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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Hey y'all,

Behind and to the east of my grandmother’s house was the old home site.

We didn’t know anything about the people who had lived there. My grandfather had bought the land in the 20’s for his first wife, and he had died 15 years before I was born and my grandmother, his second wife, didn’t know the stories of who had been there before. But whoever the original residents were, they had left traces.

There was the old cistern where they had stored rainwater for the dry times. The brick foundation of the old smokehouse where they had stored the salt meat that saw them through the winter. The only intact building from the previous homesite was a small shed that despite the patches over the years still leaned precariously, kept from total collapse only by the mass of privet and spirea that surrounded it, probably planted originally to hide it from view.

The foundation stones for the old house were still there if you knew where to look. The house hadn’t been large – perhaps 25x30. And all along the front of it, on the south side, had been a flower bed. It was lost to history, but every spring, the old lines were made visible once again when the daffodils bloomed. They made the invisible, visible. For a few weeks every spring, the past came to life.

That was 40 years ago. The pond Dad put in required dozing and trees came down and the earth there is no longer the shape it was when I was a kid. The cistern got filled in and the former home site scraped and then my brother built his house and it’s all lost, that old homesite. But the dozer operators had pushed all the dirt into a berm on the south side of the new home site, and this berm contains hundreds of daffodil bulbs that, more than a hundred years ago, some housewife unknown to us had planted with care along the path to her front door on the south side of her house. And every spring, that berm comes alive and is a mass of yellow flower.

Last year, I happened to be home at just the right time, and dug some of those bulbs up, and brought them three hours south to where I live now. I planted them around a small peach tree I had high hopes for. Sadly, the brutal winter storm we had at Christmas, where it went form 70 degrees to 12 degrees and back to 60 degrees in 5 days, did in the peach tree. But yesterday morning, as I was walking around the backyard, I noticed that the daffodils that had marked the planting site had come bloomed. And once again, the invisible was visible, and the story continues.

Five Beautiful Things

A new photo from the James Webb Space Telescope, containing literally thousands of galaxies. You can download a high res-version for yourself at that link.

On a related note, here is a huge image of the Milky Way Galaxy that contains 3,2 billion (with a B!) individual objects - most of which are stars.

Sure, Bohemiam Rhapsody is cool. But what's even cooler is Bohemian Rhapsody being played on the largest pipe organ in the whole world.

Mary Oliver was amazing. Here she is reading the poem Why I Wake Early, published in a collection of the same title [Amazon, Bookshop] in 2004.

​Ancient FM is a streaming site that streams mediaeval and renaissance music. Ran by volunteers and funded by patrons, this is exactly what the internet is best at.

On The Blog

Things I published on my blog last week.

​Listening: We have forgotten how to listen - especially to people who think differently than we do.

Other cool things I found

Hear me out: a Benoit Blanc/Muppet mystery movie. I need this to happen.

As someone who used to sell used books for a living, I love the work being done at A Good Used Book. Their Social Media game is strong, and they curate like a boss. There is nothing worse than a used book store that doesn't realize that their primary job is curation.

Thank You!

A lovely reader bought me a copy of the book I mentioned last week, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. (Amazon) (Bookshop).. I just started it last night! This newsletter remains free and ad-free because of the support of my members, who insist on my making it free for everyone else. Other ways to support this project include buying me a cup of coffee or forwarding it to your friends or even just replying and saying hi.

Take care of yourself. And each other.

Hugh Hollowell Jr

Publisher

​soverybeautiful.org​