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 looked at towns thinning out, their young drawn away by the golden roar of cities and empty promises, leaving the old to sit under dark windows in darker hills. I called it the dying of small fires when I noticed how the ordinary signals of presence are going out one by one in a long, quiet surrender to convenience.

All of that was prelude.

This is the next turn of the same thought: keeping is the human art of staying faithful to what has been put into your hands, and that art is failing at the level of ordinary daily life. We are not only losing traditions and places. We are losing the inner posture that makes any tradition or place survivable, possible, thinkable. From the smallest objects to our ability to belong to a place, we are forgetting how to keep.

We so often try to point to one cataclysmic event as the point where everything went wrong. You hear it all the time. “Where did we go wrong?” as if there was a singular moment when the pillars fell. I think most people can agree that we’re not living well, but pointing to some pivotal moment is not the key. Instead, we need to reevaluate the thousand small permissions and consolations and compromises we’ve made where we allowed the good old days to slip through.

The broken thing can be replaced faster than it can be repaired, so we replace.

The strained bond can be avoided easier than it can be mended, so we avoid.

The hard season can be fled more quickly than it can be endured, so we flee.

Objects matter here, though they are only the first lesson. The materials you choose, the way you pack food, the way you mend a gate or keep animals or refuse to let plastic touch what you harvest, these are a form of apprenticeship. They train your hands in permanence, and the hands train the heart.

When you insist that something be durable, you are practicing patience.

When you take care of a tool instead of treating it as expendable, you are practicing attention.

When you keep a tradition long enough to learn why it was built, you are practicing humility.

The same muscles that keep a jar in the pantry or a fire in the stove are the muscles that keep a marriage through lean years, keep a town through economic winter, keep a church alive when it would be easier to drift away, keep hope alive when the days are short and the headlines shout ruin. The modern world tries to convince you that everything is weightless, that you can pick up and go without consequence, that obligations are optional accessories. Anything worth having however carries weight. A home carries weight. A child carries weight. A place carries weight. A vow carries weight. A kept life is a weighted life, and that weight does not crush. It steadies.

The whole economy hums along whispering that whatever is difficult is optional, that whatever is old is suspect, that whatever asks your presence is trying to steal your freedom. You feel that whisper at the kitchen counter and in the parking lot and on your phone late at night. It presents itself as relief, as efficiency, as self care, as the reasonable thing to do. In truth it is a kind of training, teaching your hands and heart to default toward exit. Once your hands learn the rhythm of use and toss, your mind learns the same rhythm with vows and neighbors and even your own sense of duty. That is why a people can be surrounded by abundance and still feel hollow. A life can be made fluent in convenience and still fail at the basic work of being human, being part of a community, of living well. Keeping feels slow because it resists that rhythm. It is the long obedience of ordinary days, and ordinary days are where the battle is won or lost in a thousand thousand small decisions to compromise or to hold.

Keeping is learned by proximity, and especially by the nearness of generations to each other. A child does not become rooted because you tell him that roots matter, he becomes rooted because he grows up among adults who are rooted, who know the land and the people and the calendar of the year like they know the rooms of their own house. A young man learns how to carry weight because he has watched older men carry it without theatrics, watched them meet the hard parts of the year with presence rather than distraction, seen them keep the hearth work and the neighbor work and the village work in a way that makes endurance feel ordinary. An old person remains whole because she is still threaded into the daily life of a family, not visited as a relic but relied on as kin. When those bonds thin, the skill of keeping collapses.

Children become a category to manage instead of souls to welcome.

Young adults become a mobile labor force drifting between cities and screens.

Elders become a quiet problem handled by emotionally distant professionals.

When we choose to silo ourselves, to compromise on our relationships instead of to keep them, each group loses something that only the others can give. The young lose models of steadfastness. The old lose the dignity of being needed. The middle lose the language of responsibility because responsibility makes sense only when it runs both ways across time. In a kept world, you do not just love your people. You are useful to them. That usefulness takes form and becomes the very shape of what it means to belong to a people and a place.

The cultural repair we need will not arrive with a single grand solution. It will come the way winter light returns after the solstice, almost imperceptibly at first, by small brave acts of saying no to compromise and greasy ease done again and again until they shape a new season.

