Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree

Ryan B. Anderson

Reflections on family, nature, and tradition from the end of a dirt road in Vermont. oldhollowtree.substack.com

  1. 16 MARS

    You Need to Find Your Old Hollow Tree

    There is a tree at the entrance to the forest. It is very old and contains a large hollow in its center. As a boy, I would stop at the old hollow tree, pick up a stone from the path, and toss it into the dark opening before continuing on into the green. At first it was a game, the sort of thing children invent through their good little ways. I liked the sound of the stone rattling down into the cavity. I liked the thought that the tree was keeping count. I liked having a threshold to cross before disappearing into the woods. I do it still now. The game has remained, though as I grow older the character of it has changed a bit. The old game of dexterity feels more like a toll I pay before entering the forest. Some days it feels like prayer. Some days it feels like a bead slid on an abacus, a stone for every entrance into the wood, a stone for every afternoon spent wandering beneath the canopy, a stone for every small return to the same beloved place. I do this old ritual from my youth now with my wife and little girls and it has become a tradition that belongs to our family. I have said more than once to my wife that the old hollow tree looks near the end of its life. One day it may finally come down, and when it does I will have the opportunity to see how many stones it has gathered, how many times I have passed that way, how much of my life it has quietly kept. Lately, more than anything it is causing me to reflect on the state of affairs however and the experience of families everywhere. At the risk of sounding imperious or prescriptive, we live in a time when every family needs something like this, some old ritual tied to a real place near home, some repeated act that binds memory to the land until the land itself begins to feel like kin. Families should be rooted, have some fidelity to place. Families do not remain by affection alone however. Love needs form. It needs return, repetition, ritual. A family needs a path it always walks at dusk, a stone wall where children stand to watch the first fireflies, a porch where the first spring peeper is heard and named aloud. To be clear; these things need not be grand. Their power lies in how often they are repeated and in how naturally they become part of the family’s inner life. A child may not yet understand what a ritual means, but the body understands return long before the mind can explain it. You go to the same place. You do the same small thing. You carry the same expectation into the season. Over time the act gathers weight. What began as a game becomes a habit, what began as a habit becomes a family custom, what began as a custom becomes something almost liturgical. It acquires the gravity of old things, and children raised inside its good green sphere come to feel that the world itself has a shape, an order, a set of beloved thresholds through which life is meant to pass. We live in a time that pulls families outward toward abstraction. The wounded world asks us to care about distant crises, universal systems, ideological dramas, global emergencies, all before we have properly introduced our children to the patch of earth nearest their own door. We teach the children to talk about the planet while they cannot name the trees behind the house. We hand them causes before we hand them belonging. We make them conversant in the broad language of concern while they remain strangely unacquainted with the ordinary green miracles close at hand. This is too much weight to place on a little soul that has not yet fallen in love with anything particular. Love of the world begins with one place. Stewardship begins with one corner of it and a family tradition rooted in a specific place performs this quiet initiation. It says to the child, here is your forest, your field, your shoreline, your old tree, your spring path, your winter hill. It says, this place knows your footsteps, it knows you. It says, return here and you will remember who you are. There is another gift in these traditions, one that only reveals itself after years have passed. They turn time into something you can touch. Most of life slips by uncounted. Days blur. Seasons pass into one another. Children grow tall. Parents stoop. Fields green and brown and green again. Yet when a family keeps a place-bound ritual, time begins to take on shape, coalesce into weighted form. The old hollow tree has become a witness to my own life. It has seen the boy with dirty hands and no sense of mortality. It has seen the young man returning from college. It has seen the husband, the father, the man who now enters the forest with different questions than he once did. When I think of the stones collected in that hollow, I am thinking of years. I am thinking of all the selves I have been while returning to the same threshold. This is what traditions do when they are rooted in place: they become a family’s sort of silent archive. They keep account in ways no photo album can. They transform a tree, a gate, a path, a boulder, a creek crossing into a keeper of memory. When children inherit such a place, they inherit continuity. They inherit the knowledge that they enter a story already underway. Your family needs something old, something tied to the natural world around your home. It may not be an actual old hollow tree. It may be a stump where each child leaves an acorn before the first walk of autumn. It may be a candle lit on the window sill of your apartment at nightfall. It may be a spring visit to the creek with bare feet and rolled cuffs, a stone laid on a wall each time you return from the woods, a hand pressed to the same sugar maple before the first tap of the season. The particular form matters less than the faithfulness with which it is kept. Choose a place. Choose a gesture. Return often enough that the place and the family begin to shape one another. In time the ritual will deepen of its own accord. The children will come to expect it. The adults will come to need it. The place will gather the family’s years into itself. That is how roots are formed. That is how a household becomes native to its own ground. Find your old hollow tree. Put a stone in it. Return. 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

    10 min

  2. 16 FÉVR.

