Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree

It is late August and the northern places have begun to transform with quiet, unassuming grace. The nights grow cool in the hills and a walk down the road, through the forest, or past a tangled hedgerow will reveal autumn’s early, subtle gains. Apples have begun to tumble from branches, splitting open in ditches and their bruised, tart-sweet perfume mingles with the crisp air. Sumac has begun to blush along the edges of the field as if the bees told it a risky joke. Goldenrod reigns over every field. The light has sharpened, no longer softened by June’s hazy gauze but instead casting crisp edges on leaves, stones, and weathered fences. The sky feels closer to November’s stark clarity than midsummer’s languid glow now. A faint browning creeps into the green, signaling the year’s inevitable turn toward more balanced days after summer’s wild sunlit bender. This is late August’s arrival, subtle and without ceremony, leaving most of us to ask “Where has the time gone?” It is a good question and we seem to remark on it often. People will tell you that time keeps speeding up for them as they age, that the days are long but the years are short. They ask “How did my children grow so big?” The days are so full, the weeks just float away and there is the ever-present lament of “I need more time.” They are common complaints and questions. Rarely do you hear that we can slow the turning of that old grindstone, however. It seems to be a secret well kept, hiding in plain sight.We can slow our perception of time. It is not arcane or difficult, but it does require practice that, like all good practices, eventually forms into a benevolent habit. The secret to slowing time is twofold: first in deliberate attention, in actively attempting to simply notice what is changing before you. Most people rush past the season’s signs, distracted by screens or lamenting summer’s end, only to find themselves at Labor Day or Halloween, asking, “Where did the time go?” Time can be stretched however, made to linger and burn slow like a well-tended fire, by noticing the small shifts that mark the turn. This, in part, is why it becomes important to attune yourself to a place, to stay there for a long time and become intimately familiar with its seasons and its signs. Do you know the birds at your feeder, the weeds in your ditch, where the moon rises over the ridge this time of year? Here in Vermont, late August has many little omens and signs: goldenrod fills the fields while asters bubble up from the ditches and roadsides, their purple and yellow blooms complimenting the fading green. Corn in the fiend stands tall, tassels dry and rustling, while dairy barns glow with the soft light of evening routines. We have lost over an hour of daylight since the summer solstice and those lights are now necessary. In the woods, the understory shifts; wood nettle fades, jewelweed scatters seeds, and birch leaves curl on the forest floor. Along roadsides milkweed pods are just beginning to split open, their silken threads catching the wind. Each day offers a detail, a small slow secret to anchor the moment if you but pause to gather it.The second element you need to slow time may sound ironic. It is filling your days with good work. Imagine each day as a wooden chest placed on the riverbank. The river is time, always flowing, always pushing, apathetic to what it carries off. The chest is your days. A chest left empty is light; it is carried off easily, swept downstream before you have even marked its presence. That is how whole months can vanish unnoticed, how years slip past with the haunting sense that you never truly lived them. A chest that is filled with the weight of good work, of perennial tasks, of hours well-spent building, making, growing for your family cannot be rushed away. It settles into place, anchored by what you have placed inside with care. The day remains regardless of the rising river and its rushing insistence. You can prove this for yourself. Work a property hard for a single year on evenings, weekends, whenever the light allows, and by the following autumn it will feel as though you have been there for decades, even generations. The soil will know your hand, the fences your hammer, the animals your presence. This good work does not mean frantic busyness, nor endless striving, but rather keeping with the good green pattern of the world: tending bees, stacking wood, pruning apple trees, raising children. In the city you may achieve this as well, though it may not feel as intuitive. Instead of splitting wood, you may have more agency around the relationships you build or the initiatives you take to improve commonly held spaces like parks, or the old rituals of your faith you steward. Whatever the case may be, you place good weight in the chest through these acts. They belong to the perennial cycle, the tasks that root you in a place and in a rhythm beyond yourself. Fill enough chests this way, and the river of time still flows, but you are no longer at its mercy. The days remain along the bank, solid, waiting, part of a lasting pattern. The chest of each day is so full, so well-weighted with effort and care, that time itself seems to lengthen around you, yielding to and flowing around the chests you placed and filled. This is the gift of good work. It thickens life with a welcomed heaviness, a vigor that cannot be pushed and pulled by the whims of culture or time. The modern world thrives on distraction, urging acceleration and feeding on the despair of time slipping away. It prefers you scroll rather than watch the moon rise over a quiet hill, count emails instead of fireflies flickering in the twilight, fight instead of love. This rush erodes the river bank while simultaneously causing you to forget to fill your chest, leaving it weightless. To slow down time is to resist this current, to live as though each day carries intrinsic value, as though the good green pattern of the world and its cycles of growth and decay, its fleeting moments of beauty, were drawn out for you to witness and build upon. You can start simply. Watch as the sky’s evening slides from gold to pink to gray, stars emerging one by one. Invite a neighbor over. Listen to the crickets. Remember an old tradition from your