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Recent episodes
The Green Conspiracy
Jun 1, 2026
4m 51s
Rebuilding Home
May 11, 2026
8m 14s
You Need to Find Your Old Hollow Tree
Mar 16, 2026
9m 31s
There is No False Spring
Feb 16, 2026
9m 10s
A Crisis of Keeping
Nov 26, 2025
10m 48s
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| Date | Episode | Topics | Guests | Brands | Places | Keywords | Sponsor | Length | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6/1/26 | ![]() The Green Conspiracy✨ | natureseasons+3 | — | — | — | greennature+6 | — | 4m 51s | |
| 5/11/26 | ![]() Rebuilding Home✨ | homenostalgia+4 | — | L.L. BeanHudson Bay | — | homenostalgia+6 | — | 8m 14s | |
| 3/16/26 | ![]() You Need to Find Your Old Hollow Tree✨ | childhood memoriesnature+3 | — | — | — | hollow treechildhood+3 | — | 9m 31s | |
| 2/16/26 | ![]() There is No False Spring✨ | Februaryseasons+4 | — | — | — | Februaryfalse spring+5 | — | 9m 10s | |
| 11/26/25 | ![]() A Crisis of Keeping✨ | disposabilitykeeping+4 | — | — | — | crisis of keepingdisposability+5 | — | 10m 48s | |
| 11/21/25 | ![]() The Final Stronghold of Civilization✨ | civilizationhousehold+3 | — | — | — | civilizationhousehold+5 | — | 10m 27s | |
| 11/16/25 | ![]() To Stand in the Dark✨ | seasonal changereflection+4 | — | — | — | Novembernatural world+4 | — | 6m 56s | |
| 11/5/25 | ![]() We Fathers Must Not Let the Fire Die✨ | fatherhoodwinter solstice+4 | — | — | — | fatherhoodwinter solstice+5 | — | 8m 34s | |
| 10/15/25 | ![]() Little Lights and Dark Days✨ | Halloweenautumn+4 | — | — | — | Halloweenautumn equinox+5 | — | 10m 18s | |
| 10/8/25 | ![]() You Need to Keep Going✨ | seasonal changenature+5 | — | — | Octoberthe lake+1 | Octobermaples+6 | — | 7m 20s | |
Want analysis for the episodes below?Free for Pro Submit a request, we'll have your selected episodes analyzed within an hour. Free, at no cost to you, for Pro users. | |||||||||
| 9/24/25 | ![]() You Must Recognize Your Victory Now✨ | seasonal changepersonal growth+3 | — | — | — | wintersolstice+5 | — | 8m 19s | |
| 9/17/25 | ![]() How to Find Your Balance in an Unbalanced World✨ | balanceequinox+4 | — | — | — | balanceequinox+5 | — | 11m 47s | |
| 8/20/25 | ![]() How to Slow Down Time | 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 | 14m 08s | ||||||
| 8/17/25 | ![]() Flowers Freely Given | Author’s Note: this essay is part of the Reports from the High Wood series, a weekly premium report from our homestead that offers 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.Normally these Sunday posts are for paid subscribers only, but the nature of this essay makes it feel right that this post should be available to everyone.Here are some of our past beekeeping posts that will give context if you are new here:"You could charge for this, you know." The kind woman I did not know remarked as she cut a handful of zinnias and marigolds from our meadow. She was visiting from another state, staying with my friend and neighbor who I saw swimming earlier. I invited them to walk up to our home and cut flowers. Her comment caused me to reflect not only on the possibility of tourists cutting flowers and taking photos in our meadow for money, but the morality, authenticity, and general ethos of the idea. Two weeks ago, another friend walked up from the village with her daughter and her daughter's boyfriend. These beautiful teenagers spent one of their final evenings together before leaving for college by putting the flowers from our meadow into each other's hair. I smiled as they stood there in the field, looking like Oberon and Titania holding court, unaware of summer's fade. Could I ever bring myself to charge a stranger for such a thing? Would it be right? Would it be better to leave the meadow a secret for friends and friends of friends to come and leave with a bouquet for their table? What is even the purpose of the Humming Meadow?We live in a time when everything is bent toward transaction. The smallest pleasures are weighed for their commercial potential, packaged, branded, and sold back to us as a curated experience. Even the flowers are not spared; wild bouquets and meadow walks appear on glossy flyers promising wellness, mindfulness, reconnection. To resist this “agri-tainment” not easy. We are told we must monetize the hours we spend, the skills we carry, even the beauty that happens to fall on our land. I am not immune to this. I write here, I keep bees, I tend a homestead that asks for both labor and investment. Yes, we care deeply about beekeeping, the land, and creating something good and perennial but there is also a practical wisdom in selling honey, in asking readers to support words worth writing. Yet there is also a line that must be drawn if one hopes to live in alignment and equilibrium with the good green pattern. Not every moment, not every experience, not every gift of place should be folded into the ledger. Our wounded modern world may need fewer things for sale and more things given freely, without calculation or branding, without the heaviness of an exchange. There must be some part of our lives—a table set for family, a forest path known only to neighbors, a good old ritual—that remains unpriced. Perhaps this is because, while in the meadow this evening, I sensed we are actively living in “the good old days”. I know it in my bones when I watch my daughter chase after our black cat through the meadow with an armful of zinnias. I know it when I see my wife at dusk, standing barefoot in the grass, holding our youngest while moths relieve the butterflies’ watch over the meadow. I know it in the steady rhythm of the