    There is No False Spring

    February is so often treated unfairly. We call a run of warm days a “false spring,” as if the month were trying to trick us, as if it had made a promise it could not keep. We speak of it with suspicion, as though any softness in the air must be a deception and any thaw a betrayal waiting to happen. Dear February is treated with too much wariness. This has never sat right with me. February does not lie. It does not overpromise. It does not pretend that winter is finished. It does not hang banners or sound trumpets. It simply marks a turn. A bright day in January feels like mercy granted to the frozen hinges and tired beams, rafters, and pipes. A bright day in February carries a different weight though, doesn’t it? The light has changed. The arc of the sun has shifted higher over the ridge. The shadows shorten even when the air still bites your face and stiffens your hands. You stand in the yard and sense that the day has lengthened in a way that cannot be reversed. What you are witnessing is not a counterfeit season but the first honest movement toward green. February is not a fraud. It is a covenant written in light that heralds the emergence of the good green pattern below. Yes, the month is unsettled. It can give you sleet in the morning and thaw by afternoon. It can harden the ground overnight after loosening it by day. It can glaze the road with ice and then send water running in the ditches before supper. The sky moves quickly in February, and the wind seems to test its strength against the hills. Beneath that volatility, however, something steady is underway. Walk the fields and you will see it written plainly in tracks. Mice run longer lines across the crusted snow now. Deer cross open ground they avoided in December, moving with a deliberateness that speaks of shifting instinct. Coyotes call again at dusk, their voices carrying over the valley in a tone that feels less like hunger and more like heraldry. A purposeful sort of sound that is less frantic than it was in November. The hills and valley are awake in a new register now. Buds hold tight on the maples and dogwoods, but they have swollen. Sap stirs on the south-facing slope where the sun lingers longest. Steam will soon rise from sugar shacks where men and women stand watch over boiling sweetness drawn from still-frozen hills, their faces lit by fire and long work. The earth is not soft yet, but it is no longer asleep either. February has begun the work of return. This is why the charge of “false spring” misses the point. A lie requires intent, and February has none. It does not promise full bloom. It does not pretend that crocuses are ready to split the soil. Snow still lines the stone walls. The pond still carries ice thick enough to hold a man and his doubts. The mornings still demand gloves and a bit of resolve. Wood still must be moved and stacked. Water still must be carried to animals. What has changed is the direness of your place in time. You are now closer to the equinox than the solstice. That fact stands independent of mood. The light lingers into late afternoon and stains the snow with a faint rose that was absent in December. The air smells faintly of water when the sun hits the south side of the yard. Even the cold feels different. It sharpens and then gives way to something less brittle and more raw and wet. It comes in pulses rather than pangs. The green pattern has been set in motion, and no late storm can undo that fact. A blizzard may blanket the hills next week and erase every track you saw this morning. It will melt. Frost may grip the orchard again and blacken early ambition. It will release. It is easy in this month to posture as a cynic. On any clear day someone will say, with a kind of satisfied resignation, that winter will return with a vengeance. They will point to the forecast and nod gravely, as though expecting hardship proves seriousness and forecasting ruin proves maturity. You may come to believe it proves something else: that February asks for steadiness, not suspicion. It asks you to notice what is happening without inflating what might. The animals do not debate the coming week. They move when the light tells them to move. The sap does not wait for unanimous agreement about temperature trends. It rises when the conditions are right. The farmers do not mock the thaw. They mend fences, sharpen tools, check seed inventories, and clean out the sugarhouse because they understand that a season is turning whether they narrate it or not. They prepare because preparation is what this hinge of the year requires. Cynicism does nothing to hasten or delay the change. It only dulls your ability to participate in it. February rewards those who keep working through uncertainty, who stack wood cleanly, who step outside at dusk and listen, who take the lengthening light seriously. February does not need to announce itself. The evidence stands in the open if you are willing to see it. Light stretches farther across the field and reaches corners of the yard that lay in shadow all winter. The maples answer the sun with quiet pressure beneath their bark. Tracks multiply at the woodline and along the edge of the stone fence. Steam lifts from the sugarhouse roof and drifts into a sky still hard with cold but softened by duration. Water runs under the ice even before the surface yields. Life is already moving with a confidence that does not ask permission. This month asks you to notice that movement and align yourself with it. It asks you to trust the arc of the sun more than the mood of the morning. The hinge has turned. The direction is set. However many frosts remain, however many storms sweep across the ridge and lay fresh snow over the fields, the green pattern has begun its climb. February carries that beginning in its bones. It holds the weight of renewal without spectacle and without apology, steady as the light that lengthens day by day. Three Actions to Live a More Rooted Life 1. Step Outside at the Same Hour Each Day Pick a time. Late afternoon. First light. Dusk. Go outside whether you feel like it or not. Stand still long enough to notice what has changed since yesterday. The length of the shadow across the yard. The scent of thaw in the air. The first track at the woodline. Rootedness begins with attention. February teaches that direction can be detected before comfort arrives. If you train yourself to observe small shifts in light and movement, you will begin to trust slow change rather than demand spectacle. A rooted life is built by those who mark the arc of the sun and adjust their work accordingly. 2. Do One Necessary Task Before You Feel Inspired Split the wood. Mend the fence. Clean the tools. Sort the seeds. Write the letter. February does not wait for motivation and neither should you. The farmers in the valley prepare because preparation belongs to the season, not because conditions are ideal. Choose one act each day that serves the coming spring and complete it without drama. Stack the wood cleanly. Sharpen the blade properly. Finish what is in front of you. Rooted people align their labor with the direction of time. They do not postpone faithfulness because the air is cold or the sky uncertain. 3. Refuse Cynicism, Practice Steadiness When someone says the thaw is temporary and the cold will return worse than before, listen politely and continue your work. Rootedness requires steadiness under unsettled skies. You can acknowledge volatility without surrendering to suspicion. Notice what is actually happening. Light is lengthening. Sap is stirring. Tracks are multiplying. Life is moving. Anchor yourself in what is real rather than what is forecast. Trust the hinge of the year. Trust the pattern that has outlasted every winter before this one. A rooted life is not naïve. It is attentive, disciplined, and confident in the slow return of green. 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

