Category: Posts

Considering the circumstances

We live in perilous times. I’m sure that has always been true, for somebody. It’s after all, why apocalyptic literature always has an audience: it’s always the end of the world for someone.

But here in the US, things seem particularly fragile. Rights we assumed were etched in stone have been seen as ephemeral. Elected leaders have made room for White Supremacy and Christian Nationalism to go unchecked, even as they pour fuel on the fires.  

When I started this piece, I made a list of all the ways our country is falling apart in front of us, and all the ways this is making it harder and harder on all of us. But I abandoned it because you probably have the same list, and any list wouldn’t be exhaustive.

But suffice it to say, we are not living in normal times, and everyone feels it. The question is, what do we call it?

Because when someone asks you how you are doing, it isn’t cool to trot out that list. I mean, none of us have time for that, and there isn’t much you can do to solve any of those things as an individual today, and again, we all have the same list.

In the aftermath of the Civil War in the US, a thing that was of such magnitude that it practically decimated the US South, Southerners would sometimes refer to the war and its aftermath as “the recent unpleasantness”.

In Northern Ireland, they speak of the time of the conflict from the 60s to the 90s as “The Troubles.”

So much of what happened from 2020 to 2022 globally can be put down to “The Pandemic”, even things that were not directly virus-related. It is just how we talk about that time.

“I lost my job during the pandemic.” “We got married during the pandemic.” “I went half-crazy during the pandemic.” “The inflation that happened during the pandemic is lingering.”

But what is our shorthand for what is currently happening?

I have begun referring to all the chaos around us as “The Circumstances.” I’m sure I didn’t invent this, but I’ve been on too many Zoom calls where people check in and they say, “I’m doing okay, considering the circumstances.”

Everyone I explain this to laughs, but usually a little too knowingly. They too are living in the circumstances, feel pulled about by the circumstances, and like they are living at the whim of the circumstances.

“How are you, Hugh?”

“OK, given the circumstances.”

“Will you be at [event]?”

“Probably, but it depends on the circumstances.”

“Why are you writing so much?”

“I don’t know what else to do, considering the circumstances.”

Looking for place

A few years back, I was at home for our annual family reunion. It happens every Easter—we Hollowells gather, and we bring food, and we hide Easter eggs, and we ooh and awe over people’s kids, and tell each other it’s been too long. They began doing this when I lived away, and now that I live much closer, I try to go every year.

I was standing down by the pond, watching the kids fish, when one of my many cousins moved up beside me and said he had heard we live in Jackson now.

You should know that Jackson is not only the capital of Mississippi, it is also the largest city as well. In fact, it is almost twice the size of the second-largest city. That all sounds much more impressive than it is; Raleigh, NC has suburbs that are larger than Jackson. Even so, relative to the rest of Mississippi, Jackson is huge.

And so, to my family back home, the big city often seems like a hotbed of crime and terror, whereas to me, it just feels like where I live.

So, I confirmed he was right: we live in Jackson now.

“No way would I live there,” he told me.

“Well, you have a great life here,” I told him. “We like it there, but I enjoyed living in Raleigh, too, and I enjoyed living in Memphis, and I enjoyed living here back when I did. I’ve just learned that you can always find a reason to love a place if you want to.”

“There’s something to that, I guess,” my cousin said before he went in search of another hot dog.

The other day, somebody I recently began working with on a project said, out of nowhere, that she loved how important a sense of place was to me. And while it’s true that I feel place deeply, like I told my cousin, it has always been like that.  

I cannot describe to you how important the cedar trees on our place were to me growing up, how much I enjoyed the small creek that ran through our property, the sounds of the mockingbirds as I walked through the woods.

But it was like the way I felt a decade later as I rode the bus down Poplar Avenue in Memphis, watching the cars go by and the high-rises downtown become shopping centers and then mansions as we headed east. Or the way I felt as I walked in Tom Lee Park and watched the river roll by, or how proprietary I felt when eating dry-rubbed ribs at Interstate BBQ. I would visit Wild Bill’s juke joint on Vollintine, bobbing my head to the music and drinking a 40 and feel like this was home.

In Raleigh, I would walk the streets and pass the restaurants and the clubs and the shops and feel a sense of ownership, and a desire to protect the people there, as well as the people who were believed not good enough to be there.

And yesterday, as I walked the streets of downtown Jackson, the city I have called home for over seven years now, I saw all the ways beauty sneaks into what is a hard city to thrive in, and I felt a huge sense of pride for us, and for the resilience of the people here.

