Renee makes flower arrangements from the flowers in our yard. This was this morning’s offering.

Hey y’all.

The world is a lot right now. Several times the last few weeks I have had to go on news and social media fasts because it all seems overwhelming. Yesterday I opened Facebook, and my first 12 posts on my feed were accounts I do not follow or ads. Most of them were obviously written by AI, or had obvious AI images.

On the other hand, when my wife’s grandfather died, we inherited a 1930’s era Singer sewing machine. It is made of cast aluminum, and it has engraved fillagree borders, and the manual that came with it told you how to replace the belt, how to lubricate it, and even showed you how to use it. It’s as if the makers assumed you would be using it 90 years later.

I know it does not seem like there is a direct correlation between my Facebook feed and a 90 year old sewing machine, but the worldview of the creators of those two things – how they see what they are making, how they think about the users of the thing they made, and how they think about the future of the thing they made, could not be more different.

I think about this stuff a lot, I know. I don’t think the issue is the technology. It’s the worldview of the builders, and how they see the people they are building for.

Writing this newsletter is good for me and my mental health. I have talked about that often over the years – that the requirement to search for beautiful things to share with you forces me to hunt for beautiful things, when I would rather lay on the couch and sob.

But at the end of the day, if I did not think about you, the reader, constantly, as I create every issue, I would not bother at all. I want this newsletter to be useful to you, helpful to you, and even hopeful to you - the sort of thing you are eager to share with someone else. There are so many people telling you that things are bad. I want to be one of the people showing you the other trail, the one less spoken of, where beauty exists and shows us all the things that are still worth fighting for.

I have spent nearly thirty hours this month working on changing the tech that underpins this newsletter, in the hopes it can be more useful, more beautiful, more shareable by you, the readers and users of this project.

The new site, admittedly still in progress, is my act of care in the world, an offering to you.

Thank you so much for reading it.

Program notes for the new site:

There is a new website, and new issues will be uploaded to the public archive automatically. Back issues unfortunately must be updated manually, an excruciating task. It will happen slowly, but it IS a priority.

The web version of every issue allows comments for subscribers. The robust website will also make it easy for readers to share links to individual episodes, makes it much easier to read in browsers and on your phone, and allows me to easily find and link to past issues, putting future me in conversation with past me.

Note that comments are only for subscribers, a feature designed to reduce spam and to promote goodness in the comment section. That does mean you may be asked to go through a verification process to make sure you are a subscriber, but it’s not an onerous one.

Sadly, the emails will come from a new email address: hugh@news.lifeissobeautiful.org. Note that this is a send-only address – the best way to reach me is still to reply to any issue, or directly at hugh@hughhollowell.org. Best practice is to add the new address to your address book, and you might have to train Google to not send it to your promotions tab by dragging it to your inbox. (If this issue did not come to you from that email address, it will – there is a process called warming which gradually migrates you to the new address, so inboxes don’t freak out.)

If you are an RSS person, the newsletter now has a full RSS feed, if that is how you prefer to read things. The RSS feed is found here. You will probably have to add it manually to your feed reader. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, RSS is how you get your podcasts, and how many of us prefer to read the internet. There is a great explainer here.)

Five Beautiful Things

The New York Times gives you a list of 118 things you can do instead of doomscrolling. (just @ me next time, guys!)

A thread, with more than 4,000 comments, of low-effort ways to show your partner you care. These are, as the original poster said, ‘ “we’re tired and have responsibilities” realistic’. These are mostly wholesome and sweet.

And here is a list of 357 things that are good to do.

I did not know there was an infrared map of The Milky Way galaxy. It was “compiled from 200,000 images taken over 420 observation nights across 13 years (2010–2023)” and is so large, we can’t display it as one image. You can see some of them here.

This is an old one, but I don’t think I have shared it before: From the extremely prolific Maria Popova, a video with the words of Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman contemplating the wonder of life itself, accompanied by the music of Yo-Yo Ma and the animation of Kelli Anderson. Have your audio on for this one.

In Case You Missed It…

The most clicked link in the last issue was to the never before publicly displayed Monet about to be auctioned.

There were two new pieces on my blog this week:

When morning comes: the joy of surviving the night as a person with depression

The dead hedge: an ode to the ever-evolving organic sculpture I built in our backyard, for the wildlife and for us.

If you would like to get an email when I post something to my blog, you can sign up for that on this page.