    9 min

  3. 26/11/2025

    A Crisis of Keeping

    We are in a crisis of keeping, and we need to learn how to hold on to everything again. I have been walking around this truth for years, naming different faces of it, because the thing itself is too big to see straight on. I called it disposability when I was stooping to pick up wrappers and bottles, watching how a world of throwaway materials trains a throwaway mind. I called it drift when I looked at towns thinning out, their young drawn away by the golden roar of cities and empty promises, leaving the old to sit under dark windows in darker hills. I called it the dying of small fires when I noticed how the ordinary signals of presence are going out one by one in a long, quiet surrender to convenience. All of that was prelude. This is the next turn of the same thought: keeping is the human art of staying faithful to what has been put into your hands, and that art is failing at the level of ordinary daily life. We are not only losing traditions and places. We are losing the inner posture that makes any tradition or place survivable, possible, thinkable. From the smallest objects to our ability to belong to a place, we are forgetting how to keep. We so often try to point to one cataclysmic event as the point where everything went wrong. You hear it all the time. “Where did we go wrong?” as if there was a singular moment when the pillars fell. I think most people can agree that we’re not living well, but pointing to some pivotal moment is not the key. Instead, we need to reevaluate the thousand small permissions and consolations and compromises we’ve made where we allowed the good old days to slip through. The broken thing can be replaced faster than it can be repaired, so we replace. The strained bond can be avoided easier than it can be mended, so we avoid. The hard season can be fled more quickly than it can be endured, so we flee. Objects matter here, though they are only the first lesson. The materials you choose, the way you pack food, the way you mend a gate or keep animals or refuse to let plastic touch what you harvest, these are a form of apprenticeship. They train your hands in permanence, and the hands train the heart. When you insist that something be durable, you are practicing patience. When you take care of a tool instead of treating it as expendable, you are practicing attention. When you keep a tradition long enough to learn why it was built, you are practicing humility. The same muscles that keep a jar in the pantry or a fire in the stove are the muscles that keep a marriage through lean years, keep a town through economic winter, keep a church alive when it would be easier to drift away, keep hope alive when the days are short and the headlines shout ruin. The modern world tries to convince you that everything is weightless, that you can pick up and go without consequence, that obligations are optional accessories. Anything worth having however carries weight. A home carries weight. A child carries weight. A place carries weight. A vow carries weight. A kept life is a weighted life, and that weight does not crush. It steadies. The whole economy hums along whispering that whatever is difficult is optional, that whatever is old is suspect, that whatever asks your presence is trying to steal your freedom. You feel that whisper at the kitchen counter and in the parking lot and on your phone late at night. It presents itself as relief, as efficiency, as self care, as the reasonable thing to do. In truth it is a kind of training, teaching your hands and heart to default toward exit. Once your hands learn the rhythm of use and toss, your mind learns the same rhythm with vows and neighbors and even your own sense of duty. That is why a people can be surrounded by abundance and still feel hollow. A life can be made fluent in convenience and still fail at the basic work of being human, being part of a community, of living well. Keeping feels slow because it resists that rhythm. It is the long obedience of ordinary days, and ordinary days are where the battle is won or lost in a thousand thousand small decisions to compromise or to hold. Keeping is learned by proximity, and especially by the nearness of generations to each other. A child does not become rooted because you tell him that roots matter, he becomes rooted because he grows up among adults who are rooted, who know the land and the people and the calendar of the year like they know the rooms of their own house. A young man learns how to carry weight because he has watched older men carry it without theatrics, watched them meet the hard parts of the year with presence rather than distraction, seen them keep the hearth work and the neighbor work and the village work in a way that makes endurance feel ordinary. An old person remains whole because she is still threaded into the daily life of a family, not visited as a relic but relied on as kin. When those bonds thin, the skill of keeping collapses. Children become a category to manage instead of souls to welcome. Young adults become a mobile labor force drifting between cities and screens. Elders become a quiet problem handled by emotionally distant professionals. When we choose to silo ourselves, to compromise on our relationships instead of to keep them, each group loses something that only the others can give. The young lose models of steadfastness. The old lose the dignity of being needed. The middle lose the language of responsibility because responsibility makes sense only when it runs both ways across time. In a kept world, you do not just love your people. You are useful to them. That usefulness takes form and becomes the very shape of what it means to belong to a people and a place. The cultural repair we need will not arrive with a single grand solution. It will come the way winter light returns after the solstice, almost imperceptibly at first, by small brave acts of saying no to compromise and greasy ease done again and again until they shape a new season. It will come when men and women decide to be present where they are needed, not only in emergencies but in the plain hours when nothing glamorous is happening. It will come when young people are invited to stay and shown that staying is valuable and honorable. It will come when children are treated as fully human members of the household and the town, not inconveniences to be hidden away. It will come when elders are put back into the center of family life so that their knowledge and dignity can do their quiet work. We are in a crisis of keeping, yes, but crises are also thresholds. If we want the world to be human again, we must relearn the old posture of standing watch, of enduring. We must learn to hold on to the living things given to us now. Land, children, seasons, light, each other. This dark part of the year teaches that the fire does not keep itself. Neither does a culture. Neither does a family. It hinges on keeping. It hinges on 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