childhood, however mundane or sacred. Learn the smells of the season: cut grass cooling in the evening, apples softening in ditches, their ferment a promise of autumn. Notice a child’s laughter carrying across a field or the weight of their hand in yours. Keep a journal, even just a line, to note the first asters frothing up in the low places, the morning mist coiled in the valley, or a fox darting across your path. Writing these moments anchors the day, adding a little weight to the chest you keep at the river’s banks. Do this and you will not look back in November, startled, wondering where the season, the very year went. Instead when you fill each day’s chest with timeless things and good work you ensure it sits heavy in your memory, not lost to the flotsam and detritus of distraction. The practice of noticing is one of quiet rebellion, a choice to dwell in the present rather than race down the river toward the next milestone, to believe that each day matters.The temptation this time of year is to grieve summer’s fading ease or allow the current to sweep you toward autumn’s glory, but the wiser path is to dwell here, in the thick and forgotten briar of the present, considering each day with intention. Walk the roadside and taste the tart bite of a wild apple. Cut a bouquet of whatever wildflowers remain for your table. Watch for small shifts: the first red leaf, the slant of light across a barn that was not there a week ago, the cool breath of evening. Let these acts ground you. They require no great effort, yet they imbue the days with an endurance otherwise lost. Ultimately, we do not need more time. We simply need to pay attention.Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree offers a free reflection like this every Wednesday. Paid subscribers get access to additional lessons on how to live a more grounded life in our wounded modern world. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit oldhollowtree.substack.com/subscribe

It is the middle of August and now we wander through our high summer haze toward the equinox, toward fall. It may feel cruel to speak of autumn as the children yet splash and shout in the swimming holes, as the berries burst on the vine, as the school bell still gathers dust, but walk now slowly along the ditches where the lilies and daisies once bloomed and you will know this is the truth. Those fair flowers of July have bowed gracefully into the loam making way for the bright, proud goldenrod and the asters frothing in the shade-low. We so often associate nature with regeneration; cut leaf or limb and expect it to grow back. We will acknowledge its cyclical nature too. Rarely however—and at our intellectual and spiritual impoverishment—we fail to recognize its lessons on sequence and inheritance, of succession. We know of this inherently, even if we do not think actively on it. We see the clover fade in the front yard while the Joe-Pye weed fluffs about at the roadside. We muse that we haven’t seen a dandelion in some time while the curious scalemail of milkwort catches our eye. We wander to the woodline seeking the blushing maidenpink only to find the arcadian blue vervain. These green things do not endure as marble and steel. They may not even regenerate as we romanticize they do. No. We understand inherently that everything in nature holds to the good green pattern, that everything eventually gives way for what next the season calls. The old wheel turns and something blooms anew.We celebrate steadfastness to a fault, don’t we? We laugh and remark that someone is as stubborn as a mule with a twinge of pride. To be unmovable, unmalleable, unyielding has become very much an admirable trait. When we think about succession, when we reflect at the roadside on the browning flowers of yesterday and the bright flowers yet to bloom, we may reap an uncomfortable conclusion, however. All that dogged determination to never be moved in our positions, even by convincing arguments is always directed outwardly; we resist with pride any influence that seeks to change our attitudes. We make this conscious choice to don our armor and decide we will not be moved by others. But what about ourselves? What do we lose by not allowing ourselves to be moved from within? We are but iterations in a long good pattern, not only in terms of our lineages, but also in terms of ourselves. We grow and change if we but allow ourselves to do so. Our politics, our faith or lack thereof, the weave of our moral filaments—the inheritance we give ourselves is the ability to shift these, to adapt to whatever spiritual, physical, or intellectual environment in which we find ourselves. You may find that the flowers that served your loam in one season no longer suit you. This is fine. Allow yourself to carve space for what comes next.This call to inner adaptability extends to how we inhabit our own time, as flowers do theirs. If we accept that we are part of the same good green pattern as the flora of the meadows and hedgerows then we must also accept that we are made for the time, the good, long season, we inhabit. The Joe-Pye weed does not long for the dandelion days of spring, nor does the snowdrop waste itself in dreams of the goldenrod’s high summer glory. Each grows into what light and rain its season offers. We may romanticize the simpler past, its agrarian nature and straightforward morality. We may imagine the perfection of some future utopia where all will finally align into an abundant climax. This longing cannot root us here where we are needed however. The soil we stand in today is not the soil of yesterday, nor will it be tomorrow’s. What wisdom, beauty, or courage we have to offer can only bloom in the conditions we are given, under the particular angle of today’s sun. This does not mean we should “live for the moment” (a tired cliche of which we should all dispel ourselves) but rather recognize that we are well attuned to our own time, that what value and insight we can bring belongs here in these wounded days. We can make the dubious but inspiring claim that we were made for the challenges of our time but it may be more accurate to say we are simply well equipped for the challenges because they were forged in the environment in which we were raised. You may lament that you were born in this time as many