Hugh's Blog

Lost words

Growing up on the western border of Southern Appalachia in the 70s and 80s was the end of an era. The people who largely raised and cared for me were adults during the Depression, who had values their children would not share and would, in fact, actively run away from when they got older.

In the years after the Second World War, their children would seek to distance themselves from the hardships their parents had faced, would go to school, would get careers instead of jobs, and would often move to town as soon as they could, and their kids would grow up to smoke dope, listen to rock and roll, and have kids my age.

But that wasn’t my story or my parents. My Dad was born to parents who were older than his peer’s parents, and so we were caught in a warp of sorts. I have always had much more in common with the generation before mine than I did with my own. I was the first generation to leave home and move to the city, in a pattern more in common with people born a generation before me than my own.

So in boot camp, I was the ridiculous kid who crumbled cornbread into his sweet milk in the dining hall unironically. I was teased unmercifully once in college for saying “My Stars!” when overwhelmed with the sheer audacity of something. I had country words – words that did not belong in those august halls of academe.

In fact, I think I miss the words most of all. Words I no longer hear, and that have, for all intents and purposes, disappeared, that remain in collective memory only as the butt of jokes on reruns of The Beverly Hillbillies.

My people did not think about things; neither did they reflect. Instead, they studied on it. One did not do something soon, but directly. It’s been an age since I heard anybody called a peckerwood. And while my current peers are likely to respond to a shock with an expletive, my grandmother would have said, in response to any shocking revelation, “Well, I swan!”.

I don’t think folks swan anymore. And I think we are poorer for it.

It’s sort of like how I lost my accent: I began to try to be broader – to communicate and be heard by a wider audience, both as a kindness to them but also because I suspected, deep down, that they, with their 5 o’clock news vocabulary, were smarter than we were. I tried to have the rhythms and cadence of Mr. Earnest Hemingway and the vocabulary of Time magazine, rather than the impeccable timing of the old men who told stories on the porch of Woodard’s Grocery, or the melodious cadence of those educated men (always men, sadly) who preached revival meetings in vast tents that traveled the Southland every summer.

I know we can’t go back. When I say I will do something Monday week, my people know what I mean – but in our mobile, transient world, I’m probably not talking to my people, but rather to somebody who grew up in Iowa or something. Instead, they need to hear it will happen next Monday, and since everyone on the TV and in movies says next Monday too, I either have to change or risk being misunderstood. And when I do say it the way they want me to, I lose a little bit of my heritage, my difference, and my past in the process.

The world I grew up in, a world I loved and was loved by, no longer exists. People are far more likely now to buy a biscuit at McDonald’s than they are to make them at home, and somebody is far more likely to take the Lord’s name in vain than they are to shout “Diddily Durn!” when they stub their toe against a rock. We can’t go back – it’s progress, they tell us. And our words and our distinctiveness are collateral damage along the way.

The Church

The church building was small – no more than 1000 square feet all told. My granddaddy’s name is on the cornerstone, along with the date – 1941 – when they built the brick building after the wooden structure that had been built in 1870 would no longer serve, but there was an even earlier building before they built that one that had burnt to the ground.

It was built in the height of wartime, and raising the money to build it was a struggle in this small community, 10 miles outside any incorporated town. But they did, and over time they would add on some Sunday school rooms, and when I was a little fellow in the mid-1970s, a fellowship hall that was the scene of all the church potlucks I remember. There were beautiful chandeliers in the ceiling that had been salvaged from the old building, converted from candles to electricity, and three different pictures of Jesus on the walls, all portraying him in varying shades of white.

Across the street is a small cemetery. Dozens of people who loved me are in that cemetery, including Monty and Doc, and my Dad. I suspect I will end up there one day too, one way or another. Our fortunes seem intertwined, this church and me.

I learned about Jesus in this brick church, and I memorized the Apostle’s Creed there, which was printed on a piece of paper that had been pasted to the flyleaf of the hymnal. The words Holy Catholic Church had a line through the word Catholic, with the word “Universal” written over it. Brother Burton, our pastor, explained to me that Catholic meant universal, but we didn’t say Catholic, because we didn’t want to confuse anyone.

During Vacation Bible School I learned how to look up verses in the Bible, and did it so well I won a Bible with my name written in it as a prize. We ate butter cookies and Kool-Aid, made crafts with popsicle sticks, and learned the ancient stories about donkeys that talked and floods and stones that rolled away because of love.