    11 min

  4. 21/11/2025

    The Final Stronghold of Civilization

    A quiet fatalism has settled over much of our modern culture. You hear the defeatism everywhere. There is a tone of resignation, a soft nostalgia without the accompanying responsibility to reclaim. The solutions are distant and abstract, with meaningful decisions now made far away by unreachable forces. Prominent authors and commentators claim our role is but to bear witness to the fall. The result is a kind of sad paralysis. People watch institutions weaken, mourn what they believe is lost, and convince themselves that decline cannot be reversed. This mindset obscures a simple truth: the work that matters most has never depended on national forces. It has always begun at the scale of the home. Institutions may falter, but the household endures. Indeed, as all the major institutions around us crumble, the household is the last stable social unit we possess. It is the final stronghold of civilization. The cracks in our large institutions (schools, churches, political parties, government writ large) have been apparent for years. The time following the pandemic however exposed how paper-thin they had truly become. Schools struggled to maintain their basic missions during the pandemic despite access to technology and the remote flipped learning model having been popularized for over a decade. Most churches and dioceses, already facing bankruptcies and scandal, surrendered to state mandates leaving parishioners wondering how sacred their sacraments truly were. Civic groups and community organizations lost the participation that once sustained them. The worst and most extreme elements of the political parties told you to either turn your neighbor in to the authorities or disregard their wellbeing altogether. What’s worse is that in the last five years, these institutions did not seem to learn much from one of the most historic events in their members’ lives; they continue to sleepwalk through the ruins of trust and efficacy as if we are not in a post-pandemic world. The old structures people relied on feel hollow. They still exist, but their ability to form character, teach responsibility, or create belonging weakened significantly. This decline is real, and ignoring it serves no purpose. We live in a time when a disillusioned people are looking for truth, consistency, stability but as they look to the grand old pillars of yesteryear, there are cracks in the marble and moldering mortar. The gaze then turns inward, away from the horizon and back to the hearth. How could it not? The household is the last stable institution. It remains capable of producing order, meaning, and resilience even when larger systems falter. The household is the last place where effort maps clearly onto outcome.It is the only level of life where you can actually build something without asking permission. It is the only institution still in your direct care. What’s more, your efforts there result in moral lessons that serve as touchstones when the town square is washed away. A consistent presence teaches reliability. A predictable meal teaches rhythm. A warm winter fire teaches care. A tended room teaches humility. A calm voice teaches prudence. These small actions shape a moral environment that strengthens everyone inside it and fills the void left by the academic, religious, and civic institutions that failed basic tests at the start of this decade. Within the walls of a household, effort still matters. Agency still exists. There is a common refrain we see from commentators that sounds like “Look at what we have lost! Look at what they have taken from you!” This is the pathetic and unearned cry of the lazy. A person has no right to mourn dying towns, fading traditions, or diminishing light if they are unwilling to clear the path, hammer the nail, or tend the fire themselves. Renewal begins with those who are willing to labor. A household that chooses responsibility becomes a source of stability for its neighborhood and a source of inheritance for its children. Indeed, the pessimists and chronically online doomsayers will claim this is a retreat or escape, a ceding of ground. On the contrary, a home that is truly kept in the most reverent sense of the word is not an escape from the world. It is the antidote to it and its failures. It is the smallest functioning republic: a place with customs, rituals, expectations, safety, boundaries, warmth, memory. It is the micro-scale society that actually teaches a child what the larger society should look like. The primal blueprint. Every porch light left on, every garden dug, every fence mended, every bedtime story told, every neighbor fed, every table filled with laughter and order: these are the acts that hold the world together when nothing else can. It is not a retreat. It is the final front by which men and women seeking agency in a wounded culture can actually mold their world. From there the effort radiates however. A man may not be able to single handedly reverse national decline but a family can create a good home. A good home can save a street. A street can save a town. A town can save a region. A region can save a nation. A family cannot control national outcomes, but it can shape its own future. A neighborhood cannot rewrite global systems, but it can become more connected. Imagine every home radiating light through the small human-scale work described above. Does the radius grow to cover the nation? No, but it overlaps with the home next to it and it amplifies. When many households commit to such work, a patchwork series of beacons are lit and communities recover. Schools improve when families provide structure. Churches regain purpose when supported by steady homes. Towns revive when people take responsibility for the places they inhabit. Ultimately, society grows outward from the household, not inward from the state. But how? How does the work begin? The stability of a home that grows in fractals and ripples does not appear on its own and is certainly not handed to you by the state. It develops through slow, small, steady work shared by all the generations rooted in one place. Families that cook together, maintain their property, tend to repairs, read, create ritual, and care for one another form habits of resilience. The grandmother who plays with the infant, the grandfather who laughs from the workshop, the father who tends the fire, the mother who announces a toast, the child who gathers flowers…these small routines offer a counterweight to the sweeping cultural and institutional decay and exhaustion. They create competence, trust, and vitality. Even small acts of order accumulate into strength: tools kept in their place, meals shared without a rush, seasonal tasks completed before the turn, candles lit in darkened windows, children included in the work of daily life. This scale of life, of hearth-work, restores the agency lost when the marble pillars crumbled. We live in a period when many large structures are unsteady. This is not a reason for despair or even self-deprecating nostalgia. It is a reason to focus on the level of life where effort still matters and results can still be seen. The household remains the last stable thing. It calls for responsibility instead of resignation. It calls for presence instead of commentary. It calls for work instead of complaint. Those who choose to keep their homes with intention are already participating in the quiet reconstruction of the world. As the old institutions continue to sleepwalk and falter, this is the work that sustains a future. The home is the ground on which renewal of a nation will be built. Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree focuses on nature, family, and tradition. Please consider supporting this work which helps fund our family’s 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

