The way I was told the story, there was a pastor who had finally gotten to go on a long, well-deserved vacation, and while he was gone, a young preacher just graduated from the seminary filled in.
When the regular preacher got back, he asked his head deacon how it went.
“Oh, he was decent,” the head deacon said. “But I think every great preacher has one sermon they preach over and over, and he just hasn’t found his yet.”
Recently, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about what I’m trying to do with my writing. What my one sermon is, if you will. And I think, if I have to nail it down, I’m just trying to make a case for a better world.
I have a newsletter that has gone out each week for almost 12 years, and it has a pretty tight purpose: It’s about how to survive in a harsh and brutal world.
I wrote a book about food, love, and memory.
I write sermons each week about how we build a better world than the one we have now.
I have a podcast where I tell stories that tend toward hope.
And then there is this blog. I have struggled with what goes here. It tends to be a mishmash of things. The leftovers, if you will. Things that don’t easily fit anywhere else. But mostly, they are small personal essays that trend toward the same pattern: Here is an alternative to this current world. It doesn’t have to be like this.
The essays are descriptive, not prescriptive. “This is what I did”, not, “This is what you should do”.
All of this makes me a very bad internet writer. It also makes me a horrible spiritual teacher. Because the world is desperate for people who tell them what to do.
Not just what to do, though. What to think. How to think.
In the before times, the marketer Hugh Macleod told us that the market for something to believe in is infinite. And it’s true.
But I am not interested in telling you what to do, or believe, or what to think.
I don’t want to tell you how to schedule your day so that you can drink a cup of coffee on your back deck and watch the sun rise. Hell, I don’t even know if you have a back deck.
And then there is social media. Which is a damned mess.
What began for me as a way to stay in touch with people I care about and as a way to find new people has become a place that seeks to addict me to posts that either make me sad or outraged. Except when they want me to buy something.
Yesterday I opened my Facebook feed and the first 12 posts were either ads or people or groups I don’t follow, and have no real interest in. I have more than eleven thousand followers on there, and less than 10% of them ever see anything I write. Instead, they see what Facebook wants us to see.
Which is apparently things they want us to buy, or things that will make us mad.
And don’t get me started on the ways social media throttles free speech. If I have a link to an article I think you should read, if I post it to any of the social sites, they make sure virtually nobody sees it in their feeds, so you will stay on their site.
They have algorithms that decide what you can or cannot write if you want to be seen. I’m sure you have seen the social media shorthand folks use to get around it: Unalived, graped, yte folks. I totally get why they do it – if you don’t, nobody sees your stuff.
But I want to write and link to what I want. I hate being told what to do. I hate the idea of an algorithm training me to write acceptably to them as the cost of readership.
There is a trend in recent years to become more analog. People are buying flip phones. Using paper calendars. Sending postcards. Using paper planners. Much of this is in reaction to the ways tech, and especially algorithms and AI are being forced upon us.
So, I am going backward a bit myself – to about 2006. In 2006, I had this blog, and I would post links to videos I thought were funny on the new site called YouTube. I would write essays about things I had strong feelings about. I would link to other writers, and react to their writing. Lots of us did these things.
By 2010, much of that had moved to Social Media, and we got comfortable, and began to post less and less to our blogs. And then in 2013, Facebook began to restrict your audience unless you paid them. But by then, we had quit posting to sites we controlled, and had pushed our audience to social media.
So, I am taking back control. I’m recommitting to this blog, and will now be updating it regularly as if it is 2006 again. Sure, maybe only 200 people will see something I write, but at least it won’t try to make money by making me angry.
I’m rebranding it too, as part of my recognition of what I’m doing with my writing. What was formerly Hugh’s Blog (I hate naming things) is now Small Offerings, a site where I share things with you that either I write with you in mind, or that I found online and thought you would enjoy.
I have come to understand that each thing I create for others, whether a blog post or an essay or a book or an omelet or a cutting board, is a small offering to the world, a tangible representation of the world in which I wish to live. When I post something, it is me saying: Here. I made this for you.
What this means going forward
I will continue to write small (~ 1000 word) essays each week. The subjects will revolve around what is occupying my mind at the time. That might be my work, or my long-term effort to make my yard into a wildlife habitat, or the recipe I am trying to nail down, or the story of a trip we took.
But I will also share links to things I think are important, or that need wider distribution, or that I think are hilarious and that brought me much needed joy.
I will share small things – like a great photo, or an inspiring quote, or maybe a meme that really sums it all up.
Some of you reading this only read these things when I post them to social media. I currently syndicate this to Threads, BlueSky, Facebook, and Tumblr, and I post the full text on my personal Facebook page. For now, I have no plans to stop that.
Others read it via email. I have no plans to stop that either, but I recognize that most folks want less, not more, email in their inbox.
If you are a current email subscriber, you will continue to get an email with the full text of any essay blog post. This will be 1-2 posts a week.
The new posting schedule will begin next week, and after that, there will be an option to get one summary email per week with all essays, short posts, and links. I’ll let you know when that is live.
And some of you are still sitting on your RSS feedreaders. The RSS feed for just the essays is https://blog.hughhollowell.org/category/posts/feed/ and the RSS feed for all the posts is the same as it is now: https://blog.hughhollowell.org/ feed/
Rebranding is chaotic and involved. I am working off a long list of upgrades and features, so bear with me if things seem to be in disarray, that is because things are in disarray! For example, it really bothers me that I don’t have a logotype yet for the blog title on the website.
And of course, I should say that all of this – the more than 15 hours I have spent on this project over the last two weeks, the costs for the email service provider to deliver the posts, and all the costs of being a professional independent writer in the 21st century – are all covered by the membership team that supports my work and that allows me to focus on you and your privacy, instead of using intrusive ads and sponsorship deals. If my work matters to you, I hope you will consider becoming a member – not just for the perks, but to keep my voice online.