Love Is Perfectly Imperfect: A Campfire Conversation with Briddge and Cherrie Orius

Love Is Perfectly Imperfect: A Campfire Conversation with Briddge and Cherrie Orius

Back in September, I wrote about meeting a man named Briddge Orius at the Returning Citizens luncheon in Norfolk, Virginia. We had maybe ten minutes together. We instantly connected over our mutual love of Ziggy Marley’s “Love is My Religion.” At the end of our conversation, he was recommended a book that would help shape some of my thinking. “Love” by Leo Buscaglia. He told me it was the book that taught him the importance of loving himself. At the end of our conversation, I asked if Briddge and his wife Cherrie would sit down with me for a Campfire Conversation. They said yes. This is that conversation. It’s also the first Campfire Conversation that is not one-on-one. It is with a married couple to boot. And I think you’ll hear why that matters. Because Briddge and Cherrie don’t just talk about love. They work it out in real time. They push back on each other. They disagree. They finish each other’s thoughts and then challenge those thoughts a sentence later. It’s love in practice, not theory. Perfectly Imperfect I need to tell you something about this episode. About sixty minutes into our conversation, I looked over and realized my phone had stopped recording. Storage was full. We’d been having one of the deepest conversations I’ve had on this adventure, and it wasn’t captured. We lost about fifty minutes of audio. In the moment, I had a choice. I could get frustrated, hold onto expectations for what this episode was supposed to be, and let it derail us. Or I could take a breath and trust that the conversation itself was the gift, not the recording of it. We regrouped. I cleared some space on my phone. And we picked it back up. What you’ll hear in this episode is the first seven minutes that were captured, then me bridging what was lost, and then forty-five minutes of conversation that picks up right where the energy left off. You’ll also notice the audio isn’t perfect in places. I have the technology for one-on-one conversations. This was three people and two lapel mics around a fire. That’s what happens when you try to have real conversations outside. Perfectly imperfect. Here’s why I’m telling you this. One of the themes from the lost portion of our conversation was expectations. Briddge put it simply: “Fear comes from expectations we’ve put on ourselves, on others, on our experience.” And there I was, living that lesson. If I had held onto expectations for what this conversation needed to be, I would have lost something far more valuable than audio. I would have lost the friendship that was blossoming right there at the fire. I got something better than a perfectly captured episode. I got two new friends. Love as Mirror, Compass, and Symptom When I asked Briddge and Cherrie how they define love, they each came at it differently. Briddge sees love as something you know before you can name it. “It’s like a feeling. You can’t really define it, but you know it. It’s like a connection. You can’t really describe it, but it’s there. It’s a lens. It’s a mirror. It’s the soul.” Cherrie sees it as understanding. “The reason why people have a problem defining it is because we don’t truly know what love is. For me, it’s more of an understanding. If I love a person, I’m going to extend that.” Then the conversation went somewhere I didn’t expect. They disagreed, right there at the fire, about whether love is born in us or developed. Cherrie believes we arrive with it. “We’re born with love. Real love. Authentic love that has not been conditioned or taught. If you truly love, that respect is automatic.” Briddge pushed back gently. “We do have love within us. It’s an internal thing. But that capacity within has to be developed. That’s why we have to grow into loving ourself.” I think they’re both right. And that tension between “love is already in us” and “love has to be grown” is one of the most honest things about this conversation. It’s the same question I’ve been wrestling with since I read Buscaglia’s book last fall. Cherrie also offered a framing I haven’t heard anyone use before. She compared love to an illness and feelings to symptoms. “Love is the actual thing. The feeling of love is a symptom. It’s something that can change. It can go away. But true love is not a feeling.” I keep coming back to that. If we mistake the symptoms for the thing itself, we’ll always be chasing feelings instead of tending something deeper. Can You Stop Loving Someone? At one point, the married couple dynamic caught fire. Briddge said he believes you can make the choice to stop growing in love with someone. Cherrie wasn’t having it. She pushed back immediately. “On a romantic level, but you can’t stop loving me.” Briddge held his ground. “As a loving person, I can’t stop loving anybody. But in the relationship, I can make the choice to stop growing in love with you.” Watching them work this out in front of me was something special. This wasn’t a debate for the sake of being right. It was two people who love each other deeply, wrestling with what that actually means when it gets complicated. And they didn’t resolve it neatly. They just kept going. That’s what love looks like in practice. Messy. Unfinished. And still moving. Leading with Love When It’s Hard The conversation took a turn when I asked a question I’ve been sitting with for months. If I’m leading with love, do I have to love the people who are causing harm in the world? Cherrie’s answer was immediate. “You still have to love them from a humanity or a human standpoint. You may not approve of what they’re doing, but that’s separate. Ask yourself what happened to them. What makes them do that. Because it’s something.” Then she shared a deeply personal story that I’ll let you discover in the episode. It involves forgiveness in a situation where most people might say forgiveness should not be given. And it demonstrates what it actually looks like to separate the person from the act. To love the human even when you can’t accept what they’ve done. Briddge followed with something equally direct. “If you choose to be a loving person, if you choose