The New 2026

It’s been hard to get out since the holidays.

There’s the seasonal depression that comes with winter in Colorado, the days are short, the birds have mostly gone, the ducks that are here are huddled on the few lakes that haven’t frozen over. Even the beefiest moose only has nubs for antlers right now. Then there’s the holidays, where, despite all manners of biology telling us we should slow down, the world speeds up for a month between Thanksgiving and New Years. My wife and I scurried back to Texas then hosted our families right before getting sick for a week and then right back to work. Bleh, It’s hard to see how I’d been motivated to get up hours before sunrise every (weekend) morning for the past few years. But this is to be expected, the holidays come around every year and, while exhausting, there is lots of love.

What hasn’t been expected is the general state of the world, no big deal, right? Every day we’re met with new headlines about pipelines in Alaska, predator persecution in Utah, opening boundary waters for mining or any number of money-hungry decisions that will cause undue suffering to the natural world. Most of us outdoor people are out here so we can get away from human intervention, get back into the wild, and at least take a stab at returning to a state of mind our ancestors might have donned. We’re animals meant for the savannah, not for cities and phones. We’re meant to be looking and listening at a very basal level and more and more of us have noticed, if we don’t take a stand and actually talk to people, we and the wildlife will lose our home.

Which is where the early mornings come back in.

With all of this weighing down on my shoulders it’s hard to feel motivated to get up at 4:00am, go out to the silly little woods and take my silly little photos of these silly little birds. “What’s the point of mental health and sharing what makes me happy if so much of the world is doomed?” says a small voice in my head.

I hear no answer.

I’ve asked myself this question so many times, depression runs in my family and the easy answer, the historical answer, is that it all just sucks and you’ve just got to deal with it. Stoic? Maybe. Defeatist? Definitely. That’s not going to cut it anymore.

The other day while I was battling this ongoing, ever-present turmoil of the human condition, a friend reached out. A photo of a downy woodpecker that I liked but didn’t think anything special of had touched him just enough to reach out and say, “thank you.” A shock to me but a pleasant one. We talked (typed) for the next few minutes about this and that but all on the same theme. Art.

Art is here for the bad times even more so than the good. Why am I to care about posting a little woodpecker when the natural world, Ukraine, Gaza, my own United States are in turmoil? Because people need art and art means something different to every person. So, we must create. If art can allow a step back from the horrors of the social media feed, a step back into the viewers body, that is a real human success story. We live so much of our lives from a place of anxiety and stress, all centered in the head, art can alleviate some of that tension. If you cannot make it out into the woods, damn it, I’m bringing the woods to you.

Creating art is a puzzle, it’s a problem-solving game that involves your brain’s creative mechanisms along with some of its most structured and detail-oriented parts. This interplay of work and creativity is great for us; this is most of the reason I go out. The wilderness calms my ADHD riddled mind. After all, there are so many sounds to hear in the silence of a forest. But now I have a new motivation, it’s you. Any poor sap that got tricked into reading this blog or following a photo account of a guy who really sucked at this a few months ago (new results pending) is driving me to create. Strangely, it feels like a pressure from them to create for me. Great art can only come from true expression of the heart after all. Next time I’m snuggling deeper into a pile of warm blankets as my 3:45 alarm goes off, I’ll have a motivation to give back that helps drive me and for that, I thank you.

Anyways, thanks for reading, thanks for viewing, thanks for creating for your own and my own sake, it means a lot to me.