The Values Sort

A series of indeterminate length exploring the core things that drive us.
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  • Philosophy

Growing up, the path was clear: "Where you go, I'll go. Where you stay, I'll stay." But what happens when the path you were given becomes a betrayal of your very self? Hosted by Nick Walton—husband, dad, and coffee roaster—The Values Sort explores what happens when you have to rebuild your life’s foundation from scratch. After leaving the structure of his childhood church and feeling "lost," Nick found a simple tool: a deck of cards, each printed with a single human value like "Helpfulness" or "Honesty." By sorting them down to five core essentials, he found a new way to navigate the world. In this series, Nick explores the cards that changed his way of thinking, sharing the essays and stories that define them. Whether you are 10 years old or 80, this is an invitation to figure out who you are, five cards at a time. nickfromoregon.substack.com

  1. 3d ago ·  Bonus

    Witness

    I want to talk about witness. Can I get a witness? It’s churchy, right? It kind of reminds me of old time religion. Call and repeat. Can I get a witness? I also think of a court. Witnesses being called to account for what they saw. Who did what, when, where, why? When I was growing up in church we were told to be a witness. A witness to the goodness of God. To the redemptive power of Christ in our lives. Which was hard, because it felt so large, you know? It felt so weighty. I felt a pressure to have witnessed something to which I could attest. And so, not entirely unlike this essay project I’m working on now, I combed my life for anecdotes or little stories that would prove not only the goodness of God, but hopefully… his very existence? I am a man whose faith in faith communities has been challenged. Things are weird for me in that area—you may have surmised. I have already talked about leaving a church community, and I’ve already talked about beginning to relate to a different one. This whole confusing process has been a confusing process. I am, to add to my own confusion, a member of a lay monastic order. Stay with me. You’ve been with me for this long, stay with me. My path is my own, and I’m only sharing it. Not recommending it. We have some friends. They are more like siblings. We choose our families. It’s a woman I grew up with, she was a little older than me. Her younger sister sang at my wedding and we remain close to this day. This older sister joined a christian mission school a thousand years ago when we were all very young. She met a boy, as kids often do, and so on, and so on, and she married an Englishman living in Northern Ireland. There they planted themselves and put down roots. Their faith and their vision for the future carried them across oceans and across theologies until finally they landed back at home, in Northern Ireland, where they live today with a very different, (though very similar) vision for their community. Our faith journeys are our own. And mine is no carbon copy of anyone else’s. But through life’s thick bits and thin bits we’ve become quite close with this couple from my past. They have, as I said, become like family to us. Quite dear. And part of that endearing has been some similarities in the wandering paths of wondering about God. When my wife and I were beginning our long walk out of everything familiar to us, our friends invited us to spend time with them, ask questions with them, and tuck in a little closer with them. They invited us to join the Order of the Mustard Seed. It is, as I said, a lay monastic order, which is really just a gimmicky way of organizing people who are loosely connected by thought and idea. The Order involves vows. If you can get your head around that. The vows are simple, but they’re like mustard seeds themselves, full of potential meaning and potential application. The three vows are associated with six practices, and I will share them with you now. * A vow to be true to Christ * A practice of creativity * A practice of prayer * A vow to be kind to people * A practice of justice * A practice of hospitality * A vow to be a witness to the good news you know. * A practice of learning * A practice of mission Now, what do you think of that? What do you think of those vows? What do you think of me having taken them? Do you know me? Do you know my heart? What then, do you think of my having taken these vows? Am I fulfilling them? I have fulfilled my vows. I have betrayed my vows. It has really depended on the day. I am empty of the promises I made in my youth. I promised to be sold out and radical. And I’m not sure if I ever knew what that meant, anyway. But am I a witness? What have I witnessed and will I testify? I am my own testimony. I am basically only a witness to my own life and circumstances. I am a witness to the mycorrhizae of relationships that have made me who I am, and I am witness to the transcendent power of community. I am not the man I once was. I don’t think or behave like I once did, and I certainly don’t worship the way I once did. But. Can I get on board with justice, hospitality and learning? I can. I can. As an act of worship to the God I’m no longer even altogether certain of, and as an act of love toward my fellow humans I can pursue justice, I can foster creative thought and action in my life. I can remember how much I must not know, and