When I went away to the Marines, my mailbox was packed with letters and cards from the people of that church. They prayed for me like it was real, and they sent me care packages of homemade cookies as I moved from base to base.

Like a lot of kids, I drifted around as I got older, and I hadn’t set foot in that sanctuary in years. I came home from the Marines for a week’s leave, and I stopped by when I saw Brother Burton working in the yard of the church. I stopped to talk to him.

I had a lot on my mind. I had fallen in love with Heather, a woman who had broken up with me when it turned out she was a lesbian. I had never met a lesbian before, but I had learned in this building right here that same-sex relationships were sinful. I knew we couldn’t be together, and I knew I loved her, and I was powerfully concerned she was going to hell, and if I kept hanging out with her, I was afraid I might be going to hell, too.

I figured I would ask Brother Burton what he thought. He and I sat in the yard of that old brick church for an hour or so, just chatting about first this thing and then that, about how things had changed since I had been gone. I was trying to work up my nerve to ask him about Heather, when he said, “Now, take that house right there”, and pointed at the house across the road, by the cemetery.

“Yes sir. That’s Mrs. X’s house”, calling the name of the lady who lived there my whole childhood.

“Not anymore. She died, and now it’s a rent house. For a while, two gay fellows and some kids lived there. I never thought I would see gay guys living together like a family in this place, but things change, I guess.”

I got real still.

“Did they ever come to church?” I asked.

“The kids came to Vacation Bible School that summer. But then one of the guys lost their job, and things got hard for them, and they had to move. They didn’t have any money for groceries or anything, so we took up a collection and bought them a bunch of groceries. You can’t let kids go hungry, just because you don’t agree with the parents.”

This was exactly the conversation I had wanted to have when I stopped the car, and I hadn’t even brought it up!

“But wait”, I said. “Isn’t that condoning sin?“

He looked off into the sky like perhaps the answer was written there. Then he looked me dead in the eye and said, “Maybe. I don’t know if it is or it isn’t. Maybe I’ll pray on that for a while. But I do know that if you see somebody that needs help, and you can help them, then to not help them is definitely a sin.”

As I got in the car and drove off, I still didn’t have any answers. In the end, Heather and I would remain friends until the day she died 25 years later. Eventually, I learned that what I had learned about same-sex attraction was wrong and that there were many ways to be Christian beyond what I learned in that red brick building. But in the yard of that small brick building, I also learned, and have held onto, the idea that there were things you could not be sure about, and that was OK, but that didn’t ever absolve you from doing what you knew to be right.

I’m tired.

I’m whipped.

My job at the church has me running hard both last week and this week, and there is lots of detail work involved, and much extroversion involved, and while I love so much about my work there, neither of those two things are on the list. I swear I have spoken more in the last two weeks than I have in the last six months. It is at times like this that I am certain I am a social introvert.

And in the last three months or so, five people I care about have died – some from Covid and some from cancer, but regardless, they are still dead.

And then there is the lunacy that is the current Supreme Court, as we watch decades of civil rights work get rolled back. For folks like me – white, straight, Christian, male – we’re as safe as houses. But queer folk, women, people of color, and people of other faiths are considerably less safe than they were six weeks ago. But it shouldn’t have to affect you for it to matter to you.

And then there is the “mass shooting of the week” – most recently in Highland Park, Illinois. When Columbine happened, we were in shock for weeks. Now I can’t even keep up with which one is the most recent one.

It’s all too much.

As an introvert, I often take weeks to formulate my thoughts on something. I will process it in my head, turn it this way and that, argue for and against it, and then, having made up my mind, will want to write about it. But we will have had three new things to be outraged about by then. The internet is an outrage machine – it both generates it and rewards it – and I have no desire to participate in that game.

So, this is just a reminder that I don’t blog about current events. You shouldn’t mistake my silence on things for lack of care or concern – rather it’s that I only have so much energy, and I want to use my voice in places where those words are useful. We do not need my outrage – there is already plenty to go around. If you need me to tell you why you should be upset, you clearly are not paying attention.

I am a huge believer in the idea of modeling the world we wish to see, and I want to live in a world that rewards thoughtful writing, and intentional rest, and that recognizes that by telling the truth about our fears and struggles, we can reduce the amount of shame in the world.

