Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree

Ryan B. Anderson
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  • Society & Culture
  • Updated weekly

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

  1. 3 days ago

    The Liberty of Rootedness

    Here in the hills of inland New England, you could wander down the road this weekend into the village below. You will be going down to watch the fireworks with your family on the bridge that spans the lake as your friends and neighbors light them from a dock. It will be a little dusky as you walk down along the tree-lined road through the tunnel of green and everyone will be too excited, too full of anticipation of the night to come, to even mind the biting bugs that hatched in the humidity of the past week. That humidity brought hot days and brilliant nights of thunder and lightning that your children did not even mind for they were too exhausted from the long days of playing and swimming and doing all the good green things that children do. On your way, the widow who lives nearby may ask you to help her lift something. You oblige without thinking. The woman who lives behind the church with her ducks will wave even though she doesn’t quite remember who you are. This is fine; you can remind her again as you have a dozen times before. You will exchange some pleasant words with the new people who moved into the nice house down by the inn where your friends lived until recently. They were getting older though and moved to be closer to their children and grandchildren a few states away. Your own child will tug on your sleeve and remind you the fireworks are starting, interrupting your reflection. The show will be fantastic, of course: gold and red and blue illuminating the silhouettes of the tall maples and pines at the lake’s edge and they’ll go on longer than you think possible. You will not notice that a family member or neighbor or old friend handed your children sparklers amid the spectacle, and they will beg to light them in the dark heat. This is fine; you’ll walk back up the hill and light them for your children on the front lawn before putting them to bed. Ah, but then all the rogue displays from the families scattered around the hills will begin to peek up through the distant trees and you will relent as your little ones plead to stay outside for just a little longer to get a better look. The fireflies will begin to wander into the field from the woodline. There, amid all those good lights both man-made and green-grown, you may find yourself thinking about liberty. We say the word so often this month, this week that it loses its edges a bit, becomes some ephemeral banner instead of the blood-red real thing it actually is. Indeed, what are we celebrating here in the village when the sky lights up over our good green hills? Our wounded modern world has an answer ready of course. First, some will tell you there is nothing worth celebrating at all, that the country has strayed too far from its initial ethos to still be considered valid. This is so cynical and defeatist that you justifiably reject it outright and do not give it a second thought. Beyond the rage and the gnashing of teeth however, another more insidious and consumptive yet subtle answer to the question will be presented to you: liberty as optionality. Ah yes, freedom is the open road, the life untethered, the ability to leave anything and everything in a moment for something better. Your hometown is dead or dying or the politics are so corrupt that it is irredeemable. Your parents and older relatives are so extreme and their views so outdated that they are no longer worthy of your contact. All the old institutions, civic, religious, and otherwise are so eroded that the only thing worth your consideration is the interstate highway system. These, of course, are all lies. Yes, there is a kind of freedom in leaving your place and the people who raised you. It is the same sort of freedom shared by a leaf torn from a branch, tumbling wherever the capricious wind declares. You can watch that freedom, that liberty as defined by our wounded culture, hollow out the old hills. Watch as the windows in the homes of aging parents darken and their shingles fall, the yards grow conspicuously silent in the absence of the laughter of grandchildren. You can experience it yourself when you return for the old home days and struggle to name half-remembered faces from a lifetime ago. The millennial generation that kept every option open now lies scattered across a dozen cities, free as leaves in the wind, as the towns that raised them die alone. Yes, this is what the liberty of optionality builds. Nothing. Building requires staying, and staying is the one option it can never choose. There is an older liberty of course, the liberty known by the men and women of 1776. The cynical reader will be quick now to remark that their ancestors too had left. Yes, they left England and had crossed an ocean in ships that half-killed them, but we must mark the sort of leaving that was, the nature of it. The leaving was one-way and it was binding. They did not hop on the interstate for better prospects or better liturgy or better night life in an established coastal metropolis. The men and women who left England sold everything, boarded an unforgiving ship, and planted themselves in a brutally dark wilderness with no road back. We must be clear here: they left one home forever in order to build another one forever. This was not the same consumerist modern impulse to pick up and leave when the prospects grow thin. Indeed, by the time of the Revolution the men signing their names to the Declaration of Independence were the sons of the sons who chose to stay. They were men with specific acres and specific obligations and specific graves to tend and they were defending ground their families held for a century. In short, they were men of place. Despite this, we are quick to myopically claim that the American way is to strike out onto the dark frontier, to chase fortune in lands unknown, but the fortune two hundred and fifty years ago was a farm of which you could walk the bounds in the grey light of a single morning. Indeed, liberty in its oldest and truest sense is the freedom to root yourself, to choose the place and the land and the work and to stand behind that choice with your whole weight for the rest of your good life. Conversely, the modern man with no true obligations is not free. He is merely loose. Ask him what he would defend and he has no answer, because defense requires a threshold, and a threshold requires a home, and a home requires the one thing he has spent his whole life avoiding: the closed door, the planted flag, the decision that forecloses all others and in doing so finally means something. Ultimately, the seed carried to ground is not the leaf tumbling in the wind. The loose man will protest, of course. You have heard it first hand if you come from a small rural place. He will tell you that rootedness is a fool’s bet, that you will sink your life savings into a forever home only to watch the taxes triple, the politics grow impossibly corrupt, the economy die, the drugs ravage the masses, and the malevolent yuppie foreigner arrive. He will tell you that no place in America is stable enough to justify such profound investment. You will see this argument grow in volume as our systems are rocked by instability, as political discontent grows on both sides of the aisle. Notice however for what the loose man’s liturgy of cosmopolitanism is actually advocating: a guarantee before commitment, an iron-clad promise that the ground will never shift. No honest man can offer him this, no such system and no such standard survives contact with the blood and dirt and marrow of life. Is your councilman corrupt? Your world is malleable and your will is strong; unseat him. Is your school or your church or your gazebo on the green disappointing? Perhaps it is but waiting for you. Indeed, you have no guarantee your wife will not sicken, your children will not break your heart, your own body not bend and betray you before its time. Marriage, children, land, your very calling: every one of these a reckless concentration of risk in a single unhedgeable position. Every one a reason a life means anything at all. No heroes were ever made by hedging their bets. Note well too that the loose man is no safer than the rooted man. When the hard times arrive (and they do arrive everywhere) the man who survives them is not the stranger moving to his fifth state in a decade but is rather the man whose neighbors know his name, who has fed people from his garden, who belongs to a vast web of obligation thick enough to hold aloft the terrible weight of crumbling marble columns as the systems fail. Our deepest error, our modern culture’s deepest lie, is this: we should wait for a stable place to justify our commitment. Stability has never been the precondition of rootedness, however. It has always been the product. The good town you cannot find anywhere in America is not found. It is made by people who stayed and made it, none of whom had a guarantee of success. To look at the risks and walk away is merely asking to inherit what you refuse to build. You know this in your body, marrow-deep in your very bones if not yet in your desires or inclinations. Every one of the most binding choices in your life, the marriage, the children, the mortgage on the old place with the sagging barn, every single one of them narrowed your options and every one of them made you more free. Your apple tree will not bear fruit the year you plant it, yet you plant it all the same for children who will pick fruit from the boughs you will never see at their zenith. The act of planting the tree has not limited your freedom but it rather has exercised it completely. The man who plants for the harvest he will never reap has escaped a sort of tyranny of self. You may yet witness it this weekend still in whatever small town you watch the fireworks or the parade. The volunteer fire department grilling on the green, the old man who mows the abandoned house at the edge of town without anyone’s consent, the young fam