    10 min

  5. 16/11/2025

    To Stand in the Dark

    November contains a sort of harsh clarity. We see this first in the natural world; anything extraneous is shed. The trees drop useless leaves and limbs, the hives expel the drones, the animals become discerning in their movement, hibernate. The darkest stretch of the year, the heaving black throughfare leading to the solstice, does not allow for many frills. It is a time to conserve all things necessary and reject the ancillary. This is—like so many elements of the natural world—an invitation to reflect. First, the act of shedding to the fundament in the natural world. Second, the same act in ourselves. Third, the rebellion of this austerity. In the northern places, this stripping-down arrives early and without apology. The first hard frost rigors the fields, and what once sprawled in green excess now contracts into its essential, sharp lines. The marshes dull to pewter, their summer shimmer and buzz replaced by a quiet, skeletal geometry. Oaks and maples stand newly honest, their canopies surrendered, revealing the stark architecture beneath—angles, joints, and axes that summer’s abundance concealed. Even the coastline simplifies: tides pull back debris, winds flatten the dunes, and the ocean grows colder, darker, more deliberate in its motion. There is a sense that the land itself is tightening its belt, drawing resources inward, refusing all ornamentation. What persists does so because it must; what falls away does so without ceremony. This seasonal austerity is a lesson in instinct, in the ruthless intelligence of survival. The northern wild places do not cling to what cannot be carried through winter. They pare themselves to the minimal, the durable, the true. In this bareness, this disciplined retreat to the fundament, the landscape offers its quiet catechism: to endure, one must return to what is necessary, and let the rest go. So too with us. The frost falls, the snow arrives, and we—however consciously or not—take stock of what we will continue to carry. The abundance of summer, the swimming holes and holidays and easy dreaming of all the good plans to come give way to fundamental needs. Indeed, even in our modern lives full of so many conveniences and ease, this holds true. The cold sets in and our gaze shifts from the horizon to the hearth. The dark arrives and we find ourselves gently rocking a sick child and twice-checking the latch on gate. We stop planning and building to focus on the fundamental; our family, our home, our health. Precautions are taken so the children never have to think about warmth or food. An unwelcome noise outside causes you to stand a little longer peering out into the dark than you would have in the languid days of June. Such is the invitation of November; you are called to shed your summer dreams and turn your entire focus to the immediate, the necessary, the true. This is good, the forced setting of priorities, the reframing of perspective. Whatever auxiliary hopes and small decadences remained are shed to reveal what matters. Warmth. Nourishment. Family. Yet even within this season of bareness, there arises a kind of rebellion. It is quiet, human, and defiantly warm. We gather in kitchens that glow against the dark, coaxing abundance from our stores as if to remind winter that it cannot have everything. Its grasp may claw from the woodline all the way to the door but there, we proclaim, it must cease. The feast, in November, is an affirmation that austerity cannot fully lay claim to the human spirit. We roast with ceremony transforming the red harvest into something communal and light-bringing. Around a long table, we answer the starkness outside with laughter, with candlelight, with the laden plate passed from hand to hand. It is a refusal to let the season’s spareness diminish us. Instead, we meet the cold by gathering close, by feeding one another richly, by insisting that gratitude and generosity still have a place even as the world narrows. Though we stand in the dark and take stock of the fundament, this feast is our counterpoint to winter’s demand for simplicity: a reminder that while the natural world hunkers down, we are creatures who rebel by way of fellowship, by creating warmth where none is given, by celebrating audaciously the very abundance we have just finished paring down. It is a paradox in a way, yes. Such is the way of things however, those lessons learned standing here in the early winter-dark. Please subscribe to support our family’s beekeeping tradition. Living the Year - Three Acts to Embody This Time * Take a deliberate walk in a wild or quiet place and practice “noticing what has been let go.” Choose a trail, shoreline, or field and walk slowly, paying attention to what the season has stripped bare: the fallen leaves, the exposed branches, the drained marshes, the stillness of animals. As you observe, name (aloud or in your mind) one thing in your own life that can also be shed; maybe it’s an obligation, a lingering expectation, a distraction masquerading as necessity. Let the landscape teach you where to loosen your own grip. * Shed to the fundament in your physical environment. Walk through your home room by room with a box or bag in hand, and ruthlessly discard or donate one non-essential item from each space. Something that no longer serves warmth, nourishment, or family. This mirrors the natural world’s stripping of leaves and debris, forcing a return to durable essentials like a secure hearth and stocked pantry. * Rebel through a defiant feastGather your household or close loved ones for an intentional November meal (like our American Thanksgiving), lighting candles and sharing stories of gratitude around the table, explicitly toasting to the warmth you’ve conserved. This acts as a quiet rebellion, transforming pared-down resources into abundance and insisting on fellowship against the season’s austerity. 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