I guess I am just saying that what I told my cousin is true: there is always beauty wherever you are. There is always something to be proud of, something to notice, something that needs improving, and something to celebrate. And I have found that looking for a thing increases your odds of finding it, whether that thing is a reason to love where you are, or reasons to hit the road the first chance you get.

The thief of joy

I know a guy—let’s call him Steve. In one way, he’s my peer. We are both ministers. Both pretty active online. Both have newsletters. Both are on the very progressive end of our respective denominations. Both have reach and influence. In the circles we share, we are both known and respected for our positions.

But Steve has additional marks of success. He has served in a very high-profile role in his denomination, whereas mine barely knows I exist. He goes on international humanitarian trips and writes about them. I barely go to the suburbs, have only been out of the country one time, and my passport is currently expired. He has written books, probably five or six of them. I only recently published my first one.

In my head, I think of him as successful at all of this “being a public person” stuff, and I don’t think that way of myself at all. In my head, he is a successful writer, and I am not. Not because of anything I know, but because of the story I have written about him in my head.

Theodore Roosevelt once said that comparison is the thief of joy. He was onto something, I think. In truth, comparing myself to Steve is not a fair comparison. Because I know all the chaos and struggle that goes on in my head, all the times I catch myself slacking off, all the ways I let myself down, and with Steve, I only see the final results. I see his outsides and compare it to my insides.

I know this intellectually, but it doesn’t matter—not really. Deep inside, most of the time I am still convinced Steve has a better life and is more successful than I am.

It’s also worth noting that for all the ways our situations are similar, there are significant ways they are not. He has generational family financial resources that I do not have. His spouse works a professional job that provides health insurance for his family. My spouse is disabled and on Medicare.

Steve and I have another difference, too. He recently wrote a blog post about his writing, and it turns out that I make about three times more from my writing than he does from his writing.

Huh. Freakin’ Steve, man.

Steve isn’t the only one—he’s just a recent example. As a child growing up in a poor household in the 80s, I was taught by everyone, both implicitly and explicitly, to be deeply dissatisfied with the way my life was, and that my goal in life should be to improve it, to make it better. I was a child of Reaganomics, of greed is good, of the era that made Trump a household name and a source of aspiration. Titans of industry like Lee Iacocca and Jack Welch were household names.

I spent my twenties working in financial sales trying to get that life, and then my early thirties trying to get away from it. It would be the unhoused, the addicted, and the mentally ill who saved my soul as well as my life, and who ultimately showed me the way out.

But not all envy is about money, and not all the ways our society measures prestige have dollar signs attached. Which is why I can sell more books than Steve and still find myself jealous of his life.

Serendipity

On the day it happened I was 11. Mom had dropped me off at Dad’s office because she had to run an errand, and the plan was for me to ride home with Dad. It was always fun to be at Dad’s office. It was a very masculine place, and the employees treated me well, mostly out of deference to Dad, who was their boss. I would sit in his office on a comfortable chair and read a book, and if I needed a scene change, I would go exploring in the warehouse and hit up the Coke machine.

Dad’s office was only 10 minutes from our house if you took the most direct route, but on the way home that day, we turned right at Warsaw Grocery, leaving the highway we would normally take and instead went down Strickland Road—a viable path, for sure, but one that would add another 10 minutes to the trip.

I was confused. “Why are we going this way?”

“No reason, “Dad said.

“But it’s longer.”

Dad looked at me, and then back at the road. He sighed.

“Not everything has to be faster, Son. It’s just a change of pace. Seeing something different. And besides—it opens doors.”

I told him that this made no sense to me.

“Look at it this way: If we go the same way we always do, we are exposed to the things we normally see, the people we normally see, the routine we always do. But if you go a different route, you just opened another door for things to happen to you that wasn’t there before. You made room for luck, or serendipity, or providence, whatever you want to call it, to happen. Or, you can stay in your rut and complain that nothing good ever happens.”

* * *

I had occasion to go to the post office today.

That’s the thing about selling books-people expect you to mail them out. This leads to all sorts of side quests, like buying packing tape, shipping envelopes, and shipping labels. These are all things nobody tells you that you are going to need as a writer, but here we are.

People say they become writers because they love writing, but I don’t think that is necessarily so, because any time you get three or more writers together, what they talk about is how their books sell, or how they do not. It is not, after all, called the New York Times Best Writers list.  

