Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree

Here in the hills of inland New England, you could wander down the road this weekend into the village below. You will be going down to watch the fireworks with your family on the bridge that spans the lake as your friends and neighbors light them from a dock. It will be a little dusky as you walk down along the tree-lined road through the tunnel of green and everyone will be too excited, too full...

The canopy leafs out and we are suddenly reminded of June’s benevolent conspiracy, its invitation to hide amid the green. The bare, brutal skies of November are on the other side of the year and we can take solace in a little concealment, a good green refuge. The world softens in these weeks as the stark silhouettes of winter blue ease into the froth of leaves unfurling. You grow weary in those gr...

People will tell you that “you cannot go home again.” What they mean is that time moves in one direction; the old people die, the stores close, the fields grow over, and the little places that once anchored a childhood lose their shape beneath the capricious whims of modern life. A man returns years later looking for what he remembers and instead finds vinyl where there was once canvas, particle b...

There is a tree at the entrance to the forest. It is very old and contains a large hollow in its center. As a boy, I would stop at the old hollow tree, pick up a stone from the path, and toss it into the dark opening before continuing on into the green. At first it was a game, the sort of thing children invent through their good little ways. I liked the sound of the stone rattling down into the ca...

February is so often treated unfairly. We call a run of warm days a “false spring,” as if the month were trying to trick us, as if it had made a promise it could not keep. We speak of it with suspicion, as though any softness in the air must be a deception and any thaw a betrayal waiting to happen. Dear February is treated with too much wariness. This has never sat right with me. February does not...

We are in a crisis of keeping, and we need to learn how to hold on to everything again. I have been walking around this truth for years, naming different faces of it, because the thing itself is too big to see straight on. I called it disposability when I was stooping to pick up wrappers and bottles, watching how a world of throwaway materials trains a throwaway mind. I called it drift when I look...

A quiet fatalism has settled over much of our modern culture. You hear the defeatism everywhere. There is a tone of resignation, a soft nostalgia without the accompanying responsibility to reclaim. The solutions are distant and abstract, with meaningful decisions now made far away by unreachable forces. Prominent authors and commentators claim our role is but to bear witness to the fall. The resul...

November contains a sort of harsh clarity. We see this first in the natural world; anything extraneous is shed. The trees drop useless leaves and limbs, the hives expel the drones, the animals become discerning in their movement, hibernate. The darkest stretch of the year, the heaving black throughfare leading to the solstice, does not allow for many frills. It is a time to conserve all things nec...

We entered the dark part of the year this past weekend. You crossed over the threshold and now stand closer to the winter solstice than you do the autumn equinox. You’re on the other side of the year from the merry month of May at the absolute grimmest stretch; the days are dark, growing darker yet, and there will be no brightness, no brilliance, no break in the dark for another month and a half....

The dark creeps in now. It does that this time of year, right before Halloween. You’re in the garden until well past eight o’clock one day and the next you’re huddled by the woodstove fighting back the marrow-deep raw of a late October fog. You sit down for dinner with your family and note there is something off about the dining room; all those daily imperceptible shifts in the way the sun sets ov...

It is October now, though you wouldn’t know it from the mercury rising the past week. The maples are rapidly growing bare and the leaves are crisp beneath our boots, yet the air hums with a misplaced summer heat. For days now, the warmth has lingered heavy, uninvited, strange. The bees are restless, spilling from their hives past twilight, agitated and uncertain of the season or their aims. The fu...

You’re well on the march to winter now. The solstice came and went back in June and your days became imperceptibly shorter. Lammas came and went quietly with the early harvest. Now the equinox is behind you and there is no denying that summer in all its good green glory has performed its function. Everything good grew, bloomed, and went to seed. Purpose and achievement realized, made manifest. A c...

We are deeply unbalanced, off-kilter, ready to fall. Take a look at any headlines and no matter your politics or lack thereof, you will likely conclude our entire world is teetering on the edge of a blade, at risk of falling into cataclysmic disorder. This coming Sunday however contains a heavenly convergence that is worthy of your reflection and may offer some solace; it is both a new moon and th...