    7 min

  6. 05/11/2025

    We Fathers Must Not Let the Fire Die

    We entered the dark part of the year this past weekend. You crossed over the threshold and now stand closer to the winter solstice than you do the autumn equinox. You’re on the other side of the year from the merry month of May at the absolute grimmest stretch; the days are dark, growing darker yet, and there will be no brightness, no brilliance, no break in the dark for another month and a half. Well, except for you. It all hinges on you now, northern man. You set the tone, stay the momentum, reclaim evergreen-old ways. Hearth-keeper. Merry-maker. Father. You are called now to presence. You are called now to keep. We so often see the next fifty-or-so days with Thanksgiving and the run-up to Christmas as an exhausting marathon feast. For you though, it is a vigil. The world asks that you show your quality as husband, father, son, and neighbor now. The days are few, the nights long, and within that ever-narrowing time, every act carries outrageous weight. You are also tempted by distraction now, however. It is so easy to say you are tired, to turn on the game after Sunday dinner, to linger in the garage, to sigh as your wife asks you to get the decorations down from the attic. To fade. Do not withdraw now. Do not diminish yourself as the shadows grow long at the woodline. Do not let the world turn without your strong hand upon it. When the outside world grows harsh, when the fields lie still, when your home fills with the excited sound of preparation, you must be there. Climb the ladder and hang the wreath. Fetch the wood. Surprise your wife. Gather the children. These small deeds are wards against the dark, they are prayers reaffirming that life continues, that the warmth you bring and grow and tend cannot be extinguished. Remember that you establish the temper of every hour. While your wife is reflecting on where best to lean the cornstalks on the front porch, you need to be determining the very air of the day. You need to be slipping your children a little candy from the Halloween hoard and proclaiming your right of taxation. You need to be planning outings, carving meat, and remarking with authority on things you know nothing of. You need to be dropping in on the women in your life with an armful of mums and a gallant stride. You need to be leaving surprises for friends and sneaking the dog a morsel of Sunday dinner under the table with a wink and a nod to the nearest child. The kind of wink only a father can give, the kind that forever keeps you in their confidence and says “I will always be on your side.” The home needs your warmth. The table needs your weight. The children watch you and learn what good endurance looks like in the ordinary tiring hours when the sun sets too early. Bring them light, laughter, guidance. Let your presence be the keystone that centers, that steadies the room. When your wife leans into the labor of the season, the quiet shaping of the home, you must meet her there. The work belongs to both. Your touch upon the hearth-work is the old inheritance, the way men once met the seasons and cycles of life with quiet reverence. Attend to it. Mend the last of the fences, light the candles, stand in the raw descent of dusk and know what is asked of you now. Just as the jack-o-lanterns give way to the garland, so too does your autumnal joviality and Thanksgiving revelry give way to something deeper. Something hallowed and evergreen. Something old. So many of our old ceremonies and traditions surrounding the solstice and Christmas have entirely disappeared; they lie scattered and desecrated in the shadows of convenience and commerce. We have lost something ancient, something equal parts solstice bonfire and midnight mass, something green and white, wild and hallowed. Where are the home-spun fireside delights of yesteryear, the halls decked with the rustic charms of mistletoe and holly, the candles, the fires, the caroling? These august customs of sheer, unbridled optimism flourished when men had a little more vitality, when they were a little more dangerous, when they threatened to drive the dark away. We all crave the same thing our forebears sought however: the assurance that our homes will outlast the night, that the days will grow longer, that the year will begin anew. Now, here in the long dark of the year, you need to reflect on those good old traditions that came before you, you need to reclaim the discarded crown of holly. It is you who now bears the torch upon the hill, you who now lights the candles, you who now tends the hearth. The year will die and when it does, when the trees stand black against the snow, when the days begin their slow return, you will see what your keeping has wrought. Your wife will move through the rooms in quiet contentment. Your children will laugh in the warmth you have made. The dog will rest near the fire knowing all is well. The house will hold a stillness that feels like victory. Outside, the fields will sleep beneath frost, and you will know that you have met the season’s demand. You have stood where you were needed. You have tended what was inherited. The world will turn again, but for now, you sit in the light of your own making, watching as your family orbits around you as planets around a sun they never doubt will rise. The cold cannot touch you. The dark cannot enter. You have kept faith. You have kept watch. And in this keeping, you will have remembered what it means to hold the light. These free weekly reflections are available to everyone. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our family’s apiary. 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