It will come when men and women decide to be present where they are needed, not only in emergencies but in the plain hours when nothing glamorous is happening.

It will come when young people are invited to stay and shown that staying is valuable and honorable.

It will come when children are treated as fully human members of the household and the town, not inconveniences to be hidden away.

It will come when elders are put back into the center of family life so that their knowledge and dignity can do their quiet work.

We are in a crisis of keeping, yes, but crises are also thresholds. If we want the world to be human again, we must relearn the old posture of standing watch, of enduring. We must learn to hold on to the living things given to us now. Land, children, seasons, light, each other.

This dark part of the year teaches that the fire does not keep itself.

Neither does a culture.

Neither does a family.

It hinges on keeping.

It hinges on you.

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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 result is a kind of sad paralysis. People watch institutions weaken, mourn what they believe is lost, and convince themselves that decline cannot be reversed. This mindset obscures a simple truth: the work that matters most has never depended on national forces.

It has always begun at the scale of the home.

Institutions may falter, but the household endures. Indeed, as all the major institutions around us crumble, the household is the last stable social unit we possess.

It is the final stronghold of civilization.

The cracks in our large institutions (schools, churches, political parties, government writ large) have been apparent for years. The time following the pandemic however exposed how paper-thin they had truly become. Schools struggled to maintain their basic missions during the pandemic despite access to technology and the remote flipped learning model having been popularized for over a decade. Most churches and dioceses, already facing bankruptcies and scandal, surrendered to state mandates leaving parishioners wondering how sacred their sacraments truly were. Civic groups and community organizations lost the participation that once sustained them. The worst and most extreme elements of the political parties told you to either turn your neighbor in to the authorities or disregard their wellbeing altogether.

What’s worse is that in the last five years, these institutions did not seem to learn much from one of the most historic events in their members’ lives; they continue to sleepwalk through the ruins of trust and efficacy as if we are not in a post-pandemic world.

The old structures people relied on feel hollow. They still exist, but their ability to form character, teach responsibility, or create belonging weakened significantly. This decline is real, and ignoring it serves no purpose. We live in a time when a disillusioned people are looking for truth, consistency, stability but as they look to the grand old pillars of yesteryear, there are cracks in the marble and moldering mortar.

The gaze then turns inward, away from the horizon and back to the hearth. How could it not? The household is the last stable institution.

It remains capable of producing order, meaning, and resilience even when larger systems falter. The household is the last place where effort maps clearly onto outcome.It is the only level of life where you can actually build something without asking permission. It is the only institution still in your direct care. What’s more, your efforts there result in moral lessons that serve as touchstones when the town square is washed away.

A consistent presence teaches reliability.

A predictable meal teaches rhythm.

A warm winter fire teaches care.

A tended room teaches humility.

A calm voice teaches prudence.

These small actions shape a moral environment that strengthens everyone inside it and fills the void left by the academic, religious, and civic institutions that failed basic tests at the start of this decade. Within the walls of a household, effort still matters. Agency still exists.

There is a common refrain we see from commentators that sounds like “Look at what we have lost! Look at what they have taken from you!” This is the pathetic and unearned cry of the lazy. A person has no right to mourn dying towns, fading traditions, or diminishing light if they are unwilling to clear the path, hammer the nail, or tend the fire themselves. Renewal begins with those who are willing to labor. A household that chooses responsibility becomes a source of stability for its neighborhood and a source of inheritance for its children.

Indeed, the pessimists and chronically online doomsayers will claim this is a retreat or escape, a ceding of ground. On the contrary, a home that is truly kept in the most reverent sense of the word is not an escape from the world. It is the antidote to it and its failures.

It is the smallest functioning republic: a place with customs, rituals, expectations, safety, boundaries, warmth, memory. It is the micro-scale society that actually teaches a child what the larger society should look like. The primal blueprint.

Every porch light left on, every garden dug, every fence mended, every bedtime story told, every neighbor fed, every table filled with laughter and order: these are the acts that hold the world together when nothing else can.

It is not a retreat. It is the final front by which men and women seeking agency in a wounded culture can actually mold their world.

From there the effort radiates however.

A man may not be able to single handedly reverse national decline but a family can create a good home.

