Hugh Hollowell

Trying to build a a better world.

Doing The Next Thing

This essay published

Like a lot of people, I haven’t been sleeping well lately. And by lately, I mean the last three months.

I mean, I don’t know why. After all, there is a global pandemic, millions of Americans are out of work, and mass civil unrest. Why would any of that cause me distress?

Seriously, though, it’s been pretty bad.

But last night, exhausted, I went to bed at 9:30, and was sound asleep by 9:45, and slept through until 5:30, which is more or less my normal wake up time. I got up, made coffee, and sat on the couch, listening to birdsong as the dawn crept in.

I have a long list of things on my to-do list, but this morning I am going to enjoy the feeling of being rested, of having a clear head, of having a slice of beauty before the day begins.

The clear head allowed me to think – something that has felt rare lately.

The last three months have been pretty brutal. I am a community builder by vocation, and what it takes to survive a pandemic and what it takes to build a community are at odds with each other. It’s a perfect storm – a new non-profit, a new city, a new community, and a global unemployment crisis means that some of your projects get put on hold, and some of them die, and some of them have fates that are of yet undecided.

The only way I have survived it has been to create projects – things with definite starts and ends. Projects give me structure, and you don’t have to worry about the future – you just do the next thing.

Building a chicken house. Planning a rainwater catchment system. Building a bookcase. Planning a deck. Starting a newsletter. Starting a podcast. Learning how to edit audio. Learning how to edit video. Doing some contract work.

And I guess, beginning to blog again.

I’m not sure what the end of all this *waves hands* looks like.  I’m not sure what the future, at any reasonable distance out, will look like. So, instead, I am just doing the next thing.

A new thing

This essay published

A mentor told me once that the key to success was to do something – anything, really – and then notice what is working, and do that, and to notice what isn’t working, and to not do any more of that.

It sounds simple, and in truth, it is. It just isn’t easy. Even the man who told me that, an extraordinarily successful man financially, had a personal life that was a hot mess. His wife has contempt for him, his kid hates him, his peers talk about him behind his back. But regardless, the advice, if followed, works.

Do more of what’s working.

For the last five years, I have run a small newsletter. Doing no promotion or ads, I have built up a loyal following with off the charts reader engagement. I have done this consistently over the last five years, week in and week out. I think I’m pretty good at it.

I started it because a publisher told me I should have one, to build a platform. I always had this idea in the back of my head that it would be good to have for when I publish that book, or when I appear on Oprah, or whatever. It began as a means to an end.

But along the way, I discovered that I am actually pretty good at the newsletter format and that it suits me for several reasons.

  • There is a definite deadline.
  • There is a definite theme.
  • There is a format.
  • There is a definite audience.

All of that is different than blogging.

Here on my blog, I can write whatever I want, when I want, how I want, and whoever wants to read it, can.

And that is sort of the problem, at least if you have a brain like mine. I need constraints.

I didn’t want to believe that was true. I want to believe I can sit down, full of discipline and hope, and pound out reliable content. But that isn’t me.

I need a schedule. I need a format. I need the constraints that come with a newsletter.

I started a newsletter so that I would have an audience when I became a writer. But along the way, I figured out that my newsletter was what I was writing. My newsletter was, slowly, incrementally, creating a body of work.

So this winter, I spent a lot of time reflecting, and looked for what was working, and what wasn’t. And by any measure, my most successful creative endeavor ever is my newsletter.  So what would it mean to do more of that?

So I’m starting a new newsletter, in addition to the existing one, called Hopeful Resistance. The focus is different, and so is the format. Here is how I am currently describing it:

The world is a hot mess right now.

And outrage, while appropriate, is by itself impotent. The better world we dream of won’t come from hitting refresh on Facebook so we know we are not alone in our anger. No, that world will come about as a result of the countless small decisions we make in our daily life. We resist the world on offer by living into the creation of a new one.

We resist by living.

This is a newsletter about how we do that.

So that’s the deal. A new newsletter. It will be an essay format, and it will come on Fridays so you will be able to read it when you have more time. Maybe over coffee on Sunday morning, say. And it will be an exploration of how we build a better world than the one in which we currently live.

I hope you will sign up here.

It’s free*. No ads. Unsubscribe whenever you want.

*Like all my creative efforts, it’s made possible by my patrons, who give a little each month so the rest of us can read it all ad-free.

Nostalgia for a different past

This essay published

I don’t know if you have spiritual practices that others don’t view as spiritual practices, but I do.

Like cutting the grass. Once I realized there is substantially no difference between walking the labyrinth and cutting the grass with my push mower, I came to see cutting the grass as a spiritual practice.

Another one I have is looking at my Facebook Memories. It is like a perpetual journal, where I can see what was on my mind on this day for each year for the 12 years I have been on that platform. And sometimes I cringe at what I said, and sometimes the urgency of my post is lost, and now it just seems inane, but always I end up with things to reflect on in my quest to find healing for myself.

And today, I was reflecting on the lost relationships I have, most especially with the people I grew up with. What led me to this was noticing someone with whom I had went to High School and who had once commented on something of mine from 10 years ago, but who was no longer my Facebook friend. And then I noticed he was Facebook friends with other people from my childhood that I didn’t know he knew (different circle of friends) and that made me reflect on A) How small the world of my childhood was and B) How shut out of that world I am now.

As a child, I had the curse of being the kid who read, and while that helped me substantially with trivia contests and ACT scores, it also made me dissatisfied with the small world in which I lived. It gave me a desire to see more of the world than the 30 acres on which we lived after inheriting it from my grandmother, and the small church with my grandfather’s name on the cornerstone as the chair of the building committee, and the sure thing job I could have had as a lineman for the Power company my cousin was the head of.