to be a person that leads with love, you’re gonna have to find love for them.” No escape hatch. No exceptions for the people who make it hard. That’s the commitment. Energy, Judgment, and What We’re Really Starving For Toward the end, the conversation shifted to energy and judgment. Cherrie talked about leaving a job because the negativity was changing who she was. “My energy was not what it used to be, and my team was feeling that. I told my husband, I can’t go back to that place.” Briddge was vulnerable about his own struggles. He talked about doing well around people but struggling when he’s alone. “When I’m alone, my energy is bad. But when I find people, because I’ve learned to value people so much, my energy with people is super bright. If you interact with me, you think I’m the coolest dude. But when you leave and I’m by myself, it’s a struggle.” I think a lot of people, especially men, will recognize that. The gap between how we show up in the world and what’s happening inside when no one’s watching. Briddge also named something I keep hearing in these conversations. “One of the most important things we can do is stop judging. Right now we’re at a state where everybody finds something wrong with everything. There’s no love when there’s judgment.” And Cherrie put her finger on something connected. “We no longer listen to understand. We listen to defend.” I think those two ideas go together. When we’re judging, we’re not curious. When we’re defending, we’re not listening. And without curiosity and listening, love doesn’t have room to do its work. Why This Matters This conversation is part of my Heart-Strong Adventure, a year-long exploration of where love and fear show up in our world, especially in the lives of men. What made this conversation different was the dynamic. Every other Campfire Conversation has been one-on-one. This was a married couple talking about love together. Sometimes agreeing. Sometimes pushing back. Always honest. And I think that’s what this whole adventure keeps teaching me. Love isn’t something you figure out alone. It’s something you practice with other people, especially the people closest to you. It’s a mirror. It’s a compass. It’s perfectly imperfect. Briddge brought his copy of Buscaglia’s “Love” to the fire and read a passage near the end. “Man has no choice but to love. For when he does not, he finds his alternatives lie in loneliness, destruction, and despair.” Look around. Loneliness. Destruction. Despair. Briddge is right. I think the reason is simple. Not enough love. If this conversation sparks something in you, I’d love to hear about it. And if someone comes to mind who might need to hear this, please share it with them. Because these conversations around the fire are how we change. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit adventure.heart-strong.org [https://adventure.heart-strong.org?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

The Forest Isn't Trying to Kill You: A Campfire Conversation with Michael Douglas

Nearly ten years ago, my wife, Becca, and I drove up to Maine Primitive for a survival course. I thought I knew what I was signing up for. A Marine-turned-survival-instructor in rural Maine. I was expecting hardcore. Toughness. Grit. What I experienced was something completely different. I experienced a kindness and compassion from Michael Douglas that helped change how I see strength, especially in men. From that point forward, I started seeing different ways that men can show up in the world. Last December, I reached out to Mike and asked if I could come up once a week just to volunteer. Do grunt work around campus. Whatever he needed. He said yes. What started with me hauling firewood turned into something neither of us planned. Mike started learning about my work in strategy and business planning. I started helping him get clearer on where to focus his time and energy with Maine Primitive. Meanwhile, he started mentoring me. I took classes in bow making, earth living, and tracking. I spent hours in the woods learning to pay attention in ways I never had before. Over the course of a year, we built something rare. He’s part mentor to me. I’m part mentor to him. And we’ve become close friends. The kind of friendship where you can say “I love you” at the end of a conversation and mean it without flinching. This past December, we sat by a fire at Maine Primitive the day after a big snowstorm. Everything was still blanketed in white. The boughs were laden with what Mike called “pre-holiday ornaments of beautiful, fluffy white clouds.” And we talked about love, fear, nature, survival, and what it takes to choose love when anger would be easier. Watching the Woods Disappear Mike grew up in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. One of the first wildlife refuges in the nation. As a kid, he had what felt like an endless expanse of cedar swamps, scrub oak, and pitch pine. Then development came. He watched the dirt road where his best friend’s parents used to walk hand in hand get paved. When that happened, the walking stopped. More houses came. People stopped waving to each other in their cars. Neighbors stopped knowing who lived next door. The community became, in his words, “more of a municipality than a community.” That loss made Mike angry. He joined the Marine Corps to push deeper into his passion for wilderness survival. He volunteered for every survival school he could get into. But each one taught the same thing: how to get rescued, how to get back home. Mike didn’t want to get back home. He wanted the woods to be home. Eventually, he moved to Maine because there were more trees than people. But the anger stayed with him for years. He carried it. He let it define him. Until he noticed something. “At some point you look back at that wake, and you’ve burnt more bridges than you’ve built, and people are just sick of hearing you complain all the time. You finally notice that even you are getting tired of being alone and miserable.” You Choose Love This is where the conversation shifted to the core of everything Heart-Strong is about. Mike described the moment when fear stops being the driver. “Obviously, no one’s gonna listen to what I have to say. I guess I