Members only

This renovation, and all the work and money that went into it, was made possible by the paying members who keep this project (and me!) going.

Last Saturday, paying members got their monthly Members Only email from me, where I laid out some of my plans for this release, talked about what the rest of the year is looking like, and shared my plans for our upcoming wedding anniversary.

Membership starts at just $5 a month, and makes it possible for this email to be ad-free and AI-free for everyone. Members also get access to bonus essays, first dibs on things I decide to sell, a monthly newsletter, and generous discounts, among other perks.

Thank You!

Ideas from links this week came from Maria Popova and Jason Kottke.

Thanks for your reading, sharing, and all the ways you work to keep going.

Till next time,

HH

P.S. If you like this newsletter and want to support it, there are 3 WAYS THIS WEEK! PICK ONE right now before you forget:

1. Buy a copy of my book, or maybe just a cup of coffee.

2. Forward this to a friend, and tell them they can get their own subscription at lifeissobeautiful.org

3. Click on the comment button below and leave a comment on this issue. Tell me what you liked, or what you didn’t.

One of the old China roses in my front yard that just keep putting out blooms all summer, despite the heat.

Hey y’all. 

I have some news for you today, and so this issue is a bit different.   

The short version is, I have been depressed AF most of this year, and so getting this newsletter out has been a damned struggle. My goal has always been to get this out to you on Monday, baring Federal holidays. I have failed at that more often than not this year, and some weeks I haven’t been able to get it out at all.   

So I am changing some things. I don’t know how to not be depressed (I am not soliciting medical advice at this time) but I do know that it is easier for me to get it out later in the week rather than earlier, so I am going to move my publication goal to Friday. I already publish something for the members most weeks, and I deliver a 1500 (ish) word sermon most Sundays, so having all my public-facing work done at the end of the week seems to make sense to me. I can do what I do with the other two pieces, and work on it as I have energy and will.   

I have learned from looking at open rates that y’all are subject to opening the email at all sorts of times, so I’m hoping that sending it on Monday is just an “important to only me” thing.   

I’ve been putting this newsletter out for the last 11 years, and I don’t see that changing. I hope this move make it a bit more sustainable for me to keep doing it. As always, thank you for your support.      

Five Beautiful Things

“…so very helpful to me to keep my hands busy during times that they itch to destroy me.” As someone who lives with depression while also managing to get a lot done, I resonated so hard with this post from Jenny Lawson on depression and art.  

Check out this collection  at the Library of Congress of photos taken by photographer John Margolies, specializing in “roadside vernacular architecture: Think hot dog stands shaped like hot dogs, donut shops shaped like donuts, and gas stations shaped like everything from dinosaurs to pagodas to teepees.   

Matt Dixon makes pictures of robots. Damned adorable pictures, actually.   

Katie Farris gives us a poem on the wisdom of writing love poetry in a burning world. 

OK, hold on for this one. In 1920, Richard Samuel Roberts, a Black man, moved from Florida to Columbia, South Carolina and opened a photography studio. Self-taught, Roberts went on to take many thousands of photos of middle class Black folk until his death in 1936. He preferred to take photos on glass plates, rather than the newly emerging film, and when he died, his family put the thousands of glass negative plates under their house, where they sat for decades. In the late 70’s, they were recovered and printed and put in a collection at the University of South Carolina, giving us the largest archive of middle class Black life during Jim Crow we have. Here is a 30 minute documentary about how they were found again, his family’s reactions, and his immense skill at capturing Black skin on camera.  

In Case You Missed It…

The most clicked link last issue was E. B. White’s his inspiring, succinct reply to a reader’s note full of despair over the state of the world.   

A new podcast episode went up, with me telling the story of the 7 year old boy who marked up our house and our hearts.  

Members only

Over the last weekend, my paying members got a long (but yet incomplete) essay about my trip to Pennsylvania, how good it felt to be there, and how hard it is to live in a place you love but that does not always love you back. 

Membership starts at just $5 a month, and makes it possible for this email to be ad-free and AI-free for everyone. Members also get access to bonus essays, first dibs on things I decide to sell, and generous discounts, among other perks.

Thank You!

For 11 years this one-man labor of love has remained ad-free, AI-free, and financially free for everyone because of the generosity of my reader patrons. If you already support my work: I appreciate you more than you know.  

You can support this work by buying a book, sharing this link with your social networks, forwarding this email to a friend, by becoming a paid member or just buying me a cup of coffee.

