This is Life Is So Beautiful, a weekly email handwritten, non-AI-generated, personally crafted, and curated by 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.

I hope you enjoy it. - HH

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“For all that has been, THANKS, for all that is to be, YES!” - Dag Hammarskjöld

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Hey y'all,

I’ve been driving a lot lately.

In my day gig as an interfaith community organizer, I crisscross the state often. A couple of thousand miles a month is not unheard of. And the last two weeks I have been out of town on mini-vacations – first to the panhandle of Florida and then to the mountains of North Carolina.

I don’t really like the act of driving. But I like the time by myself – the time when I can’t do anything else but be alone in my head. I find that it’s one of the few places in my life where I can’t really do anything else. Oh, sometimes I will listen to audiobooks or music, but for the most part, I like the silence, and I just let my brain run and play.

I plan out things I want to write. I design the new roof I want to put over our deck. I have conversations with people who are dead. I think about how things are going, and if I like the way it’s all working out, and if I don’t, then plan what to do about it. This sort of unstructured time – a time when the alternative is boredom - is rare these days.

As to how things are going:

I’m not writing as much right now. There are several reasons for this, some of them healthy and some of them not. My moving the computer out of the house and into the office I built in the garage storeroom has helped me create better boundaries around work. But it means I don’t just pop on the computer to dash out a quick post on my blog. I’m going to have to get better at scheduling my writing time.

I’m traveling a lot for work. I like traveling, but don’t like being away from home. After all, I’m trying to build a life I don’t want to escape from. I need to learn to be more intentional when I’m at home.

Overall, I’m happy. I have lots of things in the air, which my ADHD brain loves. But I have to tend to those things, or else I end up with weedy flowerbeds, which is both literally true (I have been gone most of the last two weeks, after all) and a metaphor.

And I still like sending this newsletter out most weeks, even if it is harder to be consistent right now because of other obligations recently. I’ve been writing it since the spring of 2015 – my marriage is the only project I have done for longer.

It still gives me joy. I still love getting replies and recommendations. I still love this community we are building here, such as it is. And I wish I was better at it – but also recognize that it’s all a trade-off, and that I have to balance the time I have to do this with the income it generates, so I can take care of my other obligations.

I guess I’m just saying thanks. I’m grateful for you, grateful people find this to be worth reading, and grateful for the opportunities to share my thoughts with you all each week.

And as for the future? Right now, I’m just saying yes.

Five Beautiful Things

Hank Green, with beautiful thoughts about what we owe to our former selves, as well as our ancestors and communities.

Small Kindnesses

By Danusha Laméris (shared with me by faithful reader Nadine)

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

(If you have short poetry you like, hit reply and tell me about it. - HH)

These new images of Mars are extremely high resolution and have a color accuracy that is striking. This isn’t the Mars we knew from textbooks.

​This video, composed of over 100 engravings from the 19th century, is poignant and hits me in good places. It’s a “meditation on subject/object dualism”.

I never knew watching ice melting could be both beautiful and tragic at the same time.

TCB

The Grief Groceries post continues to spread, and now has been plagiarized and spread all over social media under the purported authorship of many different people. I guess that’s validation of a sort – when your ideas are good enough to be stolen. I’m grateful people find it helpful. I hate having my ideas stolen.

I get that ideas spread. But I also am a small business person who depends on my members and patrons to feed my family, and so every one of the more than 100,000 times this was shared without my name attached to it deprived me of marketing, and ultimately, my family of income.

Of the billions of people on the planet who do not give me money each year, the overwhelming reason is not that they think I suck, or they don't like leftists Southerners, or because of my saying that Black Lives Matter, but because they simply do not know who I am.

If you ever want to help me, the single most important thing you can do is share my stuff in such a way that people know who wrote it. My biggest problem is never theft, but obscurity.

Meanwhile, a year ago this week, I was thinking a lot about prayer. (Spoiler: I still have no idea how, or even if, prayer works.)

Check this out

This Instagram reel of the sky in New York after the Canadian wildfires is other-worldy.

This dude bought the 22 volume paper version of the 2023 World Book encyclopedia and I’m jealous. (But I agree that binding is atrocious.)

Thank you!

Link ideas from Swiss Miss, Jason Kottke, and Nadine.

I’m grateful I get to write things that matter to people. I’m only able to do it because of the support of my members, who make it free for everyone else. If you want to support my work, consider becoming a member, or buying me a cup of coffee or forwarding this to someone you think might like it. And if someone did forward it to you, you can get your own subscription here.

Take care of yourself. And each other.

HH

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