do. Remember however that the wounds of the modern world are best addressed by you because you are what grew in their strange and unwelcome light. You are attuned to these days and therefore you are the one who is able to affect them.Living fully in our season shapes not only us but the legacy we leave. We so often speak of legacy as if it were a monument—stone, immutable, meant to withstand the grinding of that old wheel. Nature’s bequest to you is not cold granite or august marble however. It is living soil, warm loam, dark earth. The flowers may reseed and we can point to this as their legacy; we see the continuity and celebrate its triumph. What about the quiet work it has done underground though? There is more than just the perpetuality and cycle. The flowers neither cling to their form nor demand to witness their work’s fruition; they merely enrich the earth for what comes next. Our own succession should mirror this. We leave not immortal monuments of ourselves but fertile ground, not rigid demands but space for growth, not expectations but opportunity. When we release the vision and expectation of what we will our legacies to be, we allow them instead to bloom in wild, unexpected ways, fostering a beauty we may never witness but can trust to flourish. How can it not if the inheritance we leave is such fertile ground? It is tempting to try to control the bloom that follows in our green wake, to demand that our successors mirror our shape and hue and purpose, but to leave good ground is to leave space for surprise and beauty we ourselves might never have imagined.August's dying flowers teach us to embrace the good green pattern of succession. As daisies fade to feed goldenrod, we learn to release a desire for a different time, adapting to our own season’s light and rain, however strange it may be. By releasing control over ourselves, our beliefs, our legacies, we cultivate fertile ground for growth, trusting that what blooms next will carry forward in ways we cannot predict but can believe will be beautiful. In their quiet-fade, the flowers show us that true flourishing lies in preparing the soil for a beauty yet to come.Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and access the bonus section of this essay and voiceover, consider become a paid subscriber.Three Ways to Live a More Rooted Life* Plant and Tend a Succession Garden: Start a small garden with flowers or herbs that thrive in different seasons, such as marigolds for summer and asters for fall. As each plant fades, enrich the soil with compost from its remains, mirroring nature’s succession and practicing adaptability by embracing what each season offers.* Reflect and Adjust Personal Beliefs: Set aside time each month to journal about your current values, politics, or faith. Identify one belief that no longer serves you, and explore a new perspective, allowing yourself to grow like flowers shifting with the season’s light.* Mentor with Open-Ended Guidance: Share your skills or wisdom with someone younger, perhaps a child or student, without dictating their path. Offer support and resources and encourage their unique growth, leaving fertile ground for their future bloom. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit oldhollowtree.substack.com/subscribe

Artificiality is now the norm. Screens can simulate nearly everything, images can be doctored, videos completely fabricated, words twisted, sounds engineered. There, as always, is hope however. In this wounded modern world, where so many things have become false or illusory, you always possess one pure conduit of truth: your sense of smell. In a sea of artificial reality where you cannot trust your own eyes, scent resists the modern manipulation. It is stubbornly real, a direct communion between the natural world and your own body, your mind. Indeed, as you are assaulted by the lies of your contemporary culture that tells you up is down, it may be the best means by which you stay grounded to reality.When you walk a country road this time of year, you will notice the milkweed blooming along every roadside and pasture edge. Its flowers are a muted pink, shaped like little stars, and their scent drifts across the fields in waves of rose and honeysuckle. There is nothing quite like it, nothing synthetic that can replicate the way it hangs in the warm July air. Any attempt to manufacture a milkweed perfume would be folly. You could analyze, deconstruct, and place back together the exact chemical makeup of what makes a milkweed flower smell and you know in your heart of hearts a simple truth. It just wouldn’t be right. Just the way strawberry flavored ice cream never quite tastes like real strawberries, just the way you can tell when a dress is made with a polyester blend, just the way you can sense when someone’s tone is insincere; there is something in you that can perfectly sense when something is attempting to be what it is not, when its authenticity is compromised. In a time when so much is digitized and mediated and reduced, a single breath of milkweed is a reminder that reality still waits for you just beyond the screen, the threshold of your door. You cannot download this fragrance or bottle it. Even if you could, it can only be experienced perfectly in its natural environment; imagine for a moment the perfectly constructed milkweed perfume in the lobby of an urban apartment building. Are you tantalized or repelled? As with all good things, you must be present to receive the aroma of milkweed. The sweetness there on the country roadside in early July is proof that not all beauty has been commercialized or rebooted or churned into a homogenous slurry. Some old truths are immune to such fleeting things. You must go outside, find a wild place, and remind yourself with a deep, deep breath what life is like away from all the rebooted, commercialized, hyper marketed grey-safe content being pumped at you. That's what so much of contemporary global culture has become, hasn't it? Grey-safe. A corporate, HR-approved gruel to keep you from the green.Scent is an honest witness. It does not just guide your eyes to the beauty of a wildflower in full bloom, but also to decay. If something has gone wrong, you will smell it before you see it. Your eyes can overlook details, your mind can rationalize them