If you have links to share, questions to ask or just want to say hi, just hit reply. I read al my emails, and try hard to respond.

Take care, 

HH 

P.S. If you like this newsletter and want to support it, there are 3 WAYS THIS WEEK! PICK ONE right now before you forget:

1. Buy a copy of my book, or maybe just a cup of coffee.

2. Forward this to a friend, and tell them they can get their own subscription at lifeissobeautiful.org

3. Click on the comment button below and leave a comment on this issue. Tell me what you liked, or what you didn’t.

Hey y’all!

It’s 6:30 in the morning, and I am cutting down camelia bushes. In some parts of the south, that sentence alone is enough to have me convicted for heresy. Camelias are prized here, and for good reason. Their rose-like blooms in the fall and winter, are bursts of hope in otherwise dreary times of the year. They are one of my favorite flowers – their blooms have seen me through many a seasonal affective disordered depression.

But these particular ones have not been happy for years. They are on the south side of my house, having once edged our patio with blooms. Our first two winters here they bloomed nearly nonstop. 

But that was when they were under the shade of the neighbor’s backyard live oak tree. Over the pandemic, our neighbor moved away and his successor waged war on all the trees in their yard, including the live oak that had given us, and our camellias, much needed shade. 

They have not bloomed since then. Their leaves are sun-scalded, and while they still grow, it is as mere evergreen shrubs, a shadow of their full glory. 

So it is August, and I am putting them out of their misery. They were once thriving, and then things changed and now the kindest thing to do for them is to take them out. The shade is never coming back. They would, if I left them, just struggle in the blistering heat every summer. It feels a bit like euthanizing a favorite pet, honestly. Like it’s the most caring thing you can do. 

If we were starting from scratch, I probably wouldn’t buy new camelias—I tend to focus our shrubs on native plants that benefit our pollinators, and that can grow without interventions. But this winter I will buy a few to replace the ones I cut down and plant them in the wooded area at the back of our yard. Both so I can get my winter roses, and so they can know the joy of blooming where they can thrive. 

As I’m cutting down the camelias at this early hour before the heat comes in, it occurs to me that a lot of the things I hang on to (like these camelias) are things that once worked for me, but then things changed and now they don’t. 

And when things quit working for you, perhaps the kindest thing you can do is to let them go.  

Five Beautiful Things

St. George’s Hall in Liverpool, England is tiled in 30,000 hand-crafted Minton tiles, usually kept covered and only uncovered for a few weeks each year. Well, they are currently uncovered, and here is a six minute film showing them to those of us too far away to see them in person. The tiles first make an appearance around the 3 minute mark, but the whole video is worth a look.   

“You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” – Jane Goodall (click through to read the full quote).

A fascinating piece about how we are fighting to save the wrong bees, one craftsman’s work to save the right ones, and the realities of growing older and marketing. 

Check out this amazing photo of the full solar eclipse over on NASA’s site Astronomy Photo of the Day 

This incredible poem. "What I Am Telling You, Jessica, Is That Those Chickens Are Fine" by K.T. Landon 

In Case You Missed It…

The most clicked link last issue was this collection at the Library of Congress of “roadside vernacular architecture”  

Over on my blog I posted about depression and roses, about reimagining what resilience looks like, and this damned heat and its effect on my mental health my garden. I’m blogging a bit more, so if you want to make sure you don’t miss any posts, you can subscribe a number of ways here.   

If you are a paying member, you got an essay over the weekend that was really a love letter to our house, and on Wednesday, I sent a video (calling it a vlog seems too grandiose for what it was) to the paid members. This might become a thing – weekly videos for members, that is.   

As a reminder, membership starts at just $5 a month, and makes it possible for this email to be ad-free and AI-free for everyone. Members also get access to bonus essays, first dibs on things I decide to sell, and generous discounts, among other perks.    

Thank You!

For 11 years this one-man labor of love has remained ad-free, AI-free, and financially free for everyone because of the generosity of my reader patrons. If you already support my work: I appreciate you more than you know.  

You can support this work by buying a book, sharing this link with your social networks, forwarding this email to a friend, by becoming a paid member or just buying me a cup of coffee.

If you have links to share, questions to ask or just want to say hi, just hit reply. I read al my emails, and try hard to respond.

