Nathan Oldham | Photographer

Peace, inside and out, is what I want. #inspiration #christmastide #quoteoftheday

Reminder for today: You don’t owe anything to the frenetic hustling world. #annelamott #inspiration #slowdown

☕️ London Fog macarons from @charhausecookie are game-changers. Go there. Also, their house latte is excellent. Coffee is from the delightful @silkcitycoffee just down the road. #microbakery #womanowned #ctbusiness #glutenfree #connecticutlife

When life gives you…no tripods, make one! Pro tip: wrap a gorillapod on your trekking poles and stick it in the ground. #phototip #hiking #photography #videoproduction #contentcreation

Branches like finger bones itching at their nakedness in winter. We (Northerners?) look out frost-paned windows and consider a new year while life huddles beneath the frost line, waiting for a thaw. Resolutions. Plans. Improvements. How to keep goodness alive through the blizzards of animosity. How to retain autonomy in our mind and liberty in our spirit. How to risk delight and confront evil. At the same time? I know, at a minimum, we must listen less to our little hand computers and wall computers and desk computers— all the little screens with little people and little mouths plinking their ideas into our heads like coins in a fountain. Always raining down copper and alloy and disrupting the moment, taking away a chance at reverence and consideration. At a minimum to fill some of that time with friends and the hearth of warm conversation while the winds rage against our homes. At the very least, we can be warm together in here.

A lack of words is what I feel most when trying to decipher the world. When I feel boxed in and try to rip through the banality of routine with my mind— like raking my hand through freezing snow just to feel something that isn’t a computer or a steering wheel— words almost breach the divide. And when I stare out over a parking lot and mutter my discontent to the firmament, the words are truncated and sighing. I wonder if that’s how music began forever ago. Some ancient castaway heaved a sigh and a groan heavenward and found a melody in their throat. So we sing when we pray? That might be enough, because the words are never quite right until there’s some breath behind them, until they hitch and bray and settle into the atmosphere. Until they come from the heat and thrum of a spirit instead of a baffled mind.

If all of this theorizing and speculation leads anywhere, it’s here, back to us. Decades watching dawn break and letting tides bury our feet and holding newborns and surviving car accidents and holding familiar hands. This is the stuff of living. And that’s what all the poets and books and religions are trying to say— that the big mystery is wrapped up in the ordinary endurance of love. And quantum physics and saviors and expanding universes are somewhere between the heart and the hand; that all of this (looks up to the sky, into whatever forever extends beyond the blue) is about this (looks into my sons face that shines beneath sandy wind-tossed hair).

Religious inclinations and personal values do not justify an allegiance with tyranny, even when that tyranny reflects your peculiar form of virtue. Today, about half of Americans will gamble on a dictatorship because they see democracy as a failed system. Believing civil debate, reason, and compromise can no longer improve our republic, many Americans misplace their trust in a demagogue who gives voice to their innermost compulsions and elevates self preservation over common good. I, for one, prefer the deep flaws of democracy to the promised ruin of autocracy and hope to God I am wrong about all of this. #election2024

For you. This is one of my absolute favorite spots on my local trails/ a copse of evergreens that make this 100 foot tunnel. #fall #autumn #connecticut #nikon