commit to learning where I can. And I can practice hospitality in my life, every day, with as many choices as I can muster. I can be a witness to these things. “Now wait”, you may be saying. What about prayer and mission? I’m conveniently leaving out these two more Christiany terms. Well. I can testify to these things as well, though they do formulate differently in my brain now than they once did. In season and out of season I find myself in prayer. I find myself tuning my ear toward the creator of the loved universe all the time, you guys. All the time. I ask questions, and I make my requests as I go about my day. I practice, (and it’s a practice), nonjudgmentalism, (knowing we judge ourselves most harshly), and I practice kindness toward others and gratitude. That’s prayer, right? Am I doing it right? The Psalms, (silent “p”), are a huge book of poetry in the old part of the book. And in order to claim Clyde, my 10¢ goldfish who died in a house fire, I memorized the twenty-third Psalm. I will again paraphrase. There’s a lot to unpack. It says something like, Lord, you are my shepherd. I need nothing. You supply. You lead me to peace and still waters. You envelop and restore me. You lead me, quite naturally, on the road of righteousness–to you be the glory. I can walk with confidence through the valley of death-in-life because I know you’re with me. Your direction and discipline are mine for the taking, and I drink it all in. You feed me, you feed my enemies–blessed is your name! You, creator of all things, have chosen to honor ME! I can’t contain the mystery of this. Surely your divine essence will permeate me and leak out of my pores every day that I’m alive, and when the day comes, I lay down and die, I will arrive in the great oneness of your presence for ever and ever. Something like that. I could quote it from the actual bible if you wanted me to, but that’s not why you’re here. This Psalm, this poem, and me running it through my brain backwards and forwards for forty years is my prayer, and so is my Values Deck. I’ll explain. When you do the exercise with me, once you’re finished, I take a trophy. I snap a photo of you, of your beautiful values choices and I add it to a collection on my phone. I text you the photo, and then I hide it in my heart. I don’t show it off to people, and I don’t put them on the internet. Periodically I scroll through the photos, and I might land on you, and if I did I would think kind thoughts about you. I wonder about you. I wonder what other choices you’d make today. Maybe I send you a text reminding you that I care for you. This is my act of worship. This is what passes for prayer in my life today. Finally, I’ll talk about mission. I don’t want to, but I’ll do it anyway. I am disgusted, outright disgusted with almost all of the missionary work that’s ever taken place on this God-loved planet. For time immemorial it’s mostly been s****y white men who couldn’t hack it in the societies and communities in which they were born, trying to stroke their own fragile egos in someone else’s garden. They drag their reluctant wives and their culturally fragile children around and in the absolute best of circumstances they tend to be paternalistic, rude expropriations of culture in favor of whiteness, Americanness, and a distinctly western flavor of the faith. In the worst of circumstances, well. In the worst cases the missions industrial complex has been an exporter of the very worst we have to offer. Cruelty, sexual abuse, criminal behavior, circumvention of cultural norms and national laws—all routine. It’s nothing but a Tuesday. I’ve seen. I’ve tasted that water. I won’t really be convinced that the net effect has been positive. The outliers, the true altruistic cases are the exceptions that prove the rule, and are very rare. I’ve known a couple, and inevitably they “fail” in fulfilling the expectations or demands of missions boards and sending bodies. And when that happens they do something else, something more, sometimes more beautiful, sometimes something closer to home. I mentioned in a previous essay, my first sojourn out of the United States. I was but fifteen years old traveling to far off lands on a missions trip. I listened to a compact disc of the Supertones, a christian-dollar-store Mighty Mighty Bosstones on the flight over, and from my place of privilege I let a girl fall in love with me when I got there. In truth I was as in love with her as a kid can be. Love is small when you’re young but it’s nimble. It moves fast. We wrote letters for a long time, and I know she expected me to grow into an honorable man, to come back for her and rescue her from poverty and abuse. In the end I did not. Because I was fifteen. And I never should have been there in her community in the first place. I broke that girl’s heart. I know because her brother told me so when Facebook was finally invented. In due course she married an abuser like some of the men she’d grown up with, and was eventually discarded with her children. I am not responsible for this. I am not not responsible. I do not bear no responsibility. I was there as an evangelist. A brutish occupation involving passionate preaching and threatening conversion techniques. I am ashamed. I was fifteen. Christ Jesus forgive me. I was fifteen, but I am not not responsible. So the word mission is quite loaded for me. I have not, in all my years, met many missionaries I didn’t want