    17 min

  2. 1 Jun

    The Green Conspiracy

    The canopy leafs out and we are suddenly reminded of June’s benevolent conspiracy, its invitation to hide amid the green. The bare, brutal skies of November are on the other side of the year and we can take solace in a little concealment, a good green refuge. The world softens in these weeks as the stark silhouettes of winter blue ease into the froth of leaves unfurling. You grow weary in those grey days from so much exposure amid the stripped limbs and nude skies, but there is a sort of mercy now in the hills and hollows, now in the green. There is a starkness to November you feel when its wicked winds rip through the high places, tearing away leaf and cloud alike, leaving nothing between you and the void of space. It feels as though you are more vulnerable then, more scrutinized by the world and all its wounded ways, judged harshly for the faults that are not wholly your own. It is hard to describe, but you know the feeling; the trees are bare, the sky contains but distant stars apathetic to your condition, and it seems you are weighed and measured in a way that is not fully fair. Winter arrives whether you are ready or not and there is little leniency given for the ill prepared bare in the cold light. Not so in the early days of June. Here you can walk along the old stone walls amid the just-born calves, the fully-leafed maples and birches creating a protective tunnel for you. There in the green places, shielded from the uncaring harsh-light of space and sin and the wounded world, you are able to slow and notice creation again. The salamander, the moss, the fiddlehead fern. Those ferns, not fully unfurled, resemble something nearly arcane in these late spring days: a shepherd’s crook, a crozier, a staff. Sheltered away from the demands and neon noise of the modern world, strolling or even sitting amid those ferns more appropriate for a fairy tale than real life, you may even allow yourself to contemplate the not-wholly-real. A day dream, a fantasy, even magic. You remember, however faintly, the sort of imagination you possessed as a child before adulthood narrowed, blended, and reshaped everything toward the greasy grey ease of utility and speed. The green world quiets everything just enough so that part of you, the part that still dreams and wonders, can knuckle up back from the wet loam into the light for a little while. Such is the conspiracy of June, the offering here at the start of summer: a promise of respite. A place to recline in the bough-dappled light, a green refuge away from the din and the drone and the grind. A moment to allow your mind to wander. Yes, there is work still to be done (always work!) but June does remind us that life cannot subsist upon labor alone. You require beauty and silence too. You yearn for shade and birdsong and the green and gold of bough-dappled light. You require places where the soul is not pressed constantly beneath the weight of headlines and schedules and fluorescent light. Rest beneath long limbs. Watch the wind rock the canopy. Listen to the peepers rising from the wet fields at dusk. The world, for all its wounds, still contains good green sanctuaries. Your refuge remains. 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