hives, in the sting and the sweetness that mark this work as ours. These days are fleeting, precious, lit with a kind of unselfconscious joy. The business is still small enough that it does not consume us, the children still young enough that they do not pull away. Even the meadow itself feels fragile, an ember of soil and seed that could easily be snuffed out by carelessness or greed. Were I to charge for entry, to make the flowers a product instead of a gift, I would lose something essential. I would no longer wave to a stranger who has wandered up the road from the village and mean it when I say, “Take some home with you.” I would no longer welcome a friend of a friend with scissors in hand and feel no need to count the stems. These are the years when such hospitality is still possible, when the gate is open, when we do not guard ourselves against loss because what we have feels abundant.In time, this ease will change. The children will grow, the business may harden into necessary edges, the meadow will pass through its seasons and become something else. I do not fool myself that the wheel will pause here. The dandelion gives way to the clover, the clover to the goldenrod, the goldenrod to the asters. So too with us. What we hold today will be asked of us tomorrow, and if we are wise, we will give it gladly. To cling too tightly is to miss the gift of the season we are in. Better to live as the flowers do, spending themselves fully while the light is theirs, trusting the good green pattern to carry on. If we can live this way, even for a time, we will have left enough behind—honey in the jar, flowers in a stranger’s hands, memory pressed into the hearts of children—for something beautiful to grow after us.Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree is a reader-supported publication that in turn supports our family tradition of beekeeping. Please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to get updates when we begin to sell honey, candles, and more. 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 | 7m 36s | ||||||
| 8/14/25 | ![]() What We Learn from Dying Flowers | 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 | 11m 38s | ||||||
| 7/6/25 | ![]() Three Truths Milkweed Can Teach Us About Parenthood | The common milkweed stands tall along the roadsides and fencerows all summer, steadfast and unassuming in the ditches, the hedgerows, the border-places. To some, it is just a weed, coarse in its stalk and broad of leaf. To those with eyes to see however, it is the silent keeper of a secret, the host of a story older than any one of us, the tender of a cycle that endures without question or complaint. It is the keeper of old truths we can yet learn—old truths of what it means to be a parent.If you were to look closely at the undersides of its leaves, you would find the light green, perfect eggs of the monarch butterfly. In time, these eggs will split open and the smallest of caterpillars will emerge, fragile, insistent, hungry. From the moment it is born, the caterpillar begins to eat the milkweed’s leaf. Bite after bite, day after day, until it has taken so much the limb bends under the absence of form. Make no mistake, however; this is not a parasitical relationship. The milkweed gives itself over without protest, giving of itself to nourish the green-life that comes next.This is the first truth about being a parent: you must be willing to be consumed. You must accept the quiet sacrifice, the nights without sleep, the years when your energy is parceled out in small, fleeting rations to someone who cannot yet stand alone. You will watch the body you knew lose its form to exhaustion, the routines you relied on collapse. You will face your own limitations in the small hours of morning-dark, measure your temper against physical and emotional fatigue. Like the milkweed, you will let yourself be consumed because you understand that all this giving is not loss but rather a gift that will carry your child into her full, beautiful strength.In time, the caterpillar grows robust, full of vitality, its form and function fully realized. When it has eaten its fill, it crawls to the underside of the leaf and hangs there motionless. It is hidden from the wind, sheltered from the rain, shielded from the beating summer sun. The milkweed becomes not only a place of nourishment, but shelter. Its broad leaves a rampart against the elements, a quiet place for the next transformation to begin. There in the stillness of the leaf’s under-canopy, the caterpillar begins to change, weaving the bright green chrysalis that will hold it in perfect safety. It has consumed part of the milkweed, yes, but the plant is still steadfast and sure, it is still upright and a predictable, perfect haven for the would-be butterfly.This is the second truth about being a parent: you are called to become a refuge. In the long seasons of childhood, you must be the place of safety, the place of certainty, the place where your child can press themselves against your steady love and find the courage to grow. You shelter them not only from cold and storm but from the flood of cheap influence, the blare of voices that would strip their innocence and identity for profit. Your arms become the walls that keep out what does not belong. Your words, the quiet assurance that some things will not change. In a time when so much is unrooted, you are the root. In a culture that demands more, faster, brighter, you are the calm shelter, the enduring green pattern that is always predictable, steadfast, sure.When the time comes, the chrysalis splits. The butterfly emerges almost immediately strong