away, but your nose is harder to fool. Perhaps you notice the rancid odor drifting near the chicken coop on a warm afternoon. It is the kind of smell that triggers a subtle unease before you even fully register it. You follow the trail of sulfur and carrion fumes through the door to the bedding straw until you discover the culprit: a missed egg you must have overlooked days earlier has split open, spilling its contents into the straw and attracting a nest of maggots. That smell is not subtle. It does not invite debate or interpretation. It insists on attention, on intervention, on a clear acknowledgment that something has begun to rot.Modern culture tends to mask its own corruption. Slogans, curated feeds, sniveling qualifiers. You learn to trust your senses because when someone is lying or when a system is rotting from within, you often feel it first in your gut, the same way your stomach tightens at the scent of something spoiled. You may even be told by the academically minded that disliking a putrid smell is merely a product of your western upbringing, identity, or status, that cultural influences—not your own good instinct—shape your perception of smell and it can simply be rationalized away if you were but a bit more enlightened. Ultimately though, you know when something is wrong and you act.There is another side to this honesty, one that affirms rather than celebrates the bloom or warns of the rot. If you were to visit the bee yard with me now, the air itself smells like warm bread. The hives are in their most productive season, drawing comb and storing nectar that will become honey by summer’s end if not sooner. You can stand near the hives and breathe in the scent of progress, of abundance taking shape cell by hexagonal cell, of promise manifest. It is a wordless assurance that some good work remains untouched by the counterfeit world beyond the hedgerow. It is a smell that settles your spirit, a full-throated declaration that some work is still true and good and yet remains amid the decay. No algorithm can counterfeit this aroma, no influencer can monetize it, no unelected bureaucrat can tax it. When the bees are making honey, you can tell. The air changes. The world declares itself trustworthy in that small way, that wholly-good scent of honey ripening in the comb. Evidence to which you can point that the world may still be trusted in places where people have chosen to care. It is a reminder that there is still good work to be done, good work that will outlast you. Whatever your good work may be, whatever you do to make the world more beautiful, someday others will stand where you are standing and breathe in that same fragrance, feeling that same hope. Sawn wood, chiseled stone, tilled loam. It is all but evidence that the essential things—family, nature, tradition—remain unbroken. It is the necessary reminder that the ground beneath your feet is still real, and that truth, when you know how to sense it, still lingers in the air and it is something too fine to contain or corrupt.All of this reminds you to keep your senses awake. Scent remains one of the last simple proofs that something is real, that something is working or failing, that something is worth your attention. In a time when illusions are easier to produce than ever before, the honest report of your nose is a gift. Milkweed blooming, a rotting egg, the smell of your own good craft: these are signs that the world still tells the truth if you care to step outside, bring it forth, and breathe it in.Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree is made possible by readers like you. If you believe in reclaiming what is real and beautiful in a wounded world, consider supporting this work as a paid subscriber. Benefits abound for those who do.Three Actions to Live a More Grounded Life1. Seek Out Unmistakable Scents in Their Natural PlaceThis week, take time to walk somewhere wild or uncultivated. Find a place where milkweed, clover, or wild roses grow without human arrangement. When you arrive, pause to close your eyes and simply breathe. Notice the fragrance exactly as it exists, untamed and imperfect. You cannot download this experience. You cannot simulate it. 2. Let Scent Be Your Early Warning SystemResolve to trust your nose when something feels “off.” If you catch the whiff of mildew, rancid eggs, or decay—literal or figurative—act on it without delay. Clean the coop, take out the trash, confront the problem. Likewise, when you sense moral or cultural rot, do not let polite convention convince you to look away. A culture of illusions depends on your willingness to ignore what your senses are telling you. Let your nose teach you that small problems grow worse when you pretend they do not exist.3. Surround Yourself With the Aroma of Good WorkSpend part of this week making or tending something real. It might be baking bread, cutting fresh wood, harvesting herbs, or caring for an animal. As you work, notice the smells that rise from your effort: sawdust, warm dough, clean earth, flesh and fur. These scents are evidence that you are part of something trustworthy and enduring. When you fill your days with genuine labor and its unmistakable markers, you fortify yourself against the grey-safe illusions of modern life. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit oldhollowtree.substack.com/subscribe

The urgency is real now. You feel it in the long stretch of daylight, the way everything grows all at once, in the good green pattern absolutely bursting forth now. Gentle May makes her exit ushering in heady June. The sun is up before you are and lingers long past supper yet somehow the days feel too short. Daylight runs close to fifteen hours now, and still it is just not enough to complete everything you want. The natural world is hurrying: bees rise earlier, the dandelions bloom and seed, trees race to fill their canopies, and we too are swept into the momentum. There’s planting to finish, wood to cut, children to chase through wet grass. You start early and end late and lie awake thinking of what you did not do. The season runs hard. The earth is moving fast and it is hard not to be moved by it. Amidst all the fervor and rampant work however, June extends an invitation to us with verdant hand to linger a moment. It is an invitation we