Essays from the wilderness
I go into the wilderness.
I write about what I find.
Most weeks I go somewhere quiet — a ridge, a forest, a long stretch of road with nobody on it — and I write about what happens out there. Not the scenery, exactly. What the scenery does to a person when there's no one around to perform for.
I write about my brother, who isn't here anymore. About my father. About a marriage I'm still learning how to be good at, and about God — who I wasn't sure existed until I'd been alone in the wild long enough to stop talking and start to notice.
I found peace out there, and I found God out there, and I've come to believe other people can find the same. That's why I do this in the open, and why these letters stay free. If any of it helps you breathe, that's enough.
Come along — free, straight to your inbox.
A letter
I was six years old, it was the middle of a brisk South Carolina winter, and the heater in the back of my parents' Chrysler minivan was slowly drowning me.
Not dramatically. Just thoroughly.
A thick wall of hot, stale air pouring out from the front, and by the time it reached me in the back it wasn't air anymore.
I tried to say something and the words didn't land.
I tried louder.
Nothing.
It felt like yelling into a room that was already closed.
But finally, my dad looked up into the rearview mirror.
He saw me. And without saying anything, he reached over and cracked the window.
I shoved my face into the small opening.
Cold air hit me and I remember thinking — I can breathe.
I had been heard.
I think about that moment more than I probably should. Because so much of my life since has been a version of it. Trying to say something true out loud. Waiting to see if anyone looks up. And every so often — not often, but enough — someone does.
That's why I write.
Not because I have answers to the world's most pressing questions. Not because I'm trying to fix anything in myself, or in you.
But because I've come to believe that when one person cracks the window, the whole van breathes a little easier.
I write here when I need to exhale. If that's useful to you, come along.
The letters and the posts stay free, for everyone, always. The Out There Club is what funds that — members support the whole operation directly, and as part of belonging they get one longer essay each month. No brands. No algorithm. Just people who want the writing to exist.
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