Take care, 

HH 

P.S. If you like this newsletter and want to support it, there are 3 WAYS THIS WEEK! PICK ONE right now before you forget:

1. Buy a copy of my book, or maybe just a cup of coffee.

2. Forward this to a friend, and tell them they can get their own subscription at lifeissobeautiful.org

3. Click on the comment button below and leave a comment on this issue. Tell me what you liked, or what you didn’t.

I spent last Saturday at the Mississippi Book Festival - on of my favorite events every year. 

Hey y’all!

I don’t know how it is for you, but I find it’s easy to fall into despair. At this point, it almost feels like watching the news on a regular basis is some sort of masochistic kink, because every day a new set of horrible things has happened. I’ve had to take news sabbaticals at times, because the exposure to all that is wrong in the world I cannot impact is overwhelming.   

In his book 4,000 weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman talks about a thought experiment he came across. Here he talks about it in an interview with Krista Tippett:
 
All the way through history, there have been some people who lived to 100, even when life expectancy was much shorter on average. And every day that somebody turned 100, there was a baby being born somewhere. So you could easily imagine these chains of end-to-end, 100-year lives. And if you do it that way, you find that, like, the Renaissance was what, six, seven lifetimes ago, and the time of Jesus about 20 or so lifetimes ago, and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, 35 lifetimes ago, and the whole of human civilization, based on a conventional definition, 60 lifetimes ago. It’s like, it’s nothing.

Put this way, none of us are but a few lives removed from a world where most people never traveled more than 100 miles in their lifetime, and their knowledge of the world was limited to what they could personally see. 

I don’t think we have evolved enough as a species to handle the onslaught of information about the wider world – especially when it comes to traumatic events. It’s crushing. 

But just because we cannot fix everything does not mean we can fix nothing, and what we can fix deserves to be fixed. Which is why I loved the first link today, about New Yorker Craig Campanella, who has taken it as his personal mission to repair and replace missing basketball nets in public parks. 

“There are more important problems in the world, but this is something I can do that is helpful…”, Campanella said in the interview. 

Flooding in other countries is horrific. The crimes in the legislature are unspeakable. War crimes happen every day. And while I need to be concerned about that, and exercise any influence I have to prevent or stop those things, day to day I don’t have much influence about any of that. 
 
But a basketball net costs $11. There is a man in my neighborhood whose daily walk includes a trash grabber and a five gallon bucket, and what he can fix is the urban litter problem in our community. We rescue feral kittens and get them homes. 

We can all do something. Despair is not our only option. 

Five Beautiful Things

New York man makes it his mission to make sure public park hoops have nets. Not all heros wear capes. 

A never before publicly displayed Monet has appeared, and will be auctioned off at Sotheby’s Paris. It’s estimated to sell for at least $25 million dollars, which would make it the highest priced auctioned painting in French history. If you think you know Monet, this one may surprise you, since it is from his late in life abstract impressionist period. I think it’s lovely. 

The artist Mu Pan has a collection of acrylic paintings he calls “microMUniverse mandalas” on display at the Hashimoto Contemporary Gallery in NYC. These are fascinating to me – acrylic on paper, nearly all of them smaller than 15x15.  

An award-winning stop motion short film that involves a robot vacuum cleaner, a Chinatown senior center, and two anthropomorphized rabbits that hits on themes of love, loss, and meaning. I don’t think I understand everything they are trying to do here, but I feel the same way about the Beatles’ song “I am the Walrus”. I still think both the song and this short film are beautiful. 

Here’s a gift link to a NYT story about how, as a result of development and climate change, black bears are moving into the suburbs in Southern California, with humans having mixed thoughts. But the main reason I am sharing it is because of the excellent bear photographs and video that accompany it. These bears are just out there in LA, living their best life.     

In Case You Missed It…

In the last issue, I forgot the link to the collection of vintage restaurant menus. It’s here. As one person who wrote in to ask about the missing link said, “Well, at least we know AI did not put this newsletter together.” 

The most clicked link last issue was to the poem when your children ask me what i did while the planet was burning, by kai cheng thom. 

Members only

As I say in the headnote, I am in the middle of a huge renovation of LISB. This week alone I have spent more than 20 hours on it, not counting the hours it took to put this issue together. The question small publishers like me have to answer is, how does that work get paid for? How do I pay for the literally thousands of dollars a year it costs to publish this newsletter, not even counting my time? 
 
The obvious way is by locking the best stuff behind paywalls, using affiliate links and selling ads, along with your privacy. But we have gone a different direction: all this is paid for (and thus kept free) by a group of paying members.   

