Gatherings, which we’re announcing soon!

Become a Firekeeper

Here’s what my brain’s been digesting lately:

• Glen Hansard Discography 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 - I’ll never quite recover from losing this man, this artist, this genius, this gentle, gentle soul. The world lost one of the best, and his music will always endure. If you’ve not yet jumped in, now is the best time of all time. Honor him, treasure him, love him. Please.

  

• Project Hail Mary 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 - Minutes after finishing this film, my Mom called me and told me I had to watch it because the main character was “so me” that I wouldn’t believe it. Sarah said the same. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s a thing, and for some reason this movie quietly snuck into becoming one of my top 10 movies of all time. I loved it. So very much I loved it. It stayed pretty damn true to the book (which I also loved), and Gosling nailed it, considering he was acting alone a lot of the film, and responding to a puppet the other half. I cried for some reason a lot, and also found out that something I’ve always experienced has a name that I never knew about. It’s called Stendhal syndrome, and it’s basically “a rare psychosomatic condition where a person experiences rapid heartbeat, dizziness, confusion, fainting, or hallucinations when exposed to art or objects of great beauty.” Yep. I have that, and this movie brought it out.

  

• Land by Maggie O’Farrell 🔥🔥🔥🔥 - I’m about 50% through this, and I absolutely love it. Set in Ireland, on what I take to be the Dingle Peninsula ( a place we’ve been lucky to visit about 8 times and is one of my all time favorite places on earth), this book is so far stunning. I love the way O’Farrell writes, and the only reason I am not giving it 5 flames is 2 reasons: 1) I haven’t finished, and b) Sometimes I DO feel like Maggie chooses $30 words where a $3 word would do just as lovely. Still though, she’s an artist, and a wonderful crafter of outrageously beautiful sentences. So go on, use your fancy words, I’ll still gobble them up.

  

• Paradise in Plain Sight by Karen Maezen Miller 🔥🔥🔥🔥 - TMI maybe, but, we always have Buddhist books in our bathroom so whenever we have to do a #2, we have something beautiful to read and remind us how to be better humans. The book rotates (and is then thoroughly sterilized) and right now it’s this stunner from Karen Maezen Miller. It’s about her buying a home in LA that came with an unbelievable Zen Garden, that she then had to learn to take care of. It’s a Buddhist Koan in the best sense of the word, a lesson wrapped in a beautiful tale. What a reminder, what a beautiful writer. Please, read this one.

  

• The Drama 🔥🔥🔥 - Ok, I like this, kind of a lot, but I also did NOT like this. For some reason (and Please don’t think I am being shallow here) but Robert Pattinson’s hair really threw me off and distracted me in this film. That’s not why I gave it only 3 flames though. I thought that what plagues so many A24 movies kind of plagued this one for me, and it’s this over-saturation of something I don’t know how to put my finger on but only can call a constant simmer of anxious dread. I know it’s supposed to, but sometimes I think it’s overdone to the point of losing its nuance and it makes the films uncomfortable beyond the “this is uncomfortable art” and somewhere into “I just am not enjoying it.” This probably makes no sense, but I just don’t know how else to explain it and I hope some of you have seen it so you can ring in beyond the usual “Zendaya is amazing,” statement, because she is, but yeah. Thoughts?

  

• Amish Country Medium White Hulless Popcorn 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 - I know, you’ve already heard me talk about popcorn before, and I sang high and long the praises of the Amish Country LadyFinger kernels. I know. These are better. By accident we ran out of popcorn, found a sample bag of this new kind, tried it, and fell so deeply in love that we bought a 50lb bag of kernels on the internets to make it cheaper in bulk. Yeah. It’s that good. It’s bright white, it’s perfectly textured, and it’s almost completely hulless so you don’t get stuff stuck in your teeth and you get all the lightness you deserve. Try it, you’ll buy 50lbs too.