A good home can save a street.

A street can save a town.

A town can save a region.

A region can save a nation.

A family cannot control national outcomes, but it can shape its own future. A neighborhood cannot rewrite global systems, but it can become more connected. Imagine every home radiating light through the small human-scale work described above. Does the radius grow to cover the nation? No, but it overlaps with the home next to it and it amplifies. When many households commit to such work, a patchwork series of beacons are lit and communities recover.

Schools improve when families provide structure.

Churches regain purpose when supported by steady homes.

Towns revive when people take responsibility for the places they inhabit.

Ultimately, society grows outward from the household, not inward from the state.

But how? How does the work begin? The stability of a home that grows in fractals and ripples does not appear on its own and is certainly not handed to you by the state.

It develops through slow, small, steady work shared by all the generations rooted in one place.

Families that cook together, maintain their property, tend to repairs, read, create ritual, and care for one another form habits of resilience. The grandmother who plays with the infant, the grandfather who laughs from the workshop, the father who tends the fire, the mother who announces a toast, the child who gathers flowers…these small routines offer a counterweight to the sweeping cultural and institutional decay and exhaustion. They create competence, trust, and vitality. Even small acts of order accumulate into strength: tools kept in their place, meals shared without a rush, seasonal tasks completed before the turn, candles lit in darkened windows, children included in the work of daily life.

This scale of life, of hearth-work, restores the agency lost when the marble pillars crumbled.

We live in a period when many large structures are unsteady. This is not a reason for despair or even self-deprecating nostalgia. It is a reason to focus on the level of life where effort still matters and results can still be seen. The household remains the last stable thing.

It calls for responsibility instead of resignation.

It calls for presence instead of commentary.

It calls for work instead of complaint.

Those who choose to keep their homes with intention are already participating in the quiet reconstruction of the world. As the old institutions continue to sleepwalk and falter, this is the work that sustains a future.

The home is the ground on which renewal of a nation will be built.

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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 necessary and reject the ancillary. This is—like so many elements of the natural world—an invitation to reflect.

First, the act of shedding to the fundament in the natural world.

Second, the same act in ourselves.

Third, the rebellion of this austerity.

In the northern places, this stripping-down arrives early and without apology. The first hard frost rigors the fields, and what once sprawled in green excess now contracts into its essential, sharp lines. The marshes dull to pewter, their summer shimmer and buzz replaced by a quiet, skeletal geometry. Oaks and maples stand newly honest, their canopies surrendered, revealing the stark architecture beneath—angles, joints, and axes that summer’s abundance concealed. Even the coastline simplifies: tides pull back debris, winds flatten the dunes, and the ocean grows colder, darker, more deliberate in its motion. There is a sense that the land itself is tightening its belt, drawing resources inward, refusing all ornamentation. What persists does so because it must; what falls away does so without ceremony. This seasonal austerity is a lesson in instinct, in the ruthless intelligence of survival. The northern wild places do not cling to what cannot be carried through winter. They pare themselves to the minimal, the durable, the true. In this bareness, this disciplined retreat to the fundament, the landscape offers its quiet catechism: to endure, one must return to what is necessary, and let the rest go.

So too with us. The frost falls, the snow arrives, and we—however consciously or not—take stock of what we will continue to carry. The abundance of summer, the swimming holes and holidays and easy dreaming of all the good plans to come give way to fundamental needs. Indeed, even in our modern lives full of so many conveniences and ease, this holds true. The cold sets in and our gaze shifts from the horizon to the hearth. The dark arrives and we find ourselves gently rocking a sick child and twice-checking the latch on gate.

We stop planning and building to focus on the fundamental; our family, our home, our health.

Precautions are taken so the children never have to think about warmth or food.

An unwelcome noise outside causes you to stand a little longer peering out into the dark than you would have in the languid days of June.

Such is the invitation of November; you are called to shed your summer dreams and turn your entire focus to the immediate, the necessary, the true. This is good, the forced setting of priorities, the reframing of perspective. Whatever auxiliary hopes and small decadences remained are shed to reveal what matters. Warmth. Nourishment. Family.