    Witness

  2. Jul 30 ·  Bonus

    Heritage

    Let’s talk about my heritage. Let’s talk about booze. For thirteen weird years alcohol was prohibited in these United States. It was a master class in the foolishness of attempting to legislate morality. You might be shocked to learn how much alcohol was still produced, transported and consumed under the pious noses of a government tasked with guarding the purity and upstanding character of its citizenry. My great grandparents, my mom’s mom’s folks made bathtub gin. Which I’ve always been a little curious about. Bathtub Gin is how people colloquially referred to all manner of garbage-liquor containing cheaply produced grain alcohol diluted with water, juniper berry juice and even glycerine. They would have been experts at procuring this grain alcohol, probably legally produced for medical or scientific uses and, umm, diverted for domestic consumption. They would have used their metal or porcelain bathtub(s) to blend the final beverage, bottled and distributed throughout the community. And they would have known their way around distilling, even if “bathtub gin” didn’t typically involve the actual distillation process. When you distill liquor, you start with grains. Grains soaked and boiled in water, often with herbs and spices and other goodies, until the mash is separated from the feedstock. The feedstock is the alcoholic liquid that will be distilled into whatever spirit you’re distilling. And the remainder, the porridge-like grains mixture that’s been all boiled up is called the mash. The spirit is what you’d be going for in this scenario. That’s the marketable material. But in the end there’s a lot more mash than there is spirit. Many years after prohibition ended my great grandparents, the gin-runners, would come to visit us in Oregon from time to time. When they came, they drove their sedan, and in the trunk of said land-yacht they had a special suitcase. Ornate and beautiful, it contained a full bar. Or, a travel sized bar. But a fairly complete bar. I do not really even drink. An occasional summertime beer. A neat whiskey from time to time with a good friend ‘round a backyard autumn fire. But this is my heritage. One of my family’s love languages is firearms. We share them, we hand them down through generations. There are some old guns rattling around in this family. And some very neat old pieces of engineering they are. I grew up around guns, and I’m not afraid of them. I’m not unfamiliar with them, with their operation and function, and I’m not oblivious to their power and allure. Once, when I was learning to shoot larger firearms, we had a series of vegetables which we were invited to compare to the texture of our own bodies. Does the pumpkin feel softer or harder than my stomach? Does it seem more or less impervious to a bullet’s piercing power? And then of course, we shot the vegetables. And they were obliterated and I was convinced—guns were not toys. They were tools, in my home, for hunting. But I am not a hunter; I bear neither the need for a winter’s meat, nor the sporting desire. The world has changed, and I will not hand guns down to my children. My parents may not like reading this. My grandparents would not like reading this and my deeper-forefathers are likely rolling over in their graves. I will not hand the weapons themselves down to my children, but more than that I will not work to hand down a value for them. It’s not that they’re not beautiful on some level, but they’re powerfully destructive and have become representative of an ugly culture that’s grown up around them in recent years. There is a part of me that laments the loss of this culture of hunting and sportsmanship. It is largely overshadowed by aggressive fear-of-neighbor and protectionism, and I am repelled. Love of craft engineering, sportsmanship, these things are the spirit of my heritage. The rest is just mash. My dad’s mom is in assisted living now. She is old, and she is in need of community and care and she’s able to find both in her current living situation. But it’s required her to downsize, and so we have begun, as a family, the process of sorting her life like so much tonnage. Who gets the rolltop desk? Who gets the Ray Eylery paintings? Who will be responsible for these things moving forward.k I have her biscuit bowl. Her fried chicken-flipper. I have the rolling pin she received for her wedding and a very well-used potato masher with a lot of life left in it. These things are tonnage. These things are mash. The spirit of my relationship with my grandmother is the time she excitedly told me I had a baby sister. And later a baby brother. The spirit is not the biscuit bowl, it’s the memory I carry of her making the biscuits, and the recipe I contain within my brain today. Grandma is the grandparent I have been the closest with throughout my life. Her husband died when I was just about five, and my other grandparents were somewhat distant. I wrote about my grandfather in craftsmanship. But grandma was normal. She took us on errands. She watched us on regular days. We knew which of her phone books worked best for sitting up a little higher at her table for predictable meals of green beans and iceberg salads and, yes, fried chicken and biscuits. That’s the distillation of my relationship with her. The normal. My other grandparents were exotic and different and unknowable to me. Grandma was everything knowable. I treasure my memories and I treasure her. What is this value I feel for my own past? My family’s past? What’s that about? I wonder. There is so much in the present I don’t understand. So much about the future that I cannot predict. They say if you don’t understand your past you’ll be doomed to repeat it. I’m reaching into my past, not for tonnage, but for meaning. For a thread linking things of worth and value from the past to my future. One day in the not too distant future my grandmother will go on to the next thing. And she will exist only in memories. My dad and I will both carry the tonnage of a childhood lived alongside that woman. But what will my kids remember? Hands knurled from arthritis. The same few stories told over and over. Oil of Olay. All mash. I have grandma’s biscuit bowl. But one day I will let it go. Because it is also the mash, and not the spirit. I have already decided. One day I will have a ceremony, and I’m not yet sure how it’ll look. Maybe when I’m about sixty years old. Or seventy. Or fifty. I’m trying to think it through now. I will let the mash of my heritage go. I will let it die, and be done. I will encourage my kids to remember their grandparents! I will share stories while I yet may. I will encourage them to harvest my belongings for items that might have some meaning to them. And then I will take the rest and perhaps I will have a cleansing fire. I will write a story for my children, I will contain the past for any of my grandchildren who care to observe it. I will attempt, like my ginny-forefathers, to distill and refine, only my refined spirit will be an attempt to send something of value forward into the future. I will dig a hole, while my body will still dig, I will gather my grandchildren and hand them shovels, and I will tell stories about the biscuits of my youth, the subtle, and not-so-subtle racism that existed in my childhood and will doubtlessly exist still, the deaths that came too soon, the fried chicken, the appreciation for fine engineering, and together we will bury the past and allow it to die. Because our heritage isn’t the mash, it’s the distilled spirit that’s rendered at the end. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