    9 min

  7. 15/10/2025

    Little Lights and Dark Days

    The dark creeps in now. It does that this time of year, right before Halloween. You’re in the garden until well past eight o’clock one day and the next you’re huddled by the woodstove fighting back the marrow-deep raw of a late October fog. You sit down for dinner with your family and note there is something off about the dining room; all those daily imperceptible shifts in the way the sun sets over the nearest ridge have caught up to you and are taking a small toll. All around you now, a bit more gloom sets in. Halloween is of course more than just ghouls and goblins, it is the halfway point between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice: the downhill of the downhill toward the darkest point of the year. The gloom before the true dark of the turn of the year. The leaves have finished their brief reverie. The fields, once humming with life and green, stand quiet under mist and crows. The garden gate swings in the wind, and even the morning coffee seems darker, heavier, its steam adding to the wisps at the woodline. You feel the tilt of the earth not in your bones but in your habits, the way you reach for the light switch earlier each day, the way conversation around the dinner table grows more inward, the long shadows reaching for the cellar door. You know what to do, however. You begin, instinctively, to bring light into your home. You might not even think of it, but you do. A candle on the dining table. A string of lights on the porch railing. A pumpkin carved and lit from within, its face soon flickering against the damp night. These small illuminations push back against the growing dark with a steadfast gentle defiance. We smile and tell ourselves they are for the children, and perhaps they are. The children are the reason you lay the newspaper on the table and pull the top off the pumpkin, the reason you scoop the seeds with your hands and pretend not to mind the mess, the reason you scrape a spot of rogue wax off the porch in November. You do it for the laughter, for the faces warmed by the orange glow, for the delight of watching fire bloom in spite of the gloom. You also do it for yourself, however. You do it to remember that though the darkness claws ever closer to the door, searching and scratching for a thread to pull loose, that sometimes the smallest light is enough to make a home feel whole again. It is an old wisdom, perennial and ancient, this turning toward little lights in dark times. You might not call it ritual, but that’s what it is. You light the candles and the jack-o-lanterns not only for beauty but as a quiet defiance, an illuminated line in the sand. You have seen enough of modern ills to know they do not come with the season, that the dark of our contemporary wounded culture ever urges and churns without cycles, without good green patterns. The news is loud with tragedy and rage, the world feels increasingly brittle, and everything seems designed to keep you anxious and distracted. The easy conveniences promise to make life simple, but instead they make it smaller. You scroll instead of speaking. You purchase instead of creating. You forget the smell of woodsmoke on your clothes and the taste of real fruit in your mouth. Yet, there are still the children, asking to carve pumpkins, to light candles, to stay up late to see the moon. They do not ask you to explain the wounds of the world to them, they do not even ask to make it more bearable. They do endure it though. The dark they face is not the same as yours however. It is not the dark clawing at the door, howling for your attention. It screeches silently in the wires, it hides behind screens, it slips into the corners of classrooms and playgrounds. You watch it reach for them, and it makes you ache. They are too young to understand how much the world asks of them already, how much it desires them. They come home tired, not from running or climbing, but from keeping up with all the influences and inputs and noise. You see it in them, don’t you? That quiet weariness that no child should know. That neon static scream of too much, too much, too much behind their eyes. We laugh to ourselves and joke that we weren’t meant to have as much information as we do, that the 24-hour news cycle is really too much, that knowing about sorrows across the world probably isn’t good for us. We erred. We were not meant to pull back the curtain and stare so long into the digital cauldron, to be overwhelmed with so much information and so little knowledge. Our little towns and schools and homes have been flooded with every sorrow of the world and we were not prepared. We adults grimly laugh at our mistake and shrug but the children, they do not understand. How could they? So you light the candles again. You make soup and laughter and warmth. You teach them the old rituals equally arcane and ordinary: how to carve faces into pumpkins, how to gather leaves, how to make a home glow from within. You do not tell them it is protection though it is. You do not tell them it is prayer though it is that too. In time, the days will shorten even more. The mornings will freeze, the windows will fog, the ground will harden. The year will grow dark before it turns again. If you have done your small work, your hallowed hearth-work, if you have carried your little light faithfully through the fog, then the dark will not have the final word however. Instead, the children will remember. They will remember your laughter in the flicker of the jack-o-lantern, the smell of cinnamon and smoke, the quiet moments when the world outside seemed to press too close but the light inside held steady. They will remember that there was a way to live gently and glow, ever repelling the screaming dark. 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