have to roll up my sleeves and do something about it. What can I do in my limited life on this planet, in my neighborhood to cultivate a little healthy spot and with my own medicine, my own gifts, my own talent and perspective? And that’s when the shift from angry adolescent into young adulthood starts to take place, and it’s a powerful shift. And what is the catalyst of that shift from fear? You choose love.” You choose love. Not love finds you. Not love happens to you. You choose it. After the anger. After the grief. After the bridges burned. You look at what’s left and you decide to build from love instead of fear. And then Mike said something I’ve been thinking about ever since. “So that dichotomy is false. It’s a dance, it’s a relationship. You cannot have one without the other.” This is something I keep circling back to in this adventure. Love and fear aren’t enemies. They’re dancing partners. Fear alerts. Love responds. The problem isn’t that fear exists. The problem is when fear takes the lead and never lets go. The Price of Admission Mike talked about his new role as a grandfather. The sweetness of being a wisdom keeper, tempered by the recognition that his tank has more space than fuel. He’s watched his grandparents go over the falls. Then his parents. Now it’s his turn. And yet, instead of retreating into fear about that, he said this: “Bad things are coming. I don’t need to look for them. I don’t wanna find them, but they’re gonna come, and when they do, I look for the gift in them. Because that’s the price of admission.” That’s not toxic positivity. That’s not pretending pain doesn’t exist. That’s a man who has been through enough to know that suffering and growth are woven together. And he’s choosing to orient toward the growth. Attitude Comes First If you’ve ever taken a survival class, you know the fundamentals: shelter, water, fire, food. Mike always adds one that comes before all of them. Attitude. Your attitude determines how you approach everything else. And in Mike’s framing, that’s where love and fear do their most important work. A fear-based attitude says, “I need to suffer through this until I get rescued.” A love-based attitude says, “How do I make the best of this situation?” He takes this into his classes at Maine Primitive. When students build shelters, the standard isn’t just surviving the night. The standard is more comfortable than your bed at home. “Now we’re not building a survival shelter. We’re building a fort, and we’re kids and it’s gonna be cool.” Suddenly it’s play. And in that play, fear and love start working together. The fun gets you going. The cold keeps you honest. Both voices are real. And in holding both, something powerful happens. “Congratulations. You’ve just been repowered with your birthright choice. Also known as sovereignty, also known as empowerment, or resilience or reliance.” Being Vulnerable Isn’t for the Weak I asked Mike about the shift from his angry younger self to the man I know now. The one who leads with kindness. The one who helped change my understanding of what masculine strength looks like. “Being vulnerable isn’t for the weak. You have to be strong enough to be vulnerable.” He talked about how many men in the modern Western world stay stuck in adolescence well into their fifties. The us-versus-them thinking. The need to conquer before being conquered. At some point, he said, you realize the rest of the world is your home. And creating an enemy out of it is exhausting and counterproductive. “When you put that down and you pick up love, even though you know it’s going to go its own way, like there’s a peak of fruition and then things die back. It’s part of the cycle. When you can accept that rhythm and you become part of it, you do more good.” He also named something about men and emotional scars that hit close to home. Men take pride in physical scars. We show them off. But we don’t even acknowledge our emotional scars to ourselves. And that silence is taking a toll. Men in the US are four times more likely to commit suicide than women. Young men, five times more likely than young women. Mike’s response to this wasn’t clinical. It was human. “Strong good men are born of strong good women. And if you don’t have that powerful matriarch in your family, your neighborhood who stands up for and holds you accountable at the same time, then how do you know how to be a good man?” Aboriginal Television Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, Mike said something about fire that I don’t think I’ll forget. “Aboriginal television. One channel. Infinite stories, no commercials, and everybody taps into this ancestral spirit around the fire. They can’t help but feel connected to something deeper than self. Life feels at once sacred and so insignificant in the vastness of the space.” That’s why these conversations happen around fire. Not because it looks good on camera. Because something happens when you sit in the glow that doesn’t happen anywhere else. Defenses come down. Stories rise up. And the things that matter most find their way into the open. Tending Your Sacred Fire Near the end of our conversation, I asked Mike what fires we need to tend in ourselves and in the world. His answer started where I’ve been learning all great answers start. With self. “Tending your sacred fire starts with self. You can’t spread ease if you carry dis-ease in your heart about who you are. It shouldn’t drive you. The dis-ease should fuel your love for self first.” And then he drew a distinction that I think matters more than anything else in this conversation. “If you have dis-ease and it drives you to make other people happy, you’re spreading disease. If you have dis-ease and it gets you off the couch and you look at the landscape and address the needs of the people around you, your loved ones, your community, starting with self...” He went on to paint a picture of what that looks like in practice. It’s raking your elderly neighbor’s lawn. It’s checking in on someone. It’s letting energy move through systems of care instead of systems of transaction. “Once you become part of that energetic system exchange, it flows through you too. And that, I mean, there’s bounty in that. It’s an untapped