Yet even within this season of bareness, there arises a kind of rebellion. It is quiet, human, and defiantly warm. We gather in kitchens that glow against the dark, coaxing abundance from our stores as if to remind winter that it cannot have everything. Its grasp may claw from the woodline all the way to the door but there, we proclaim, it must cease. The feast, in November, is an affirmation that austerity cannot fully lay claim to the human spirit. We roast with ceremony transforming the red harvest into something communal and light-bringing. Around a long table, we answer the starkness outside with laughter, with candlelight, with the laden plate passed from hand to hand. It is a refusal to let the season’s spareness diminish us. Instead, we meet the cold by gathering close, by feeding one another richly, by insisting that gratitude and generosity still have a place even as the world narrows. Though we stand in the dark and take stock of the fundament, this feast is our counterpoint to winter’s demand for simplicity: a reminder that while the natural world hunkers down, we are creatures who rebel by way of fellowship, by creating warmth where none is given, by celebrating audaciously the very abundance we have just finished paring down.

It is a paradox in a way, yes. Such is the way of things however, those lessons learned standing here in the early winter-dark.

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Living the Year - Three Acts to Embody This Time

* Take a deliberate walk in a wild or quiet place and practice “noticing what has been let go.” Choose a trail, shoreline, or field and walk slowly, paying attention to what the season has stripped bare: the fallen leaves, the exposed branches, the drained marshes, the stillness of animals. As you observe, name (aloud or in your mind) one thing in your own life that can also be shed; maybe it’s an obligation, a lingering expectation, a distraction masquerading as necessity. Let the landscape teach you where to loosen your own grip.

* Shed to the fundament in your physical environment. Walk through your home room by room with a box or bag in hand, and ruthlessly discard or donate one non-essential item from each space. Something that no longer serves warmth, nourishment, or family. This mirrors the natural world’s stripping of leaves and debris, forcing a return to durable essentials like a secure hearth and stocked pantry.

* Rebel through a defiant feastGather your household or close loved ones for an intentional November meal (like our American Thanksgiving), lighting candles and sharing stories of gratitude around the table, explicitly toasting to the warmth you’ve conserved. This acts as a quiet rebellion, transforming pared-down resources into abundance and insisting on fellowship against the season’s austerity.

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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.

Well, except for you.

It all hinges on you now, northern man. You set the tone, stay the momentum, reclaim evergreen-old ways.

Hearth-keeper.

Merry-maker.

Father.

You are called now to presence. You are called now to keep. We so often see the next fifty-or-so days with Thanksgiving and the run-up to Christmas as an exhausting marathon feast.

For you though, it is a vigil.

The world asks that you show your quality as husband, father, son, and neighbor now. The days are few, the nights long, and within that ever-narrowing time, every act carries outrageous weight. You are also tempted by distraction now, however. It is so easy to say you are tired, to turn on the game after Sunday dinner, to linger in the garage, to sigh as your wife asks you to get the decorations down from the attic.

To fade.

Do not withdraw now. Do not diminish yourself as the shadows grow long at the woodline. Do not let the world turn without your strong hand upon it. When the outside world grows harsh, when the fields lie still, when your home fills with the excited sound of preparation, you must be there. Climb the ladder and hang the wreath. Fetch the wood. Surprise your wife. Gather the children. These small deeds are wards against the dark, they are prayers reaffirming that life continues, that the warmth you bring and grow and tend cannot be extinguished.

Remember that you establish the temper of every hour. While your wife is reflecting on where best to lean the cornstalks on the front porch, you need to be determining the very air of the day. You need to be slipping your children a little candy from the Halloween hoard and proclaiming your right of taxation. You need to be planning outings, carving meat, and remarking with authority on things you know nothing of. You need to be dropping in on the women in your life with an armful of mums and a gallant stride. You need to be leaving surprises for friends and sneaking the dog a morsel of Sunday dinner under the table with a wink and a nod to the nearest child. The kind of wink only a father can give, the kind that forever keeps you in their confidence and says “I will always be on your side.”

The home needs your warmth. The table needs your weight. The children watch you and learn what good endurance looks like in the ordinary tiring hours when the sun sets too early. Bring them light, laughter, guidance. Let your presence be the keystone that centers, that steadies the room. When your wife leans into the labor of the season, the quiet shaping of the home, you must meet her there. The work belongs to both. Your touch upon the hearth-work is the old inheritance, the way men once met the seasons and cycles of life with quiet reverence. Attend to it. Mend the last of the fences, light the candles, stand in the raw descent of dusk and know what is asked of you now.

