Stockholm · 59.3°N

Oliverhem

hem /hɛm/ — Swedish for home. This one belongs to the Olivers.

There is a word in this borrowed language
I have stopped translating: hem.
It does not mean the house. It means
the gravity — the thing that bends
all my traveling back toward itself.

I have two children. Which is to say
I have two clocks that run on wonder,
and by their time I measure everything:
how tall the winter, how brief the year,
how little of the world needs winning.

The dog is named for lightning —
as if we knew, when she was small,
that joy would move through us like weather,
sudden, electric, impossible to schedule.

My work is a long apprenticeship to mercy:
I teach machines to stand beside the sick
without getting in the way of the hands —
because somewhere a nurse is tired,
and the software should kneel, not the nurse.

But the truest thing I own is silence,
kept on an island the maps barely bother with.
Granite, pine, a cabin the color of old fire.
Out there the signal searches for me,
fails, and I am finally found.

And in the evening, when the water
holds the sky like something it won't spill,
I count what cannot be transferred,
inherited, or sold: woodsmoke, four heartbeats,
the northern lights arriving unannounced —
everything I mean when I say home.

— Will Oliver

01 — Kontoret

The office

Chief Customer Officer at Mesalvo, building healthcare IT that hospitals actually want to use. Two decades in health tech, from Kansas City to the Nordics — these days mostly about bringing clinician-first systems to Sweden and Norway.

02 — Gården

The yard

Life happens outdoors here: mountain-bike trails around Stockholm, sailing warm water when summer allows, and slow weekends at the island cabin — family and dog included, wifi optional.

03 — Vardagsrummet

The den

Off the bike and off the clock: scuba diving wherever the water is clear, evenings at Fotografiska, and a weakness for Stockholm's auction houses — I go to look, mostly.

Currently plotting: more time underwater, less time in airports.