resource.” The Child Warrior and the Adult Warrior Mike ended our conversation with a distinction I keep coming back to. “That’s the realm of the adult warrior. A child warrior thrashes against an imaginary or an actual enemy, an other. The adult warrior recognizes the battles within and its unconditional love for self, for family, for ecos. Our home.” A child warrior fights the world. An adult warrior tends it. A child warrior says, “This is me and this is how it’s gonna be.” An adult warrior says, “Oh, that’s where you’re at. Okay, let me get there with you and then let’s find some common ground and then let’s hash some things out and grow together.” That shift, from fighting against to growing with, is something I see in Mike every time I’m at Maine Primitive. It’s in how he teaches. It’s in how he meets people at their edge instead of demanding they meet him at his. It’s in how he builds shelters in a snowstorm because the love of what he’s creating is stronger than the pull of a warm couch. Why This Matters This conversation is part of my Heart-Strong Adventure, an exploration of where love and fear show up in our world, especially in the lives of men. Mike’s story is one of transformation. From a young man burning bridges out of grief and anger to someone who chooses love knowing full well that love comes with loss. That’s not weakness. I think that’s one of the strongest things a man can do. The forest isn’t trying to kill you. It’s just trying to grow. And so are we. The question is whether we approach that growth from fear or from love. Whether we armor up or open up. Whether we stay stuck in the child warrior’s fight, or step into the adult warrior’s care. If something in this conversation sparked something in you, I’d love to hear about it. And if someone comes to mind who might need to hear this, please share it with them. Because the conversations we have around the fire, the real ones where love and fear both get to show up, those feel like how we change. For more information on Maine Primitive and their programs, visit www.maineprimitive.com [http://www.maineprimitive.com]. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit adventure.heart-strong.org [https://adventure.heart-strong.org?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

What You Learn About Love When It Gets Taken Away: A Campfire Conversation with Sam Harris

If you’ve been following my Heart-Strong Adventure for a while, you know Sam Harris. You know he spent 24 years, 8 months, and 10 hours in prison. You know he came home on July 1, 2024 and immediately started working to help others do the same. You know he co-founded the Re-Entry & Recovery Alliance. You know he goes back into the facility where he was incarcerated and facilitates the I OWE MORE group, a program he started from scratch while still serving his sentence. You may have read my reflections on our lunch together or my visit to Lawrenceville, where Sam brought me inside a prison for the first time. So, when I sat down with him in my brother-in-law’s backyard in Virginia Beach for a Campfire Conversation, I didn’t want to start where we always start. I wanted to go deeper. This past fall, we built a fire, talked about love, fear, and what it means to come home after 25 years. What came out was one of the most honest explorations I’ve had of what love actually looks like when everything else has been stripped away. The fire helped. What Love Looks Like When It’s Gone There’s something about sitting around actual fire that changes a conversation. The smoke doesn’t care where you sit. It finds you anyway. The crackle fills the silence in a way that makes silence feel okay. And somehow, the things that are hard to say in a restaurant or on a phone call become a little easier to let out. Sam started talking about love. The kind of love that’s so ordinary you don’t notice it until it’s gone. “You really don’t know something until something’s taken away. I remember being married when I went to prison and losing everything. How bad you miss that word. I love you.” He went in during November 1999. His release date said May 2052. He would have been 80 years old. “You get in prison, you’re facing that release date,” he said. “Mama gonna tell you she loves you. All my sisters. But that’s a certain kind of love. And when you miss that part there. And then the friend love, the friends that you had out here, most of them are gone.” Then he told me about a man he’d met inside. Had to be 2003 or 2004, he said. A mail call. Someone announced this man’s name. And the man said no. “He wouldn’t go get the mail. ‘Cause he had been locked down so long. He had never got mail before. He said, ‘No, that ain’t for me.’ He had been down 20 something years.” Sam let that land. “Could I ever get to that point where nobody knows me?” Long story short, it turned out to be a long-lost niece who had tracked the man down. Sam’s face shifted when he told me. “Look at love. His niece. Never met. But to know that you meet people like that in a prison. That now you have to go in this environment and recreate this thing called love.” Coming Home to More Anger Than He Left Behind Here’s the thing about Sam that I keep coming back to. He spent 25 years in one of the most fear-based environments imaginable. And when he came home, he expected the outside world to feel different. Lighter. More open. What he found surprised him. “When I came home, one of the worst things that I deal with now is the amount of hatred and anger in the world. And I am like, why are people so mad out here?” Sam was a time capsule. He went in during November 1999 and came out 25 years later. And the first major change he noticed wasn’t the technology. It wasn’t the kiosks or the smartphones. It was the anger and fear. There was more of it out here than there had been in there. I’ve been sitting with that ever since he said it. Love in Action Sam didn’t come home and rest. He came home and got to work. He’s now a peer navigator with the Suffolk Public Defender’s Office, sitting with people who are where he used to be, not just incarcerated, but desperate. He described one man who was being belligerent in the courthouse. The attorney walked out. Sam sat down. “I said, look, man. They’re trying to help you avoid what I just went through. He said, ‘I know your story.’ And him and I sat there and had a dialogue for about 20 minutes. Did he change right then? I don’t know. But I know his demeanor came down. And I believe he saw someone who cared. To stop and talk to him.” He also has a proposal that he’s been bringing to anyone who will listen. He calls it the front door policy. “I remember November ‘99. I remember walking the streets of Suffolk. I remember one night calling 911. The lady’s like, what’s your emergency? Like, I just need help. Because I was addicted to drugs and just walking around. She said, I don’t know if we can help you.” He paused. “Well, if I throw a rock through this McDonald’s, now you come and lock me up and put me in jail.” He isn’t telling that story to excuse what happened. He’s telling it because he drives past people on the street now and wonders. Are they thinking what I thought in ‘99? His proposal is simple. When someone shows up at the court in crisis, before a crime happens, not after, somebody walks them through the front door and gets them help. “I think you can avoid a lot of guys going through the bottom. Imagine saving some lives doing that.” The Economics of It I want to talk about the economics for a minute. Because Sam did, and it stuck with me. The state spent roughly $45,000 a year to incarcerate him. Twenty-five years. Meanwhile, he was earning between $.27 and $.45 an hour working inside. On a good month, he made about $52. Deodorant cost $2.45. “Deodorant is 5% of my monthly income. Now equate it to the street. You paying $400 for deodorant. That’s what we’re doing. Would you pay $400 for a bar of deodorant out here?” And then there’s the furniture. Sam worked for Virginia Correction Enterprises, a prison labor program that manufactured furniture for state agencies and universities. A friend of his used AutoCAD software to design it. One day they found a newspaper. A professional draftsman in the early 2000s was making $75,000 to $80,000 a year. “These companies were losing bids because he’s paying him $.80, and this company’s paying the guy $80,000. But they’ll let me use that same computer to do that. But it won’t teach me how to clock in and out when I go to McDonald’s.” He brought this to a parole board member once. Laid out the numbers. 200 men go up for parole in a month. Two or three get out. The state spent $45,000 per person to rehabilitate them. And almost none of them are ready. “Your car breaks down. You take it to the shop. He keeps it three weeks, gives it back. You drive it a few days. It breaks again. How many times you take your car back to him? It’s not gonna happen. So why are we giving the state all this money to rehabilitate people? In the business world, we called that malpractice.” The Senator For years inside, Sam watched the Virginia General Assembly during session. Hours a day, third week of January through March. He watched bills come up. He watched one senator in particular. Ex-military, very vocal, not interested in early release for people like Sam. Sam wanted to meet him. When Sam came home, he got his chance. Last year. Shook his hand. Talked a little. “I didn’t even say nothing negative or bring up how I felt about a comment he had made. I just wanted to show him. And I said, all I’m saying is, you just congratulated me on coming home, and there’s plenty more of me back there.” Someone asked Sam later if he thought it got through. “It may be 15 years down the road, we don’t know. A seed may be planted.” That’s leading with love. Not agreeing. Not forgiving on a timeline. Not pretending the harm didn’t happen. Just showing up. Planting a seed. Letting go of the outcome. The Fire Sam Is Tending Near the end of our conversation, I asked Sam about the fires we need to tend. In ourselves. In community. He talked about the I OWE MORE group. How it started one night when he looked out his window and watched men dying in an overdose epidemic. “What can we do to help these guys?” He talked about 80 men gathering in a room without staff present because there are conversations you can’t have when you’re being watched. He talked about what his co-founder carried in those first two months, losing his mother and his son, and having nowhere to put it. “We found out,” Sam said, “that’s a hard thing for men to do. Is to sit and just talk.” That’s the fire Sam is tending. He came home. He found more anger out here than he left behind in there. And instead of adding to it, he keeps going back through the front gate, and he sits with men, and he talks. Why This Matters This conversation is part of my Heart-Strong Adventure, a year-long exploration of where love and fear show up in our world, especially in the lives of men. We build systems around fear and then wonder why men come out more afraid than when they went in. Sam spent 25 years inside one of the most fear-based environments we’ve created. And the first thing he noticed when he came home wasn’t the technology. It was that the world out here had more anger in it than the world in there. That observation should stop us cold. What Sam is doing now isn’t just remarkable because of what he survived. It’s remarkable because of what he chose on the other side of it. Peer navigation. Front door policy. Going back through the gate to sit with men who have nowhere else to put it. That’s not recovery. That’s love in practice. Sam’s story is one of the most direct answers I’ve found to the question I keep asking. What does it actually look like when a man leads with love? Not in theory. In practice. Every day. If Sam’s story sparked something in you, I’d love to hear about it. And if someone comes to mind who might need to hear this, please share it with them. Because the stories we tell each other around the fire have always been how we change. Learn more about the Heart-Strong Adventure: adventure.heart-strong.org [http://adventure.heart-strong.org] Learn more about Sam’s work: rraalliance.com [http://rraalliance.com] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit adventure.heart-strong.org [https://adventure.heart-strong.org?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