So that’s what I try to model here. So, there will be no hot takes. No hashtags. No outrage. I probably won’t write anything that will go viral. I’ve done all that. It’s a lot like cheap sex – it feels good while it’s happening, but you won’t like yourself afterward. And like cheap sex, it’s hard to do it while caring about the other people involved. Or, honestly, yourself.

The Mentor

In the 1990s, I worked for about 18 months for a man who owned a number of businesses. He was in his early 50s then and was financially successful. He liked me a lot and was my first true mentor, and I learned a lot from him, including, ultimately, that I had no desire to be like him. But it would be a while before I knew that.

He was married to a beautiful woman who had been an Olympic-level track and field athlete. Together, they had a 12-year-old daughter who excelled academically and athletically. She went to a parochial private school, and in the summer, went to camps – basketball camps, soccer camps, baseball camps.

They lived outside of Memphis in a huge house on a golf course, and she volunteered and lunched, and he kept starting businesses. He had worked for FedEx in the early days and had cashed out with a bunch of stock which he parlayed into a number of companies – everything from cleaning supplies to service businesses to eventually, a bank.

Officially, my job was as a troubleshooter for his nationwide janitorial company – I went in to fix troubled accounts, which usually meant taking the clients out to eat and then firing half the employees. It got so that even the threat of my visit would turn troubled accounts around because the employees knew heads would roll if I showed up.

When he first taught me this technique, I asked how he knew which employees had been causing the problems.

“I don’t,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter. They don’t speak English, so you couldn’t find out anyway. Just fire half of them, and the rest will be so scared they will do whatever you tell them.”

Fear, the mentor taught me, was an effective tool for getting people to do what you want. If that sort of thing is important to you.

He wasn’t a smart man, and he knew this. But he told me that what he lacked in brains he made up for in effort.

“There are people who are smarter than me. I can’t control that. But they can’t outwork me without my consent”.

He routinely scheduled meetings – especially unpleasant meetings or meetings with sales people – for 6 AM.

In fact, 6 AM on Monday mornings was when he would fire people, his rationale in those pre-internet days being that then they had a whole week to work on finding a new job rather than being fired on Friday at 5, and then you can’t do anything constructive until Monday and have the whole weekend to fester.

Many mornings the mentor would meet me at job sites at 4 AM and we would go visit accounts, then eat breakfast after the sun came up. He would tell me stories of business victories and drop bits of wisdom he thought I should know, and we would go over various things I was working on. My unofficial job was to be his sidekick and mentee – it filled a lot of needs for him at that stage in his life. I joked to my wife at the time that he paid me to be his friend. There was, it turned out, a lot of truth in that.

Once while eating breakfast, I told him that if I was as successful as he was, I would not be out at 4 AM looking at accounts. I would be in bed.

He laughed and said that part of the reason he was successful was precisely because he was the kind of business owner that checked on accounts at 4 AM.

“But you are in your 50’s”, I said. “You are successful. When do you get to sleep in?”

In six more years, he told me. He stabbed a piece of pancake and put it in his mouth, then pointed at me with the fork.

“There is a six-year plan.”

His daughter was 12, he told me. In six years, she would be 18, and then he would divorce her mother and cash out and retire.

“Truth be told, that’s the real reason I’m out here most mornings. I just don’t want to be home when my wife wakes up. If the choice is to make money or spend time with a woman I hate and a kid who hates me, well, that’s an easy choice.”

I was floored. He had every single status symbol I associated with success: A beautiful family, a nice home, lots of money, and control of his schedule. People feared him, respected him, and some of us wanted to be like him.

But all he had really done was build a life in which he was miserable and spent much of his time trying to pretend he wasn’t. I was reminded of Steven Covey’s comment about the man who climbed the ladder of success, only to find it was leaning against the wrong wall.

I can track so much of who I am now back to breakfast that morning in that diner. I wasn’t sure what I was going to be yet, but I was sure what I did not want to be – someone who sacrificed so much to build a life everyone envied, but from which they themselves wanted to escape.

Weeping this morning as I walked

I still walk most days. I like to swim, but if the sun is shining and it’s not raining, I prefer to walk, even if I have to leave the house at 5:30 AM to do it when it’s comfortable outside. I’ve written a lot about my walks in these pages, but it is probably the single most important practice in my life right now. Roll out of bed, down a cup of coffee, and then 2.5 miles in 42 minutes. Like clockwork.

