Posts – Hugh's Blog

The roses persist, and so do I.

I’ve been struggling with low-level depression for most of this year. Just doing the bare minimum of self-care has been a struggle. It’s effect on me has been exacerbated by a big cut in income I have experienced this year, and the loss of health insurance which prevents me from having access to mental health meds.

Also, it is so, so hot here. I haven’t built anything in my workshop in over a month, because it is in the 90’s in my workshop all the time. I haven’t been on one of my long walks in over a month because of the heat. This is circular, because one of the most effective ways for me to stave off the effects of depression is to go for long walks in nature (walking in the suburban mall doesn’t work the same way – I’ve tried).

The big cut in income brings its own problems, of course, but the depression means you just do not have the energy to do the things you need to do to deal. I learned last week that one of my contracts is being cut in half. I don’t have the energy to freak out, but my brain really wants to. My car needs some expensive brake work, so I’ve parked it until I find some money, and instead am driving my very reliable 25 year old work truck, which is amazing except the air conditioning does not really work (have I mentioned how hot it is here?). I have no energy to work on any of this.

Everything is made harder when you are depressed.

Meanwhile, my antique roses are doing great.

Antique roses are those introduced to market before the introduction of hybrid tea roses in 1867. Antique roses tend to be bulletproof, because they were popular before disease fighting spraying regimes were really a thing. Back then, roses that couldn’t fight off disease just died.

I have a bunch of roses in my yard. Most of them are antiques. And right now it’s 98.8 degrees outside, with a heat index of 110, and my roses are just blooming up a storm. In August, in the middle of Mississippi.

I guess roses don’t get depressed.

Actually, the heat does stress them, but they keep going. They are resilient in the face of stress, not immune to it.

Talk about goals.

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.

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.

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.

Mike’s Bible

Today is Mike’s birthday. Facebook reminded me this morning, which felt like a punch in the gut. So, I thought it was fitting to tell you about Mike’s Bible.

The Bible itself is nothing to look at. If you were looking for a generic idea of what a Bible should look like, it would look like this one. It’s black leather, with gilt edges and a black ribbon to mark your place, and in gold script in the lower right-hand corner, it has Mike’s name embossed.

This Bible is nothing special on its own, but it is very important to me. Thoreau said the value of a things lies in what of we have to give up to obtain it. By that measure, it is one of the more valuable things I own–not from what I gave up, but what was given up for it to come into my possession.

It’s the King James Version – a no longer fashionable version first published in 1611, with archaic language that uses thee and thou as pronouns. In my experience, two kinds of people still use the King James Version. The first is people who grew up using it, who find the language comfortable and soothing, who relish the poetic notes as the language of devotion. The second is people who desire a scripture that is fixed in time, an immutable authority that does not change.

I am the first sort of person. Mike was the second.

He first came in my office about 13 years ago, just off the bus from Virginia. His marriage had ended because of his chemical addiction. He had an ex-wife and a daughter, neither of who would talk to him, and he had been raised by a grandmother, now dead. She had given him the Bible he carried everywhere, with his name embossed in gilt on the front.

Mike would come to the church I was at in those days and lead us in hymns he knew, which were the most strict sort, involving lots of blood atonement and proclamations of our unworthiness. He believed in a wrathful, powerful God in a way I have never believed in anything. He could cite obscure scriptures to “prove” his points, and when he was sober–which admittedly came and went–-he was a kind and gentle soul.

Over the three years I saw him often, Mike would occasionally go away for a while to various rehab facilities, and while there he would write me letters filled with Biblical citations and affirmations of his complete recovery when he was released. Promises made, the Holy Spirit invoked, Satan renounced. This time, it was going to be different.

Sadly, his aspirations always exceeded his abilities, for Matt never lasted more than a month outside of rehab before he was using again.

One day he walked into my office. I had not seen him for a good three months. We always said that when people disappeared on us, it was either really good, or really bad. For Mike, it had been bad. He was dirty, and smelled of sweat and urine. In his hand he held his Bible.

“Preacher, this is my Bible. My granny gave it to me when I got saved at a revival when I was a teenager. I don’t want to lose it – will you hold onto it for me?”

Of course I would.

Mike began a steady descent after that day. I wonder sometimes if the responsibility of keeping track of his one prized possession hadn’t been good for him. I don’t know – I just know that after that, he spiraled down quickly.