and ready. Its wings dry in the July air. Soon, it lifts from the leaf, rises into the sky, and flutter-drifts across the fields. No matter how you wish to keep it close to admire its beauty, no matter how you long for more time, there is no staying its flight. It will go where it must go. To the far coasts, to the warm valleys of California or the mountains of Mexico, to the places you cannot follow. It must. The meadows of your quiet home cannot hold the monarch; indeed, they may well stifle it. The world waits for its arrival, and the milkweed can only watch it go.This is the third truth about being a parent: you will let go. You will stand in the quiet field of your own making and watch what you have raised take wing. It will feel impossible. It will feel as if your own heart is carried away, fragile in the wind—an impossible pain. Yet there is a promise in this leaving.The monarch always returns. When summer comes again, the progeny of that first butterfly will drift back to the same patch of milkweed, drawn by something older than the memory of their own short lives. They, like us, are drawn to familiar ground by blood-memory. To place. They will settle in the fields where their lineage began. They will sip the nectar, carry the pollen, complete the cycle. What was once nourished by the milkweed returns to nourish it in kind.This is the hope you are given: the work you have done is not lost. The sacrifice, the shelter, the letting go. All of it will return in time. The children you release into the world will come back in ways you cannot predict, cannot fathom. They will remember the lessons, the tenderness, the home you made with your good hands. They will tend it in their own season, carry it forward for another generation. In this there is no final ending—there is only the slow and certain continuity of the good work, of the pattern, of things well rooted and an understanding of place.When you pass a stand of milkweed this summer, pause a while. Look beneath the leaves. Watch the caterpillars at their quiet work. Know that you are witnessing something old and good and true. Know that every parent, like every milkweed, has been asked to give, to shelter, to let go, and to trust that what flies away will someday return. Know that this is not a lesson of loss, but a story of continuance, of love returned in its own time and season, of an old cycle yet unbroken.Author’s Note: Normally, these Sunday essays are for paid subscribers only. This essay however will remain free forever so that it may bring hope, joy, or solace to any parent navigating the good, green pattern. Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree seeks to explore the intersection, the crossroad, between family, nature, and tradition. If you seek green paths and old truths, you are home here. Please consider subscribing. All proceeds from this publication support our family tradition of beekeeping. 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 | 8m 47s | ||||||
| 7/2/25 | ![]() You Need to Stop and Smell the Roses or Lose Your Grip on Reality | 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 | 11m 06s | ||||||
| 6/4/25 | ![]() Let June Overwhelm You | My baby does not want to sleep this week. She wants to stand. She wants to place her hands on my stomach, get her feet under her, and lean gently back. She wants to stand there in bed and show me she can wave her little hands. I resist the urge to be frustrated by this, the voice like television static in my brain that tells me she needs to sleep so I can go do things. Tidy the house, get the honey business in order, make more money. She of course, is simply embodying exactly what this season is for. She is nine months old and life pours from her: a deep spring that has no end. She is June manifest, all fullness and unfurling. The grass outside is tall and bending under its own weight, the hive boxes are heavy, the days are long and glowing and, like her, impossible to contain. Everything is blooming all at once, including her. June does not want to be managed and be put to sleep. It wants to spill over. My baby does not want to sleep because the season and life itself is rich, loud, and bright. We need to stop trying to get ahead of it and instead let ourselves be overwhelmed by the vitality of it all.Now that the spring hunting season is over, the turkeys have returned. They march out of the forest and strut across the garden rows, royalty tossing mulch aside with their talons imperiously and pecking at anything that moves. It is annoying. It is also beautiful. There is something deeply comic in how proudly they move, something oddly triumphant in their reclaiming of the fields and trails. “I did not die. I am here.” Their presence is inconvenient, yes, but it is also a reminder that the woods are never empty; they are full of life, burgeoning, waiting to spill out when the pressure lifts. The turkeys that scratch through the newly tilled field are doing exactly as they should in June, in the time of abundance. When I see them scatter as I round the corner with a wheelbarrow or watch them sunning themselves in the long grass, I try not to shoo them. Their disregard for the boundaries is charming. They have survived the blasts and arrows of another spring and this is their reward.The other fields are being hayed now. The roar of the machines starts early, and by late afternoon the air is thick with the scent of cut grass. It is a smell that pulls on memory. Step into a barn, long unused, and note how it still holds the sweet green ghost of hay from a decade before. Life sticks around. It presses into wood, settles