The Cool Air of What Seems True: A Campfire Conversation with John Biewen

I’ll be honest. I was a little starstruck sitting across the fire from John Biewen. John is the creator, producer, and host of Scene on Radio, a documentary podcast out of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. Over the past decade, he has taken on some of the hardest subjects in American life. Race and the invention of whiteness. Democracy and its fragility. The patriarchy. Capitalism. Each season is deep research distilled into something that feels less like a podcast and more like a graduate education you can take on a walk. His work has greatly influenced how I see the world. Last fall, I spent weeks with his Capitalism series. It cracked open questions I thought I already had answers to. When I reached out, I wasn’t sure he’d say yes. He is a professional journalist, documentarian, and storyteller. One of the best. I am an amateur dude who asks people to sit around campfires and talk about love and fear. Asking John to have a Campfire Conversation with me is a little like asking Michael Jordan to play a game of horse in my driveway. The fact that John said yes tells you something about the type of person he is. We sat together in Hillsborough, North Carolina, on a rare snowy day, and talked about fear, love, justice, capitalism, community, and the stories we tell ourselves to keep what we have. Justice First, Fear Underneath I came into this conversation through my usual door. Love and fear. Where do they show up? How do they shape us? John came through a different one. “If I were to try to express what is in the forefront, it’s justice. And systems of oppression. And trying to understand them.” He wasn’t dismissive of the love/fear lens. He just doesn’t lead with it. His words are justice, decency, kindness. But as we talked, the connection became clear. The systems he’s spent his career examining are built on fear. Fear of the other. Fear of falling. Fear of not having enough. He named something I think about a lot. “One thing that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough is the precarity of what most people live with and this sense of it in our society. If you’re not one of the winners, it’s really tough. You can fall very far and nobody’s gonna catch you.” That fear doesn’t just affect individuals. It shapes everything. “The fact that we’ve set up our society like that has deep seated ramifications for how our politics work and how we live together and don’t live together.” The Tension of Participation This is where the conversation got uncomfortable. In the best way. John made a documentary series arguing that capitalism is built on the exploitation of labor and the natural world. He also has a 403(b) retirement account invested in the stock market. He said it plainly. “Should I have not signed up for the 403(b) when I was 30 years old as a cub reporter at Minnesota Public Radio? Because there’s not another way actually that I’m aware of that I was gonna support myself in retirement. That was the way.” I need to name this because I hold the same tension. I benefit from a system that I’m learning causes profound harm. I wrote a 5,000-word piece about how capitalism has been built on extraction and exploitation. And my financial security sits inside that same system. John and I didn’t resolve this. But I think there’s something important about saying it out loud. Two guys sitting around a fire, both aware that the system they’re questioning is also the one keeping them comfortable. As John put it: “People have a great capacity for telling ourselves stories about the way the world is in order to justify us getting what we want. And keeping what we have.” That line includes us. What Love Looks Like I asked John how he thinks about love. “I care about you. Which is to say, I love you. If it comes to it, I will love you. I mean, I will do. I will care. I actually care what happens to you and will take steps to make your life better if I can. Especially if you need that help.” Not a feeling. A commitment to action. That distinction matters. He pointed to what’s happening right now in Minneapolis, where thousands of people are showing up to protect their neighbors from ICE raids. “The people who are feeding people, the people who are giving people rides, picking up their neighbor’s kids and taking them to school so the parents don’t get grabbed at the school doorstep.” That’s not abstract love. That’s love with its boots on. The Fire He Tends I ask every guest what fires need tending. In ourselves. In our communities. John’s answer surprised me for its simplicity and its importance. “We really need to tend to the fire of telling the truth.” He went on to say: “Trying to say stuff that’s true. And that feeling like amidst so much that’s not true and so many lies and so much gaslighting and so many actually culturally nurtured untruths that we’ve all grown up with for generations, to in the face of that, to just kind of try to open a window that lets in the cool air of what actually seems to be true. That feels like really what I’m trying to do in the world.” But truth wasn’t the only fire he named. He also talked about the fire of community, of caring, of openness. And then he said something that caught me off guard. He admitted he’s not great at community. He’s introverted. Not a joiner. Prefers to stay home with his laptop and his books. “I’m not a great participant in community if I’m really, if I’m being honest.” I pushed back. Isn’t the storyteller one of the most important roles in any community? Someone who steps back, sees the connections, and shares what they find so the rest of us can see more clearly? He paused. “I do think that my work sometimes contributes to what people do in community and to people’s understanding, and that that can help the kind of work that people do.” A mentor of mine said something similar to me recently. There are soldiers and there are surveyors. You need both. Someone has to do the work on the ground. And someone has to climb the ridge and map the terrain so the work makes sense. John Biewen has been mapping terrain for over a decade. And for this conversation, he was generous enough to sit with me and share