This is Life Is So Beautiful, a weekly email from Hugh Hollowell, devoted to the idea that our hope for survival in this brutal world is rooted in finding the beauty that is everywhere, but sometimes hard to find.

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My office for the last few years has been a desk in front of our living room window. It’s at the front of our house, and looks out over our front yard, and while I love it, it was never meant to be a permanent office. Instead, my thought process when we set it up was that I would occasionally write here, but would have my main office offsite.

Then a global pandemic happened, and I settled in here, first temporarily and then for good. But my creative process is messy, and I need piles of things around me, and I have object permanence problems due to my ADHD, so I need to see things – drawers and cupboards are where things go to die. So, our living room looks increasingly like the office of a mad scientist and not like the living room of a ranch house from 1950, which it is.

So, I have been working in the evenings and weekends on a room of my own. There is a storeroom off our carport that just needed insulation and sheetrock to be functional. It’s an awkward space, around 6 feet by 16 feet, or roughly double the size of a large office cubicle. But it has six feet of windows, and it faces east, so it will have good daylight, and I’m hoping that the physical separation will create room for better boundaries for me between work and not work. My wife is mostly happy we will get our living room back.

It's also a chance for me to think about what I want from a creative space, and what I need to feel good.

I know I need lots of photos and artwork that remind me of people and places I love. While some people find such things distracting, I find such things root me to my people and my geography, which are by far my two largest influences. And I will need shelves for books: As a small lonely child growing up in rural Marshall County, Mississippi all those years ago, in a time before the internet or cheap phone calls, books were my first and longest friends. And I will have corkboards and white boards, so I have a space to “offload” my brain, and get things out in the open where I can see them.

But the thing I love most about this process is the thing I love about any new project – it is that the future is wide open. It hasn’t been set yet, there is no inertia to ground you – literally anything is possible, given the spatial and financial constraints. I love that part of any new project, and miss it so much when it’s gone.

But I’m really looking forward to this new space.

Five Beautiful Things

• The Guardian does so many things right. So many. But high on any list is their photography, which they just consistently knock out of the park. This collection of their “Portraits of the Year” highlights the best of their portraiture (and features) from last year.
• From an old (2008) auction lot listing from Sotheby’s, a collection of original artwork from E. H. Shephard, illustrating Winnie The Pooh for the original Milne books. I love these so much.
• I missed this – it came out in 2020 - but it is right up in my jam: A collection of Mexican recipes, taken from a collection of more than 2,000 digitized cookbooks, some of which are 200 or more years old. Called Recetas: Cooking in the Time of Coronavirus, there are three volumes, and they are free to download.
• Here is a video of a racoon playing in the snow, trying to catch snowflakes as they fall. Those little hands!
• In 1989, Sammy Davis Jr. was dying of throat cancer. There was a show on TV, celebrating his 60 years in show business – it was a virtual who’s who of Black show business. Gregory Hines came out on stage and tap danced, but then, he brought Sammy on stage. But first, he knelt and helped the dying man put his tap shoes on. Sammy came on stage and, while literally dying from cancer – he would be dead in three months-time – stole the show with his moves. I love this whole thing so much – it is a masterclass in, well, class.

Elsewhere

As I mention in the second link below, I’m trying to pare down the number of projects I’m working on. One thing that didn’t make the cut was my Friday newsletter, The Hughsletter. I explain the thinking behind that difficult decision here.

But one consequence of that is that was where I shared the blog posts I had published that week (if any). And since there was a lot of people who relied on that to know when I updated my blog, I have decided to make links to my new posts a regular feature here, so people can still find them.

So, last week on the blog:

• ​Writing for people: There has been a lot of talk and fear about AI and what it means for writers. I think out loud about that some here.
• ​Fewer, better things: Dropping projects, cleaning up messes, and doing fewer things better.

Thank you!

In the coming weeks and months, there will be changes to the format and design of Life Is So Beautiful, as I work to make this a more sustainable, better publication. It’s one of the fewer things I want to do better, as I mention in the blog post I linked to above. This means there will be dust and a small bit of chaos, but overall, I think it will be worth it.

I am forever grateful for your readership and loyalty, and for your sharing these letters with your friends. And of course, I would be incapable of doing this work were it not for my members, who pay small amounts every month (or year!) and enable me to afford never to have ads or sponsored posts. A few people pay for all of this, and I could never do it without them. To learn more about membership, check out this link.

Take care,

HH

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