into rafters, soaks the air. The first cutting of hay is an old harvest, one that comes before the tomatoes or the squash, and one that always seems to sneak up on us. The fields do not ask whether we are ready. They give what they give when they give it! In the barns, in the bales, in the very beams of the old buildings, the evidence of this abundant generosity remains. It is tempting to try and schedule your joy, to plan for a slower season, to wait until things calm down. June will not wait though. June bursts forth. It leaves its mark. You will smell it years from now and remember, maybe with tears, how alive it all once was. The bees too are swelling. Hives are booming, spilling over with new brood and bright pollen. I spoke with another beekeeper this week who had just added a second deep super to one of her hives. Without the space to grow, the bees will leave. The queen will abscond, taking her workers and their ambitions elsewhere in search of a roomier home. You must make space for growth or you will lose it. This is one of the central challenges of June: how to make space for all this life. It is tempting to try to maintain control, to keep things manageable, to keep the grass mowed and the fowl out of the garden. Life does not want to be manageable though. Life wants to fill every crevice. It wants to stand up in your bed and wave its hands when its time for sleep. The beekeeper adds a box. She expands the space. She allows for more. This is wisdom you too can learn from the bees about all this boundless June life: do not contain it. Make room. Say yes to the overflowing. When the good green pattern this time of year offers you more than you expected, do not flinch. Just make more room for it.This is the truth of June: it is too much, and it is perfect. Everything is blooming, and there is no possible way to hold it all. So don’t. Let it spill. Let the baby stay awake and the bees keep growing and the turkeys walk all over your tidy plans. You will not regret having witnessed it. You will regret having missed it because you were trying to get ahead, however. What June offers is not efficiency. It is abundance. It is the fullness of the fields and the scent of old hay and the riotous growth of everything good. If you are lucky, it will knock the wind out of you. It will remind you that your job is not to master life, but to receive it. Go ahead. Let it overwhelm you.You will be ok.Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to unlock this essay, every Sunday essay, the entire archive, and a narrated voiceover for this essay and all essays. 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 | 7m 54s | ||||||
| 5/28/25 | ![]() You Have to Let it Linger | 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 | 8m 17s | ||||||
| 5/21/25 | ![]() We Have Forgotten Our Children | In the early mornings here in the meadow, the grass glitters with dew, heavy, bowed. Beyond the path leading to the wood line, a keen eye might see the smallest of movements. A doe lifts her head from a nest of ferns where she left her spotted fawn, a fox trots home after a dawn hunt, a sow bear shows her cub how to nuzzle out the tender shoots. The wild animals here slinking through the bough-dappled light do not hesitate to protect and tend to their young. Every creature, from bear to bird, gently shelters and guides with a good instinct that points to perennial truths. The creatures of the wood raise their young with remarkable care, attention, and dignity. Yet, beyond the wood line, in our wounded modern world, we have forgotten how to do the same for our own young children. Over the past decade, we have experienced a profound hyper-focus on social justice. We have reframed dehumanizing language, deliberately designed spaces for marginalized groups, and viewed people holistically with a fierce protection. This all-encompassing social justice movement has rapidly changed our culture, transformed the physical world we inhabit, and shaped the way we communicate. It has also quietly, blindly, tragically excluded our children. Listen to conversations about children and you will hear dehumanizing terms. Carefully consider the next public place you visit and you will see we build spaces that ignore their small bodies. Read any media and note how we view them as not children, but as incomplete adults. This cultural neglect, this silent tragedy, this betrayal, haunts our shared humanity. It deepens our collective wound. We need to think hard about how our language, public spaces, and narratives fail our children, diminish their dignity, and erode the warmth of our collective life.Our culture casually accepts dehumanizing language for young children, a practice tolerated in ways no other group endures. Terms like “brat,” “little tyrant,” or “animals” pepper parenting blogs, social media, and advertisements, framing children as chaotic nuisances rather than the vulnerable humans they are. We do this easily, almost reflexively. The post pictured above was written by someone who is normally even-keel, considerate, who has raised children. The speaker is not an evil, malicious person, they are merely a victim of the dehumanizing culture that has so permeated our language and very minds. Contrast this instance of “unsocialized animals” written with ease, that went relatively unchallenged, with our cultural labor to retire and forbid terms like “thug” for black men or “hysteric” for women, driven by earnest and good social justice advocacy to honor a person’s inherent worth. For children, however, dehumanization is ambient, slipping by unexamined. You may not have noticed it