Sometimes it takes longer. This morning I stopped to see a neighbor’s kitten and to smell the blooms of a magnolia whose low-hanging limbs were heavy-laden with blooms. I know this cuts into the pure exercise value of the walks, but if I can’t play with kittens and smell flowers, I’m not doing it.

Many days, I will listen to an audiobook or, more rarely, a podcast. But sometimes, I need to be alone with my thoughts, and I leave my headphones at home like I did this morning.

Which is why I was weeping this morning as I walked.

I’ve had a lot going on. I know, I know, we all have a lot going on – it’s not just me. But as Thoreau said, I wouldn’t talk about myself so much if there was anyone else I knew as well.

Like many people, the two-year interjection of the Pandemic into my life caused major disruptions. I have friends who lost businesses, changed careers, lost their homes, lost their families, and others who are now just trying to survive.

I know other people who saw their businesses flourish during the pandemic, who sold their homes at the top of the market and retired, who started new businesses, who developed new interests, who met romantic partners as they navigated the world in new ways. For them, the pandemic was the best thing to ever happen to them.

But I suspect that many of us are like me – I had a little bit of both happen. I lost some people, I watched dreams crumble, and I also made new friends and developed new ways to earn an income. It was a mixed bag.

When I was working with people who were experiencing homelessness, I learned early a rule of thumb for knowing who would make it out and who wouldn’t. The people who made it out, who survived, who worked the system and got rehoused were, by and large, the people who talked about the future.

“When I get my new apartment, I’m gonna…”

“When I get the new job, I want to…”

Like that.

On the other hand, there were the 50-year-old men who made sure I knew they had been the starting quarterback in their senior year of high school, or the former soldier or the person who showed you the pictures he had carried in his wallet for 15 years of a kid that was now grown. These people seldom made it.

From them, I learned to think much more about the future than I do the past. But that doesn’t mean I never think about it. Instead, what happens is that eventually I stop moving long enough and then it hits me like a wave, and emotionally, I have to deal with it.

Which is why I was weeping this morning as I walked.

For the last two years and change, I’ve been moving constantly, like a shark that will drown if he stops. Trying to keep my family safe, trying to make money to pay the bills, trying to figure out ways to be useful, trying to learn how to do new things as the old things I knew how to do had become much less valuable in this new pandemic-scarred world.

Maybe it’s the pond and the relaxation that comes as I sit beside it. Maybe it’s that some gambles I took early in the pandemic look like they will pay off. Or maybe I’m just tired of moving.

In any event, it really hit me this morning that a lot of things are just… gone now. People I love. Things I loved doing. Dreams I had. Hell, my whole speaking career. My personality changed. So did my tolerance for bullshit. Friends died. Others moved away.

And this morning, I just found myself mourning it all.

The Buddha tells us that our unhappiness comes from our attachment to a predetermined outcome. That has always resonated with me. It’s not that I’m unhappy a thing happened – it’s that it’s not what I wanted to happen.

And this morning, I just felt all of it wash over me as I walked, alone in my head.

Which is why I was weeping this morning as I walked.

Prayers

I don’t understand prayer. I mean, not really. I don’t know how it works, or if it works, and I have noticed that when I pray for something to change, the thing that changes the most is usually me.

Maybe that is how it works, after all.

I once was pastor to a woman named Karen. Her partner – let’s call him Tony – was routinely physically abusive to her and trafficked her to support his drug habit. I knew she needed to leave him, she knew she needed to leave him. But she didn’t have the strength to leave. She, like many in her situation, was afraid.

Those of us who loved her tried to be supportive of her, and we all pretty much despised him. During our weekly chapel service, we would all pray for her safety. She and I would talk regularly, and she would tell me that she was praying something would happen to him so he wouldn’t hurt her anymore.

Several men in our small community volunteered to whoop his ass, but she asked them not to. It was a combination of her fear of him and that none of them could afford to catch a charge for assault.

But Tony was his own worst enemy. One day, he smarted off to the wrong person in a drug deal gone bad, and 6 guys beat the ever-loving shit out of him. I mean, they broke his legs, broke his jaw, broke his skull, broke his ribs, broke things inside of him. He was inside the hospital for more than a month and when he finally did leave, he left in a wheelchair.

While he was in the hospital, we bought her a bus ticket to go live with a friend of hers in another state. She was free. He would never hurt her again.

