This is Life Is So Beautiful, a weekly email that is handcrafted, non-AI-generated, personally written and lovingly curated by Hugh Hollowell. It’s devoted to the idea that our survival in this brutal world is rooted in finding the beauty that is everywhere, but sometimes hard to find. If you missed last week's edition about the election, and if our sun is rising or setting — you can catch up right here. |
On a day trip to Meridian last Saturday, and it was as beautiful a day as I can imagine.
Hey y’all!
All the pine trees are dying.
Obviously, not all of them, of course. But I live in the part of Mississippi that wants to be a pine forest, and so I am surrounded by pine trees. And everywhere I go, they are dying.
It starts innocuously enough. Usually a limb will brown up, looking out of place on an otherwise verdant green tree. But two weeks later, the whole thing is brown.
We are in a drought here – the second summer in three years for that to happen. We are about 15 inches behind for the year, and we have gotten very little rain since July. We are praying for rain as we watch creeks dry up, lakes disappear, and all the grass has been brown since August.
The pines grow weak because of the drought, and then the pine beetles move in and kill them. Then you have to spend thousands of dollars to have them cut down.
This is just one tiny economic impact climate change is having, let alone the environmental impact of all the animals who depend on the pines having to try to adjust. But I led with the economic impact because it is immediate and affects humans the most directly and immediately. And we are an immediately driven culture.
But eventually, the rains will come, and if too late to save any of the browning pines, it will still nourish the seeds that have fallen, and seedlings will sprout. Sunlight will get to places the tall pines prevented, and new species will grow, which will bring new wildlife to the area. The old, now dead trees will turn into homes for bugs, which will turn into food for birds. This will happen largely without human intervention.
In last week’s election, Mississippi elected Scott Colum as its senator. Colum is a Black man, and is the first Black senator elected by Mississippi voters. That its Mississippi, the heart of the Confederacy, and that Colum is Black, obviously make this historic. Many commentators have said this “came out of nowhere!” But it didn’t, just like the mass pine die-off did not come from nowhere.
People in Mississippi have been working toward exactly this goal since at least 1964, when the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was denied delegates at the National Democratic convention. They have been dreaming about it for far, far longer.
Like the drought and the pine beetles, at any given moment, it looked like not much was happening. Democracy requires slow, patient work. It doesn’t look good when you freeze a moment in time. But unlike natural systems, democracy is not self-healing. Human systems require human interventions. Like voting and organizing.
Either way, at any given moment, it is easy to feel defeated when you look around at the current situation. It’s hard to take the long view when your world is on fire. But when I look at history, it seems like over the long term, optimism about the future is the only realism, and the long road is the only one going anywhere.
Five Beautiful Things
Here’s a playlist of Sir Christopher Lee reading Edgar Allen Poe poems and short stories.
Museum of Natural History of Venice has digital images of some of the more arcane things in their collection on display at the Google Arts and Culture website. Like, a two headed calf. An alleged mermaid skeleton. A mummified cat with a mummified rat. It’s wild, man.
Conde Nast has highlights on their website of the Natural History Museum in London’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year award winners. That grieving elephant broke something in me, y’all.
The website Ordinary Abundance is an interactive site walking you through an average apartment, highlighting items that would have seemed the province of kings only a few generations ago. I love all of this: the call outs, the esthetic of the apartment, the UI of the website. It’s just beautiful, the whole thing.
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In Case You Missed It…
The most clicked link last issue was Raleigh, NC’s 9,000 square foot Shimmer Wall.
One day soon I will shut up about the elections, but the euphoria in mississippi is strong right now. On Small Offerings, I wrote a brief post about some thoughts after Scott Colum’s win: Mississippi, 24 hours later.
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Thank You!
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Till next time,
HH