until now just as a fish does not notice the water in which it swims it is so common. This betrays a culture that has drifted from the respect we have learned to give others, leaving our youngest outside the protective ideals we champion. It is a loss that echoes in our words. We should grieve this behavior, as it diminishes the vibrant humanity of our children. When we use dehumanizing language for any group, something deeply sinister happens: our willingness to neglect and even harm the targeted group becomes ever so slightly greater. Consider when we refer to children as “burdens.” We subconsciously frame them as liabilities, something from which to liberate ourselves. How about “mouths to feed”? You’ve heard it hundreds of times, and each time some part of your brain reduced children to mere consumers of resources. These are but standard examples said daily. There are infinitely more vulgar terms for children used which I will not write. Ultimately though, even the most innocuous slip of “brat” or “spawn” strips children of their humanity. It is the last acceptable language of dehumanization and that dehumanization subtly invites harm. Every atrocity in history started with this shift in language. We would do well to remember that.Beyond the language we use to neglect a child’s humanity, we also neglect their physical being. Public spaces, particularly bathrooms, expose this neglect, designed for adult needs while treating young children as mere afterthoughts, their small bodies invisible in our plans. Most restrooms lack toddler-sized toilet seats, step stools for sinks, or changing tables, forcing parents into awkward, often undignified improvisation. Considering the ease and affordability of 2-in-1 potty training toilet seats and stools, there are some extremely easy wins to be had for those who own any sort of public venue with a modicum of will.We prioritize inclusive designs for other groups: wheelchair ramps, braille signage, gender-neutral stalls. To not have a stall accessible to a person in a wheelchair would be unthinkable for a restaurant or library, yet we shrug when a child cannot sit on the toilet without falling in. It is clear we, as a culture, value social justice commitments to accessibility and dignity yet we do not have the will to extend this justice to children. Why? These adult-centric spaces, cold, unwelcoming, unreachable, assume children’s needs are temporary, unworthy of the care we extend to others. Their presence is but an inconvenience in a world built for adults. This oversight, rooted in seeing children as not yet whole, sidelines them from our vision of a shared, inclusive world, a loss etched, screaming in the very bricks and pavestones of our architecture.Our most haunting failure however is our cultural narrative of young children as “incomplete adults,” raw material to mold rather than whole beings with rights deserving of dignity now. Parenting media, children’s books, and campaigns fixate on what children will become, overshadowing their present humanity. Raising Good Humans Every Day (2024) by Hunter Clarke-Fields offers “mindful practices” to shape toddlers into “future successes,” with chapters like “Building Your Child’s Future Self” that prioritize adult traits over present emotions (Amazon reviews, 2024). The Wonderful Things You Will Be (2024 edition) by Emily Winfield Martin imagines what children “will be” (brave, wise, kind) while rarely celebrating who they are now. A 2025 parenting podcast, Good Inside with Dr. Becky, framed preschoolers’ tantrums as “obstacles to future resilience.” These media, though well-meaning, reflect our collective unease with children’s impulsive, emotional now, casting them instead as potential simply waiting to be shaped. We are no strangers to affirmation however. The last two decades saw fierce advocacy for affirming present identities for adults especially related to race or gender. We celebrate adults for who they are. We see children as seeds, however, only ever viewing them as the people they will be. This is a lamentable lens that fades the child’s vibrant today, denying them the dignity we champion for others. This narrative overlooks young children’s full humanity, valuing only their distant tomorrow, a loss that dims our collective heart.In the woods just past the meadow where my daughter plays, the animals continue to honor their young. A doe does not ask what her fawn will become before shielding it, a bear sow does not wait for her cub to prove its worth before teaching it, a vixen is incapable of viewing her kits as anything but what they presently are. These animals, guided by instinct, by the good green pattern of the natural world, nurture their young with fierce, present care, a lesson our sophisticated culture has forgotten. We have championed social protections like reframing language, building inclusive spaces, and honoring one’s present identity, but in our fervor we have left the children behind, tolerating dehumanizing terms like “brat,” designing spaces that exclude their small bodies, and seeing them as incomplete adults instead of whole people. This neglect shapes our norms, spaces, and stories, eroding children’s place in our shared life and diminishing something vital and good in all of us. We must change how we speak, build, and see. Stop laughing at “tiny tyrants,” build sinks for six-year-old hands, and honor children as whole now, as we do others. Imagine a world where our words uplift children, our spaces welcome them, and our stories celebrate their present humanity. Imagine our collective wounds healing.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 the ills of our wounded modern 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 | 12m 57s | ||||||
