Hugh's Blog

Reimagine resilience

I have always liked Victor Havel’s declaration that hope is an orientation of the spirit.

For years, my blog’s tagline has been “Hopeful in spite of the facts,” and that is sort of what I’m getting at – hope isn’t dependent on facts, but on your orientation. And a key component of that orientation, for me anyway, is the decision, made in advance, that you will do all you can to make it to that day when the world as it is becomes the world as it ought to be. I cannot guarantee I will be there for it, but I want to deserve to be there.

And that requires resilience. And resilience is made up, more than anything else, of practices.

There are different ways we humans connect with that which is more than us. Some people feel the infinite in music and song. Others know transcendence in their bodies. Some people respond to the holy in visual art, or aesthetics.

Me? I’m a word guy. I believe in the power of words to change the world. I recognize it is not the only way, but it is my way. When I was interviewed for my friend Kathy Escobar’s podcast last fall, I made a slide show of five different prose quotes that have shaped me and added to my resilience, and I shared the story behind them, and how I came to them.

I think about resilience, and things that overlap it, a lot. I have done so ever since the late 00’s, when I was on the edge of burnout and reached out to Bart Campolo, who would eventually become a sort of mentor to me, but at the time was just a name I knew from the internet. His advice, and friendship, would change my life as well as my career. Or perhaps those two changes are not inseparable.

Earlier this year, I did a recording for a (different) podcast that didn’t end up airing about resilience. In it. I talked about the practical side of physical resilience—things like having both electric and gas heating in my house, and several weeks worth of food in my pantry, and knowing who on my street is the cook or the nurse.

I find that physical resilience makes mental resilience easier to achieve. After all, like my hero and fellow Mississippian Fannie Lou Hammer said, if you have 400 quarts of soup put up in your pantry, nobody gets to tell you what to do. You sleep easier, knowing you have more options, more control, and more likelihood of weathering what storms may come.

My phlox is laughing at this heat.

But I am not.

It’s hot here.

I know, I know. I live in Mississippi, and it’s August. What do you expect?

Actually, most summers are not horrible here. There are usually enough thunderstorms and cloud cover to keep it from getting too hot for too long – most days are around 90 to 93. It IS humid here, but it means we have depths of green in our landscape that are only dreamt of elsewhere.

But this summer is brutal.

The heat index here has been over 100 for weeks. The last few days the actual temperature has been over 100. And what’s worse, the nighttime temps have been hot as well – this morning at 5:30 when I got up, it was 80 degrees outside.

When it’s that hot, nothing gets a chance to recover, including us. Our house is going to be 78 degrees inside by 4PM, with the AC running full blast. It just can’t keep up.

We desperately need rain, too. It hasn’t rained any significant amount in almost six weeks. Even the most drought resistant shrubs in my yard are looking peaked. We are, in short, miserable. We are all miserable.

We had a severe drought in 2024, and it weakened lots of pine trees, which were then more susceptible to southern pine beetles. There are now dead pine snags all over Jackson in testimony to the drought of 2024.

I have 7 pine trees on my property that all survived the 2024 drought. I hope they survive this one, too. Hell, I hope I survive it.

I’m always attracted to the flowers that seem to thrive despite the harsh weather. Like the phlox in the front yard – paniculata, I think. I grabbed several of them last year at a native plant sale. There was no editing on that photo up top – it really is that rich and vibrant in the midst of no water or care for six weeks.

This is one reason to grow native plants – they have evolved over generations to be able to thrive here. It draws in hummingbirds and bees and butterflies, and it comes back reliably year after year.

I have just talked myself into growing more of that for next year. My existing clumps are not yet big enough to divide, but I think it’s easy to grow from seed.

The search for the perfect pair of pants.

I am not a vain man, at least when it comes to clothes. I wear a uniform of sorts – most days it’s jean-cut chino pants and a t-shirt in the summer, and a sweat shirt or hoodie in the winter.

