Category: blog

Introducing: Canebrake Studio

It feels tone deaf to try to talk about anything on social media right now that isn’t the horrific situation in Minnesota. Or the Epstein files. Or Venezuela. Or. Or. Or.

I know many of us are collectively grieving while in shock and in fear. Meanwhile, we still have to pay the light bill. The mortgage is due. We’re still expected to show up for work. It’s a lot.

So it is with a bit of reticence that I tell you I have done what many of you have asked me to do, and I opened a store to sell the handcrafted items—spoons, cutting boards, crosses, etc. — I make. It’s also where you can buy a copy of my book, Food Is Love.

I started a company to hold the store and my writing and publishing work, and it’s called Canebrake Studio. I talk about the logic behind the name on the store’s about page.

Why not just start an Etsy shop?

Several reasons, including liking to be in control, owning my audience, and seller fees, but the biggest one is that I don’t just want a place to sell things, although I surely do hope you buy things I make. I also want a place to talk about things like being a leftist who is trying to build a business in keeping with my values, in public, from scratch.

This is going to be a business with a point of view.

Because the time and money to make this happen came about because of the members who support my work, members at every level get a 10% discount on everything in the shop. You can learn more about being a member on this page.

The inventory will be updated on Sunday evenings, usually by 9 PM Central Time, so please check back.

And it’s still under construction, but all the pieces are there. Pardon the dust as it continues to get tweaks and adjustments. Remember, I’m building this in public.

I’m really excited about this, and I hope you will check it out.

Food Is Love—The Book

In December of 2021, I wrote a blog post about biscuits. I had been on a long road trip, coming home from a friend’s memorial service, and I was all in my feelings. I stopped for a biscuit at a fast-food joint.

As I drove home, staring at the gray asphalt in front of me, I thought about how, in the midst of my deep sadness, I sought comfort not in a whiskey bottle, or illicit chemicals, or retail therapy, or any of the other ways our society connects with its feelings, but instead, I sought out a biscuit.

This led me to reflecting on all the ways food and memory and feeling are intertwined—how safe I felt at that potluck dinner in that church basement, how loved I was when mom made my favorite meal, the comfort at having the same three deserts at every family celebration.

It occurred to me that food is love, and that I have known this as long as I have known anything. The people who loved me in the rural hill country of Mississippi didn’t have many tools to show that love, but, by God, they could make sure I was fed food that nurtured my soul as well as my body. We might not have health insurance or name-brand clothes, but we could have cobblers and fudge pies and biscuits that flake like a pastry from Paris does.

After a long hard day at work, a pot of beans and ham and a slice of rustic cornbread give you strength to get up tomorrow, to take care of the people you love. And the health, energy, rejuvenation and even joy that comes from simple food, prepared well and with love and intention, can give downtrodden people enough margin in their lives to keep going and sometimes inch forward, even when everything around them seems to conspire against them. 

So, I wrote a book about that.

It’s 30 essays about food, love, and care. Interspersed, there are 25 recipes of foods that matter to me, and that have stories attached to them. Along the way, you will learn how to season a cast-iron skillet, the makings of a perfect barbecue bologna sandwich, and we will go hunting for muscadines in the thicket so we can make jelly.

But mostly, I hope this book will help you reflect on the foods that are tied to memories for you, and that take you back to the people you love, again and again.

You can buy a signed copy from me, or get an unsigned paperback of Food is Love at Bookshop.org, Amazon , on Kindle, or at Barnes & Noble. You should also be able to order directly from your local independent bookstore.

Goodbye, 2025

I hate the winter, but I love New Year’s Day. It’s a time when we at least consider what we can do differently in the future, while remembering the things we have done in the past. If you, like me, have the twin addictions of hope and nostalgia, it can be a wonderful time.

It can also be a time of depression and anxiety if you are not careful, especially if when you look back you see pain, and if you look forward, you see anxiety and scarcity.

Although I am addicted to hope and nostalgia, I live with anxiety and depression. And 2025 has been rough, y’all.

The back story:

In 2024, I was hired to build a nonprofit to connect living wage employers to formerly incarcerated folks. They had some funding commitments, and a general plan, so most of what I needed to do was to bring about implementation. In late fall of 24, those funding commitments disappeared, so we pivoted to getting federal money commitments to fund it. We reached terms in the first full week of 2025—the future looked amazing.

And then the inauguration happened. Federal money disappeared. People who had been eager to talk to me suddenly quit returning calls. Some of our best relationships lost their jobs. We came up with alternative plans to downscale, but couldn’t downscale enough, fast enough. By April, we didn’t have any money left to pay me. I lost my health insurance at the end of May.