  

• Chasers of the Light Bespoke Elopements + Handfastings 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 - If you’re sick of hearin about these by now, sorry, not sorry at all. They are that good, that fun, that world and life changing, and that amazing. We go all over the world, we want to go all over the United States, and we want to work with YOU. Whether it’s a full elopement that we plan for you, OR even if you’re already married, we do these custom handfasting ceremonies that include me writing you a custom handfasting poem, officiating the official handfasting ceremony (and explaining the entire custom and how you keep it going), AND then you get a full amazing photography shoot with it. They are beautiful, they can be done anytime you wish to create a new vow renewal tradition, and they are so much more emotional than you’d think. Yeah. Everyone is welcome to do them, everyone should. Basically, reach out, let’s make magic.

  

Hope some of these tickly your pretty little fancies. Hope you find some new stuff to occupy some of YOUR time.

I love you all.

Be good.

Anyhow, I talked about how so often I feel we wait for apologies from our childhoods, our traumas, the people that have hurt us, and unfortunately, bluntly, so many times they are never coming. I talked about how the holding on is like scratching a scab because you’re sad you got cut. We just keep the wounds open.

Today I’m asking some big questions and I want some big honest answers from the lot of ya.

[A little reflection lives here for our Firekeepers — the folks helping keep this fire burning. If that's not you yet, no pressure, just know it's there.]

Also, something I genuinely DO want to know: Any secret Costco purchases we’re seriously missing out on? What’s your go-to, can’t miss, always have to have it purchase?

Leave a comment

Finally, a favor: Membership is hurting here at Signal Fire lately, and I get it, money sucks.

I’m just asking if you want to help keep this fire burning, and join our beautiful family (and get a front-row seat to our first ever Monthly LIVE Zoom Gathering/Poetry Reading/Party), we’d sure love to have you. We’re like NPR, fully reader-supported, and honestly grateful for every one of you. Button is below if you wanna help this flame spread.

Become a Firekeeper

I love you all.

Be good.

Surrounding us, at all times, is so much beauty it is so nearly incomprehensible. We are bombarded by it, our senses attacked at all times with so much stunning grace, so much overwhelming loveliness, it’s hard to handle, it’s hard to understand.

We fail so often to enumerate this, to chronicle it, to pay it the attention and appreciation it deserves. This becomes habit, and we fall into it.

Not today friends. Not today. Let’s do this.

Read more

I think I am lucky for the ways my brain is so bizarre. I think it was just happenstance, a strange twist of fate, or perhaps karmic compensation for all the ways it felt broken all those shaping years. Whatever the case may be, it happened without any announcement or anything remotely close to fanfare, really, it just happened like it was inevitable and meant to be this way. I just one day realized I had never once been waiting for my childhood to explain itself to me. More, to apologize.

This was an unceremonious thing, one devoid of resolution or a moment where a light-bulb went off and suddenly everything I’d been through just made sense. There was just a day I understood, and it was quiet, and it was beautiful.

Someone emailed and asked me a question recently about my late diagnosis of Autism, asked how it affected me as I looked backwards, and explained that they too were diagnosed late, that they too went years and years without the label or the explanation that accompanies it. Bitter, they felt, angry. They wanted an apology, I think more than most things, they wanted justice for all that aching.

I look at the me in the photo above, the little version smearing mud on my arms in my all white t-shirt and He-Man underoos, the impish smile because I can almost guarantee my Mom, behind the lens, was telling me to not smear mud any higher up, and I once again feel that beautiful quiet, that understanding that I cannot go back and change a single thing about the childhood I came through. The good, the bad, the tough, the simple, the lovely, the joyful, the sorrow-soaked. I cannot, and there is a strange peace in it for me.

I read a quote recently that said quite eloquently, “Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past.” I think this is that. I think it’s always been that.

I remember the birthday parties in classrooms as a child, the little version of me that refused to eat anything that was made by anyone other than my own Mom. I remember being teased for never trying the plates of brownies or cookies, the strange casseroles in long tupperware containers, the hamburgers grilled at school picnic days. I remember finding reasons to fake sickness on the days of field trips, to pretend I was my own father and call myself out to the office in high school. I remember the teachers that sent me to the principal’s office, the counselors that told me I couldn’t possibly earn the grades I was getting, so I must be cheating. I remember feeling broken in more ways than whole, that I never quite fit.