| 5/14/25 | ![]() Your Wedding Deserves Children | 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 | 13m 41s | ||||||
| 5/7/25 | ![]() Your Children Need to See You Kiss | Something is wrong.Imagine your culture has a common folk ritual of which everyone knows, it has lasted since before written history, and is innately good. Your stories tell you it is good; nearly every folk and fairytale your grandparents told you revolves around this good ritual. Your science tells you it is good; if you partake in this ritual, you have measurably less psychological distress, you become wealthier, and you even live longer. Your very heart tells you it is good. By all accounts, you and everyone you know, rational and Romantic, should understand this thing is good. If you would like, it can even cost no money and very little time to perform. Despite this, an overwhelming amount of young people from every class and creed walk away from the ritual, the good old tradition, every year. They cite financial hardship, a desire for personal growth, prioritizing their profession. When your mother was a girl, nine out of ten people took part in this ritual. Now, about three out of ten do. This ritual is real. It is marriage, and young people are walking away from it.How did we come to this? How did we get here? What can, or even should, be done? Everything stated in the opening paragraph is true; marriage causes us to live longer, have reportedly fewer and less extreme mental health problems, and has been a cultural keystone for longer than any historian can remember. We are, in many ways, defined by marriage. Yet now we stand at the precipice of abandoning the good old tradition altogether. We need to explore why, where we stand, and where to go from here. We owe ourselves this.The Old Ball and ChainWe have had access to mass media, television, for less than a century. In that time, our regional culture, accents, music, and traditions have rapidly homogenized. There is no arguing that television has affected our society immensely and the content of it has influenced us. For the last seventy years of American programming, men who openly despise their nagging wives have been front and center. One could even go so far as to argue that “I Hate my Wife” is not so much a trope as it was a full on genre. It was most prominent in sitcoms from the 1950s to early 2000s and, although modern shows tend to avoid it due to evolving norms, one must wonder what damage to our society, institutions, and culture has been caused by having an entire genre of sitcoms starring resentful husbands and domineering wives blaring in every American home for the last seventy years. You may roll your eyes at this assertion, but ask yourself how our culture would be different if we had been constantly inundated by respectful spouses who were enamored with each other, courtly romance, or faithful partnerships built on mutual admiration and a shared goal. What if, instead of laughter generated from bitterness, these programs proclaimed that love could deepen over decades, that family life was not a trap but something which to aspire? Media forms us more than we care to admit. We are not immune to propaganda or even the subconscious erosion of our morality by everyday tropes. When every punchline is aimed at the same sacred thing, how long before we learn to laugh at it too? Something is wrong.Bachelor NightYears ago, before my beautiful daughters were born, my wife and I, recently wed, owned a small home in a city. She left for a weekend to a work trip (a conference for historians I think) and, to dull the edge of loneliness, I met up with some friends at a bar. A new acquaintance with whom I was unfamiliar joined us and I explained to him my wife was out of town. His face twisted, he leered, and offered with an earnest growl “Heh, bachelor night, am I right?” and gave me a knowing nudge and wink. There was an implicit understanding that I was supposed to do something unfaithful while she was gone, let loose, engage in some sort of debauchery and this man was inviting me into his confidence expecting to hear my dark plan that did not exist. I brushed him off and asked him if he was married. He explained he was too busy living his best life, chasing goals, and “keeping things chill” to tie the knot with anyone. Maybe one day, but right now, he was good flying solo and not being tied down. His explanation stuck with me all these years for one reason: nearly everything he said conveyed a sense that he equated marriage with a loss of freedom. In his eyes, to be married was to be tethered, domesticated, diminished. It was clear he saw marriage not as a declaration of love but rather a limitation. After fewer drinks than I would normally have, I said goodnight to my friends and went home early to our empty house. When I went inside and closed the front door, I thought about this man who was mistaking detachment for independence. I looked around at the evidence, the artifacts of the life my wife and I were building together. The photo of our wedding reception where she is grinning amidst a tangle of hair and a flower crown. The back yard we were landscaping, figuring out the right plants for a climate to which we were both strangers. The large table frequently crowded with friends and family. I was building something good with someone I loved, and nothing about that felt like a cage. It felt good and it felt right.What Can We Even Do?As I stood there in my house, preparing to go to bed, thinking of