what he’s found. Why This Matters This conversation is part of my Heart-Strong Adventure. A year of exploring where love and fear show up in the world. John and I are both men who grew up in modest families, worked our way into comfort, and now find ourselves asking hard questions about the systems that got us here. We both played D3 basketball. We both care about justice. We both benefit from a system we’re learning to see more clearly. The difference is John has spent decades doing the deep, slow, careful work of documenting these systems. I’m a few months into trying to understand them through the lens of love and fear. Sitting with him felt like sitting with a teacher. Not because he lectured. Because he was honest about what he knows, what he doesn’t, and where he falls short. That’s the kind of man I want to learn from. If John’s words sparked something in you, share this with someone who might need to hear it. And if you haven’t listened to Scene on Radio, start anywhere. You won’t regret it. Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org [https://www.heart-strong.org/] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit adventure.heart-strong.org [https://adventure.heart-strong.org?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

When Love Becomes Resistance: A Campfire Conversation with Kharma Amos

Kharma Amos came out as a lesbian in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1990. She was 18 years old. It wasn’t the most accepting place or time. Her entry into adulthood shaped everything that followed. As she told me around the fire: “My entry into adulthood was one of resistance to hate. Of me and people like me being discriminated against in various ways at that particular time in history. And so, when I first felt a vocational call to ministry, it was in a context of wanting to show up with love in the world as a resistance to that which takes life away or others people who are marginalized.” That call led to a decade serving as a local church pastor in a queer context, years of denominational work, and eventually to the Unitarian Universalist Church in Brunswick, Maine, where she now leads with a theology rooted in one foundation: “Universalism, the history of Universalism is about love. About if there’s anything sacred, it’s about love. And there are none of us outside the grasp of that.” This past fall, I sat with Kharma around a fire in my backyard. We talked about love and fear, queering norms, perfectionism and mistakes, and what it actually means to center love in a world designed around fear. What emerged was a conversation about the radical work of choosing love over fear, not as sentiment but as practice. Queering Everything One of the more powerful parts of our conversation was when Kharma talked about queering as a verb. “The word has evolved and means different things in different contexts, but my verb is my favorite way. And it really is about deconstructing normative framework.” Then she gave me an example that reframed how I think about the word. She told me about her mom, who is probably mostly straight, “but she’s queerer than some white gay men who are rich and married and live in a nice house on the corner. She, because she deconstructs normative frameworks.” This stuck with me. What Kharma is describing isn’t about sexual orientation or gender identity. It’s about the willingness to question systems that aren’t serving people. It’s about asking whether the way things have always been done actually needs to be that way. Kharma talked about how queerness had been powerful in her life “to be able to deconstruct all the inheritance, hang onto what’s good and maybe question the stuff and leave it behind if it’s no longer serving.” Then she pushed the question further. If queering is about deconstructing normative frameworks, what does that mean for how we run organizations? How we make decisions? “What does that mean about how we run a board meeting? Does that mean we don’t, we throw Robert’s rules out the window and think about more liberative models of how we are in relationship, or how we make decisions, or how we discern how we show up for each other.” For men, this kind of queering is radical work. Because masculine norms are some of the most rigid and policed we have. Don’t cry. Don’t be soft. Don’t need help. Be the provider. Be the protector. Never show weakness. What if we queered those norms? What if we asked: are these rules about what makes a man actually serving us? Or are they causing isolation, disconnection, and harm? The Fear of Freedom When I asked Kharma why people are so afraid to expand their definition of love, she said something that caught me off guard. “Freedom is hard. I observe people, like there’s a fear of freedom for some folks... Freedom is sometimes harder when you can do whatever you want. Then you have to exercise discernment and make choices that you’re then responsible for.” She compared it to the fear of expanding the definition of God. When you start questioning one thing you were taught, it threatens everything else. “It’s like, I think I’ll use the metaphor of a Jenga. You stop, you question this thing and say, oh, I actually don’t actually believe that God sends people to hell. That’s a Jenga peg that comes out. Sometimes people are afraid with faith, if I start to question, it will all come crumbling down. And then what will I rely on?” This is fear in action. When you’ve built your whole life on rigid beliefs, pulling out one piece threatens the whole tower. “If that, then I’m actually responsible for making good choices on my own and not just doing what someone told me. I have to be more intentional. I have to think about it. That’s frightening.” But here’s what Kharma showed me: love doesn’t require us to have all the answers. Love creates space to question, to try different ways, to learn from what doesn’t work. When Being Right Matters More Than People Kharma spoke about something that breaks her heart. Trans kids opting out of sports just to avoid the rhetoric and judgment. “When being right about something becomes more important than the people who are harmed by the rhetoric, it feels like we’ve gone off the guardrails. We are not centering