The following week, in our chapel service, we lifted her name up during prayer time and thanked God for her safety. One lady asked if it would be wrong to thank God for Tony’s being in the hospital. Or wrong for them to be glad he would never walk again.

I told them that they got to feel what they felt. I told them that there is no one prescribed response to trauma, and no one way to feel after trauma was over. And I told them that Jesus said he was in favor of tying rocks to people and chucking them in the sea if they harmed vulnerable folks. David, a man we are told is a man after God’s own heart, wanted to smash the heads of his enemies’ babies against the rocks.

I told them it was complicated, sometimes, this desire to protect the vulnerable while also wanting to model a better world.

But I also told them that Karen had been in danger, and now she was not. Because this happened, she was now safe. And I reminded them that this was caused 100% by his own actions. In other words, Tony got his ass beat because he was the sort of person he was. This was entirely the consequence of his own actions.

As I’ve said before, I don’t think there is a plan. I think God, or the Universe, or whatever metaphor you want to use for whatever is larger than we are, is just frugal and, since the universe wastes nothing, the tragedies that befall all of us are not debris left over from disasters, but building materials from which we build our lives.

So I don’t know if our prayer is the reason Tony will never walk again or the reason Karen is still alive. But I do know that those prayers changed me.

Payday

Today is payday for my day job, which means that I sit down and pay the bills that will be due before the next payday. Perhaps it just means the capitalists have won, but the feeling of it being payday and sitting down and being able to pay all of your bills – there is truly nothing like it.

I get how sad that sounds. But I have spent a not-insignificant portion of my life – both as a child and as an adult – not having a lot of access to money to pay just the regular, everyday bills. Poverty changes your brain.

In my twenties, my business card said I was an “Account Executive”, but basically I helped rich old people hide their money from the government.

I was successful, in that I made good money and I was praised for my performance, but a failure, in that I hated the pressure my managers put on me, and I hated the pressure I felt to push people into solutions that made money for me but were of dubious real long term value for them. I was a failure because I hated my life, and wouldn’t do anything about it.

If you know the movie Glengarry, Glenn Ross, my life was a lot like a weekly visit from the guy from Mitch and Murray. I once was told by a manager that I just needed to buy a more expensive car – because then I would have more debt and thus be more motivated to close deals.

I hated that money drove everything in my life. I hated that it was the only way we kept score. I hated that it was all that mattered. I made good money (especially for a 28-year-old kid) but we spent it like drunken sailors, too.

Eventually, I noticed that I had to drink a pint of vodka in my car to work up the courage to go into the office, and I quit.

I made $96,000 in my last year of selling money at the beginning of this century. The next year I made $18,000, got a divorce, and moved into a friend’s attic apartment.

So, all that is to say, I have lots of screwed-up narratives in my head about money.

Earlier this week, one of our cats had some weird symptoms that we needed to take her to the vet. This was unplanned and unexpected, and I hate that my only hesitancy around taking her was that I was unsure how much this would cost. To be clear – it wasn’t that we had no money to pay for it – we do – but that open-ended question just hung over me.

I have broken teeth in my mouth I am scared to go to the dentist for. Not because of fears around pain or fear of dentists or even that it is likely that at some point in the next ten years I shall have to migrate to dentures – it is that it is a huge open-ended question mark around how much it will all cost and that there is every possibility that I will have a pleasant visit with a professional who will, at the end of our meeting, tell me I owe them $3500, with no warning in advance.

The lowest I have ever felt in my life was one summer morning in May, in Durham, NC. We had just left Duke Hospital, where my wife was being evaluated for eligibility to have a heart transplant that would save her life and give her a normal life expectancy, rather than the 3-7 years she had if she did not get it.

That morning, we had a meeting with the financial counselor, who looked at our insurance coverage and told me that if we did not get approval from one of our insurances to cover this procedure, I would have to show evidence that I had $20,000 in cash before they would list her as eligible for transplant.

I did not have $20,000. I worked at a small, scrappy grass-roots severely underfunded nonprofit that I had founded, and I made very little money while doing good work. I did not know where I could get $20,000. I had very little hope, under normal circumstances, of ever seeing $20,000 at one time.

And so, with a smile on her face, this nice person at Duke told me that because of choices that I had made around vocation and income and yes, money, my wife might die.

Spoiler alert: We got it worked out, she had the surgery, and she did not die.

But I still feel all sorts of anxiety about money. While writing the passage above about that day at Duke Hospital, I had to stop and get up and walk around, because even though it is almost 7 years later, it is all still too fresh in my brain.