Paid membership starts at just $5 a month, and makes it possible for this email to be ad-free and AI-free for everyone. Members also get access to bonus essays, first dibs on things I decide to sell, and generous discounts, among other perks.   

FYI: I am currently building out a collection of handmade kitchen goods like cutting boards, serving trays and utensils I will be selling for the holidays, so there is never a better time to be a member (and thus get a discount) than now.   TK TK

Thank You!

For 11 years this one-man labor of love has remained ad-free, AI-free, and financially free for everyone because of the generosity of my reader patrons. If you already support my work: I appreciate you more than you know.   

You can support this work by buying a book, forwarding this email to a friend, by becoming a paid member or just  buying me a cup of coffee. 

If you have links to share, questions to ask or just want to say hi, just hit reply. I read al my emails, and try hard to respond.

Take care, 

HH

The heat has broken, for which I am thankful.

Hey y'all!

On Thursday, I woke up at 5:30 and while the kettle was working to heat up the water for the coffee, I looked at the backyard weather station display in our living room.   

It said it was 65 degrees outside. I literally did a double take. The last time it was under 70 degrees at 5:30 in the morning was sometime in June.   

Summer is hard here. Not because it gets so hot, although this summer was hotter than normal. But because it doesn’t cool off at night. Last weekend I woke up at 3AM and went to the kitchen for a drink of water. It was 78 degrees outside. At 3 in the morning. Basically, from July until the end of September, your air conditioner runs nearly nonstop.   

So that day that happens each year around the end of September when it feels like somebody flipped a switch and you have entered a whole new season is always special.  

So when I saw (and confirmed!) that 65 degree temperature, I did what any sane person would do. I sat on my back deck and drank a cup of coffee. It was almost chilly.

And then, for the first time in several months, I went for a three mile walk.   

The birds were singing, as if celebrating the coolness in the air. The sun peered through the branches and once again I was in love with the world.   

It’s been a rough summer for me, and I know I am not alone in this. The chaos of my countries political situation, the financial struggles (also not unrelated to aforementioned political chaos), and just all the ways life has been lifeing have really held me down, and the heat has made all of that worse.   

With climate change, things will only be worse in the future. I know that sounds pessimistic, but that doesn’t mean it is not true. My wife and I are already talking about ways we can mitigate it’s impact on us next year, and what are responsible measures to take.   

But right this exact minute, that isn’t what I’m thinking of. Right now, I’m just ridiculously happy the heat broke. 

Five Beautiful Things

After Dolly's death last month, there has been a rush of folks to cover her songs. I have particularly loved this cover, by the Chaps Choir, of her Light of a Clear Blue Morning. 

The poem when your children ask me what i did while the planet was burning, by kai cheng thom.

Many people loved the Harper's Bazaar collection last week, so here is a digital collection of thousands of vintage restaurant menus - mostly from new York City, and date from 1890 to 1910. 

This piece in the Guardian on experiments vs goals is pretty much how I live. But it's great to have the validation. 

Tolkien reading from The Hobbit, the first time he ever used a tape recorder. ( There is also this YouTube channel I have shared before, where there are whole audio books of his work, narrated by him. Much more proffesionally done, but without the whimsey)

In Case You Missed It…

The most clicked link by far last issue was this video of 91 year old Lloyd Khan – author, builder, skateboarder, body boarder and all around excellent human.

On my blog this week I shared the origin story of how we ended up rescuing kittens.  

If you were a paying member, you would have gotten an essay from me where I reflect about the nature of work and what I think the universe is, or is not, telling me about the future. 

Paid membership starts at just $5 a month, and makes it possible for this email to be ad-free and AI-free for everyone. Members also get access to bonus essays, first dibs on things I decide to sell, and generous discounts, among other perks. 

Thank You!

For 11 years this one-man labor of love has remained ad-free, AI-free, and financially free for everyone because of the generosity of my reader patrons. If you already support my work: I appreciate you more than you know.  

You can support this work by buying a book, forwarding this email to a friend, by becoming a paid member or just buying me a cup of coffee.  

If you have links to share, questions to ask or just want to say hi, just hit reply. I read all my emails, and try hard to respond.

Till next time,

HH

In a friend’s office.