There is a dress version of the uniform, where I wear the same pants and a blue oxford button down and a blazer. I like to not think about my clothes.

But man do I feel David Lynch here. I think way too much about my pants – currently my favorite are these, which I would rate as a 8 out of ten.

I am searching for a good pair of pants. I never found a pair of pants that I just love. I like comfortable pants and clothes I can work in, that I feel comfortable in. I don’t really like to get dressed up. I like to wear the same thing every day and feel comfortable. It’s a fit, it’s a certain kind of feeling, and if they’re not right, which they never are, it’s a sadness. You know, it interrupts the flow of happiness. I’m working on it, believe me.

—David Lynch, GQ, 2021

(via Matt Thomas)

Mepkin Abbey

In August of 2010, I spent a week at a silent retreat at Mepkin Abbey, a Trappist Monastery in South Carolina.

I was in the midst of a time of discernment. I was so broke and scared and newly married. I would pray with the monks 7 times a day and eat with them in silence, and the rest of the time I just walked the grounds, or would read in my room during the heat of the day. I had zero cell phone reception.

The Monks chant their prayers from the Grail translation of the Psalms. And in every service, they would chant from Psalm 70:

“O God, come to my assistance;

O LORD, make haste to help me!”

It became a mantra of sorts for me that week, as I walked for hours and hours in silence.

Literally a week doesn’t go by that I don’t think about that experience. And there is a part of me that eternally yearns to go back.

What I don’t know how to do.

There are people out there who like my writing. Who love it, actually. I have more than 200 folks who actually send me money every month just so I have time to write more. My open rates for my emails hover around 60%. I’ve sold dozens of 5 packs of my book to folks who love it and want to give it as gifts.

I’m not for everyone. But the people who I am for connect deeply with what I write. I get people who send me pictures of their cats and kids, who send me unsolicited Venmo payments for my birthday or when I post we are going out to eat for our anniversary. People send me pictures ALL THE TIME of what they made from one of my recipes.

I guess what I am saying is that I have deeply loyal, connected fans, for want of a better word. And that is a huge gift, for which I am deeply grateful. I feel like I have the writing part down. I’m a good storyteller. As Dizzy Dean is alleged to have said, it ain’t bragging if you can do it.

What I do not know how to do is to find more of those people.

Of the billions of people on the planet who do not subscribe to my newsletter, read my book, or listen to my podcast, the number one reason for that is because they have no idea that material exists. It’s not that they are rejecting me, or my writing or my delivery or my values: It’s that they do not know who I am. My biggest problem is not talent–it’s obscurity.

The world is a hard place. Forces conspire to take away our freedom, our agency, and our joy. Oligarchs pit us against each other, and make money off our fear of our neighbor. So what do we do about that?

There are many answers. Some of us protest. Some of us build community. Some of us hunker down. Some of us pray. Some of us teach others skills.

I write. Like Fionna Apple said in the early days of the pandemic, when she released her album Fetch The Bolt Cutters, this is what I know how to do.

I know how to write hopefully. To tell stories that connect us to who we are, or at least who we want to be. To tell you a story that will give you a moment of respite from the horrors of the world. To help you see the world from a different point of view. To give you language for a different way to be in the world.

I know I know how to do that because those are the words people tell me when they write me.

I know how to do that. I just wish I knew how to do that for more people.

The Daily Log

As a self-employed solo operator, one of the best things I do is keep a daily log. It began so I would remember when I did what, or what I committed to, but I quickly learned a side benefit was that as a solo operator, it is easy to have worked all damn day and feel you got nothing accomplished. Except you can look at the log and see that you actually did.

I don’t know that the tools matter all that much—use whatever makes it easy for you to use—but for me it’s a Google doc that I just leave open all day. I keep the file open in a browser tab, and I enter things in it all day as bullet points. You could use a dime-store composition book if you wanted.