So, I had sold some books (yay!) and I packed them and bought postage and printed labels and taped them firmly and took them to the post office. Because they are prepaid and metered, I can drop them in the lobby box if I want to, but I don’t—I went inside and stood in line and chatted with the people next to me in the queue and then handed them to the clerk.

By now, some months into going there several times a week, she knows me. I don’t mean we hang out, but she recognizes me, and we have a small chat about the weather, and on Fridays she will tell me to be safe over the weekend. All of this is unnecessary—after all, I can drop them in the box in the lobby, remember?—but community is made up of thousands of small conversations, jokes, and pleasantries just like this.

The clerk is not anonymous to me, despite my not knowing her name. She smiles when I come in, and she comments on the number of books I have sold, and whether the orders are increasing or decreasing. She matters to me, in the sense that if she was not there, I would notice it. She is part of the world I have built here, one tiny piece of this community I call home.

It might indeed be faster to just put them in the box in the lobby, but I won’t know that, because I have no desire to replace her and the interactions we have with a speedier visit. And from a purely pragmatic point of view, one day, something is going to go wrong at the post office. I will need help to figure out directions, or my package might be a half an inch too large. And when that happens, I will have months and months of small deposits in my account with her. It is a lubricant to prevent future disasters.

But the main reason I go inside instead of dropping them in the box is the lesson I learned all those years ago on Strickland Road: when you get a chance, try to open doors and give serendipity a place to land.

Six years

Six years ago today–February 23, 2020-was the best day I had had in months. But I did not know then that it would be the last time I would hug my dad.

My wife and I were foster parents then, and almost a month before, a young boy we will call Paul (not his real name) came to live with us. Paul had just turned 7, and was full of energy and spirit, and Mom and Dad had heard so much about him. They had decided to come to Jackson to meet him for themselves.

It was a Sunday, and like today, it was a nice day, and the sun was shining. I had to preach that morning, and so my parents (who lived two and a half hours from us) got here in time to meet us at a local restaurant, and then they came to our house.

Paul showed off his room, and my parents oohed and awed in all the right places. I had told Mom how much Paul loved playing with Legos, so she had brought a huge bucket of Legos from when we were kids, and so she and Paul played Legos and talked about our cats, and then he and Dad went outside and my father who never once tossed me a baseball played catch with this kid he just met.

I made a big pot of chili and a huge skillet of cornbread that day, and we ate it for supper around our dining room table. Paul told jokes-he was a master joke teller- and Mom and Dad told him stories about me when I was a kid, and about the hoses they had, and how much they were looking forward to his coming to visit them.

When it was time for them to go home, we went out to the car and did that thing you do when it was a good day and you don’t want it to end. Paul got hugs and said how much fun he had had, and we all were talking about us going to see them one weekend soon.

That had been a really rough winter for us. We had major unplanned expenses, the chaos of the foster system, and car problems galore, all on top of the ever-present depression. But this? This was a good day. In my journal for that day, I said it was the best day I had had in a very, very long time.

In a few weeks, of course, the world would change forever. School shut down, and travel stopped, and we were all hunting for toilet paper and there were COVID projects and remote learning and we prayed this would all be over by Thanksgiving so we could all gather together.

But then in October Paul got sent back to his family, and two days later COVID killed my dad and I would not smile again for months.

But I didn’t know any of that on this day, six years ago. On that night, as I watched the red taillights disappear at the end of our street, I only knew the aching in your sides that comes from laughter, the hope of future plans, and that I had come from love, that I was loved, and was filled with love in return.

Applause

When I was 16, I walked across the stage at a community college in our state capital to cheers and applause. I had just won the statewide competition for extemporaneous speaking, and as a result, would go to Tulsa, Oklahoma to represent Mississippi.

Somewhere, in a box, I have a picture of that day. I was grinning from ear to ear. I was socially awkward and had been bullied, so I seldom got affirmations of my abilities like that. It was one of the best days of my childhood.

And the whole time that was happening, I was experiencing suicidal ideation.

I am a writer, and so I create metaphors to describe my experiences as I try to explain them to others. This frustrates my therapist, who wants plain language, but like Popeye, I am who I am, and who I am is a person who needs metaphor.

My favorite way to explain how I experience depression is that it is sort of like herpes. It’s always there – always. I have been medicated and CBT’d, and talk therapy’d, and it all helps, and it always falls short, because there is no fixing this—not really. I just accept that I have depression, in the same way my cousin has red hair, or I have blue eyes. Shittiest genetic surprise ever.