should acceptEven as nature rushes forward, it does so deliberately. The forest does not panic. The wildflowers do not fret about order or scheduling. They come in succession as they are called. The edible ramps are passing on, making way for lily-of-the-valley and her delicate ivory bells. The trillium bows out, and jack-in-the-pulpit springs up from the cool understory. The maples leaf out in a green so pale they glow. On the meadows’ edge, the violets now give way to buttercups, then chervil and red clover. In the low wet places, the skunk cabbage opens in a yellow riot. This is not frantic blooming however. It is the steady, ordered abundance of a world that knows how to wait its turn. The trees do not envy the grass. The bees fly when the sun allows. The bluebirds, still fresh from their long migration, do not rush to build; they settle in and they sing. There is a pace here, but it’s not the one we were taught. It is slower, wiser, and deeply beautiful.The urgency we feel in our sinew and bone is not only from the natural world, it is from the systems we’ve built around it: calendars, commitments, summer programs, performance metrics. This is the time of year when everything shifts. There are forms to fill out, gear to find, bags to pack. If you let it, modern life will push you into a rhythm not of your own making. You’ll be swept along by deadlines and sign-ups and the subtle pressure to “make the most” of every summer moment. Ironically, this pressure leaves little room for savoring anything at all. Even rest becomes a checkbox. Even joy is scheduled. We are told to be efficient with our leisure, to optimize our days off, to always do more. This is disordered in the most literal sense of the word. It is out of the good, true order of our being.We rush through the season we longed for in the dark of February. The result? We miss the very thing we were trying to reach.The wisdom of June does not lie in the productive rush, in the feverish sowing of seeds after work but before dinner. It is in the lingering. The garden doesn’t demand all of you in one day. The birds do not wake and worry about what they’ll sing. The lilacs bloom extravagantly and drop their petals with no apology. The natural world is not wasteful, but neither is it hurried. What if we were to match that pace? What if we asked not how much can we accomplish today, but how fully can we notice? Can we stop long enough to hear our daughter say, “He’s carrying his house,” when she finds a snail under the rhubarb leaves? Can we let the northern flickers sing us out of a task and into a pause, wondering if we will catch a glimpse of their majesty at the woodline? There is a different kind of success to be found here: not in achievement, but in attention. The world teaches us that productivity is the goal but creation tells a deeper story; belonging, slowness, and delight are the actual rewards.June arrives. The season will turn whether you’ve kept pace or not. If you’ve rushed too hard however, you might miss what it offers. You might miss the tiny footprints in the mud beside the pond or the way the evening light catches in your child’s hair or the hush that falls between the first call of the hermit thrush and the last breeze across the clover. Have you stopped yet to wish on a dandelion that has puffed to seed? The rush is real but it is not the whole truth. Beneath it, beneath the dual din of the rampant growth and the neon hum of the modern world is the quiet, old, and true. A pace at which you can live, but only you choose it. Let the beans go in late. Let the to-do list wait just a little longer. Walk the meadow. Sit by a hive and listen. You don’t have to keep up with the earth. You only have to witness it. You don’t have to keep up with the world. You only have to endure it. Allow yourself to linger a while this June. If this free essay spoke to something deep and true in you, if you long for more reflections like this grounded in beauty, tradition, and rebellion against modern drift, consider becoming a paid subscriber to Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree. Paid posts go further: deeper essays, practical insights, and enduring truths you can live by and pass on. This is writing that builds what the wounded world is busy tearing down. Build it with me. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit oldhollowtree.substack.com/subscribe

Here in the meadow, May brings song. The bluebirds have staked their claim to the birdhouse by the old hay rake. They dart about, from the iron to the little house to the forest and back again. Their low-pitched warble signals a courtship and the promise of return next year following another long winter; four notes that implore “Now, come hither!” Promise manifest. The tree frogs however have begun to quiet their courting songs; dusk brings a quieter chorus at the woodline than it did even a week ago. The frogs are settling in. They have found their mates. Amongst it all, amid all the songs lilting and fading, there are those in the meadow and among the hedgerows bearing earnest witness to the oaths declared and the songs of celebration:The children. Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.They are there signing their own little songs learned in playgrounds and in their mothers’ arms at bedtime after long May days of scraped knees, bug bites, and dandelion picking. While we adults hang our heads in our hands, weighed down by all manner of modernity’s artificial anxieties, they are watching the birds flit about calling to one another, they are listening to the mystery of the dusk-song from the trees. They are present, fully and freely, in the perennial pattern of the seasons, of the goodness of the world.It is a wonder then, in this season of matrimony, that we have begun to exile them from our weddings.There is a concerning trend of weddings, once a rite that wove together families and futures, having become something curated and adult-only, sterilized of giggles during the vows, of small hands dropping petals, of the accidental holiness of a child falling asleep in a pew. The child, who once danced between tables and yanked at Grandpa’s tie, is now unwelcome, a perceived interruption to the ambiance.We say it's for simplicity. For elegance. We convince ourselves we’re doing