Nathan Oldham | Photographer & Writer

More faithful to my writing than my fitness but I’ve enjoyed sifting through the vibrant memories of my time in the woods as a kid. Pieces of a memoir slowly coming together. Here’s a small piece: Those river deltas and spillways were my childhood. Those trails worn through the mulched floor were my sidewalks. I navigated and charted my days by the angle of light like a land mariner with a sextant. Those days stretched out forever in my mind, fostering an affection for the wild that never abated. There was a kindness beneath the canopy and I never felt any fear tracing my way in the deep woods along its streams and rivers. I learned to love the sounds of the woods. The rain and its music. What we often call silence is just the hush of our machinery, a jarring halt of combustion and hurry; my ears attuned to the quiet small life around me. I loved the trees for their shade and their patience. I imagined being raised by the woods and felt a symbiotic fondness, a reciprocation of contentment. I would stumble upon old building foundations and wells and rusted husks of farm equipment now trapped between oaks. Ancient stone walls marked forgotten property lines that the natural world disregarded then reclaimed with lichen and moss. I would even dream of the woods so vividly that in the mornings I would walk outside to be sure there was no waterfall where I had imagined one, a little disappointed that the giant forking rivers I saw in my mind were just a conjuring. All my language and spirituality and emotion grew from the forest like saplings until my life was a manifestation of the natural world: the spirit a river, the mind a taproot, the body an ironwood.

The good things don’t seem to talk about today. They flit and dodge the heavy clouds and when it starts to rain I have this habit of just getting wet. My hope curls into a damp sponge. I hear war cries like “He who saves his country does not violate any law.” And I exhale the last of my goodwill at 6am. What then? Beauty calls upon honor. Peace calls upon reason. Hope calls upon faith. Love calls upon strength. These are the good and furious faces of our virtue. “Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls…at night his song is with me—a prayer…”

I am waiting for it to be easy to go outside again. Which is mostly sad for my dog and the guy I pay to tell me I’m not moving enough. Winter has outstayed its welcome and I’m tired of being socked in by sharp air and long nights and shitty news. We look like we live in a ski out condo because we are always bundled in layers of hoodies and socks since the cost of heat and electricity is too much right now. We aren’t wearing boots inside though, I am not a monster. How many weeks away is spring? I know we’re getting there but waking up at 5am has me staring into what I can only assume is an eternal void. But, let me tell you, the sun does keep coming up despite my skepticism, thankfully. And soon it will come earlier. And soon we will be in mud and stick season but then, THEN, I will be able to turn my nose up to the day star without being sliced by the air. There are already spring birds nearby, let’s hope they stay because theirs is the only news I want to hear.

It is strange to feel powerless after a lifetime of being told anything is possible. I don’t know who started that idea but it lost is glimmer in the early morning stampede. I don’t blame those parents or teachers for trying to pass off their own disbelief as enthusiasm. I’m just not sure what they thought would happen when we finally stepped into the petty urgency of adulthood. It is also a strange sensation to feel the shudder of another Monday when the world is kicked around by people with a few too many yachts and houses. That my horizon hangs on their ambition like a pair of dice dangling from their rear view mirror—is stark. I do not care much for that narrative. I fumble awkwardly with my hands, which feel clumsy and small and insufficient. What can I do after all? If I believe in anything, it feels like resignation, it feels foolish and silly and regressive. Belief feels like a crutch, like when people say “it’s god’s will” or “god has a plan” which will always be, to me, the greatest evasion of responsibility of all time. Life has to be more than the vague contours of divine whim, or the game of billionaires. It takes some effort to not also feel small in my heart. I think that’s where all the hate came from. People got tired then they got cold. And hate felt like maybe they had some control so they used it until it consumed them and dripped down the family tree saturating the ground like a wicked bleeding sap. So I suppose today is about not shrinking into that shriveled husk of animosity that we cling to when we feel powerless. And quitting this motivational poster of believing anything is possible is fine as long as we still believe some things are possible. We don’t need everything—just a few of the best things that have always been within reach if we can hold on a bit longer. #amwriting #writingcommunity #writersofinstagram

I am happy to not wake the boy yet. He shouldn’t be up at old people time, when we start the house thrumming with coffee machines or boiling water. The dog is asleep too, she learned quickly there is no point to sniffing at my heels before the sun is up. The water-deep fade is on the morning with only a thin strip of orange in the east. Trees punched out against the morning sky, a delta of ink lines rooted in the dark floor. The cascade will begin soon, like the cascades along hiking trails where water falls endlessly off granite faces. That’s a Monday thing and I don’t want to drown. So a little coffee first, black. Only a little light on in the house, a quiet song, so I don’t get stolen into the whitewater.