    5 min

  3. 11 May

    Rebuilding Home

    People will tell you that “you cannot go home again.” What they mean is that time moves in one direction; the old people die, the stores close, the fields grow over, and the little places that once anchored a childhood lose their shape beneath the capricious whims of modern life. A man returns years later looking for what he remembers and instead finds vinyl where there was once canvas, particle board where there was once pine, disposable things stacked beneath fluorescent lights where there were once shelves lined with goods meant to last a lifetime and beyond. Yes, much of modern America feels temporary now, as if everything around us has been designed with the quiet assumption that it will soon be thrown away. Still, home, the very concept of place and what roots us there, is more durable than people admit. We are not so lost yet. Across New England there was once a weight to ordinary things that is difficult to explain to anyone who did not experience it. The old L.L. Bean boots lined up by the door felt indestructible. The Hudson Bay striped wool blankets stacked in cedar chests carried the smell of campfire and salt air. The mugs in the kitchen cabinet were thick clay that held heat in your hands on cold mornings. Sturdy wooden tables bore the marks of decades of use and nobody thought twice about it because things were expected to age alongside the families who owned them. Everything felt rooted and was built with the assumption that permanence was not only possible but the assumed default. It is easy to write this off as materialistic nostalgia, which would be both cynical and short sighted. These objects mattered; they were expressive of the local, seasonal ethos. They served as conduits for the values of the people who made and kept them. A home deserved honest craftsmanship, natural materials, durable beauty. Care mattered. Stewardship mattered. A person repaired things instead of replacing them because there was dignity in maintenance and continuity, dignity in handing something down instead of throwing it away. The objects themselves reinforced a broader cultural confidence, a belief that families and communities were building toward something enduring rather than merely consuming whatever passed through their hands. That confidence has eroded alongside the objects. Modern life prizes convenience above nearly everything else. Fast shipping, fast fashion, fast entertainment, fast food. Entire industries now exist to eliminate friction from daily life, yet so many people feel exhausted and untethered despite the omnipresent convenience. Homes themselves often feel temporary, filled with furniture nobody expects to survive a single move and products nobody intends to repair. Even the language surrounding modern goods reveals the problem: Disposable. Single-use. Content. Stream. Feed. Everything passes through our hands as sand and leaves no imprint behind. You were not made for that kind of rootlessness, that impermanence, that loss. A home changes when the things inside it are made with care. A wool blanket folded over the arm of a chair changes a room. A beeswax candle lit at the dinner table softens the harshness of a hard evening. A handmade mug asks a person to linger over coffee for another minute instead of rushing toward the next thing. These may seem like small details, but a life is mostly composed of small details repeated over time. So too a culture. That is part of what Humming Meadow hopes to recover. Honey was simply the clearest expression of something older and more enduring that still survives beneath the surface of American life. Family. Nature. Tradition. Those words sound quaint to some people now, maybe even embarrassingly archaic or even politically charged, but they remain among the only sturdy foundations left available to a wounded culture increasingly organized around speed, novelty, and disposability. The hunger for something more enduring is visible everywhere now. Young couples plant gardens behind small homes. Families learn to bake bread from old cookbooks stained with flour and butter. Men restore old trucks instead of financing plastic new ones they cannot repair themselves. Women search antique stores for quilts and cast iron and old wooden furniture built before planned obsolescence became standard practice. People are searching for weight again. Texture. Friction. Permanence. They want homes that feel lived in instead of staged. This longing is often dismissed as nostalgia, though nostalgia is not quite the right word for it. Nostalgia traps people in the past. What is happening now feels active and intentional. People are searching for the old ways because many of those ways produced healthier homes and healthier communities than the wounded culture surrounding us now. They are searching for patterns worth recovering. Slowness. Stewardship. Craftsmanship. Shared meals. Real materials. Local identity. They are searching for ways to root themselves again in a world that increasingly asks them to float. They are searching for a reclamation of what America was. That old America is still out there. It remains in the hills and along the coast, in the old stone walls and the salt-stained piers. It remains in old hardware stores and diners and church suppers. In barns smelling of hay and machine oil. In homes where the lights are warm and the tables are full and the objects have stories attached to them. It remains wherever people still believe that beauty, permanence, and stewardship are obligations rather than luxuries. You are told “you can’t go home again.” Perhaps going home again was never really the point. Perhaps the real task before you is rebuilding it. 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

    8 min

  4. 16 Mar

    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

  5. 16 Feb

    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

  6. 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

  7. 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

  8. 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
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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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