it so the parents can have a night off. In truth though, it is grim reflection of a deeper discomfort with which we have not reckoned. It is a cultural abandonment of inheritance, of challenge, of continuity. In leaving out the children from our hallowed rite, we leave out the very ones to whom the promise is meant to extend. We blind those whose witness is most unselfconscious, most earnestly given.One can read the lifestyle articles, the blogs, the various defenses of this practice. They are well-intentioned. The defenders of childfree weddings will point to a sense of preserving the special moments, make the case that children are not well suited for formal events, and expecting them to remain quiet and composed throughout a wedding is unrealistic.Perhaps the problem is the expectation itself. Perhaps the disruption is the point.It is often said that if a parish never hears the occasional cry of a baby or the chatter of a toddler during Sunday Mass, it is a parish on the brink of death. It is a grim but clarifying reminder that we are always but one generation away from losing the values, traditions, and promises we do not pass down. Whether or not you are religious, this principle applies. A wedding is about continuity. There is deep comfort in knowing that when your love matures, when your parents are gone, when the blush of youth gives way to gray and to gravity, there will be young adults in your life who will remember something essential about you.They will remember that you made a vow. They, as children, may not remember the details of your vows. They will not remember what you said. They will remember that you took them however. They will remember that magical words that bound you to another were exchanged. They will remember that something sacred happened.This memory becomes a compass, a north star, for both them and you. These future young adults are not your peers who may succumb to the same societal pressures, trends, and pitfalls you do; they have a different perspective, a cultural antibody you do not possess. They will not fall in the same way you do. This is invaluable in holding you accountable, in keeping you true. They benefit as well. As they bear witness to your oath, they begin to craft a story they will carry into their own tangled seasons of adulthood. A story that can guide them when our wounded world inevitably tells them that commitment is naïve, irrational, or even disposable.The children need to hear your vows.An argument for childfree weddings we often hear is that they are both costly and deeply personal, that it is a day entirely focused on the happy couple and therefore their wishes are paramount. It should be about them. Yes, weddings require immense effort, planning, and sacrifice. They are charged with emotion, with meaning, with the uniqueness of a couple’s story. However they are not exclusively yours. This is jarring to our individualistic and owner-oriented western sensibilities, but a wedding, no matter how tailored or costly, is not a curated expression of self. It is a public act of union, a covenant made in the presence of others. To exclude an entire population from that witnessing, especially the youngest and most vulnerable among us who carry the future of that community, is to diminish the very nature of the union. As a brief but serious aside, we also need to ask ourselves plainly why is it only children we feel free to exclude? Try substituting any other group: “No one over sixty, too disruptive you know.” “Not for those earning under $100,000 a year. Too risky.” The suggestion is absurd. Offensive, even. Yet with children, we’re comfortable saying they’re too risky, too noisy, too inconvenient. Why? Ask yourself and you will find an uncomfortable answer.Regardless, here lies the heart of the matter: weddings, while personal, are not private performances. Ultimately, a union made without witnesses becomes something fragile. A union seen, remembered, and carried by others is more enduring. It lasts.This exclusion points to a deeper cultural malaise. It is not quite selfishness, but it something close. Perhaps it is a kind of compartmentalization, or a form of toxic individualism, where even our most sacred rites are folded into the logic of consumer choice and personal branding, of identity. When every aspect of the day is curated down to color palettes and filtered lighting, the messy, holy reality of life, the surprise laugh, the toddler’s shriek, the communion that spans generations, is treated as an inconvenience. A wedding is not a brand extension however. It is not a performance. It is a deeply human and hallowed rite. It is a sacrament rooted in something older than trend, older than taste. It is not about control. It is not about ambiance. It is not, ultimately, about you.It is about your union and the people who will hold you to it. The ones who will remind you, decades from now, what you promised. The ones who will grow up remembering they saw something sacred, something good, something worth aspiring to. When we invite children to our weddings, we invite the future to bear witness. That is worth a little noise. It is worth a little song.If this essay spoke to something deep and true in you, if you long for more reflections like this, grounded in beauty, tradition, and rebellion against our wounded world, consider becoming a paid subscriber to Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree. Paid posts go further: deeper essays, practical insights, and enduring truths by which you can live and pass on. This is writing that builds what the world is busy tearing down. Build it with me. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit oldhollowtree.substack.com/subscribe