  3. Jul 25 ·  Bonus

    Kindness

    I’ve been stalling on this one for the whole series. It may be my most dearly held value. It’s not in the cards, but it is in the fruits. It’s kindness. I’m stalling because I don’t know where to start. I have established that I’m not necessarily kind naturally. I am also not always kind today, now, in my life. I want to avoid claiming kindness as a central part of who I am, intrinsically. I’m certainly not kinder than average and maybe less. I am prone to road rage. Nothing too out of hand. No roadside fisticuffs, (except, umm, that one time with my brother…) It’s often, but not always, a sense of justice. How dare you?! Cut me off? Go faster than me? Slower? The gall! There’s a clogged-bowel of a stretch of highway near my home. The road goes from one lane to two, but only for a couple of miles, and then back down to one lane. It’s one of these classic places where wine-tasting tourists do 20 miles per hour lower than the limit and it just makes locals insane. Some local jackass is ALWAYS trying to pass nineteen cars in that passing lane. I am often that jackass. Once, some time back, on that stretch of highway, a man wouldn’t let me merge. We yelled at each other through open windows. Horrifying my wife. Once, several years ago, I had a word-battle with a man in the worst place in modern lawlessness, the Costco parking lot. Again making my wife shrink with embarrassment. These are examples not only of unkindness toward strangers, but inconsideration toward my wife, which is a certain kind of unkind in itself. It’s fairly easy to talk about unkindness. It’s more difficult to talk about the consequences that sometimes present themselves. My wife shrinks. And in that shrinking a little distance is caused between us, a little rift. And the rift requires energy on both our parts to close. And sometimes we don’t have the energy to heal quickly. Sometimes it stays awhile, and festers, it begins to be poison that sinks into our bones and into everyday conversations. Everyday life. Everyday decisions. I’m a lucky one, because every single time this has happened in our lives we’ve chosen to do the hard work of coming back together. But this unkindness is the stuff of divorces. All the damned time. We’ve all seen them unfold. Sometimes it’s some great unkindness like infidelity. But often it’s little things, left unchecked and unmanaged and un-apologized-for. Unrepentant unkindness that spins itself into rancorous hatred that begets even greater unkindnesses. When I think of kindness, I think of my friend who I took $250 off of. But it wasn’t just him, you know. It was his wife, too. She was there, it was her money, too. And the whole reason I knew the pin code for the card was that they lived their lives so very open handedly. I shared in their electricity, and didn’t help with the water bill. I used their internet with abandon. I brought big, dumb, wet fish tanks into their home. I shared their awesome huge apartment watching town go by from an old fire escape. An exciting, city-boy experience for a farmer like me. Eventually I shared in their musicality. I love Jackson Brown and Mike Scott and The Barenaked Ladies to this day because of them. And I shared at their table, they fed me and even clothed me. Our lives had been so differently informed up until that point. I moved in with a cocky, political swagger. A dismissiveness of other people and their ideas. I made dumb jokes and messes I did not clean up. I was a child. But I was old enough to grow the heck up. You may recall the story. I was about eighteen-ish, I was living with a family who had taken me in. I knew of no other place to go. And one day I got wild and I grabbed the debit card from the countertop, and I walked downstairs and across the street to the ATM, and I pulled $250 right the hell out of their account. I do not know what I was thinking. To say I wasn’t thinking is letting me off the hook too easily. I knew what I was doing and I did it. And you know the rest of the story. A little bit of humiliation, and then immediate grace. Mercy. Forgiveness. These things came not only from my friend, to whom I played sidekick for a good part of my late teens and early twenties, but his wife as well. She taught me to move the heck over and make room on the bench. Even when it hurts. She taught me that move. He loved me because he’s got a soft spot for long-shots, embodying some of those traits himself. She had her s**t together and loved me for no really good reason. Her kindness, (and his), has remained, all of these years. And now I have them as a prize. Our love for one another is the prize of their kindness, I get to be a winner, and I’m grateful. Shouting impotently alone in my car notwithstanding, I am pretty kind, most of the time. And that’s because I value it, largely because of them. I value having kindness shown to me, and more and more every day I value being a source of kindness to people in my life. Today I crave it. Now I want to practice it and do it better. Like anything it requires practice to do well. Part of what makes kindness complex to talk about or even think about, is that it gets confused in my head with niceness. And they’re not the same thing. Nice invites for dinner. Kind scrapes food off its own plate and onto yours. Nice was inviting me into a home. Kind was not kicking me out when I stole. Nice makes a gesture. Kind makes a sacrifice. Nice is nice. Kind is deeper. Kind is stronger. They’re similar. Nice, I guess, is like kind junior. They can be confused for one another but they’re not the same. Today the bench belongs to me. It’s my turn to make room on the bench, as often as I can. As much room as I can, for as many people as I can. I have mentioned the small person living in my home who is not my native-born child. This experience is providing me many opportunities to be nice through gritted teeth, and many opportunities to choose kindness. And I can report that broadly and generally speaking, I am choosing that kindness. It’s difficult to write about. Today, as I write this, their future with us is unknown. Perhaps by the time this publishes they will not be with us anymore! It is currently unknowable by me, and unknown by their mother, who is working her way through childhood traumas herself; traumas I can also not really understand or comprehend. This situation is requiring me to make room on my bench. And it’s comparatively easy to make room for a child. A young child, who’s endured tough breaks and hard knocks in their short little life. But I find a need to make room for others. Others who are easier to forget. To take for granted. My bench is getting full! But I can make room. I can make space for my eldest child, who is becoming an adult and who needs me more than ever to take up the slack in our relationship, no matter how tired I am. No matter how much I wish they’d meet me where I think the middle is. I want to remember my own eighteen year old self, and work hard to draw that line in closer, even as they begin to pull slack out. It will require me doing the moving. I will need to follow their dance steps instead of expecting them to follow mine. My bench is getting full! But I can make room. I can observe how confusing this life, and this specific situation with the young child is for my middle child. I can see them where and for who they are, and I can take steps to build up and encourage, even when I’m tired and it might be easier to allow the entropic universe to drag us closer to apathy. My bench is getting full! But I can make room. I can still be soft and tender with my youngest child as they admit quietly that they’re not really okay through this whole thing of life. I can put my elbows out and I can guard our relationship, I can never let go. My bench is getting full! But I can make room. I can show my wife compassion and love, I can do the hard work of seeing things from her perspective. I can sacrifice for her, and give my own so that she has enough. I can pile my plate full in life so that I have plenty to scrape onto others’. My bench is getting full! But I can make room. I can make room for this child, who right now just needs me to be the nuts and bolts of a dad in their life. Not the dad, not your new dad. Just a dad. Here, now, today, I will perform that function. They don’t need to know that ten years from now, by hook or by crook, I will still be there for them. Nice is me making breakfast at 6am every day. Kind is answering my phone in a dozen years and driving to wherever they are to pick them up from an unsafe situation. My job, my kindness now, is simply proving that I’ve got good dad energy. Look, it’s not easy, and I’m no paragon of kindness. I yelled at the Costco guy. I did that and I have other examples. But I do think that the first step is at least wanting it, you know? The first step is cultivating the willingness to do with less, repair what’s broken, make room on the bench. My friend’s wife didn’t have to make room for an 18-year-old thief. My wife doesn’t have to forgive me when I rage at strangers. My kids don’t have to keep showing up when I’m tired and distant. But they do. And that’s the mycorrhizae. That’s the network underpinning us all. Kindness isn’t niceness. It’s not always easy, and it’s certainly not always clean. It’s the choice to keep making room even when the bench is full, even when you’re exhausted, even when you feel the person doesn’t deserve it. I’m still learning. I still rage on that clogged-bowel of a highway. But I’m trying. And maybe that’s the first step—wanting to be kinder than you currently are. We try, we fail, we try again. We reach into our roots for the strength to try it a different way. My bench is getting full. But I can always make more room. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/su