So, when I decided to launch the membership program earlier this month as a way to make my writing economically viable, I had butterflies galore. All the old stories reared their head.

“Who are you to try to get paid money because you write things on a blog? It’s not like it’s real writing.”

“You aren’t good enough to get paid to write.”

“Nobody will support you, and you will just look stupid.”

“Writing is fun for you. Things that are fun we should do for free.”

“You are just going to be let down.”

But those are just stories I tell myself and have no bearing at all on what happens in reality. Because my brain is filled with old stories. Stories that are not kind to me.

In the Spike Jonze movie Her, the titular character says that the past is just a story we tell ourselves. And we can learn to tell ourselves better stories.

So, I’m trying to write (in my head) better stories about money, abundance, and scarcity, and better stories about my worth as an artist, as a writer, and as a person.

I’m trying to learn to tell myself better stories about myself.

And part of that is coming to believe that my labor has value and that other people believe that as well. That I need not apologize for making money for doing something which I both enjoy and do well. And that it is OK for me to ask for what I need.

The Wildlife Pond

So, I’ve talked around it, and even talked about building it, but not specifically about the reasoning behind it – we now have a wildlife pond in our backyard.

I grew up in a place where ponds were large – a ¼ acre or more – and muddy and where one fished for catfish and where the cows drank. This is not that sort of pond.

Neither is it a koi pond, where exotic goldfish swim.

It is a pond designed for frogs. And dragonflies. And birds. It is, when all is said and done, a wildlife pond. No other project I have done has elicited so many comments and questions, so I will attempt to answer some of them here.

Why did I build a wildlife pond?

Amphibians are in trouble. Their habitat is in decline, and their populations are plummeting. So I decided to make them some habitat to go along with the habitat I am already building for birds. And speaking of birds – they are more drawn to water than they are to feeders, so that is a bonus. And since I’m building a habitat for all the animals that live on my property, of which I am one, the fact that I love moving water is not incidental to the decision.

There are a lot of resources out there if you want to build a fish pond in your backyard. There are a lot of resources if you want to build a fountain. But as I researched wildlife ponds, nearly every single thing I could find supposed you lived in the UK. Apparently, wildlife ponds are a big thing there. So I had to do a lot of translating as to climate and so on. This post is my attempt to explain how I did it, and my reasoning behind some of the decisions I made.

It’s six feet wide and ten feet long and is 4 inches deep at its shallowest point and 18 inches deep at its deepest. Much like a swimming pool, there is a shallow end and a deep end. Your pond needs to be deep enough so that in hot climates (like mine) the water will stay cool in the deep parts. If you had fish, it would need to be deeper, but I don’t have fish, nor do I plan to add them. But more on that later.

The shallow end is for birds – it slopes from zero to 4 inches deep, with rocks here and there in the shallow end for the birds to light on. The robins, doves, and finches use it daily for bathing. The slope is also important for frogs and other critters to get in and out of the water – like a beach of sorts. Almost all the frog spawn we get is in the shallow end.

I dug the whole pond in an afternoon after it had rained and the ground was soft. We have clay here, so it was a pain, but the hole held its shape. I don’t know how one manages in sandy soil. It’s important that the perimeter of the hole be level – this meant I took some of the soil I dug up and used it to build a berm on the low side.

After digging the hole and tamping it firm with a tamper, I put down pond liner underlayment and then a 45 mil EPDM liner. This was by far the most expensive part of the build. There are cheaper liners than EPDM, but it is the one that professionals use and is reliable and durable. It has a 50-year life expectancy, which is 20 years longer than mine at current rates, so we should be good.

Some places will tell you to use old carpet or sand as underlayment, but underlayment is cheap, and this is part you don’t want to get wrong. The underlayment protects the liner, and I don’t want to deal with punctures.

After the liner is in – a pain, and you can probably use another person’s help here – you just add water, and then the weight of the water will press the liner into the creases of the hole. You will want to get in the hole as it fills, so you can shift things around as it fills. What sort of water you use is a matter of choice – I used tap water from the hose, but if you do this, know you need to let it sit a few days to let the chlorine dissipate before you add plants or anything. Some people just let the rainwater fill the pond, which is probably best, but I would still fill it the first time with tap water to set the liner. You could then siphon the water out and let it fill with rainwater if that is important to you.

