About

I am fifty years old, and I understand my life a lot less neatly than I did at thirty.

In 1999 I joined AmeriCorps and got placed inside a community health center. I did not know what an FQHC was. I certainly did not think I would spend most of my adult life inside one. But I liked the idea underneath it: you take care of people who need care, including the people the rest of the system has made it hard to take care of. I stayed. Leadership came early, and for the last seventeen years I have been the chief executive of Heritage Health in North Idaho. I still believe in the idea I found at twenty-three. I have just spent a lot more years learning how hard it is to keep a mission and a budget in the same building.

North Idaho became home somewhere in there. Kellie and I raised our three kids here, Jacob, Cameron and Sammie. Most of what I have figured out about people, I learned in some combination of a health center and my own house.

Life kept happening alongside the work, and the work kept getting more personal.

Kellie lives with endometriosis. So does Sammie, who waited two years for a diagnosis. Watching the two of them fight to be believed changed how I see the field I work in. I lead a health system, I know the people inside it are trying, and my own family still had to push that hard to be heard. That is what pulled me into women’s health advocacy, the work I do as EndoDad, and eventually a book called Believe Her the First Time. I did not go looking for advocacy. It was already at my kitchen table.

My mom developed Alzheimer’s early, and she has since passed away. Loving her through that illness changed how I think about time, memory and presence. There is a kind of grief that happens in real time, in ordinary rooms, while the person is still with you, and another kind that comes after. I wrote Still My Mom to work through some of it, but she shows up in more of my writing than the title suggests. She was a whole person long before the disease entered the story, and that is how I remember her. There are still moments when my first instinct is to tell her something.

I grew up in Salt Lake City, inside a religious culture that gave me a clear framework for how the world worked. As I got older, some of that certainty stopped fitting. Leadership, loss, family and my own questions made it harder to accept an answer just because it was familiar. What followed was a faith transition more than a clean break, and I wrote about it in Still Good. I still care about meaning, hope and what we owe each other. I am just more comfortable living with questions than I used to be.

Then there is my brain. It generates more ideas than any reasonable schedule can hold, follows them into strange places, and gets bored the moment something turns into routine. I spent years trying to manage that into silence before deciding to build a life around it instead. Writing became the main way I work through things. Some of what I could not stop thinking about became books, thirteen of them so far. Some became conversations on my podcast, Still Here, Still Trying. Some ideas only worked as songs. Some needed to be pictures, which is how the art started, made in spare hours under the name Infinite Canvas AI.

AI runs through a lot of the newer work. I use it, build with it and experiment with it constantly, and I am just as interested in the harder questions underneath it. I keep thinking about what happens to creativity, work and community when technology gets good at things that used to require another person. I have stood inside a gallery showing my AI-assisted art while people protested it outside, so these are not abstract questions for me. Holding both at once, the building and the questioning, is most of what the Human First work is about.

The weddings

I was ordained as a Dudeist Priest in The Church of the Latter-Day Dude in 2016, and I was ordained through American Marriage Ministries in 2021. I have officiated three weddings so far. I love learning what matters to a couple and helping shape a ceremony that feels like them. Getting to help people celebrate their love is one of the happiest things I get to do.

More about weddings →

At fifty I think about time differently than I used to. The kids are adults. My career has a lot more road behind it than it once did. People I love have gotten sick, and some have died. None of that has slowed me down much, and I am still starting more things than any reasonable person should. I just pay more attention now to what I spend the years on, and who I spend them with.

So that is what this site is. Community health taught me to pay attention to people. My family made it personal. The books, the music, the art, the podcast and the AI experiments are the different ways I keep working through the same questions. I never planned most of it. It grew the way a life grows, one thing leading to another.

If you are new here, the books are probably the best door in. Or start with the writing. Or just say hello. I read everything myself.