  4. Jul 20 ·  Bonus

    Repair

    ​Let’s talk awhile about Repair. I am at work. I am looking around at the things I have repaired over the years, just here, in this room, and it’s a pretty long list. ​I broke a stainless bolt off the foot of my effluent scrubber. I was so frustrated. It happened while I was uncrating it. It was brand-stinkin’-new! And I broke the foot off. I had to drill it out (no small feat, it was stainless!) and then re-tap, re-cut threads, and manufacture a new foot with all-thread I found at the hardware store. I did that. ​I have patched holes in the roof. I have re-soldered circuitry on my bag filler. I have repaired and maintained my roasting machine a number of times. Everything from replacing burners to rewiring for data-logging software. ​And this is my current roaster! A beautiful San Franciscan SF-25, built by hand in Nevada of largely American made parts and pieces, which I prefer and appreciate mostly because of the easy availability of replacement parts. The machine I began my career on, the machine that built this business, is resting in pieces in a storage unit. I will not go into great detail here and now, but it was also built by hand, a one-off fabrication some dude built in a garage in Olympia. I repaired, and repaired, and rewired, and rebuilt that roaster endlessly. It was maddening in its need for attention. Like a toddler, that thing demanded my constant supervision. And like some toddlers I’ve known, if left to its own devices, that roaster would surely have burnt the house down. That thing knew how to throw a proper spark. ​I have repaired espresso machines and I have repaired coffee brewers from various manufacturers and with varying degrees of competency. I’ve been to trainings and I’ve learned on the job. I’ve glued things back together out of sheer need, and I’ve paid dearly for new parts to swap in. ​I think of my home. My tractor won’t start right now. It’s a fuel issue, I’m fairly certain, but I haven’t cracked into it yet. It’s cold out there! But I’ll get to it, and it’ll run. ​I am, in truth, stalling. Right now, here, as I write these words. The toilet and shower are backed up in my home. I know exactly what the problem is—it’s a way the pipes were set up improperly in the first place, and it’d be a monumental challenge to tear them out and replace them properly now. So when I get home, I will address the issue, without fixing the underlying cause. C’est la vie. ​When I think of repair, I think of Thrift. And I think of the why behind repair. It’s not just money. It’s not just that I couldn’t possibly afford to buy my way out of a given repair project in my life. It is, for me, a value. ​A value for avoiding superfluous resource spending, and a value for having my hands on my life. I do not want to go under my house today. I do not want to get the contents of my sewer pipes all over myself. But I do want to have the job done, and I want it done correctly, and I’d prefer it be done expediently. And, as we established in capability, I am capable of many things. So I do them. ​I appreciate people’s work and I appreciate people who work with their hands. Because look at the alternative. ​We live in a world of cheap consumer goods. We live in a world of inexpensive landfills. I just put stuff in a special can and a person comes and makes my hassles disappear into nowhere. We live in a world where we ship bales of fast fashion castoffs to faraway locales for people to sort through endlessly in their quest out of poverty. We live in a world where children in other countries work at sorting our e-waste, scrapping for bits of conductive metals to sell back to us in the form of even more cheap consumer goods. ​And I am repulsed. I am alarmed. I am making choices in my own life that hopefully reduce my impact on these systems, but I feel so small. I feel so insignificant. ​I buy durable shoes. I have my blue jeans repaired when they tear. I attempt to buy high-quality shirts, preferably ones produced in a responsible fashion in a country with high standards of laborer compensation. This means I spend more money on fewer t-shirts. I spend money on jean repair. I spend more money on shoes less frequently. I am not sure I’m saving money. And I know I’m not personally saving the Earth. ​So why am I doing this stuff? It’s something about Agency. It’s something about living a life that I can be proud of and satisfied with. For and within my own self. ​(...A few hours later...) ​I have taken a break from writing and fixed my septic backup. It was a relatively disgusting and straightforward procedure, and one of my kids helped me. ​We learned how to do it better next time, and discussed strategies for managing the problem with the plumbing in the future. We did save a little money. But more importantly to me, we lived our lives together. We were not on our phones. We were not sectioned off from one another. We were knee-deep in the problem, together. ​I showed my kid that a thing could be done, and in the process, I learned the same lesson myself. It makes us feel brave. We can do hard things. We saved money, we saved the gasoline needed for a repair person to come deal with the situation, and we saved a lot of time. We were in and outta there in less than an hour. We might’ve waited for days to get on somebody’s non-emergency schedule. ​I reflect again on my pickup truck. I’ve chosen repair. I’ve chosen to upgrade instead of replace. Because when you repair something, you aren’t just fixing a machine. You are building a relationship with the physical world. You are telling the entropy of the universe: “Not today.” Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