Like herpes, sometimes it presents worse than it does at other times. Sometimes I barely notice it, like a low-level headache that you just deal with. But sometimes I will have a flare-up and can barely move I am so overwhelmed by it, and I wonder if this is the time my brain will actually kill me. Not because I want to die, because I absolutely do not, but because brains are wild and capricious and it has tried before and honestly, some days it would be really nice not to be here.

If you knew there was someone out there who might want to kill you, you would try your best to avoid that person, but when it’s your brain, the best you can do is get help and follow instructions. From your helpers, I mean. Not from your brain. Because it wants to kill you.

But you still won’t be cured. It’s always there, and so you are self-monitoring all the time. The constant self-examination is exhausting.

There are things you can do to decrease the likelihood of a flare-up. Maybe you will win. You really want to. You definitely won’t if you don’t try.

So you eat lots of protein and get lots of sunlight and have a therapy lamp and walk most days and pet your cats and try to have a spirit of gratitude for all the ways your life is amazing. You plant colorful flowers in your yard and put pictures of people you love on the walls, and you read poetry that is so stunningly beautiful you cry in the shower while thinking about it. You feed the stray kittens and march at the protest, and you smile when the kids across the street get on the bus because they see you on the porch and wave and fill you with so much fucking hope.

I hope you make it, pal. It’s beautiful here.

The chicken tender

For more than a decade, and in three different locations, we have had chickens. It’s almost a cliché, being the sort of person who has chickens in their backyard, but here we are.

Our own flock has always been relatively tiny, usually fluctuating between two and six, but almost always more than was legally permissible by the municipality we lived in. Don’t get me started on that. People can have giant dogs that bark at all hours of the day and night and that kill other people’s pets, but my two peeping hens are a problem?

I have a bit of a weird relationship with our hens. I’m their primary caretaker—transplant recipients like my wife are warned against birds because of the many diseases they are prone to carrying. The four hens we currently house are not our pets—they don’t have names, and I don’t cuddle them or put cute curtains in their coop—but they are more than merely productive livestock.

In factory farms, where chickens are forced to lay eggs year-round and are fed monotonous meals, and live in crowded, sunless conditions, a hen’s life expectancy is 18 months, max. That is the age at which egg production wanes, and thus they are deemed to no longer be cost-effective to keep alive, and are then euthanized and either dumped in a landfill or composted. As someone who does not depend on our hens for our living, we can afford to keep “unproductive” hens.

We also do not rely on them solely for eggs. We are in a sort of partnership, these hens and me. I house them and feed them and keep them safe from predators, and they lay eggs and dispose of our kitchen scraps and turn it all into manure I compost and use in my garden. They live in spacious quarters—the factory farms could fit 20 hens into the space I give our four, and while they would be happier if they could roam free in the thicket at the back of our property, they would not be safe there. It would also make getting their eggs and manure far more difficult, and there you have the eternal dilemma—balancing my needs as chicken tender (see what I did there?) with their needs for safety. Because, let’s be clear, the average chicken is about as smart as a bowl of Jello.

But, if you decide to keep chickens, have a plan for what you will do with them for the 20 weeks they are alive before they can lay eggs, what you will do with them for the three years after they are no longer productive layers, and you have to have a plan for the eggs. That last one can sneak up on you: a 12-month-old chicken can lay between 200 and 300 eggs a year. If you have three hens, that could mean 75 dozen eggs in your first full year of ownership, or one and a half dozen eggs every week.

Tell the truth: How many eggs did you buy last year? Probably not one and a half dozen a week, every single week. Honestly, having three and four year old hens whose laying has slowed is much more manageable for us.

Right now, I have two new chicks, about three weeks old, living in a storage tub in my office under a heat lamp. They are tiny, perhaps the size of an avocado, and nearly as smart. They peep a lot and respond to my voice, which means they get loudest when I am talking, which makes Zoom calls delightful.

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you over the chicks.”

They will live there another three weeks, by which time they will be living in a pen outdoors, separate from the other, older chickens until they reach full size and can fend for themselves. And then another six to eight years of partnership follows.

Lets choose wisely

NB: Each week I’m posting something from the archives of my more than 20 years of writing on the web. Sometimes it’s a social media post, sometimes a blog post, or (like today) it’s an excerpt from a newsletter issue originally published in February of 2020. Each entry gets updated with some modern context or point of view. – HH

The news is exhausting. The election is exhausting. Winter is exhausting. Social Media is exhausting. The wanton destruction of the planet and the hopelessness it brings is exhausting. 