Author’s Note: this essay is part of the Reports from the High Wood series, a weekly premium report from our homestead that offers you enduring lessons for living well in a wounded world. If you're drawn to green paths, perennial values, and timeless beauty that resists the modern glare, you're in the right place.Here are some of our past beekeeping posts that will give context if you are new here:Thank you for being here, for walking this good green path with us.Today, it began. Year one, day one.Last year, my wife and I resolved to continue my family tradition of beekeeping. It was our test year—“Year Zero”— to see if we had the patience, resilience, and skill for it.We decided to go all in. After a year of classes, studying, missteps, and successes, the true genesis of our beekeeping operation began today with the arrival of twelve packages of bees—each one weighing three pounds and containing more than 15,000 honey bees. It rained the moment I returned home, a steady spring downpour that trapped us indoors and filled the air with suspense. The bees waited in the back of the SUV, twelve boxes humming with warmth, promise, life.There is something strange, arcane in keeping bees. Before you even open a package, you're confronted by the sheer vitality of them—the vibration in the air, a smell like warm beer, their shocking heat. Most people don’t realize how warm a colony is. Each package radiated with the biological furnace of fifteen thousand small bodies pressing together, wings and legs flicking gently, trying to understand where they’d gone and when they would be let loose. With twelve boxes packed in, my vehicle felt like a roiling crucible. As I drove, the windows nearly frothed with humidity, the thrum of 100,000 little lives drowned out the engine, the whole vehicle threatened to boil over into a mass of golden light.When I arrived home, it was pouring. This forced patience. I could feel the bees were eager to escape their cramped quarters, eager to stretch their wings, relieve themselves, drink deep of fresh water. There was nothing for me to do but to leave them in the car with the windows cracked and wait for the sky to clear. I passed the time by putting my baby down for a nap. As I laid beside her, her entire little body tucked into the crook of my arm, I told her what was about to happen. I told her about the rain and how her great-grandfather and her grandmother kept bees. As she fell asleep there, I thought about why we were doing all this in the first place.Family. Nature. Tradition. We waited for the weather to align to our small designs, listening to the rain pitter-patter against the metal roof to our little cottage. There are many lessons to be learned from bees, but patience is one of the first. You can rush a job, but you cannot rush the natural world, the good green pattern. When the clouds finally broke and the drizzle faded into mist, we moved quickly. Every pair of hands went to work. We opened up the hives, removed the sugar-syrup jars that serve as a sort of cork from the packages, pried loose the queen cages, and prepared to dump thousands of bees into their new homes. Despite all our enthusiasm, my eagerness to get them housed before the rain returned, all the commotion, the bees were gentle—perhaps tired from their journey from California, perhaps content with knowing they were about to be home in a little meadow in Vermont. Bees are not so different from us; grey soggy days cause them to be grumpy, temperamental, short on patience. Today however, they met us with calmness and offered us grace.This is not just a story about our family starting twelve hives though. Not really. It is about the start of any good, green, bold thing. It is about launching something good and true and beautiful in your own life. We live in a wounded world where we are slowly killing ourselves with ease, where we are swimming in the artificial, where we are disconnected from real consequence.Surrounded by the thrum of 100,000 bees today in our humming meadow, this is what I learned and what I hope you can take and use in your own good green way:1. Creating something real requires patience.It will rain. You will wait. Then, without warning, the rain will stop, and you must act quickly. This is true whether you are planting a garden, writing a book, starting a business, or, yes, dumping 40 pounds of bees into wooden boxes. The waiting is not wasted though. The stillness becomes your preparation, your moment of quiet reflection to slow and remember why you are doing this good thing. Do not be afraid of it.2. You cannot do this alone.My whole family helped today. Even our baby, wrapped in a blanket, laughing at us as we scurried around, kept the mood light. A project worth doing invites others in. If you want to build something that lasts—something real and grounded—it must become a generational act. My mother kept bees. Her father did, too. Now it is my turn, and I am doing it with my wife. Our children are watching, helping, learning. Your version of this may not be beekeeping, but you need to think about who stands beside you when the rain lifts.Author’s note: The lesson does not stop here. In the full essay below, we will explore three more enduring lessons gleaned from the apiary that apply to your life, from which you can learn. There are also two demonstration videos of installing bees into a hive and a voiceover of the entire essay. It is worth it.If you have ever wanted to live more intentionally, more beautifully, more in tune with the perennial patterns that have shaped better lives, this essay is intended for you.Reports from the High Wood is a place for that kind of reflection, for grounded wisdom in a wounded world. This is not just about bees or family or tradition; it is about building a meaningful life from the roots up with dirt on your hands, hope in your heart, golden light glittering in your eye. If that resonates with you, I would be honored if you joined as a subscriber and read the rest of this lesson.Thank you.3. Warmth matters.The first thing you notice when you handle a package of bees is the heat. They keep each other warm, they huddle close, they hum with internal fire. They have little woodstove hearts and there is something ancient and comforting in their ember-light. In your own work or home, ask: what are you doing to preserve that sense of warmth, of communal effort? The warmth of shared labor, shared promise, shared hope? If the work you’re doing is cold and isolating, perhaps you need to return to something that throws off heat.4. Even the queen needs to adjust.Every package of bees arrives with a queen in her own small cage. She is not immediately accepted. She must be introduced slowly so the colony adjusts to her pheromones. You hang the cage gently in the hive, making sure the candy plug is facing out so the bees can eat through it and release her over a few days.That, in a sense, is leadership. In a family. In a project. In a company. You cannot storm in and demand obedience. You are introduced, you are earned, and if you are wise, you give your people—your team, your children, your spouse—time to adjust to what you bring. 