  5. Jul 15 ·  Bonus

    Craftsmanship

    My grandfather was a craftsman. He was an accomplished woodworker. The president of our state woodworking guild, he had multiple lathes in his shop, and numerous heavy tools that he built himself, sturdy, out of wood. His bandsaw, wood. His router table, wood. Drum and spindle sanders, wood. He had a lathe on which he could turn huge columns for the Elks Lodge. He had a tiny lathe on which he could turn intricate, delicate ornaments for the Christmas trees at our state house and even the United States Capitol Building! He built Governor Atiyeh’s desk. He was known for unique, one of a kind spinning wheels. He built a carousel quality rocking horse for us, his grandchildren and he filled his home with ornate woodworking details. Hidden compartments in the mantel. Secret stereo cabinets. That sort of thing. His shop was warm and eclectic. In addition to his original creations he restored antique furniture, which is a skill beyond. It’s one thing to make something beautiful. It’s quite another to fix something beautiful that someone else built with their ways and their tools and make it literally as good as new. There was a whole wall full of custom jigs that he had built for various pieces of antique furniture. The workshop smelled like a hundred kinds of wood plus his cigarettes—which he didn’t think anyone could smell. A cork board in his little office was covered in business cards, the currency of a businessman of the 1970’s, the 1980’s. It also had a hundred little pins in the shape of a drop of blood. One for every time he had given blood to the Red Cross over the years. A laborer by nature and a dairyman by trade and training, my grandfather was, for his last decades, a craftsman. I didn’t know him nearly well enough. There was tension in our family relationships and we never found each other’s deepnesses before he died. My first graphic designer is a craftsman. He’s out there, crafting still. He and I became fast friends shortly after I began as a businessman, and as a result of our friendship I have always had an outsized graphical presence as a company. Even now, he’s moved far away, took a good job, I know what graphic craftsmanship looks like because of him. I know who to hire. And who not to. He taught me what to look for. I have had exceptional graphic design, right down through the years. Which is a handy skill, because I am not a Craftsman. In some ways I wish I was. I have certainly tried to be over the years, but you guys, I’m just not. I do crafty things. I am not an unskilled person, not by a long shot. No self deprecation here. I can be honest and not betray my value for humility. I have built things out of wood that are functional as well as lovely. I have an eye for odd materials and how they might look with other materials. I can, after twenty years’ practice, make a mean cup of coffee. I can steam milk and pour beautiful latte art. I can do stuff. But here, now, I can admit that I am a generalist. I am a jack of all trades. Personally, my own sense of craftsmanship lies in spotting and managing craftsmanship. I’m a good collector of things, and I often know what things complement a company, a product, a recipe, a design project. And I think admitting that I’m not really a craftsman is the first step to developing it as a part of my personhood. And I do want to develop a greater sense of craftsmanship in my life. A greater value for it. A builder I know builds tract homes. Endless, boring, cheap. He would say that he’s providing a product for which there is demand, but if I’m honest I’m very sorry that there’s a demand for such a thing. I’m sorry for the place we find ourselves in as a society where cheaply built equals good. Malvina Reynolds sings a song, Little Boxes. Little boxes, on the hillside. Little boxes made of ticky-tacky, little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same. There’s a green one and a pink one, a blue one and a yellow one and they’re all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same. My granddad, the accomplished woodworker, used to sing that song. It’s about the devastating sameness of modernity and the boxes we find ourselves in. The boxes we put ourselves in, sometimes, but often times the boxes we’re expected to climb into by others. And the people in the houses all went to the universities, where they were put in boxes, and they came out all the same. It’s a critique of society’s willingness to default to the path of least resistance. It’s a song about settling. Another builder I know is a craftsman. He builds structures that are lovely and customized to their use case, and more importantly, structures that will stand up to the test of time. They are more expensive, though not unreasonably so. The biggest difference between these builders is the thought that both they and their customers put into the spaces they create and dwell in. So. Here we are at the end of my first free-wheeling essay with no card. No anchor. And which is it, I’m still sort of wondering? I have spent the essay telling you I’m not a craftsman and have now convinced myself that I may be. I am naturally a generalist, a tradesman, a doer. A collector of craftsmanship. Like my grandfather’s corkboard I have amassed a huge team of people upon whom I can call. My espresso machine was purchased new in 2012 and has essentially been on for 24 hours a day since then. Day in, day out, it is warm and ready to produce. It was built by hand in Florence, Italy. I am astounded at how little maintenance and repair it’s required over the years. Craftsmanship. Quality. It’s ended up being much less expensive than a cheaper machine would have been. The countertops in my coffee shop are concrete. With help from a couple of friends, my wife and I built them by hand. We designed them, we formed them, supported them, we poured and polished them, all us, all on our own. They have survived daily commercial use for thirteen years! Our signage, hand painted, classic, colorful and simple and strong. No backlighting, no plastic. Just aluminum and paint and good natured craftsmanship from a local sign painter. We have a four panel mural that is wholly our own. Again, produced by someone wonderful and local. The list goes on. I am a collector of craftsmanship. My collection is rich. It takes someone putting it together. It takes the farmer drawing lambs into the barn, the gun shearer gathering wool, it takes the person laboriously sitting at my grandfather’s spinning wheel, spinning carded wool into yarn. And it takes the weaver, mixing colors and textures to create patterns. A tapestry is not usually made by just one person. Devaluing our contribution is a trap. Devaluing others’ is a trap. One I seem almost eager to fall into at times. As has become a theme in my writing I must again acknowledge the benefit of community participation. The joy of teamsmanship, even over craftsmanship. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