love if we are heartless about the impact of that on actual people’s lives, where it’s not a theoretical argument for young trans kids in Brunswick who just wanna, who self-opt out of sports to avoid that, even though it’s their favorite thing to do. Like that breaks my heart.” This is where fear and love diverge. Fear turns complex human lives into abstract arguments we need to win. Love keeps us connected to the actual people affected by our choices. For men especially, who are often conditioned to prioritize being right over being connected, this matters. Because winning the argument while losing the relationship is a fear-based victory that leaves everyone impoverished. Kharma offered a critical question for discerning love from fear: “For whom is this loving?” If we’re only considering what feels loving to the people we already care about, while ignoring who’s being left out or harmed, we’re being self-serving in our pursuit of love. And love, she reminded me, requires presence. “Love is what turns us towards connection... There’s a tenacity of presence that’s required if I really mean what I say about love and connection.” The Fear of Not Being Loved Enough Midway through our conversation, we talked about perfectionism. Kharma mentioned working with progressive, well-intentioned people around trans inclusion and pronouns. Many of them are afraid they’re going to mess up. “It’s white supremacy culture of perfectionism,” she said. Then she said something that gets at a root fear underneath so much of our striving: “Love is like, if you know that you are loved as a human who inevitably makes mistakes, then you don’t have that kind of wrack anxiety about it. So, there’s massive fear of not being loved enough. I think that’s opportunity too.” This fear, the terror of not being loved if we’re imperfect, drives so much of how men perform masculinity. When we believe we must be perfect to be worthy of love, we get trapped in fear-based performance. We can’t rest. We can’t be vulnerable. We can’t make mistakes. Understanding that we’re already loved as mistake-making humans creates freedom to be authentic. To try. To fail. To learn. To be human. Naming Fear Takes Away Its Control When people express slippery slope fears about change, Kharma’s approach is to listen and ask questions. “When I talk to people and they do, and they have that slippery slope, if well, if we do this, then this will happen and this will happen, and then we’ll lose everything and we won’t be safe. And like it’s a spiral of fear that happens.” Her strategy? “Try and listen and ask more questions about where the fear is coming from. And in that conversation, that’s it. If you can name the fear that’s half the battle, if we wanna use battle language. I don’t think humans in general are great at being able to name the source of fear. And to be able to name it is the first thing in getting it, like, taking its control away.” This offers practical wisdom for working with fear. Instead of trying to eliminate it or shame it, we can learn to name it and understand where it’s coming from. This is exactly the kind of practice that helps men move from being controlled by unacknowledged fear to being able to work with it consciously. From Individualism to Interdependence Near the end of our conversation, I asked Kharma what we need to queer in ourselves and our communities to create a world where more of us are leading with love. She talked about deconstructing individualism and moving toward interdependence. About recognizing how much of our lives are transactional, and how that doesn’t really serve us as people. “Sinking into relationships, sitting around the fire and allowing space to breathe and cogitate and listen and take to heart and know that you, there’s gonna be another fire the next day. Like there’s a pace to this that feels more humane than our capitalist way of working right now.” She talked about the importance of having conversations that “make the drop from head to heart.” And about not leaving the circle when we disagree. “The avoidance of conflict is another characteristic of white supremacy culture and love tells us to turn toward one another even when it’s hard and not reject one another.” Then she said something that captures the scale of what we’re talking about: “It’s really important work that starts really low and close. It’s close work. We have to be proximate.” The work of choosing love over fear isn’t abstract. It’s about being proximate to other humans. It’s about bearing witness to lived experiences that are different from our own. It’s about recognizing that the systems harming others harm all of us. Why This Matters This conversation is part of my Heart-Strong Adventure, a year-long exploration of where love and fear show up in our world, especially in the lives of men. Kharma’s journey, from resisting hate in Tulsa to leading with love in Brunswick, shows what becomes possible when we choose love over fear. Not as a nice sentiment. As an actual practice. It’s about questioning the norms that aren’t serving us. Recognizing that freedom requires discernment and intention. Centering the actual humans affected by our choices instead of abstract principles. Understanding that we’re loved as mistake-making humans. Learning to name our fears so they don’t control us. Moving from individualism to interdependence. And staying proximate, even when it’s hard. For men, who are so often conditioned to reject these ways of being, this work is essential. Because the fear-based masculinities we’re handed don’t just hurt women and marginalized people. They hurt us too. They keep us isolated, performing, disconnected from the very things that make life worth living. Kharma’s invitation is simple: What if we centered love? What if we tried it a different way? If Kharma’s story sparked something in you, I’d love to hear about it. And if someone comes to mind who might need to hear this, please share it with them. Because the stories we tell each other around the fire have always been how we change. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit adventure.heart-strong.org [https://adventure.heart-strong.org?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]