5. Start small and allow your failures to not be failures.Each hive today began as a different hive that grew until it could be split. They are small now, but in a few weeks, they will have drawn out comb, raised brood, stored nectar. In a few months, we will be harvesting honey. In a year, some of these colonies may split themselves, creating new hives. Last year we had two hives and they died in the winter, but those hives built out 32 frames of comb and filled them with honey and space for brood. The new bees are being launched with this inheritance and will have weeks upon weeks of work already done for them. Did we fail last year when our bees died? Today as I slipped honey-heavy frames into the new hives, it felt like success.You need to start. Even if your version of starting today is just setting up a desk, buying a domain name, or dreaming up a plan with your child, it counts. Do not wait for perfect conditions. Do not delay your first day.If you’ve already begun, don’t stop. If the weather has you stalled, or the tools feel heavy in your hand, or the work seems slow and thankless, remember the warmth and the promise of what comes next, remember the bees out there humming in the meadow. Even now, even exhausted after a long journey, they are building something good.So are you.Keep going. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit oldhollowtree.substack.com/subscribe

We are running now, running toward the halfway point between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. Easter has come and the green blade rises along every hill and dale. Our days are long. They are long and they are good. Walk through a field or forest this time of year, along the stone walls and hedgerows, scan the the hillsides, and your wandering eye will be met with nothing but green, long desired and now present green. You become imbued with the sense that there is an incredible prejudice in your favor, that you are going to win. Here, now from the warmest meadow to the darkest ravine it is undeniable: anything good that can happen will happen.The bluebirds are back in the meadow. They flicker from bird house to the antique hay rake sinking into the field, their color so vivid to illicit a gasp. One pair has claimed the birdhouse on the knoll and they slip in and out of its little hole like a secret kept between them, the ever-growing grass, and the wind. A mated pair keeps watch, one atop the house, the other atop the hay rake, its rusted tines tangled with the dark stems of last year’s goldenrod. That rake hasn’t turned a field in generations, but now it holds a different purpose, an altar of sorts for these feathered harbingers of bright days. To watch a bluebird land there, on iron made useless by time but still offering itself to beauty, is to believe the world is ever-conspiring inevitably toward grace.Then, come evening, the peepers begin. They begin all at once anywhere there is still water until the woods vibrate with their insistence. They call from the vernal pools that formed in low places, their voices threading through the spaces between dusk and night, between cold and warmth, between winter and summer. You never see the peepers. It is a chorus that seems to rise from the ground itself, and if you stop to listen, really listen, it becomes clear that something more is being sung. A thinning occurs here, in the lull between light and dark, when you can almost feel another world brushing up against this one. You walk the edge of the pond or the woodline and feel it, the marrow-deep memory of something just at the periphery. Something good and slow and green. These frogs know something we don’t. Something we so easily forget: that, despite all the wounds in this world, it is still safe to sing, the light will return, that the good things are on the move with a passion.Walk into the forest now, past the blue birds in the meadow and through the frog song at the tree line. It is dark here, and the echo of winter whispers still. These hills are old and they have leveled with age but there are still deep places, dark places. Deep in the High Wood, there are steep hillsides where rivers have cut their long, slow will. Down in these ravines, where the sun barely reaches and the snow lingers longest, another quiet resurrection is taking place. It feels secret. It feels old. First the ramps. They are up now, bright green spears pushing through last year’s leaf litter. They’re bold and young, like swords thrust triumphantly toward the heavens. Optimism incarnate. Alongside them the fiddleheads uncurl slowly, their tight spirals relaxing with the warmth, their velvet skins still damp from the thaw. They are older, eldritch and staff-like in their spiral, their mystery. These are the foods of old stories, of first harvests, of foragers who walked softly and listened well. You have to stoop to find them, to get close, to enter their world for a moment. When you do however, it’s hard not to feel that the ground itself is giving you a gift. It is unearned, yet given freely all the same. In the dark places, the deep places, life has returned, simultaneously ancient and new.And so we run on, toward the halfway point between the equinox and the solstice, toward long days filled with light and promise. Easter has passed, but its echo remains. The green blade rises, and with it, so do we. The good things gather now not in isolation, but in chorus. Everything good all at once, overwhelming. The meadow, the marsh, the ravine…they all speak the same voice. This is not coincidence. This is not accident. This is the good green pattern of life declaring it is wholly good.Anything good that can happen will happen. And it is happening now.Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree is published free on Wednesdays. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber so I can continue to bring you these reflections from our little hill in Vermont. Thank you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit oldhollowtree.substack.com/subscribe