Before we get started: 

I am a huge advocate for pollinators. Often when people think about pollinators, they think about bees, and specifically, honeybees. Unfortunately, honeybees are a relatively poor pollinator, and besides, they are a livestock crop, and so worrying about honeybees going extinct is kind of like worrying about pigs going extinct. 
 
 Here in the US, the best bee pollinators are our native bees, including mason bees. And they get relatively little coverage. So, last week I had come across a piece that talked about this in a way that was pretty easy to understand, and it also talked about woodworking, another interest of mine, and people who make a living doing their craft, yet another interest of mine, and so I shared it. 
 
 A few of you reached out and told me you had suspicions there might be problems with the company, but I didn’t see those emails until yesterday (I am so far behind on my email). So, I did something I should have done before: I did some research. It seems the man mentioned in the article does not exist, and there are several Reddit threads out there saying that they purchased from the company mentioned and had poor experiences. 

I honestly did not think of the article as an ad, although I can now see it was. I don’t generally buy things like this (I was planning on making some to the specs in the article, though) and it never occurred to me to dig very deep, as I knew the bee info was accurate, and that was my primary reason for sharing. 

If you bought anything from Craft Folk, I would try to cancel the order if I were you, but if that is not successful, your best recourse might be disputing the charge with your credit card provider. 

I feel manipulated, and I don’t like that. And I especially hate that because I shared something, I might have induced you to lower your trust radar. 

I’m sorry – I should have researched deeper. 

HH

Hey y’all!

The state motto of North Carolina is Esse Quam Videri, which is Latin, of course and is generally translated as, “To be, rather than to seem.”

To be about it, rather than to talk about it. To be a real one. 

I think about that motto a lot. As a native Mississippian, it is much better than our own, which is Virtute et armis, which is Latin for “By valor and arms.” We’re even packing in our state motto, it seems.

But back to North Carolina. Being, rather than seeming. Verbs, rather than nouns. 

Dolly Pardon dioed this week. You know that, of course, because the world has gone full on Dolly appreciation, with tributes rolling in from everyone, and from all corners of the globe. 

A thing that really struck me is how much they are not talking about Dolly the artist – even though her artistic accomplishments are enough for several lifetimes – but Dolly the person. They talk about her charitable works, her literacy work, her paying for the band kids instruments in Black high schools, the way she treated her employees and her collaborators, what she did with her money, how she stood up for people others would have shamed, how she fought to own her music and her livelihood, how generous she was.

Every single tribute is about what a decent person she was. Much of the good stuff she did is just now coming to light, because it wasn’t publicized, and came with no promotional package. 

I have never wept at the death of a celebrity until this week. But I am not alone in this: people who can’t name five Dolly Parton songs were weeping this week because she died.

The best overall obituary I have seen (and I have not seen them all, because they are legion) is this one from Heather Cox Richardson (but also check out the linked article below). Nearly two thousand words eulogizing a great multi-award-winning singer and songwriter and it only names three of the 3,000 songs she wrote. 

To be, rather than to seem, indeed.         

“Find out who you are. And do it on purpose.” - Dolly Parton

Five Beautiful Things

As a GenXer raised on all things Mr. T, I am super excited about the new Mr. T documentary on Netflix – I hope to get to see it this weekend. Check out the trailer here.   

I loved this piece from Salon about how Dolly both represented the best of Appalachian ideals, and also challenged them.   

Six seconds of the highest ever resolution images of the surface of the Sun. Terrifying and beautiful all at once.   

During the pandemic, many museums began digitizing their archives, but maybe nobody has done more significant works than the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. They have more than 800,000 items in their digital collection, including Rembrandt, Vermeer, and much, much more, all downloadable at high resolution.  

Speaking of downloadable at high resolution, this is a reminder that if you are a classic movie buff, the Ransom Center in Texas has a 5,000 image deep collection of movie posters from the classic era. They are all hi-rez and downloadable.     

In Case You Missed It 

The most clicked link last issue was the poem "What I Am Telling You, Jessica, Is That Those Chickens Are Fine" by K.T. Landon 

The flooding in Nepal is horrific. I didn’t fully understand the scope until I watched this ~3 minute video of a calm valley getting hit by a wall of water, erasing everything in its path.   

A current project I am working on is building an organization to hold what we are calling Peace Labs – 5 day camps for teens to teach the skills of nonviolent social change. Our first Lab was done last month – I wrote about it on my church’s blog, and you can see pictures, a short write up, and a video from me about the experience here. Expect to hear more about this in the near future.     