  6. Jul 10

    #57 Sense of belonging

    Another central theme. Of this project. Of my life. A sense of belonging can encompass so many of the ideas we’ve talked about. Or at least it weaves, mycorrhizae-like throughout. What are we without a sense of belonging? Family security, humility, social recognition. They all intertwine with a sense of belonging. Forgiveness, equality, a world at peace. It’s all tied in. True friendship. Loyalty. Enjoyment of life. And card number 57–sense of belonging, feeling that others care about me– connects us, in my head, anyway, back to the beginning, card number 1. social power: control over others, dominance. Because in the times of my life where I’ve needed to reach for dominance, or control over others it’s always because I don’t feel a sense of belonging. I don’t feel a sense of security within my community. If we fall out of one, we may slip into the other. This gives me a tremendous sense of compassion for those mean people in the world, and that’s an impulse I could stand to follow a little more often. Default to compassion. Default to understanding. I cannot change the world alone. But I can change myself. I know–that’s a little “ABC Afternoon Special”. Forgive me. But it’s true. A sense of belonging is a lot of the why behind my values choices. Behind the hard work I am, (and sometimes I’m not) willing to do for my people. It’s the reason I subdue my sometimes overwhelming violence and bring it to heel. I have a high value for others feeling a sense of belonging. I lament the way many men feel the need to assert control and dominance. I care. About you. Others care about you. You are enough, you are large enough and strong enough. You have enough. We can have enough together. I reflect on all of the ways I feel a deep sense of belonging and I lament the rarity it is in some folks’ lives. I measure it in a hundred ways. I measure it in the hidden keys I know the location of. I measure it in the beautiful child I’ve been made godfather to. I measure it in manatees made of yarn and wire. I measure it in coffee customers and I measure it in the questions my friends know they can ask me about sex or poop or money. Or anything. I am blessed. I am the bearer, again, of an absolute embarrassment of riches. I am wealthy beyond comparison. I wish it was appropriate to list my riches, name by name. I have a sense of belonging in my space. I belong to a community, a large family. I am loved and cared for. I am a local business owner. I am a water board member. Belonging often isn’t a feeling you get, but the bench you’re sitting on. I’ve talked about “making space on the bench” a number of times. A sense of belonging is made real with the act of scooting over. It’s for family, it’s for friends, it’s for the weak and the marginalized, it’s for everyone, together. I left my church. Let’s talk about it a little bit. Perhaps that’s my keystone story as it pertains to a sense of belonging, and I’ve mentioned it, but I’ll talk about it a little bit more here. Thirty years. I began engaging this community when I was about nine years old and I only left in my fortieth year here. I believed everything. I contributed. I engaged. And there were times when I felt a sense of belonging in that context. But really, there were people, many people with whom I felt a sense of belonging, and it wasn’t about the church at all, it was always about the people. The structure failed. The structure claimed to be that mycorrhizal network. The church claimed to be the trellis that we could grow on and when we grew to a certain size, it broke under our weight. There was no room left on the bench, and no more was made. Men failed. It’s not okay. Some days I’m not okay. There have, nevertheless, been many people over the years who have scooted down, made room for me on their benches. Many of them have been in church, and I am heartened by the benches still available to me. I think of the number of people whose houses I would let myself into, I would eat their food and drink their coffee, I would take off my shoes and pick up their children and take apples from their trees. And I am glad. For everything. I am here. I belong where I belong. I also know how to make others feel that sense now. I reflect on the little person living in my home. I reflect on my own children and my nieces and my closest friends. And I believe all of my experiences in all of the years have stacked up and culminated in our ability to make room on the bench. I believe in our ability, my family’s and mine, to be a trellis upon which other people can hang and grow. Belonging is the mycorrhizae. It’s the network of love and affection that transfers information and nutrients between different organisms. Belonging is the key to someone else’s home, hidden in a place where the right people can find it. Belonging is the trellis. Belonging is not just the bench, it’s the act of shoving over. Belonging forks half its food onto your empty plate. I will end here with a bible verse, as has become my way. It’s one you doubtlessly know, or maybe you’ve just heard of it. Or maybe, like Tolkien in your forties this will be your first brush with First Corinthians 13. Here it is, paraphrased by yours truly. May it live a little bit within us. Love is patient and kind. It’s not jealous or envious. Love doesn’t boast or burst with self-pride. Love’s not rude and it doesn’t look out only for itself. Love doesn’t get drawn into fruitless fits of anger, and it forgets wrongs done quickly. Love doesn’t quietly root for evil to be visited upon others, but it does rejoice in the true things in life. Love is protective and trustworthy. It’s constantly hoping for the best and it stays the course. Love doesn’t fail. This is it! Card 57. The end of the deck. It feels like the end of something, but I feel like I’m just getting started. Stay tuned if you feel like it. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

