This is the introductory essay from this week’s issue of my weekly newsletter, Life Is So Beautiful. The entire newsletter, including links to five things I thought were beautiful, can be found here. – HH
The weather has been brutal here this year. We had an extremely dry spring (spring is usually our wettest time of year) followed by an extremely wet June where it rained hard nearly every day (we got more than half of a year’s worth of rain in a month) followed by a rainless July, accompanied by 110 degree heat indexes and 90% humidity.
Climate change is hitting us hard here in the deep south. It’s been exhausting. The yard has always been my retreat from the horrors of the world, but the only time it’s been remotely comfortable has been very early in the morning. Early last week, it was still 90 degrees at 9PM.
Too hot to work in the yard. Too hot to work in my woodshop. Too hot to do my mental health walks. Just too damn hot.
I’ve been miserable.
Which is why when I needed to go north this past weekend for a denominational meeting, I did not resist at all. It was held at a retreat center in the mountains in Southwestern Pennsylvania, a place filled with streams and laurel trees. I woke up my first morning there and walked out on the porch of the cabin I was staying at, and it was almost chilly.
Cup of coffee in hand, I strolled around the campus, walked past a magnificent native plant pollinator boarder, awash in insects, and ended up sitting by a waterfall, listening to the roar of the water and the morning bird chorus. I was so caught up in it that I lost track of time and almost missed breakfast. And when there was a brief rain shower, I sat on the covered porch and practically beamed, trying to soak up the feel of the cool breeze and the smell of damp soil.
While on the porch, waiting out the shower, another attendee I did not know and I were doing the sort of small talk you do at events where you meet people new to you: Where are you from, what brings you here, what do you do for a living?
At most Christian events, I just leave it that I’m a pastor, but this guy asked deeper questions, and the rest of my life is complicated, so I said that in addition to being a pastor, I’m a writer.
“What do you write about?”
This is always tricky. I make about half of my income from writing in one way or another, but the subjects are all over the place in ways that are not easy to sum up. After much hemming and hawing, I said something like, “I write about how to stay human in a dehumanizing world. Broadly, think of it as spiritual writing for non-religious people.”
I thought about that conversation a lot on the airplane ride home last night. How do we keep going? How do we find our way? What practices do we need to learn to get there? How can we bring others with us?
At the end of the day, those are the things that hold my thoughts. And a quick survey of back issues show that is pretty much the throughline in my writing this letter for the last 11 years.
I guess I’m going to have to figure out some practices that don’t involve being outside.