    10 min

  8. 08/10/2025

    You Need to Keep Going

    It is October now, though you wouldn’t know it from the mercury rising the past week. The maples are rapidly growing bare and the leaves are crisp beneath our boots, yet the air hums with a misplaced summer heat. For days now, the warmth has lingered heavy, uninvited, strange. The bees are restless, spilling from their hives past twilight, agitated and uncertain of the season or their aims. The full moon hasn’t helped their confusion, nor mine. It has cast its silver light through the boughs and across the fields, waking the nocturnal; foxes, skunk, and deer wandering through the flower field and closer to the house than I would like. The children, too, have been taken by the moon. They beg to stay up late, to join in whatever quiet work remains before bed. This is fine. The heat lends itself to frustration in us older people, but tonight my little girl carried tools down the hill to me, barefoot and beaming her headlamp despite the moonlight, ferrying a hammer, a ruler, some nails while I mended a loose board in the honey house. There is a strange paradox to this season: one foot in autumn, the other stubbornly trying to reanimate summer. The leaves have fallen and turned to tinder underfoot, perfect for jumping and tossing into the air, yet standing in the old flower field I can hear the faint laughter of swimmers down the hill at the lake in the village, as if July had clawed its way from some autumnal burial mound. It is disorienting when a season will not stay dead. It confuses the senses and makes time feel off, wrong somehow. Still, around every home, the same good green pattern continues: the swing of the maul and the stacking of wood, the scent of honey warm in the hive, the anxious hammering of boards to outbuildings before winter’s inevitable claim. It is a strange thing to sweat under a sun that should have softened weeks ago, to labor in the yard or forest with heat on your neck while knowing frost is crouched in the hedgerows, waiting to waylay the tomatoes on the vine. The small jobs about the property and home regenerate endlessly, almost as if they are urged on unnaturally by the heat. Then we see the children in the yard though, gathering leaves and stones into little piles or pretending to help us carry kindling and suddenly the heat no longer confuses and disorients, the muscles no longer ache. The children root us when we are unmoored by strange skies. They sanctify the toil and redeem it into vocation. Today the heat finally broke. Rain came in the early morning, soft and steady, and our little corner of the world exhaled. The sky turned a muted gray and the light, filtered through the patchy clouds, glowed with a gloaming calm. The bees quieted at last, huddled in their hives, and the forest smelled again of damp leaves and good sodden loam. It is the kind of weather that invites stillness, that whispers rest, rest, rest. Rest is a luxury not yet earned however. There is still wood to stack, honey to bottle and sell, another repair on the chicken coop before the cold finds its way in. Meanwhile, the children’s laughter is a ringing bell through it all, putting the reanimated summer finally to rest. They play in the new puddles we tell them to avoid, of course, and when we turn to scold we stop short. Their joy redeems the drudgery. Their play answers every unspoken question about why we keep going when the body aches and the mind frays. Even now, as the days shorten and the warmth feels misplaced, we are reminded what all this labor is for. The work, the worry, the stings and small fixes. They are for the children who chase chickens and puddles and dreams under an autumn sun that doesn’t know what month it is. They are the quiet covenant that binds us to our place and to the rhythm of work and of rest, of breaking and of mending, of toil and of joy. The skies may turn strange, the seasons may blur, the cracks in our walls may show but still, we keep going. We must. When the muscles tremble, when the hands blister, when the spirit grows weary and wonders if it can go on, we look to them and remember. For them, we labor. Through them, the work becomes hallowed. 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

    7 min
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Reflections on family, nature, and tradition from the end of a dirt road in Vermont. oldhollowtree.substack.com

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  • Création
    Ryan B. Anderson
  • Années d’activité
    2024 - 2026
  • Épisodes
    56
  • Classification
    Tous publics
  • Copyright
    © Ryan B. Anderson
  • Site web de l’émission
    Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree

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