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Hey y'all!

This newsletter is now nine years old.

Here is how I described the origins of this project a few years ago on my blog.

On February 20th of 2015, I was exhausted.

My wife was struggling to survive, and there was no guarantee she would end up on the list to get the transplant she desperately needed. I was struggling with the burnout that would eventually kick my ass, and a person I had worked hard to help get sober had died of an overdose.

When I was starting out in that work, a mentor told me that if I knew I was going to walk across the desert tomorrow, I should be gorging myself with water tonight. Likewise, he said, if I know that tomorrow I will be surrounded by ugliness, I should strive to gorge myself with beauty to prepare for it. Over time, he insisted I hang out at museums, read good books, watch good films, read poetry, and play in my garden. All in the relentless pursuit of beauty as a prophylactic against the ugliness I would encounter along the way.

But somewhere along that path, I had gotten busy, and those words seemed far away. I needed to be reminded of what was lovely, what was good, and that even in the midst of unspeakable tragedy and pain, there was beauty that could lift us above our mean circumstances and guide us home.

My particular form of ADHD, as I have said before, needs structure, but has trouble creating it, so latching onto existing structures is always helpful. And here we were, in February of 2015, just a few days before Lent.

I sent an email to 35 people who I loved and admired. The subject line was, Hugh’s Newsletter Situation, and the email said, in part:

Nine years later, I’m still sending them out. Some things have changed: Now it goes to thousands of people around the world, and it’s a bit more polished (but only a bit) and now there are occasional lengthy prose bits (like this one!) and I have less hair and more joint pain. But my wife survived her transplant, and I came out of the other side of burnout and then we survived a pandemic and now are living in an entirely different part of the country.

But what has not changed is my utter conviction that beauty can save us if anything can, and my belief in its power to lift us above our mean circumstances and guide us home.

Five Beautiful Things

​Lloyd Kahn is what my people would call a “character”. He’s the editor of Shelter Publications, which produces quirky books like my favorite book of 2020, The Half Acre Homestead. He’s 88 years old, still skateboards and surfs, lives in Northern California in a house he built by himself, and has brilliant adventures, like his recent road trip to Baja Mexico, which he heavily documented on Instagram. I love the way he sees the world.

As someone who loves to cook (where I primarily use the metric system) and who also loves to make things from wood (where I primarily use the Imperial system), this SNL skit highlighting the many hilarious, nonsensical ways the US is different from the rest of the world resonates with me. I love self-deprecating humour humor.

My part of the country is in an unseasonal heat wave (81 degrees in Jackson MS today), but these pandas playing in the snow always bring a smile to my face. The sheer joy is palpable. This is also a good time to re-link to the Panda Cams.

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live. That is the first line of the beautiful, brilliant, poem Perhaps the World Ends Here by Joy Hairo, from her collection The Woman Who Fell From The Sky. On the Poetry Foundation’s website (which is a national treasure, for sure), there is an option to have it read to you.

​Obligatory cute cat video. The one on the left looks just like our elderly (16 years old) kitty Felix, who is also very food motivated.

TCB

The most opened link in the last issue (~16% of opens) was the Vermeer-esque photo of a run down street in Baltimore. (It was my favorite, too)

On the blog:

​Dealing with transitions: I’m in a liminal space. I hate liminal spaces.

​You don’t simplify by adding things: There has to be a shortcut. There is no shortcut.

​Simplify: In which I declare domain bankruptcy, and announce some changes.

Related to that last link - I’ve been doing lots of spring cleaning on my websites: if you are into such things, I started a changelog here. I’m beginning to blog regularly again -if you want to get those in your inbox as they are published, you can sign up for that here. If you are on Mastodon, I figured out how to federate my blog over there - you can find it here.

A new thing

It’s tax time, which means adding up receipts, which drove home that this little writing labor of love I do every Monday for 9 years now costs thousands of dollars a year to produce, when you add up all the software subscriptions, hosting fees, domains, equipment and so on. It costs so much to do that I would be unable to keep it going were it not for those of you who are members of my cleverly named Membership Program.

The idea is that it’s sort of like NPR - a few people pay something each month, so everyone gets everything for free. To date, that’s how it’s worked: Everything I did was free.

But my Members are so essential to my ability to keep doing this work, I decided to create a special offering just for them: a monthly newsletter just for members, cleverly called Member’s Only (naming things is hard for me.)

It’s still being fleshed out, but so far is a very personal, behind the scenes glimpse of my life and work, where I share things I’m not always comfortable sending to thousands of folks, along with quirky things I want to share, and first glimpses of things I ‘m doing (February’s issue went out on the 19th). And the only way to get it is to be a part of the Membership Program.

I hope you will consider joining, if you haven't already. It literally makes this project possible, and means more to me than you know.

NOTE: If you are one of the 20 some-odd holdouts who are still supporting me on Patreon, please migrate over to Memberful (instructions are here). The Members Only newsletter is only being sent through Memberful. I’d hate for you to miss out.

Other ways to support this work include buying me a cup of coffee or forwarding this to a friend (get your own subscription here if someone forwarded this to you). But however you do it, thank you so much for nine wonderful years.

Much love,

HH