So, I left. In fact, I once overheard my mother describe me that way to a friend – Hugh was the one who left. I didn’t really have a plan, and it showed. I was a Marine for a while, and did all sorts of jobs from lineman to firefighter while I was a wandering scholar for a while, and I was a husband for a while until I wasn’t, and then I sold securities and a hunk of my soul at a chance at the brass ring, only to find it was bitter in my mouth and required copious amounts of alcohol to make it palatable to me.

But all of that happened because I was the one who left.

I could have stayed. I would have had a good paying job. I had a ready-made social circle, and a name that in that community meant a level of privilege I have never felt elsewhere. My world would have been smaller but more comfortable, and definitely easier.  I would most likely have married someone I had known for years and years, have bought a house not far from mom and dad, most likely have ended up on the best end of the Republican party (but maybe not, as my home county went for Obama and Hillary in the last two Presidential elections), and been an active member of the Methodist church of my childhood.

But none of that happened, because I was the one who left. I met, and knew, and loved people who were different than any of the people we knew growing up. I read books that wouldn’t have been permitted in the small library of my home town. I saw parts of the world that are a mystery to some of the people I grew up with, and I knew both plenty and want, and learned from both experiences. And because of all of that, I came to care about things that were not concerns of the world in which I was raised.

I am the product of Scots-Irish honor culture, and we tend to feel strongly about things. For some of us it is the rights of the unborn, and for others the rights of LGBT folk to marry those they love, and for yet others it is SEC football, but we all feel strongly all the same. And because I was the one who left, I learned to feel strongly about different things.

And because we all feel strongly, it often leads to feuds at worst and passive aggression at best, and it meant that I wasn’t a member of those circles any more. I will never again spend a crisp morning in a deer stand with people I have known my whole life, or have a job in the community that nurtured my family for more than 100 years, or be welcome – fully welcome – in the church of my childhood.

I like being me. But sometimes, like this morning, I wonder what it would have been like had I not left. Had I been content with where I was from, and decided to lean into being a member of that community. If I had 5 acres with a horse in the back lot and a workshop and a pick-up truck, if the only wine I had ever drank was Boone’s Farm, if going to Memphis was as far as I would travel most years, if I was just an active member of a church where my kinfolk were buried in the cemetery next door.

A friend once said she had nostalgia for a different past, and I think that is what came over me this morning – a nostalgia for a different past.

Five cookbooks I use all the time

This essay published

NB: On Saturdays I share five things around a theme. Maybe it will be five books I like, or five funny cat videos, or five Saturday morning cartoons I miss. 

I have more than 70 cookbooks in my house. I really don’t need that many – nobody needs that many, but I love them. To share a meal with others is the purest form of love I know, and all cookbooks are, then, is potential love – the plans for meals to share with people you love, like a battery of love just waiting to be tapped.

But I regularly only use about 10 of them, and five of them I use at least once a week. These are not the best cookbooks I own (however you would judge that) or even the most useful, but instead are the ones that best reflect the style of food I like, the way I like to cook, and the ones I use most often. I have links to them on Amazon for your convenience.*

More-With-Less: This is the book that made me Mennonite. Imagine a cookbook written in the 1970’s that emphasized reducing our meat and sugar consumption, that was concerned about the environmental impact of our diets, that promoted communal meals, that featured foods from around the world from myriad cultures, and that did all of that as a result of the author’s faith. The book you just imagined is this book.

How to Cook Everything: This was Mark Bittman’s first big hit, and is probably the single most used cookbook I use over the course of a year. While the title is hyperbolic, it does cover many, many recipes, but much more than that is the emphasis on the theory of why you do something, so that you not just learn how to make a cheese sauce, but you learn ways to change it (try adding a bit of chili powder, for example) and countless variations (leave out the cheese and you have white sauce, which is an excellent substitute for Cream of Something soup in any casserole, for example).

Everyone should have at least one “reference” cookbook, and while I have more than one, this is the one I use the most. I also like that he tries to create recipes for the home cook, and is more concerned with taste than being fancy. (If you can get the old 1998 edition, I much prefer it over the later revision, but either of them is excellent.)

New Complete Techniques: I love Jacques Pepin. I love his theories on eating together, I love his emphasis on fresh ingredients, and I love that his recipes just work. I probably use this one more than any other cookbook of his (I own 7, I think) because this is literally the encyclopedia on how to do anything in the kitchen. Wanna truss a chicken? Carve a ham? Make sausage? Cook Brains? It’s all here.

Mastering the Art of Southern Vegetables: Honestly, I have trouble with side dishes. I grew up in a Meat and Two sort of household, and this is really helpful to me as I try to get more creativity in my side dishes. As I try to introduce more vegetables and plant based foods in my diet, I have found myself turning to this book more and more. These are the tastes of my people, and I love the variety and fresh slants on old favorites.

The Southern Pantry Cookbook: I don’t really like “gimmick” cookbooks, but I love the premise of this one – building meals from staples in your pantry. With a focus on the busy home cook and the regional tastes I grew up with, it makes life easy and tasty. The food is good and has ample shortcuts – 30 minute red beans and rice for when you don’t have 4 hours to do it “right”, for example. We eat something out of this weekly.

No doubt you have your own favorite cookbooks – I would love to know about them, so please share them in the comments.

(If you liked this, you may also like these 5 things that make me a better cook.)

*I am a member of the Amazon affiliate program, so if you buy any of them, I get a small commission.