Just as the jack-o-lanterns give way to the garland, so too does your autumnal joviality and Thanksgiving revelry give way to something deeper. Something hallowed and evergreen. Something old. So many of our old ceremonies and traditions surrounding the solstice and Christmas have entirely disappeared; they lie scattered and desecrated in the shadows of convenience and commerce. We have lost something ancient, something equal parts solstice bonfire and midnight mass, something green and white, wild and hallowed.

Where are the home-spun fireside delights of yesteryear, the halls decked with the rustic charms of mistletoe and holly, the candles, the fires, the caroling? These august customs of sheer, unbridled optimism flourished when men had a little more vitality, when they were a little more dangerous, when they threatened to drive the dark away. We all crave the same thing our forebears sought however: the assurance that our homes will outlast the night, that the days will grow longer, that the year will begin anew. Now, here in the long dark of the year, you need to reflect on those good old traditions that came before you, you need to reclaim the discarded crown of holly. It is you who now bears the torch upon the hill, you who now lights the candles, you who now tends the hearth.

The year will die and when it does, when the trees stand black against the snow, when the days begin their slow return, you will see what your keeping has wrought. Your wife will move through the rooms in quiet contentment. Your children will laugh in the warmth you have made. The dog will rest near the fire knowing all is well. The house will hold a stillness that feels like victory. Outside, the fields will sleep beneath frost, and you will know that you have met the season’s demand. You have stood where you were needed. You have tended what was inherited. The world will turn again, but for now, you sit in the light of your own making, watching as your family orbits around you as planets around a sun they never doubt will rise. The cold cannot touch you. The dark cannot enter.

You have kept faith.

You have kept watch.

And in this keeping, you will have remembered what it means to hold the light.

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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 over the nearest ridge have caught up to you and are taking a small toll. All around you now, a bit more gloom sets in.

Halloween is of course more than just ghouls and goblins, it is the halfway point between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice: the downhill of the downhill toward the darkest point of the year.

The gloom before the true dark of the turn of the year.

The leaves have finished their brief reverie. The fields, once humming with life and green, stand quiet under mist and crows. The garden gate swings in the wind, and even the morning coffee seems darker, heavier, its steam adding to the wisps at the woodline. You feel the tilt of the earth not in your bones but in your habits, the way you reach for the light switch earlier each day, the way conversation around the dinner table grows more inward, the long shadows reaching for the cellar door.

You know what to do, however.

You begin, instinctively, to bring light into your home. You might not even think of it, but you do. A candle on the dining table. A string of lights on the porch railing. A pumpkin carved and lit from within, its face soon flickering against the damp night. These small illuminations push back against the growing dark with a steadfast gentle defiance. We smile and tell ourselves they are for the children, and perhaps they are. The children are the reason you lay the newspaper on the table and pull the top off the pumpkin, the reason you scoop the seeds with your hands and pretend not to mind the mess, the reason you scrape a spot of rogue wax off the porch in November. You do it for the laughter, for the faces warmed by the orange glow, for the delight of watching fire bloom in spite of the gloom. You also do it for yourself, however. You do it to remember that though the darkness claws ever closer to the door, searching and scratching for a thread to pull loose, that sometimes the smallest light is enough to make a home feel whole again.

It is an old wisdom, perennial and ancient, this turning toward little lights in dark times. You might not call it ritual, but that’s what it is. You light the candles and the jack-o-lanterns not only for beauty but as a quiet defiance, an illuminated line in the sand. You have seen enough of modern ills to know they do not come with the season, that the dark of our contemporary wounded culture ever urges and churns without cycles, without good green patterns. The news is loud with tragedy and rage, the world feels increasingly brittle, and everything seems designed to keep you anxious and distracted. The easy conveniences promise to make life simple, but instead they make it smaller.

You scroll instead of speaking.

You purchase instead of creating.

You forget the smell of woodsmoke on your clothes and the taste of real fruit in your mouth.