As a reminder, this newsletter is paid for by the generosity of its paying members. Membership starts at just $5 a month, and makes it possible for this email to be ad-free and AI-free for everyone. Members also get access to bonus essays, first dibs on things I decide to sell, and generous discounts, among other perks. 

 Thank you for reading!

For 11 years this one-man labor of love has remained ad-free, AI-free, and financially free for everyone because of the generosity of my reader patrons. If you already support my work: I appreciate you more than you know.  

You can support this work by buying a book, sharing this link with your social networks, forwarding this email to a friend, by becoming a paid member or just buying me a cup of coffee.

If you have links to share, questions to ask or just want to say hi, just hit reply. I read al my emails, and try hard to respond.

Take care, 

HH 

Morning in Washington, Iowa, which is where I was last week, instead of sending this newsletter. 

Hey y'all!          

Over the 11 years I have been sending these letters, I have linked to things about Lloyd Khan at least three times according to a search of my admittedly incomplete archives. Lloyd is what my people would call a character. 

He’s 91 years old, and is still full of life. The last time I linked to him was in 2024, when he went on a solo cross-country drive across Mexico at the age of 88. He’s 91 now and still skateboards, and is in training for a cross-country race. 

The first link below is a ~20 minute video of Lloyd being interviewed and shadowed. The whole thing is amazing, but there is a point at the end where the woman interviewing him asks is he has any regrets, and he says yes – he hates he waited until 65 to learn how to skateboard. He wishes he had learned when he was 5. 

Wendell Berry died on August 31^st. I only became aware of his work some 15 years ago. 

Like most good things in my life, I have my friend Brian to thank for introducing me to his work. At the time, I was not living a life conducive to my discovering new poetry. This newsletter has changed all of that, but this was in the before times. Brian and I were having one of those wide-ranging conversations you can have with someone with whom you are completely at ease. He quoted the Mad Farmer poem, and was shocked when I didn’t recognize it. 

It’s hard to say why you don’t know a thing everyone else knows. On Threads, I have seen folks since his death say they had no idea who he was, but now they have read Hannah Coulter or Jayber Crow and they wish he had been on their radar sooner. My first reaction is shock that they did not know about him – and then I remember that I too, was late to the game. 

I am mostly self-educated. While there are things I am literally a subject-matter expert on, there are also huge gaps in my knowledge, and sometimes, when I discover one of those gaps, I am filled with regret, for example, for all the years I did not know about the poetry of Wendell Berry. 

It has been said that the best time to plant a fruit tree was 10 years ago, but the second best time is now. So, if you have a favorite poet or writer or musician you wish more people knew about, hit reply and tell me about them. If we get enough, I will make a list and share it in a future newsletter.  

Five Beautiful Things 

This video of 91 year old Lloyd Khan – author, builder, skateboarder, body boarder and all around excellent human – is very much worth the 20 minutes to watch it. 

15 years ago, Abu Bilal built a wall in front of his bookcase, hiding the library from Syria’s former Asad regime. In this video, you see him tearing down the wall. This solution was brilliant. I don’t have enough knowledge to comment on the political situation, but I am always a fan of protecting books from those who would destroy them. (More context here)

The Homestead Diorama in Gettysburg Pennsylvania is like many military museums, filled with dioramas depicting the various battles. But at the Homestead, all the soldiers in the dioramas are cats. 

I love discovering new (to me, anyway) digitized archives. Like I just learned that Cornell University has all of the issues of Harper’s Bazaar from 1867-1900 digitized at high resolution, and you can browse away to your heart’s content. 

With Wendell Berry’s death, lots of his stuff is being posted on the internet. Here is one I had not seen before, called How To Be a Poet (to remind myself). There is an option to hear him read it, which I highly recommend. One cool thing about this poem is it contains a line he is often cited for, and which I have used countless times in sermons. I just didn’t know the work it came from: There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places. 

In Case You Missed It 

The most clicked link last issue was this video of the highest ever resolution images of the surface of the Sun.  

I have a new podcast episode up, with a story form my childhood that Dolly Parton’s death reminded me of.  

On my blog, I had a core memory triggered by a sound. I think, sometimes, about all the sounds we don’t hear anymore. Like busy signals. Or mechanical telephone ringers.  

In the opening essay, I link to Amazon for two different books. I want to take this opportunity to remind you that I do not share affiliate links in this newsletter, because my members pay to make this letter possible.