I went into organizer mode and began having lots of one-on-one conversations with folks—here’s what I’ve been up to, here’s what I would like to do. Ideas coalesced, and people got excited, and some folks who were trying to reboot a failing nonprofit with an amazing legacy hired me to bring this vision to their org. They had some money, not much, but had funding commitments, and a rich legacy they were under-utilizing.

Friends, four months later the funding commitments fell through, and the philanthropic world had changed, and what would have been easy to fund in 2024 became a nightmare in 2025.

So, in early November, I found myself back to beating the streets. Right before the holidays is always a good time to look for your next career move (that was sarcasm). But more than that, I began to have some pretty severe doubts about the future, this country, and my role in it.

The navel gazing:

I have spent almost all the last 20 years doing “social justice work”, broadly defined. Most of my money has come from the nonprofit sector, but I don’t think of myself as a nonprofit professional. I just wanted to do good work, and that was the easiest, most legible way to get paid for it. And it has always been relatively easy to find work that needs doing, and that I am interested in doing, and that there were enough people willing to pay me to do it.

But the world has changed. I spent this whole damn year talking to philanthropy, and they are scared out of their gourds, y’all. It’s always hard to raise money for things in Mississippi—nationally, only 3% of philanthropic dollars come to the South. But the left-leaning folks who have always been eager to try new things are now holding onto every dollar, because the work they have funded until now is in danger. And they are scared of the IRS being weaponized against them for funding “woke” causes.

Individual philanthropists (read: rich folks of good will) are scared, too. Don’t attract too much attention, don’t take risks, don’t draw the ire of the administration.

As a straight white Christian male, I’ve never really been afraid of drawing attention—but that is when you can count on due process, and a stable federal government. But I am the sole income earner in our household. My spouse is disabled and dependent on insurance provided by the federal government to stay alive. Her meds alone would cost 36,000 out of pocket. My wife and five cats depend on my earning money to keep them all alive, and there is zero hyperbole in that sentence.

So, do I really want to invest in, and depend on, a future where I derive my income by being someone who gets paid to be a high-visibility, active combatant of the government?

It does not feel safe to do so. Or wise.

I dislike saying that. I dislike feeling afraid for my family and the people I love. And I dislike making money decisions based on fear.

So here we are at the end of this horrible year, and our country is in chaos, and our elected officials are untrustworthy, and I worked full time only eight of the last 12 months, and am really not sure I want to keep working in the nonprofit sector. And I’m 53, and God help my algorithm, which is filled with articles telling me how scary the job market is for folks over 50.

To be clear—I earn income from several places. I do some contract work for a local nonprofit—I earn about 20% of my annual income from there. I have a newsletter I publish, and other writing, and that is all supported by a team of patrons—that is another 25% or so. And I occasionally sell something I made, or a commission piece, and that is maybe 8-10%.

So, right now, bills are being paid, but losing half your income and all your health insurance leaves a mark. Emotionally, having started this year on a high note and leaving it in a severe deficit has messed with my head in all the ways you might expect it would for a 53-year-old male with depression and anxiety and ADHD.

Some conclusions:

In 2026, I will have to focus on making money. That is pretty much the filter for taking on new things next year: do they make money?

I’ve removed myself from some boards, and shucked myself from some other commitments. I’ve formed a new company to hold my creative work, and it will have a store where I sell the things I make and write (expect several big announcements on January 5th!).

Related to that, expect me to make and to write more things to sell. I’m working like a madman to revamp and improve my membership program, so it provides even more value to the members who support my work. (Expect an announcement on February 2nd.)

I’ll be writing more, and Facebook monetized me earlier this year, so I’ll have to figure out how to actually work that. God bless my heart and your feed.

 And yes, while I love the idea of making a living from just the things I make and the words I write, I know I will have to find at least a half-time job to fill in the edges. So, if you know of work you think I would be good at, please let me know.

Over 2025, I’ve felt at various times hopeful, fearful, optimistic, and betrayed. I’m tired and yet know the fight in front of us is long and hard.

One thing I love about social media is the opportunity to share in your joy, even when my supply of joy is in severe deficit. I love seeing your kids’ Halloween costumes, that perfect view from your window, the crumpled wrapping paper on Christmas morning, the excitement that is evident when you post the cover of the book you just finished.  

I see you, and am thankful for you. And thanks for sharing your joy.

Wishing you every good thing in the new year.