It is all so much, and there seems to be no sign of letting up. And it is at times like this I am tempted to give up, to give in, to resign myself to our circumstances, and just try to survive. ButI can’t bring myself to do it. Because I know the truth: That while the world is full of suffering and pain, it is also full of the overcoming of it. 

Show me capitalism run amuck, and I will show you Bob’s Red Mill being given to its employees. Show me Antarctica being at record highs, and I will show you urban farms on blighted land in Baltimore, Detroit, and Jackson, MS. Show me cynical talk show hosts and I will introduce you to a wonder-filled 7 year old. 

There is as much evidence out there that we are a wonderful species, capable of doing amazingly beautiful things as there is that we are a trashy invasive species hell bent on destroying the planet and each other, but it’s not as well distributed, and it’s often hidden. 

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy received two conflicting cables from Moscow. One was threatening, and the proper response to it was war. One was peaceful, and the proper response to it was de-escalation. They each had equal evidence as being the “real” cable. Kennedy chose to believe the one that led to de-escalation, and thus we avoided nuclear war. There is a lot of conflicting information out there. I’m not talking about science or climate change or vaccines or the efficacy of essential oils, but conflicting information about who we are, and what we are capable of. And every time, we get to choose what we believe about the world around us.

I hope we choose wisely.

Update:

I wrote this just weeks before the pandemic shut everything down, almost six years ago now. And yet it feels like it could have been written yesterday. I think it’s even more important than ever to choose what we believe about the world around us, and the people around us, and to be very clear what we are looking for – because we will almost always find it.

Endurance

NB: Each week I’m posting something from the archives of my more than 20 years of writing on the web. Sometimes it’s a social media post, sometimes a blog post, or (like today) it’s an excerpt from a newsletter issue originally published in October of 2025. Each entry gets updated with some modern context or point of view. – HH

A thing many people do not know about me is that I love Old Roses. Note the uppercase letters—I’m not talking about roses that are long in the tooth, but roses that have been in cultivation for a really long time—the term is usually applied to those roses introduced to the public before the introduction of Hybrid Tea roses in 1867. 

These roses are tough, are not grafted, and can withstand neglect. One garden writer calls them roses even dead people can grow, because in the US South, they are often found in old country graveyards, surviving on rainwater and little else. I have six rosebushes that are true Old Roses, and another six that were introduced later than 1867, but are still tough and hardy and grow on their own roots. Then there are some Knockouts I rescued on clearance in the big box garden center, but hell, I like them too. 

But my favorite rose is also the oldest in my collection—Old Blush. It’s the first Asian rose introduced to Europe, way back in 1752, nearly 30 years before the American Revolution. But in China, it had been cultivated for more than a thousand years at that point. 

But here is the thing you might not realize if plants are not a big thing in your life. Named varieties—like Old Blush—are prized for their attributes, such as the color of their flowers, the number of petals, or their size, for instance. But if you take seeds that develop from rose hips on an Old Blush bush, and plant them, you don’t get an Old Blush baby bush. You get a random bush that may or may not have the same attributes, just like how if you have red hair, your kid may, or may not, have red hair.  

The only way to get an Old Blush rose bush is to take a cutting from an existing Old Blush bush, and then root it, and then plant it. You are cloning the existing bush. It is 100% genetically identical to the “parent” bush. 

So, the Old Blush bush in my front yard, which blooms periodically throughout the year but reliably into late fall every year, is genetically the same bush that was being cultivated in China 1200 years ago. It began life as a cutting from a bush that was a cutting from a bush that was a cutting from a bush and so on, all the way back to 700 AD or so. 

Life is really chaotic right now. It feels like our nation is collapsing, and our way of life is ending, and for some of us, it’s really dangerous right now. At times like this, being the caretaker for a rose that is genetically 1300 years old, which has seen the collapse of empires and survived genocides and has outlived tyrants and stood watch over the graveyards of patriots seems really important right now, and gives me hope that we too, can not only endure, but be beautiful while we do it. 

UPDATE:
My nation is still clown pants, and October seems so quaint – before we invaded Venezuela, before we watched Renee Good get murdered on video, before we *checks notes* are threating to invade another NATO country.

But the thing Old Blush teaches me is still the same. There is always an empire. There are always tyrants. There is always someone who seeks to watch the world burn.

But there is also always someone fighting the empire. There is always a resistance movement. There is always someone with the water to pour on the flames.

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.