my wife, I considered how marriage was not just inherently good, but how it was fun. So much of what we have been conditioned to think about marriage from popular culture equates it to a loss of freedom, a loss of agency, a loss of self. In exchange, we are taught, we gain a perpetual responsibility or are doomed to a slow emasculation by way of nagging. It’s not just television; you see this subtly, insidiously boil to the surface in every aspect of our culture. An off-handed remark from a neighbor, a commercial that portrays the husband as a bumbling fool, a social media joke that gets thousands of likes for reducing a wife to a burden or a husband to a child. You do not even notice this just as the fish does not notice the water in which it swims. It is too engrained.So how do you counter it? How do you dispel the snake-whispers promising freedom and regain the good old attitude that marriage is an institution worth preserving? You have fun. You kiss your spouse in front of your children and laugh as they groan. You carve your initials into a tree and let them ask why. You dance together in the kitchen. You laugh together, build together, flirt in front of blushing company. You make visible the joy of your union. You show them that responsibility and romance are not enemies, that they are not diametrically opposed to independence. You show them that freedom is not found in avoiding commitment, but in giving yourself fully to something worthy, that the work of loving a person and your place together is hallowed. The children will call you cringe and gross while they quietly feel the warmth of security wash over them. The riotous love you display transfers to them. When you kiss your husband or wife, your child feels it. They feel everything.We don’t reclaim the image of marriage by arguing about it, by writing essays and hosting podcasts. We reclaim the image of marriage by embodying something worth coveting, by living something to which our children may aspire. We evangelize through loving our husbands and wives with reckless abandon. We win back the good old thing, the innately good timeless ritual, by living marriages that speak for themselves, marriages full of laughter, devotion, joy, sacrifice, and fierce, grit-tooth loyalty. If we want the next generation to believe in marriage again, if we want them to return, we must show them it is desirable and do so with a vengeance. Let the children wake from their sleep to see you building a fire in the backyard together. Let them hear the inside jokes that only years of love can decipher. Let them witness the arguments that end in tearful apologies by the stove. The ritual survives through lived witness.Marriage is a rebellion, a defiant stand in a wounded world of greasy ease and plastic impermanence. It is a vow to stay when the modern cultures tells you to move. In a world that says with a forked tongue “keep your options open,” it is a defiant, joyful choice to close the door behind you, hand your lover the key, and build something enduring within the threshold.Something is wrong, yes, but it can always be made right.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 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 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 | 12m 54s | ||||||
| 5/4/25 | ![]() How to Begin Anything Good | 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 | 11m 12s | ||||||
| 4/27/25 | ![]() You Can Save a Beautiful Tradition | Picture it: two little girls run up to a door with a glint of benevolent mischief in their eyes. They’re carrying something, something colorful you can’t quite make out. They hang their little parcel on the door with a piece of ribbon or twine, knock, and run away. You spy their delivery: a paper cone filled with forsythia, daffodils, and pussy willow. The happy victim of the good prank looks around befuddled, notices the parcel, reaches in and pulls out a piece of chocolate that made its way under the flowers. They look up and down the neighborhood street but the girls have hidden behind a nearby bush, stifling their laughter behind cupped hands. This is a May basket, and it is a tradition we are rapidly forgetting. It is a tradition we are losing.The merry month of May approaches and with it May Day or Beltane depending on your pleasure. Nearly every culture in the northern hemisphere has some kind of celebration of fertility around May 1. How could they not? Life abounds. My aunt told me a story today of how she and her sisters would go “a-maying” to collect whatever wild flowers were blooming to decorate their door and the doors of their neighbors, leaving them in little baskets made of paper or just tied to the door. Some variations of the custom require anonymity, a sort of ding-dong-ditch. Some involve candy, baked goods, or even small trinkets. It is a sort of reverse trick-or-treating which is incredibly appropriate knowing that you are on the opposite side of the year from Halloween! Whatever the case may be, a May basket always has flowers and it is always given to herald the good green spring.Traditionally, farmers in Northern Europe would turn their cattle out of the barn into the fields this time of year. The old Celtic tradition would also involve passing the livestock through or over fire as a sort of ward against an ill-fate. Young men and women too would jump over the fires to improve their virility or fertility! Some farmers around me still have parties this time of year to celebrate releasing their cows or other stock out to pasture. Growing up, we always had a bonfire and still do. There is so much to celebrate this time