HH

PS: This is the sort of thing I used to write regularly, and which got me a reputation for being vulnerable. There are lots of people who are close to me who haven’t known about all the financial chaos of this year because I have been reluctant to write about it. I mean, “a straight white man is afraid—news at 11”.

And honestly, being vulnerable about your fears and doubts gets you clicks, but also takes a toll on your mental health.

But I still hold to the wise words of Mr. Rogers, who said that anything human is mentionable, and by talking about it, it becomes more manageable. Thanks for being the people to give me a place to talk about it.

Living off the rage

The restaurant was quiet, despite its being the lunch hour. The rain came down outside, no doubt part of the reason for the low turnout.

We hadn’t seen each other for a while and were catching up in that meandering, slow way friends do. Here is what her son did, and here are the pictures. Here are pictures of our cats, and did you hear about so and so?

Like that.

Eventually, we got to the current political chaos. It feels like that is the subject of a lot of conversations I have these days. How did we get here? How do we fight back? What can we do?

This led to different people we know doing various kinds of work around this, including one person in particular I think of as The Instagram Activist.

They are at every protest. Their Instagram page is filled with the hashtag de jour. They have an instant opinion on every issue, despite their lack of knowledge of the issue. From matters as wide-ranging as labor policy to race to LGBT issues to food accessibility, they are out in front of the cameras, giving their solutions. They show up at city council and school board meetings with a camera, trying to play gotcha with board members. They have selfies with every significant Civil Rights personality.

And whenever I mention this person to anyone, all people talk about is how angry this person is. No local politician will take their call or trust them with a meeting. All they have is rage.

But here’s the thing—the whole anger thing is a public persona. I’ve spent a fair amount of time with them one on one, and they are not like that at all when the cameras are off.

“They are angry for a living,” I said to my friend at lunch that day.  

She laughed and said that was exactly it.

“They are so caught up in the way it is, they don’t have a plan for what it could be like. They are not giving birth to anything; they are just living off the rage,” she said.

I know lots of folks who are living off the rage. Their Facebook feed is filled with “I told you so” posts. Outrage at the current administration leads them to fat-shame people who disagree with them. They are so mad they call other people who disagree with them names or slurs. The world is broken up into two camps, with the dividing mark being whether you agree with them. They are right; you are wrong. No curiosity, no nuance. Just rage.

Some people just like to fight, and are so busy fighting they never stopped to ask what they are fighting for. What happens if you win?

In May of 1780, John Adams was in Paris, trying to get help from the French government for the American colonies, then in the middle of the Revolutionary War. In a letter to his wife Abigail, he said,   

“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”

I want to be clear: I hate war, and every war results from a failure of imagination. But at least Adams knew what he was fighting for. There was a larger vision at work than just “owning the [political party I oppose]”.

Don’t tell me what you are against: what are you for?

Don’t tell us what you want to destroy: what do you want to build?

I don’t want to know what you hate: let us know what you love.

On my own

The little door to enter the crawlspace under our house is tiny – perhaps 18 inches square. Every time I have to go under our house, I swear I never want to do this again.

The plastic that has been laid in the crawlspace to keep the humidity down rustles as I crawl on my hands and knees over it. It’s dirty and opaque, and in the worst parts of my brain I imagine snakes slithering under it, keeping warm as the temperature drops outside.

I have never seen a snake under this house, but my brain knows they are there.

It’s seven thirty in the morning, and it’s 46 degrees outside, and I am crawling under my house with a flashlight in my mouth trying really hard to not think about snakes because both of the toilets in our house backed up yesterday evening and I’m afraid I shall have to replace a section of drainage pipe. I cannot remember what size drainage pipe we have from the last time I had to replace a section.

Most houses have 4-inch drainage pipe – and as it turns out, we do as well. But our house is seventy-five years old, and was built at a time when all the standards were not yet written in stone. You cannot take such things for granted with such a house as this one. Like the Holy Spirit, it goes where it chooses.  

At some point in the sordid history of this house, a jack legged renovation in the en-suite bath led to chunks of mortar and concrete ending up in the drain pipes, and shortly after we bought the house, I had to crawl under the house and cut out a huge section of the 4 inch cast iron pipe and replace it with PVC because the chunks of concrete had wedged themselves in there.

I assumed instantly that since they were both clogged, this must be a piece of the concrete we had missed, come back to haunt us.

The last time this happened, I tried plunging it, and tried pouring Drano down the tub drain, and I even took the toilet out and tried running a plumbing snake down the drainage pipe. That last adventure is how I discovered the chunks of concrete. It was then that I surrendered and called Dad.

