​

This is Life Is So Beautiful, a weekly email from Hugh Hollowell, devoted to the idea that our hope for survival in this brutal world is rooted in finding the beauty that is everywhere, but sometimes hard to find.

​Click here to read this on the web​

​

Note: I'm glad to be back after the holiday hiatus. I hope your holidays were wonderful, and that you got to spend time with people who were important to you. - HH

Thursday of last week, I found myself on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi for work. I was meeting with a team of other organizers from around the state, and it was going to be a long day. So, I went for a walk.

I was staying in a small retreat center just across the road from the coast itself, not far from the Air Force base there. After waking up and making myself a cup of coffee, I walked out the door of my room just as reveille sounded on the base’s loudspeakers and headed to the shore.

The beach at Biloxi is part of the longest man-made beach in the nation – some 26 miles of sand and dunes that extend along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The Gulf itself is brown and still here, sheltered by the barrier islands some 12 miles off the sandy beaches. It’s a pale comparison to the clear water, active surf, or rocky shores you find on the coasts that boarder the oceans, but it has its own charms, especially if, like me, you find yourself heading east at sunrise.

The Mississippi coastline is bordered by Highway 90, which runs parallel to it from Ocean Springs to Bay St Louis, a trek of 30 miles or so, with much of that having a wide sidewalk on the Gulf side. So, I found myself, with the call to reveille still echoing in the air, walking across Highway 90 in the dark, heading toward the most ancient thing there is on our planet.

It’s a reverse migration of sorts, this attraction toward the sea that so many of us feel. The scientists tell us that many millennia ago, our ancestors pulled themselves from that sea, and some of us feel it drawing us home. I know I do.

As you head east, you are walking with the traffic, sandy shore and still water to your right, the highway and traffic to your left. And slowly, the dawn begins to break over the horizon as you walk toward the garish neon lights of the casinos in the far distance that show the tourists where to “have a good time”.

I’m having a blast watching the lights of a different sort. The red streaks show first, followed by the yellow ribbons that pierce it in places. There are random palm trees along the coastline, remnants of public planting projects that were thwarted by hurricanes – many times in the history of the human habitation of Biloxi, this has all been under water. I see one majestic survivor, as thick around as I am, reaching far into the sky on a dune, backlit by the red-streaked sky.

Cars zip along behind me as I stare at it, horns honk, unhoused people sleep in the shelter of the small wall that borders this section of the beach, the neon lights scream of their attractions, and yet this tree just stands there, doing what it does.

Even the tree is a fiction. It was planted here, by people, on a dune of sand trucked here by people, and that must be periodically replenished and reformed by people. None of it is natural.

But the red streaked sky shows out over the salty lagoon that formed these shores many thousands of years before humans walked upright and will continue for eons after our demise.

It is the realest thing I know – the sun comes up every day, regardless of what we do. The tides advance a recede, regardless of what we do. Here is a force we are yet to tame, yet to improve, yet to destroy.

I draw some comfort from that as I walk on, eastward, toward the new day.

​

Five Beautiful Things

Over 100 years ago, when the world was much larger than it seems right now, successful French businessman Albert Kahn sent an army of photographers around the world to document its marvels. The resulting 70,000 images formed what he called The Archives of the Planet. I can only imagine living on a small farm in, say, Iowa, and seeing photos like this and this for the first time.

If you are having a hard time just existing these days, you might need this: I might meet a dog today!

Check out the top 100 winners of the Close-up Photographer of the Year contest.

Y’all know I’m a sucker for a good livestream – check out this livestream of a watering hole in the middle of the Namib desert in Namibia, in Southern Africa. It draws all sorts of animals, including many types of birds. Last night, I saw both an oryx and an ostrich!

We own a moka pot that someone gave me a while back, who knows of my love for coffee. I have never used it and was looking for instructions on the internet when I came across this adorable video that purports to tell you how to make the perfect cappuccino, as taught by six-year-old Viola. It’s low on instruction but high on cute, and despite my not even liking cappuccinos, I watched it over and over.

Programing note

I started this newsletter almost 8 years ago now, when I was in a very different point in my life, in a different career path, in a very different emotional and geographic place. All that to say, I have changed during these 8 years, and so it’s normal that this newsletter would change, too.

Over the next few months, you can expect some changes. Not to the essential mission – sharing beauty in the world, as a way of making the world a bit more bearable for all of us – but in format. I don’t currently have any plans to change the frequency, and it will continue to arrive on Mondays. But those are the only hard constraints right now.

These are a small part of many changes I plan for my publishing this year. I’m grateful to you for holding on, and for all of your support over the years.

This newsletter remains free and ad-free because of the support of my members, who insist on my making it free for everyone else. Other ways to support this project include buying me a cup of coffee or forwarding it to your friends.

Take care,

HH

Become a Member

​