It’s just a daily record of what I did that day and things I want to remember. Last night, I cooked some amazing hamburgers for supper–That went in the daily log. I paid my electric bill – that, along with the confirmation number—went into the daily log. I agreed to meet someone for coffee at a date in the future. The date went into my calendar, but the conversation went into the daily log.

It gives me a synopsis of my day, and makes it easy for when I need to recall when something happened, whether that need is in the courthouse or the therapist’s office. But perhaps most importantly, it helps me keep perspective. I can look at my daily log from last year and see that today, a year later, what felt soul-crushing last year has been largely forgotten now. It helps me remember the small, otherwise unmemorable things in my day: That amazing hamburger, the good conversation with a friend, the action you took that seemed insignificant at the time but that changed the course of your year, in retrospect.

Because I know some folks will wonder about logistics: I keep each year in its own document called 2026_Daily, and I use the heading structure under Styles to organize the document itself. The document is broken up by week of the year (this is week 20, for example) and so each week is a Heading 2. And then each day is a Heading 3, and I enter items throughout the day as bullet points. This allows easy navigation via the outline view in the sidebar.

Every day I write today’s date at the top of the page, and so the days are in reverse chronological order. You can see a totally made up example of what this looks like here.

Spring Equinox – Jeanette Winterson: Mind Over Matter

This whole essay is beautiful, but I love the concept of borrowing free energy.

I am a big believer in using free energy – whether it’s the energy generated round religious holidays, like Christmas time, or the energy we can feel from the changing of the seasons. Every day is not the same. Our personal energy levels are not the same every day – we all know that. This has been a long winter. If you’re not a self-confessed Goth, you’ll be glad to get out in the longer evenings. There’s no need to do anything; just take a walk.

Source: Spring Equinox – Jeanette Winterson: Mind Over Matter

Native Plants and Depoliticizing the Wildlife Garden – Humane Gardener

We can’t take care of the planet in the long term unless we take care of each other now. And we can’t take care of each other in the long term unless we take care of the planet now. I believe in human rights, and I welcome the other citizens of this earth with open arms. I believe in the rights of our fellow species to make a home here, too, and I welcome them with the plants they need to survive. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.

Source: Native Plants and Depoliticizing the Wildlife Garden – Humane Gardener

Watching the clouds

When I was a little boy, both of my parents worked a lot, and I spent a lot of time at my neighbor’s house. They were retired farmers, and as my surviving grandfather lived far away, they filled that role in my life.

They were very much a product of their time. They didn’t follow daylight saving time, or government time, as they called it, and they didn’t have air conditioning, although I think that was mostly on him, because after he died, she installed a window unit in the room she spent the most time in. They unplugged the TV when it wasn’t in use, lest it cause a fire. And every day after 3PM, he would sit on the east side of his house in the shade.

He was, by the time I remember him best, pretty ill, and his days of strenuous activity were behind him. He had a chair in the living room that was his chair, and he would sit there and read the paper, or tell me stories, or watch the news to get the weather. And he would watch the way the light from the sun moved across the floor through the window, and when it reached the edge of the couch, it was time to go outside.

I pointed out to him you didn’t have to watch the sun—you could just look at the clock and go outside after three.

“But what happens if your clock breaks?” he asked. “Besides, the light lines up with the clock a little different every day. The light is what matters, not the time.”

He would sit out there until suppertime—about 6:30 in the summer. And I would play at his feet, and we would watch the cars go by, which were many fewer in those days than now, and he taught me to lie on my back and look at the clouds and see how they would shift shapes, becoming bears and cats and sometimes look like nothing but clouds and yet be pretty all the same.

Last Sunday was daylight saving time, but I was out of town when it happened. And, to my eternal shame, I did, in fact, change my clocks. Honestly, these days, most of them change themselves. But today was a gorgeous day, and I went for a long walk, like I do most days, and I saw the white clouds on the blue sky, and I would swear I saw both a bear and a cat. I like to think that, somewhere, wherever he is, he did too.