Yet, there are still the children, asking to carve pumpkins, to light candles, to stay up late to see the moon. They do not ask you to explain the wounds of the world to them, they do not even ask to make it more bearable. They do endure it though.

The dark they face is not the same as yours however. It is not the dark clawing at the door, howling for your attention. It screeches silently in the wires, it hides behind screens, it slips into the corners of classrooms and playgrounds. You watch it reach for them, and it makes you ache. They are too young to understand how much the world asks of them already, how much it desires them. They come home tired, not from running or climbing, but from keeping up with all the influences and inputs and noise.

You see it in them, don’t you?

That quiet weariness that no child should know.

That neon static scream of too much, too much, too much behind their eyes.

We laugh to ourselves and joke that we weren’t meant to have as much information as we do, that the 24-hour news cycle is really too much, that knowing about sorrows across the world probably isn’t good for us.

We erred. We were not meant to pull back the curtain and stare so long into the digital cauldron, to be overwhelmed with so much information and so little knowledge. Our little towns and schools and homes have been flooded with every sorrow of the world and we were not prepared.

We adults grimly laugh at our mistake and shrug but the children, they do not understand.

How could they?

So you light the candles again. You make soup and laughter and warmth. You teach them the old rituals equally arcane and ordinary: how to carve faces into pumpkins, how to gather leaves, how to make a home glow from within.

You do not tell them it is protection though it is.

You do not tell them it is prayer though it is that too.

In time, the days will shorten even more. The mornings will freeze, the windows will fog, the ground will harden. The year will grow dark before it turns again. If you have done your small work, your hallowed hearth-work, if you have carried your little light faithfully through the fog, then the dark will not have the final word however.

Instead, the children will remember.

They will remember your laughter in the flicker of the jack-o-lantern, the smell of cinnamon and smoke, the quiet moments when the world outside seemed to press too close but the light inside held steady.

They will remember that there was a way to live gently and glow, ever repelling the screaming dark.

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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 full moon hasn’t helped their confusion, nor mine. It has cast its silver light through the boughs and across the fields, waking the nocturnal; foxes, skunk, and deer wandering through the flower field and closer to the house than I would like.

The children, too, have been taken by the moon.

They beg to stay up late, to join in whatever quiet work remains before bed. This is fine. The heat lends itself to frustration in us older people, but tonight my little girl carried tools down the hill to me, barefoot and beaming her headlamp despite the moonlight, ferrying a hammer, a ruler, some nails while I mended a loose board in the honey house.

There is a strange paradox to this season: one foot in autumn, the other stubbornly trying to reanimate summer. The leaves have fallen and turned to tinder underfoot, perfect for jumping and tossing into the air, yet standing in the old flower field I can hear the faint laughter of swimmers down the hill at the lake in the village, as if July had clawed its way from some autumnal burial mound.

It is disorienting when a season will not stay dead.

It confuses the senses and makes time feel off, wrong somehow. Still, around every home, the same good green pattern continues: the swing of the maul and the stacking of wood, the scent of honey warm in the hive, the anxious hammering of boards to outbuildings before winter’s inevitable claim. It is a strange thing to sweat under a sun that should have softened weeks ago, to labor in the yard or forest with heat on your neck while knowing frost is crouched in the hedgerows, waiting to waylay the tomatoes on the vine. The small jobs about the property and home regenerate endlessly, almost as if they are urged on unnaturally by the heat.

Then we see the children in the yard though, gathering leaves and stones into little piles or pretending to help us carry kindling and suddenly the heat no longer confuses and disorients, the muscles no longer ache.

The children root us when we are unmoored by strange skies.

They sanctify the toil and redeem it into vocation.

Today the heat finally broke. Rain came in the early morning, soft and steady, and our little corner of the world exhaled. The sky turned a muted gray and the light, filtered through the patchy clouds, glowed with a gloaming calm. The bees quieted at last, huddled in their hives, and the forest smelled again of damp leaves and good sodden loam. It is the kind of weather that invites stillness, that whispers rest, rest, rest. Rest is a luxury not yet earned however. There is still wood to stack, honey to bottle and sell, another repair on the chicken coop before the cold finds its way in.

