When Words Came Back

Becoming the Noise I Wasn’t Hearing

In the early 2000s, I posted to Hamburger’s Stand several times a week. It was outrage, disillusionment, and fatigue with a world that seemed to be losing its mind. I believed my rants were superior to the mainstream media pablum. I sought to make Hamburger’s Stand a leader in a movement to collapse the U.S. government and put something better in its place: a system that served the people.

The words burned hot, but they didn’t last. They turned quickly to ash. I eventually saw that I wasn’t helping society—I was only adding to the noise. I didn’t want to contribute to the commotion anymore.

For most of the 2010s, the writing came only in small, infrequent bursts.

In 2021, I picked up again. This time it began as a questioning voice until it became a dissenting one. I questioned the repeated assurances of “safe and effective.” I questioned why breakthrough cases were counted for a few months and then no longer tracked. I wrote to urge others not to be influenced by the $900 million advertising and messaging campaign promoting “free” shots, paid for by U.S. taxpayers. The injections became a newfangled stream of profits for Big Pharma, following a model the defense industry had perfected decades earlier — by going straight to the U.S. Treasury for revenue. By 2022, many people who received the shots contracted SARS-CoV-2 anyway, which was what I had questioned from the beginning.

In June of last year, I moved Hamburger’s Stand to Substack and started writing regularly again.

Coming to Substack was a calling back to my voice. A friend encouraged me to write again. Tell your stories of living in the woods. Write from your mountain perch, from your offbeat and earned perspective. Tell of your encounters with moose and what it’s like to live outside the hustle and bustle of the sprawl. Write from the part of you that wants to help. Write as if you’re speaking to one person who still believes it matters. And yes, continue to speak out — but in a different tone, so you’re not the noise.

Now, when I write, it’s to connect. To remember. To ask better questions. Not to rail against what’s dying, but to nurture what’s still alive. Many of my pieces speak from a life lived close to nature, or from lessons of healing I can pass along. I began to notice that the posts people resonated with most weren’t the ones that diagnosed problems—they were the ones that carried medicine. Stories about wilderness, breath, aging, patience, grief. I write now because when I share something true from my own life, it invites others to remember their own truth too. That’s how community begins — from standing quietly in the clearing and saying, “I’m still here. Are you?”

Still, I write about U.S. politics because I care deeply about improving the system by which we manage our affairs.

The old way of writing fed the part of me that wanted to fight. The new way feeds the part that wants to heal. And healing is a deeper kind of resistance, the refusal to let cynicism have the last word.

I’ve enjoyed the past eight months. The discipline of showing up each week has become its own kind of medicine—an anchor, a ritual, a way of paying attention and paying forward. Some mornings I sit at the keyboard with nothing to say, but the moment my fingers touch the keys, the silence begins to speak.

Maybe the words were never gone. They were waiting—just as the soul waits for us to stop arguing with the world long enough to hear what it’s been trying to tell us.

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.