At this point, you want to take a break anyway. Let the chlorine dissipate, and let the liner get settled. You can use this time to order your plants and find a source for rocks.

When we lived in North Carolina, rocks were everywhere – for free. I planted an apple tree once and unearthed five or six bowling-ball-sized rocks in the process. But this land was once prairie, and any rocks here were transported here. So, I went to the expensive landscape rock place and looked at rocks that cost $700 a ton. Then I went to the place that sells gravel and bought limestone rip-rap for $45 a ton instead. I ended up using a ton and a half of limestone rocks, ranging in size from roughly an apple to two or three the size of a duffle bag.

There are lots of ways to edge a pond, but I like rocks, and since this was close to the house, I liked that rocks were clean and easy to do and that they would create hiding places for amphibians and the green anole lizards we have everywhere here.

Placing the rocks is more art than science: Trim the liner to about six inches beyond the hole’s edge, then place rocks around the inside of the hole against the walls, as if you are lining the hole with rocks. This creates pockets where tadpoles will hide. Then place rocks around the perimeter to mark the transition and to hold the liner in place. Big rocks first, then smaller ones, then finally get some bags of gravel to fill in the remaining spaces. My liner is invisible because it’s completely covered with rocks. This keeps the liner from getting UV damaged, keeps the pond cooler, and also looks much more natural.

Everyone asks about mosquitos since we don’t have fish, and we use a 3-part strategy to prevent them: We have moving water, we plant for dragonflies, and as a failsafe, we use mosquito dunks. Mosquitos need still water, so we bought a simple pump and spitter that turns all the water in the pond over once per hour. This also makes for lovely sounds and is visually interesting.

Dragonflies showed up on the second day, and have been here ever since. They eat tons of mosquitos. And dunks are floating cakes made of bacteria that kill mosquito larvae and nothing else – we replace them monthly and they cost pennies.

We don’t have fish because they eat amphibian eggs and they poop – a lot. The nitrogen in the poop causes all sorts of filtration problems. People who have koi ponds spend thousands of dollars and lots of time filtering the poop out of their ponds. And koi are not endangered, but frogs are. So no fish.

A wildlife pond needs plants – preferably native ones. You want 60% of the surface of the pond to be covered with plants. This is a goal – right now I have swampwort and watercress and rush and papyrus and Louisiana Iris and water lilies growing in the pond, and canna and daylilies growing on the edges. I have ordered some more plants – If there is a downside, it is that pond plants are hard to find in most nurseries. Had I planned ahead, I could have had the plants lined up in advance.

The plants provide shade, habitat for the wildlife, food for the wildlife, and also make it look nice, which is also important to me. A pond is a whole new ecosystem, and it all plays a role.

I built a small landing pad patio beside the pond, so I can sit next to it in the afternoon and watch the birds bathe and hear the soothing sounds of the water. At night, the frogs sing, and I have hundreds of tadpoles zipping about in the water. Lizards sun themselves on the rocks, and in the morning, I walk the edges, looking for frog eggs that were laid overnight. And watching the birds bathe is pure joy.

It’s my favorite addition to my garden, and I wish I had done it years ago. The total cost was around $800, and it took a month of nights and weekends to do, but I probably could have done the whole thing in 3 days with planning.

If you have any questions, put them in the comments and I will try to answer them.

Food is love.

If I were to make a list of the things I know for sure, that food is love would be one of them.

I have known that since I was old enough to know anything. That the secret ingredient in the biscuits Aunt Monty stood in front of the counter and rolled out every day of her life was pure love. That the tender pot roast after church on Sunday was as sincere a sign of my mother’s affection as she was capable of making. That I have never felt as at home in the world as I did all those years ago, in the fellowship hall of Emory Methodist Church, eating Miss VanHook’s chicken and dumplings.

I come from working-class stock. We did not have money for vacations or new cars or even health insurance, but by God, we could have green beans seasoned right and biscuits fit for gods and jelly that came from the efforts of women who loved you sweating over a kettle in the heat of summer.

It was the way people who loved me but didn’t have a lot of tools to express that love, showed it.

I don’t believe I am alone in that. I have polled large groups of people, and always end up with the same results: If I were to ask you your favorite memories of people you loved who are now gone, most of the time, those memories involve food.

Because food is love. It is the product of love, and it’s how we show love, and it’s how we feel love.