One day he came in, relatively sober, and asked if I still had his Bible. I told him I did, and asked if he wanted it back.

“Not yet,” he said. “You keep it for me until I am ready for it.”

That was the last time I saw Mike. He disappeared, and several weeks later we learned he had died one night in a storm, drowning in a drainage ditch while high on paint fumes.

Mike didn’t make it, but I still have his Bible. It sits on my desk, and I will pick it up some days and thumb through it-–sometimes looking for comfort, but other times when I need to be reminded of truths I know, but am prone to forget.

The page at the front of the Bible where marriages are to be recorded has Mike and his wife’s names written in, but her name marked through and obliterated, serves to remind me that things don’t always go like we wish they would.

The underlined verses about the wrath of God and the power of God (but never about the love of God) remind me that people like Mike, who in this life was powerless but loving, needed a God who was what he wasn’t.

The embossed cover with his name on it, a gift from his Granny, reminds me that as broken and discarded as Mike was when I knew him, he was once loved and prized by his family, and that all of us have a back story–none of us are the worst thing other people know about us.

But mostly, this old Bible reminds me that you don’t always win. When I read from it, I am reminded that no one ever wanted to be sober as much as Matt, and that just wanting it is never enough.

But I really wish it was.

The Bar

It was pouring rain outside, but inside the bar, it was warm and dry. It was also dark, and the task lighting here and there behind the bar made pools that illuminated the area around them. The murmur of conversation played off the piped-in piano jazz, and the overall effect was that you were lucky to be alive while such a place existed.

It was the bar in a nice hotel in downtown Memphis in the year 2002. I was freshly divorced and stony broke, and once a week or so I would scrape $20 together and visit this place of luxury and drink two drinks. Just two. That was all I could afford, and even in those days I knew alcohol was not my friend.

It was always the same order: A vodka and tonic in a tall glass, with a lime. I had picked that up in the days when I would take clients out for drinks, and I needed a “standard” drink that every bar in the world would be able to make. It was the blue blazer of drinks.

It had the advantage of being clear, so if you were getting in over your head, you could just order tonic and lime and no one was the wiser. But those days were long gone. Now I was no longer on expenses, no longer wooing clients. Now I was the sort of person who scraped $20 together once a week to get two drinks in a nice bar.

It wasn’t really about the drinks. It was the way they would kiss my ass when I showed up. The way they knew my name, knew my drink. The way the bartender polished the glasses, the way he always had a basket of pretzels at the ready.

I loved the ways the candles on the tables would flicker in the mirror over the bar, the way the glasses tinkled, the sound of the drinks being mixed. The bathrooms in that bar were temples to the art of tile and plumbing, and to this day, it might be the nicest toilet I have ever used. An elderly Black man in the hotel uniform handed you a paper towel after you washed your hands, and you gave him a dollar while you acted as if this didn’t embarrass either of you.

The bar manager was a Black man in his mid-thirties named Daniel. He was always happy to see me, and for a while, he would remember the name of the woman I had brought there once when it was important to me that she know the things that were important to me. And when I told him we had broken up, he never mentioned her again.

It would be another six years before I would have a smart phone, and this was much too nice a bar to have a television in it. The drink sat on a coaster, sweat running down the sides of the glass as I would twist it clockwise with my fingers.

I sat at the bar, slowly drinking my clear drink, eating pretzels, and chatting with Daniel. Nowhere to go, no one expecting me or trying to get in touch with me. I was just sitting in that perfect, dark, flickering world as long as the money held out.

I don’t really drink much anymore. I might drink three drinks a year, and some years, I might drink none. But I am still a sucker for a quiet, dark bar, one that’s warm and dry when it’s wet outside, the sort of place where, when you break up with someone, they do you the favor of forgetting her name.

These days, I have come to see luxury hotels as a sort of hack. I can’t afford to stay at a luxury hotel, but I can sit at the bar in the lobby and drink my clear drink with a lime, and be treated like a king for a $5 tip on top of the cost of the drink. It doesn’t have to be the bar, either. Maybe it’s their café. Maybe it’s the nice restaurant, where you just get coffee and a dessert. For a few minutes, you can sit in the flickering light while they pretend that you too are royalty. You too belong.

And in exchange, you too can relax and forget, just for a moment, that the world is on fire.