It is late August and the northern places have begun to transform with quiet, unassuming grace. The nights grow cool in the hills and a walk down the road, through the forest, or past a tangled hedgerow will reveal autumn’s early, subtle gains. Apples have begun to tumble from branches, splitting open in ditches and their bruised, tart-sweet perfume mingles with the crisp air. Sumac has begun to b...

Author’s Note: this essay is part of the Reports from the High Wood series, a weekly premium report from our homestead that offers enduring lessons for living well in a wounded world. If you're drawn to green paths, perennial values, and timeless beauty that resists the modern glare, you're in the right place. Normally these Sunday posts are for paid subscribers only, but the nature of this essay...

It is the middle of August and now we wander through our high summer haze toward the equinox, toward fall. It may feel cruel to speak of autumn as the children yet splash and shout in the swimming holes, as the berries burst on the vine, as the school bell still gathers dust, but walk now slowly along the ditches where the lilies and daisies once bloomed and you will know this is the truth. Those...

The common milkweed stands tall along the roadsides and fencerows all summer, steadfast and unassuming in the ditches, the hedgerows, the border-places. To some, it is just a weed, coarse in its stalk and broad of leaf. To those with eyes to see however, it is the silent keeper of a secret, the host of a story older than any one of us, the tender of a cycle that endures without question or complai...

Artificiality is now the norm. Screens can simulate nearly everything, images can be doctored, videos completely fabricated, words twisted, sounds engineered. There, as always, is hope however. In this wounded modern world, where so many things have become false or illusory, you always possess one pure conduit of truth: your sense of smell. In a sea of artificial reality where you cannot trust you...

My baby does not want to sleep this week. She wants to stand. She wants to place her hands on my stomach, get her feet under her, and lean gently back. She wants to stand there in bed and show me she can wave her little hands. I resist the urge to be frustrated by this, the voice like television static in my brain that tells me she needs to sleep so I can go do things. Tidy the house, get the hone...

The urgency is real now. You feel it in the long stretch of daylight, the way everything grows all at once, in the good green pattern absolutely bursting forth now. Gentle May makes her exit ushering in heady June. The sun is up before you are and lingers long past supper yet somehow the days feel too short. Daylight runs close to fifteen hours now, and still it is just not enough to complete ever...

In the early mornings here in the meadow, the grass glitters with dew, heavy, bowed. Beyond the path leading to the wood line, a keen eye might see the smallest of movements. A doe lifts her head from a nest of ferns where she left her spotted fawn, a fox trots home after a dawn hunt, a sow bear shows her cub how to nuzzle out the tender shoots. The wild animals here slinking through the bough-dap...

Here in the meadow, May brings song. The bluebirds have staked their claim to the birdhouse by the old hay rake. They dart about, from the iron to the little house to the forest and back again. Their low-pitched warble signals a courtship and the promise of return next year following another long winter; four notes that implore “Now, come hither!” Promise manifest. The tree frogs however have begu...

Something is wrong. Imagine your culture has a common folk ritual of which everyone knows, it has lasted since before written history, and is innately good. Your stories tell you it is good; nearly every folk and fairytale your grandparents told you revolves around this good ritual. Your science tells you it is good; if you partake in this ritual, you have measurably less psychological distress, y...

Author’s Note: this essay is part of the Reports from the High Wood series, a weekly premium report from our homestead that offers you enduring lessons for living well in a wounded world. If you're drawn to green paths, perennial values, and timeless beauty that resists the modern glare, you're in the right place. Here are some of our past beekeeping posts that will give context if you are new her...

Picture it: two little girls run up to a door with a glint of benevolent mischief in their eyes. They’re carrying something, something colorful you can’t quite make out. They hang their little parcel on the door with a piece of ribbon or twine, knock, and run away. You spy their delivery: a paper cone filled with forsythia, daffodils, and pussy willow. The happy victim of the good prank looks arou...