My father was one of those men who could solve any problem. He could fix your air conditioner, rebuild your engine, or rewire your breaker panel. And for 48 years of my life, whenever I had a problem I could not solve, I called him for help.

I explained the situation to him, and said I didn’t know what to do.

He asked two questions. “Does the other toilet work?”

I said that it did.

“The one that is clogged – is it closer to the road or further from the road than the one that works?” was the second question.

“The clogged one is furthest away from the road”, I told him.

“Then it’s simple”, he said. “You have a blockage – probably some chunks of that concrete – between the clogged toilet and the wye where the other toilet joins the drainage pipe. You need to go under the house and cut out the clogged pipe and replace it.”

Oh. That’s all.

He heard the uncertainty in my voice, and walked me through what I needed to buy, the procedures of how to do it, and all of that. And that afternoon, I did it, saving myself probably $800 in the process.

But it had been five years since my Dad died, quickly and unexpectedly, one of the more than 15,000 Mississippians who died of COVID during the pandemic. In fact, it had been five years ago yesterday.

Five years since I could ask him for help. Five years since I had a backup plan. Five years since I could hear him on the other end of the phone and know that my worries were over.

For the last five years, I’ve just been on my own.

It turns out that I didn’t have to replace any pipe this time.  It wasn’t a piece of concrete, just a pernicious clog. In an attempt to avoid crawling under the house again, I decided to try snaking it from the cleanout in the front yard. This approach had hit me at 3 in the morning, when I remembered Dad’s two questions, and realized that if both toilets were clogged, the clog must be after the wye where the two branches join, and thus really close to the cleanout at the front of the house.

Twenty minutes later all the pipes were running freely, and the disaster was averted and I had spent no money at all. And literally my first thought when I saw the toilets flush successfully was that I wish Dad could know about this. That he could know I figured it out. That he knew I was OK. That I didn’t need a backup plan.

I wish he knew I could make it on my own.

Podcast Appearance: Soul + Practice

Kathy Escobar and Phyllis Mathis interviewed me on their podcast Soul + Practice: Raw Conversations, Real Practices, and it went live yesterday.

Kathy was an early role model as I carved out this weird life I have now – she is one of perhaps 5 folks whose work changed my life. I think I’ve known her for 19 years now.

If you are new here (or not), there is a lot that might interest you on here: My “origin” story, beauty as an antidote to despair, practices that can sustain you over time, and making room in the midst of it all for joy to happen.

I also talk a bit about what it means to live in the deep south when the country is on fire, and it’s probably not what you might think.

It was a lot of fun, and Kathy and I are currently trying to figure out more ways to work together. I know I’m really looking forward to that.

Happiness as an orientation

This past weekend, I made a whirlwind trip to the mountains of North Carolina to see some friends who now live in Northern Ireland for the most part, but were back in the States to visit. Other mountain friends came by, and we ate some meals together and told stories and shared what was resonating for us and what scared us and what we hoped for. 

That it was the one year anniversary of Hurricane Helene, the terrible storm that had decimated the economy and life of the area we were in was on everyone’s mind. That it was overcast and rainy made that worse, of course. 

I love these people – most of them were people I knew when I lived in North Carolina, and others I have met on return visits since I have moved, and all of them matter to me. The hardest part about leaving North Carolina was leaving all the people I love behind. Most of these people I met while doing emotionally hard work, and that causes bonds that are not easily broken. 

As someone who blogs and writes and shares things on social media, there is a degree of asymmetrical knowledge when I see people I haven’t seen in a while – while they may not know the whole story, they know the broad beats of my life – the kitten rescue, the trip to the mountains, Renee’s health. 

I generally don’t know anything about what’s going on in their life, so I generally end up asking the most questions. 

But then I got asked the one that stumped me.

“Are you happy?”

I paused, thinking about that question. Am I happy?

“Do you mean right now, with you guys?” I ask. 

“No, in general. Since you’ve moved. In Mississippi – are you happy?”

A curse of neurodivergence is the tendency to take people seriously. When folk ask me how I’m doing, I assume they want to know how I’m doing. So I gave it some thought. 

I live with depression, and while it’s managed, it’s always there. I have periodic bouts of what I would call happiness, but I don’t think I have ever experienced it as a perpetual state, as an orientation. 

So I told her that I don’t think I have ever been happy in the way she means it, but that I am content. It’s much harder in Mississippi than it was in North Carolina on almost every metric except financially. I make more money here, and housing is cheaper here, but I am 7 years in and still don’t have the sort of deep community I had in North Carolina. 