  7. Jul 6

    #56 Health

    ​Another one that’s hard to pin down. ​”Clean living.” That’s what my dad says. The old man who smokes all the days of his life and dies peacefully in his sleep at 93? “Clean living,” my dad might say with an eye roll. ​Health is an honest value to choose. Health for me and for you. Healthy foods, healthy habits. Healthy minds and bodies. At least we have our health. I can lose a lot and still have a lot if I have my health. ​But boy, that can go sideways. ​I think of my friend the artist. She lived her life clean. She avoided sugar, ate healthy, and walked fifty miles for her fiftieth birthday. And then she got cancer and died. Quickly. ​I think of my cousin, the Forester. He finished his course of study and found a job in the woods somewhere. He got married and had a pair of real nice kids. Then he got the flu and died of complications. The flu! You hear that it kills people every year, but you don’t think it kills the strong. It killed my strong, healthy cousin. He was an ox. He was a gem. He was beautiful and strong, and he died because of the flu. ​My parents are all sick and beginning the process of moving on to the next stage. For one, it’s dementia. For another, it’s chronic leukemia. For the others, it’s heart disease and diabetes. This life can be cruel. ​Oh, that we might all live to old age and die in our lover’s arms. “We walked in and found them together, peaceful and gone.” ​My friend Johnny lived until he was old. He mowed the lawn one sunny morning. He came up on the porch and half-drained a glass of lemonade, and then he sat back in his chair and went to be with Jesus. That is the dream. Death by lemonade. He died of too much satisfaction. But we don’t get to choose. My middle child was born with complications. They spent a month in the NICU in Portland, and then came home with us. Their young life was punctuated by appointments and checkups, blood draws and urine samples and renal ultrasounds. They are healthy and strong today—essentially no residual effects. ​But years later, when our third child was nearly ready to be born, the doctor reading the ultrasound (who was also involved in our middle child’s birth) stopped and looked at the chart. She asked if the older one had survived. Survival is apparently uncommon for kids with our middle kid’s condition. And survival with no meaningful consequences is essentially unheard of. We rolled the dice and won. We had the dice rolled for us. We did little more than blow on them. ​And of course, my own wife is a cancer survivor. We do not take our health for granted. Or if we do, we do so in folly. ​I have experienced acute mental health issues in my lifetime. I think they’ve been with me all along, but it wasn’t really until my wife’s cancer diagnosis that they became untenable. Unmanageable. I am not a stranger to the darkest of thoughts. Thoughts of how my family might be better off without me. ​But my family rose to that occasion. My wife, my closest friends—they surrounded me and chained me to a deeper reality of our mycorrhizal connections. I sought help and found it. I am more attuned now to my mental health and more conscious of its delicacy. ​Be well! Stay healthy! As we’ve established o’er and o’er in this series, we have but one life for sure. And we don’t even know the length of that. ​Live your life fully and chew on the bones. Drink in love where you find it and give as much as you get. Give a little more than you get. Mind the mycorrhizae. They are the only things holding us up. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

  8. Jul 1

    #55 Reciprocation of favors

    This is another weird one. People don’t tend to choose it, and they often need help understanding it. Here’s how I explain it, imperfectly, when I’m sitting with someone doing the sort: Imagine I bring you a cup of your favorite beverage. Out of nowhere. What do you feel? Do you feel loved and cared for? Or do you feel a sense of urgency to reciprocate? Do you feel a sudden, heavy weight that you now “owe” me a beverage? Do you have a value for returning the favor? Or do you simply let love do the talking? I’m not rightly sure what I think about this card. Or what my level of value might be for this concept. Let’s explore it together. I guess in the worst circumstances, this value could produce anxiety. Every time something nice happens, it’s as though a burden is laid at the feet of the giftee. That would be heavy indeed. If I buy you lunch, and you spend the whole meal doing mental math on how to buy me a dinner of equal value to “settle the score,” we aren’t having a meal. We’re conducting a transaction, and I hate the ledger. I hate the idea that relationships are a balance sheet to be zeroed out. That feels antithetical to everything I believe about grace. But... let’s look at the flip side. Let’s say you make good on that promise to bring me a box of Island Punch Spindrifts. I would not probably feel like I needed to rush right out and buy you something of equal or greater value. What I would feel is loved and thought of. It would make me think you were paying attention to my words and my likes and you wanted me to feel seen. That, in turn, would endear you to me. And naturally, organically, I’d be on the hunt for a way to love you back. Is that Reciprocation of Favors? Yes, I suppose so. But there is a nuance here—The ledger vs. the echo. * The Ledger says: “I owe you.” (Definition: Avoidance of indebtedness). This is about me. It’s about clearing my name. * The Echo says: “I heard you.” This is about us. It’s about keeping the connection alive. If you shout into a canyon and there is no echo, the sound dies. If you pour love into a person and there is never any return—never a nod, never a thank you, never a mirrored kindness—the relationship eventually withers. Not because you were “keeping score,” but because flow requires a circuit. I think back to the Mycorrhizae from the last essay. The fungi give nutrients to the tree. The tree gives sugars to the fungi. They aren’t sending invoices. They aren’t worried about “indebtedness.” They are just living in a state of constant, fluid reciprocation. If one stops giving, the other dies. The danger, as established, is in putting things on the backs of another person in expectation of reciprocation. “I did this for you, so now you must do that for me.” That is manipulation. That is a trap. But the beauty is when the reciprocation is involuntary. When you love someone so much that you can’t help but return the serve. I don’t value “Avoidance of Indebtedness.” I am happy to be indebted to the people I love. I am happy to owe you my time, my ear, my heart. But I do value the Echo. I value the back-and-forth. The volley. The dance. So, if you bring me the Spindrifts, I won’t pay you back. But I will probably write you an absurdly long text message telling you how great you are. And that, I hope, is a melodic echo. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe

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About

Growing up, the path was clear: "Where you go, I'll go. Where you stay, I'll stay." But what happens when the path you were given becomes a betrayal of your very self? Hosted by Nick Walton—husband, dad, and coffee roaster—The Values Sort explores what happens when you have to rebuild your life’s foundation from scratch. After leaving the structure of his childhood church and feeling "lost," Nick found a simple tool: a deck of cards, each printed with a single human value like "Helpfulness" or "Honesty." By sorting them down to five core essentials, he found a new way to navigate the world. In this series, Nick explores the cards that changed his way of thinking, sharing the essays and stories that define them. Whether you are 10 years old or 80, this is an invitation to figure out who you are, five cards at a time. nickfromoregon.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    A series of indeterminate length exploring the core things that drive us.
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    63
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Nick Walton
  • Show Website
    The Values Sort