So, I’m writing a book about that. It’s a cookbook, in the sense that it will have recipes, but it’s also a book of stories because the stories give meaning and context to the food.

This has no commercial potential. Rachael Ray will not have some dude from MS on her show to talk about sausage gravy and the way it felt when his family had driven 8 hours through the night to get to his grandparent’s house and the weary travelers were groggy and sleepy but a hot breakfast was waiting on them.

But because I have members who support my work, I don’t have to worry about that. So I’m gonna publish it myself, with the financial support and encouragement of my members.

More information coming soon.

(Revised for accuracy and changing circumstances on 10/11/25)

The Plan

Some years back, I was hanging out in the smoking rea of the day shelter I ran at the time. It was one of my favorite community-building activities – it’s hard to have any agenda in a smoking area, especially if you yourself do not smoke.

If you just hung out there long enough, people would forget you were the guy in charge of everything, and eventually, they would just talk. And if you were willing to just listen, you heard some amazing things.

Like the time I heard how one of our guests had been in a drug deal gone bad, and so the other party to the deal was looking for him to kill him, but our guest had hidden in a dumpster and the would-be killer overlooked him.

He turned to me and then said, “Pastor, that’s why I believe in God. Because he was protecting me that day.”

Well, as the old saying goes, the Lord protects fools, drunks and, I guess, drug dealers.

Anyway. Another time, and to the point of this conversation, I overheard two guys talking. It seems that this was homeless because he had cheated on his girlfriend, and she found out about it, and she had then thrown all his stuff out in the street when he wasn’t home, changed the locks, and also called the woman he was cheating on her with, who was unaware he was cheating, and who also threw all his stuff out and locked him out.

So he’s telling this story to another guy who we will call Guy #2.

Guy #1: I ain’t mad though. This is all part of God’s plan.

Guy #2: Oh, how do you figure?

Guy #1: I mean, I just figure everything happens for a reason.

Guy #2; Sure. But sometimes, the reason is that you did some stupid shit.

Well, yes. There is that.

Our impulse to make meaning from chaos is strong. I have spent more time than most people at the deaths of youths who died violent deaths, and I always hear folks say that God needed them more than we did, or that this is all part of God’s plan, or that God won’t give us more than we can handle – all of which are really stupid things to say that bring comfort to no one but the speaker.

But they say them anyway.

I get how it happens though. As I look back over my life, I see things that turned out poorly – a bad relationship, a job I got fired from unjustly, a friendship gone bad – that at the time seemed horrible, but which, in time, became a turning point for my life, and that led to my finding a better partner, or a more rewarding job, or led to my developing healthier relationships.

And so it is tempting to believe that the bad thing that happened was part of the plan – God’s, The Universe’s, hell – somebody’s – and that it was foreordained that as a result of this bad thing, I would be better off eventually.

But I don’t believe that to be true.

What I believe is that the universe is inherently frugal, and wastes nothing. The leaves that fall from the trees in Autumn become compost that feeds the trees in Spring. The flurried attempts to get nourishment by bees from flowers are also the accidental means by which flowers get pollinated, and thus exist. The spring ephemeral flowers only exist because the leaves fall off the trees, and thus bring sunshine to places that are normally in darkness.

The Universe is a very frugal place.

And I exist in that frugal universe. And so do you. We don’t just exist in it – we are part of it. Like the leaves, or the bees, or the flowers. And so, since the universe wastes nothing, the tragedies that befall all of us are not debris left over from disasters, but building materials from which we build our lives.

And so the fact that I spent most of my 20’s doing a job that I hated, that required me to do things I found abhorrent and that led to my drinking an unhealthy amount to survive was neither a personal disaster nor part of a benevolent god’s plan, but rather the source of the skills (such as public speaking, persuasive writing skills, and confidence in dealing with people) that I have used to build a 15-year career advocating for people who have their backs against the wall and effecting culture change. Work I would not have had the tools to do had I not learned them then, in that ugly period of my life.

Like bones and water, which, with time. Heat, and intention, form broth, the things in our past are the materials with which we build our future.

I once knew a lady who lived in a van. Her story was harsh and brutal, and she had legitimate grievances about the circumstances that led her there, and her reasons for being unable to be rehoused. But she wasn’t angry. I asked her why not, and she told me she never really thought of it that way.

“I don’t focus much on what got me here. I just ask myself what I’m supposed to be doing now that I’m here.”

That sounds like a plan to me.