I’m in the biggest city in the state, do very public work, and yet still feel a sort of perpetual loneliness here that I did not experience there. Of course, having two and a half years of your life taken by a global pandemic did nothing to help.

But I like my life. I like that I get to write a lot more than I ever have. I like that I have a house filled with cats and love, a yard with raucous flowers everywhere, and that my wife and I can afford to live in a house that is safe and fits our lifestyle. We have a few friends we are close to, and I get to do work that matters. 

Is that happiness? I’m not sure. But it’s definitely contentment. 

RIP, Harry

In the spring of last year, we ended up in the kitten rescue business. It started innocently enough – a stray cat had given birth to kittens in our backyard, in the hollowed out stump of an old pear tree. My wife, who does not do things half way, swooped into action. 

In the 18 months since, nearly thirty kittens have passed through our house, and 10 adult cats have been spayed or neutered and then released back to their colonies, so they can live out their lives while not increasing the feral kitten population. 

Over the last year and a half, this activity has altered our vacation plans, our home as we remodeled it to have a kitten hospital and nursery, our budget as we buy seemingly endless amounts of cat litter, kitten food and wet wipes, and most importantly, our lives. 

It is not now unusual for someone we do not know to reach out to Renee and say, “Hey – we found these kittens. Can you take them?”

And if we are not extremely over capacity, the odds are the answer is yes. Yes, we can. 

So it was not unheard of when a friend of a friend of a friend texted Renee last week and said that she had found four kittens, less than a week old, that someone had thrown in a dumpster, and could we take them?

We were over capacity, but one of our kittens was going to a new home in a few days, and newborn kittens really only need a warm place to sleep and regular feedings, so we closed off the dining room from our own cats and made it the overflow kitten nursery. When they showed up, they were starving – who knew how long since they had been fed?

Naming kittens is hard – especially when you are doing it every few weeks. It’s important to name them – both so we have a way to tell them apart, but also because people who adopt kittens connect with kittens who have names, and we need these kittens adopted. Most, but not all, folks rename the kittens when we adopt them out. This litter we named after Black celebrities – Harry Bellefonte, Morgan Freeman, Sidney Poitier, and Etta James. 

As is our custom, we took them all to our vet, who looked them over for obvious issues, and then we set to work feeding them 6 milliliters of formula every 2-3 hours and weighing them constantly to make sure they are gaining weight every day. 

When new kittens come in, we don’t get a lot of sleep for the first few weeks. 

All was good for a few days (other than our lack of sleep), but Harry’s weight began to plateau and then he began to lose weight, prompting another visit to the vet. The poor boy had parasites – it is assumed they all do – and he was sent home with medicine for him and all the others. 

But it was apparently too late – Harry didn’t make it through the night, and yesterday morning, I found him dead, nestled among his siblings, as if they were trying to hug him back to life. 

Various stats from kitten advocacy groups tell us that bottle fed kittens have a 20-40% mortality rate – it’s hard out here for a kitten without a mom to take care of them.

And it hurts to lose any of them, but we take some comfort from knowing that the mortality rate of the dumpster they were found in was going to be 100%, and in his last days, little Harry Belafonte was loved, cared for, snuggled, and warm, surrounded by his siblings who were also loved, fed, and warm. 

In his last week, he knew love, and was fed regularly from food bought by people who were rooting for him to make it. I’m glad we were able to do that for him, even if it doesn’t feel like nearly enough. But we’re also really clear it is infinitely better than his dying in a box in a dumpster, afraid and hungry.

Please, please don’t abandon kittens. Please spay and neuter your cats – especially those you let outside.

No takebacks.

The late afternoon light streamed through the large windows of the Starbucks. We had not spoken to each other in weeks. We were here to euthanize our relationship.

“How are you?” she asked. She smiled, paused, and then looked down at the table to break eye contact.

“I’m fine.”

I rotate the cup in my hand while it sits on the table. She and I both stare at my hands as the cup spins, silently, to my right.

“Where will you go?” she asks.

“North Carolina. I have some friends there.”

There. I’ve said it. No takebacks.

“What will you do there? Do you have a plan?”

If I were the sort of person who had a plan, I would not be in this Starbucks.

“I do. I will get a part time job somewhere, and work on my writing.”

She laughs. I notice the chip on her eye tooth.

“That’s cute,” she said. “Now I remember why we broke up.”

I feel that in the pit of my stomach, like an injection of ice.

No takebacks.

“I’ll be fine,” I said.