of year and yet we barely talk about it, let alone actively observe it. When you talk about May baskets, a-maying, “bringing in the May” or some other variation of the May Day tradition, someone will inevitably remark “Hey, my mother did this!” or “We did this as kids but not anymore.” Well, why not? You can and you may need it now more than ever.We should be reveling in the abundance of new spring life, heralding it in, shouting its arrival. We have become too staid, too fearful of seeming odd or off, of having our joy being mistaken for weakness and used against us. Our culture claims to celebrate random acts of kindness, but when was the last time you saw one? Something beyond a perfunctory volunteer opportunity or donation to the thrift store, something that showed a neighbor or someone in town that they were considered, thought of, loved for a brief moment? So, how do you even make a May basket? Ultimately, the goal is to celebrate and remind your intended target that spring has arrived and we are the better for it. It needs to include the wildflowers blooming around you; daffodils, forsythia, hyacinth, anything that is bursting with life. You can buy them—sure—but harvesting the flowers yourself, especially on the evening of May Eve (April 30) would be in keeping with the good old way. You can make it into a bouquet, wrap it in a little twine, and hang it from a neighbor’s door knob. It can be that simple. If you want to take it a step further and give your children something to do, you can fold construction paper into a cone, fill it with flowers, and slip in some candy or even something you’ve baked. Maybe something to really evoke spring like a lavender cake or cookies made with honey. Perhaps you really want to keep things as organic and low budget as possible while delivering your May joy. Find a forked branch, tie twine around the two legs and set your local wildflowers therein. This also works well as a standing decoration if your branch is long enough.Whatever medium you choose for your May baskets, the point is not perfection: it is participation. It is choosing, deliberately, to acknowledge and celebrate the good green pattern unfurling before you, to lend your own small voice to the chorus of good things that grow. It is so easy, in a world so drawn to the novel and sleek, to forget the old ways, the quiet ways that once wove neighbor to neighbor and neighbor to land. These traditions, these good old ways, are not so far from us as we think. They lay quite literally at the roadside, in the fields, the forests, waiting for you to reclaim them.If you remember even a scrap of this tradition from your own childhood, if your mother or your grandfather or a forgotten neighbor once left a basket on your door, then you already carry the ember. You already know what to do. If you do not remember, if this is your first whisper of May baskets and a-maying, then all the better. You have the honor of reviving it, of giving it fresh life with your own hands.There is no committee coming to save these things. There is no special interest or lobby eager to revive the customs of your ancestors. No official proclamation will decree that May baskets must be made, that flowers must be gathered, that neighbors must be gladdened by some small, ridiculous, beautiful gift on a bright May morning. It is ours to choose. It is ours to lose.Choose.Go a-maying. Run wild and good and secret with your children, your friends, or with your own happy self. It does not matter if you are a grandmother with her children’s children or a young bachelor with his rowdy friends; snip the flowers by the roadside, fold the paper cones, tie the twine. Knock and run. Laugh behind the bushes like the good old things can still happen. They can. They can because of you.Anything good that can happen will happen but only if we let it. Only if we reach out our hands—mud-streaked, pollen-dusted, treat-sweet, thorn-scraped—and make it so.May is almost here. Make the basket. Surprise your neighbor.Keep the tradition alive.Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Author’s Note: this week, our usual schedule needed a small shift. You’ll receive the premium Report from the High Wood on Wednesday, and the free Echo from an Old Hollow Tree today. Imploring my readers to make May baskets was too important to wait until Wednesday, as May 1 is Thursday. Sometimes people need time to pick flowers.If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, now is a wonderful time to join. The exlcusive Reports from the High Wood offer practical lessons, hard-won insights, and a deeper look at the real work of tending land, family, and tradition—all shared so you can carry something steady and useful into your own life.There’s something special on the horizon: on May 3, we’ll be receiving twelve new packages of honey bees for our hives—a major leap for us, and the largest expansion we’ve ever undertaken. We’ve never scaled up like this before, and the lessons we’ll be learning (and sharing) will be real, raw, and hard-earned.This is a rare moment, a once-only season of growth and challenge that won’t come again in quite the same way. Paid subscribers will get a front-row seat to it all—and the insights, mistakes, and victories we gather along the way will be yours to carry into your own work, homestead, or dreams.Thank you for walking this old path with us. 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 | 9m 57s | ||||||
| 4/23/25 | ![]() All the Good that Can Happen | 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 | 8m 36s | ||||||
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