I remember the February mornings my Dad would have to leave for Spring Training, each year like clockwork the 6am flight to Salt Lake City he’d have to take to join a new baseball team for a new season somewhere far warmer than Montana. I remember the slog through the second half of a school year until we could finally go join him.

I remember the sorrow that struck my family like a freight train when a drama that I’ll leave unspoken hit us when I was just in middle school. I remember the year or two that followed and the feeling of such fracture inside the four walls I’d only known as haven.

I remember the good memories too, so many I cannot speak of them here lest you’d stay months and months, but somehow I think we are creatures that forget joy faster than we do heartache.

So how then to answer the email I received, how then to address a very real, very heavy question from someone who, like me, was not diagnosed until late in life and felt the full weight of that injustice? What of those that had even harder childhoods than this, those who endured abuse or isolation, neglect or loss?

With honesty, with a little bit of tenderness.

I told her that I did not believe there was ever true closure for the way we were treated as children. That we cannot unbreak the egg once cracked, we cannot erase the heartache or the hurt, the days that were more unfair than anything else. I told her what I knew: That childhood cannot apologize to us. That we believe there exists a door, and we spend our lifetimes waiting for it to open. There is no door, there is no opening. There is wall where we imagine handle.

Waiting, I told her, is the cost, and it’s too much to pay. Waiting is the wound, maybe even more so than the wound itself. I have no idea if what I said helped, I often feel that nothing I say really can, that maybe it’s just the fact that someone, somewhere is willing to listen and try that matters. I meant it though, and it was truth as I knew it. Sometimes that’s all we can do.

I found a lightness in my refusal to wait, whether it was my own brain doing it of its own accord to protect me, or if it was something I unearthed with a hell of a lot of practice I know not, but I found it, and it changed everything. I could not carry the weight of what I could not change, not any longer, not any further, and so I set it down.

The things I endured, the tough bits scattered through an ordinary life filled with a million bits of a million different colors and emotions, shaped me into this person, this me who tries and listens and shows up and cares and responds to emails from strangers because I have felt what they feel. That everyone is just doing the best they can, and no matter how hard I try, they try, we cannot change what has already been done.

I see me, mud-stained and grinning like a little brat at a woman who was both taking a photograph and trying her best to navigate life with a kid like me, a kid who saw the world different, who faced challenges the other two kids she had didn’t, who asked a billion and a half questions, who needed to skip school and hated the hustle and bustle of parties. I see the kid who was a handful of years away from going through a family trauma that shook and shaped, that unsettled and set fire to the life we all knew. I see a kid who would turn into this me, and I remember again what I remembered the day I was emailed:

There will never be an apology from our childhoods, from our traumas, from our pain. Waiting for it is scratching a scab off every time it forms because you wish you never received the cut. Waiting doesn’t just delay the healing, it becomes the wound.

I see me, I see the mud, and I suppose I understand.

I love you all.

Be good.

Become a Firekeeper

Song of the Week

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

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

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

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

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

The saints and poets, maybe they do some.

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

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

What a wake the world was giving him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like Glen.

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

Travel well.

I love you all.

Be good.

Become a Firekeeper

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you’d like to join us and automatically get access to the upcoming Fireside Chat Live Hangouts, and more, you can do so easily by clicking the button below and becoming an official Firekeeper here.

Become a Firekeeper

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

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

Let’s do this…

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

The next step was taken wi…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think we all will.

I love you all.

Be good.

Become a Firekeeper

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

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

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

Become a Firekeeper

Poems of the day below!

I love you all.

Be good.

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

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

Let’s do this…

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

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

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

We photograph what we love the most.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love you all.

Be good.

Become a Firekeeper

Song of the Week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think we bonded.

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

I hope you like them.

I love you all.

Be good.