The value in not giving up is in itself. Just like goodness and kindness and mercy belong to themselves and answer to themselves. Virtue and truth can be found in many places but are not moored to any of them. This is the center of gravity and how we maintain composure. Resilience comes from the assurance that our virtues—our principles, our convictions—are not bobbing on the murky tides of politics or ideologies or even religious institutions, but are true in themselves. So it is okay that those conversations paused—that we’re listening together. That we felt a little too much in that moment to put into words and so we let them hover, softly, like fog between the trees. I’ll be here when it’s time to talk again. (Read the rest in the Quiet Corner substack)

As a child, the world was promised to be a big round thing of possibility. We were going to explore the universe and plunge into that glimmering cacophony of colors— the whirl of cities and peoples and jungles and deserts and animals we didn’t know the names of and places we saw in a book or imagined—we knew nothing other than the endlessness of a world that would expand to hold our huge hearts. They said nothing of wonder calcifying, of defining the parameters of belief. I grieve that. I feel the weight of children who hang their paint-smeared smocks on the hook of practicality and production. If there’s anything we need right now it is some belief. Some wonder. Some hope in a world that isn’t this (gestures wildly around). Many of you are better than me and can slip between the bitter cold angles to find pleasure, or can filter the existential muck. I can’t. Or won’t. In the forever lyrics Switchfoot, one of those 90’s bands Christian kids clung to like a life raft: “We want more than this world’s got to offer We want more than this world’s got to offer We want more than the wars of our fathers And everything inside screams for second life.” We’re always chasing wonder and being told this is it, you’ve got to look inside to find it. Or be happy with the shaft of light that blazes through the vapor of your morning coffee. There is wonder there, no doubt. But I think wonder was never supposed to be constricted and that we’ve tried for force wonder; to commodify it, to mass produce it and funnel it through pixels and sugar until we’re so doped up that the world is one brown smear of stimuli. It doesn’t have to be this way. Maybe a little more wonder could remind us of what it was like to be a kid, when we didn’t even grasp the concept of gravity and the only reason we weren’t floating into the stars was because the world was pretty amazing as it was and we liked being here, together.

I have sat through a hundred sunrises at this desk and felt something different every morning. But the last few weeks I’ve been trying to hitch my flagging resolve to that great ball of fire that peeks over the eastern hills– and I wonder at this burning star in the dead of a New England winter and I want that same relentless shouldering of light into the world. We need it. This burning light of ours is not passive nor resigned. It is a believer, I expect. In us. Like each dawn, there’s some mercy in the light saying It’s alright. Try again. There are a few texts every day from friends, usually reaching for levity or restating astonishment at the peril of dancing so near the edge of the world. And I’m doing battle every hour on the hour– not even for wonder, just for the crumbs on the floor. Enough to keep us going. Burnout is real. We cannot binge panic and expect peace. We cannot swim in a storm forever. We cannot normalize eruptive humanity. The hush before angular light strikes my forest reminds me that even cruelty must abate, even if only to regather itself. And that is all we need, just a few minutes between breaths to reassemble the pieces jarred out of place from weeks of turbulence– just a few minutes to outburn the shades and haints that come for our light. It’s alright, friends. Let’s try again.

On hard days, I remember feelings more than pictures. The way my wife reaches for my hand when she is happy, to lock fingers like one of us might float off. Smelling my son’s head when he hugs me. The coarseness of granite slabs by the ocean in Northern Maine. The mountain air in my lungs when we break into the alpine zone and turn to survey the zeppelin clouds casting shadows miles long. The smell of books. The kind of soft laugh that breathes into and out from the same laughing daylight. Harmony? The sting of tears that sweep the world into an ocean when we finally release.

Used books are their own gift— I am obsessed with retracing the notes and highlights and underlines of other people. I have no idea who they are, where they come from, or why they read the very book I’m holding now. I could create whole worlds from that but for now will enjoy the brush with a stranger I’ll never meet.