Meanwhile, the children’s laughter is a ringing bell through it all, putting the reanimated summer finally to rest.

They play in the new puddles we tell them to avoid, of course, and when we turn to scold we stop short. Their joy redeems the drudgery. Their play answers every unspoken question about why we keep going when the body aches and the mind frays.

Even now, as the days shorten and the warmth feels misplaced, we are reminded what all this labor is for. The work, the worry, the stings and small fixes. They are for the children who chase chickens and puddles and dreams under an autumn sun that doesn’t know what month it is. They are the quiet covenant that binds us to our place and to the rhythm of work and of rest, of breaking and of mending, of toil and of joy. The skies may turn strange, the seasons may blur, the cracks in our walls may show but still, we keep going.

We must.

When the muscles tremble, when the hands blister, when the spirit grows weary and wonders if it can go on, we look to them and remember.

For them, we labor.

Through them, the work becomes hallowed.

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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 culmination of green and gold, of seed and loam.

We could learn from all the trees and flowers this time of year, of all the seed sowers and bulb growers. Our days are marked by endless pings and alerts, of calendar reminders and notifications. You are approaching the fourth quarter of the business year—that most hatefully efficient quadrisecting delineation of your time—and, if you are a white collar worker who spends more time behind a keyboard than a shovel, you are likely facing some sort of “Q4 performance review.”

If so, God help you.

Your good green heart was meant for more than this.

You will be asked—either by your job or by our wounded culture at large—how you plan to grow in the coming quarter, in the time before the turn of another year.

This is neither fair nor is it natural.

When we lost touch with our agrarian roots, when we left the fields and forests for the factories and offices, we sacrificed a certain attunement with the seasons and cycles. We forgot how this time of year was instructing us in favor of steady work, a long endless metallic drone instead of a cyclical organic rhythm.

We forgot to recognize our victories. We forgot to realize when we had won and when to rest.

The good news is that creation, the loam, the good green pattern churning beneath all know better. The forest knows better. Ask any gardener or beekeeper or orchardist and they will tell you now is the season to take stock. You pull the last of the garden from the dirt, you collect the honey you’ve been waiting on since May, you take your apples to the cider press. There are few thoughts now about producing more, about endless striving. Now all thoughts turn to a heavy sigh of relief and culmination—the fruit is in the basket, the crop is in the barn, the bees are heavy with stores and the wood pile is teetering dangerously high.

It is no small thing to come to the end of a cycle and realize you have made, grown, created enough. That you worked, yes, and labored, but now you can gather. We were not meant to produce endlessly, to grow constantly, to urge and urge and urge.

This is the rhythm our ancestors trusted. This is the rhythm that kept them sane. The ability to stop and say: it is finished.

You should allow yourself the same.

Perhaps you are not a farmer. Perhaps you have no harvest in a literal sense. Still, you have planted and tended something this year. Maybe you raised children through another summer of scraped knees and wild berries. Maybe you launched a project that is finally reaching its natural close. Maybe you simply endured and held on when things were difficult in your heart. That too is a kind of harvest and worth acknowledging.

Instead of asking “what next?” ask “what now?”

What is here? What is complete? What is good?

The trees do not grow new leaves in September. They are not so foolish as to try. They know it is time to let go, to blaze out in one final show of color, to cast seed into the ground and trust the future to take care of itself.

They celebrate by ceasing.

They culminate by closing the cycle.

Do not let the tyranny of quarterly goals, year-end reviews, and other modern inventions of productivity rob you of the deep peace that is due to you in this season. Do not let our culture of relentless progress steal away the chance to enjoy what you have already accomplished.

Some will tell you that rest or idleness now is a sort of failure. The truth is that rest is the crown of the work.

The meadow in September is not anxious. The field after harvest is not ashamed. They have given what they can give. That is enough.

Now is the time to gather your own community, however small, to mark this time following the equinox. Invite friends for a meal. Bake bread, press cider, roast whatever your hands have brought in from the summer. If you have no literal harvest of your own, take stock of what you have done, all the good you have wrought and celebrate it. Buy a pumpkin, light a candle, let the children run until they fall into sleep. You are allowed to live as if the world is not only spreadsheets and headlines you know.

Celebration is a kind of rebellion. Through it, you proclaim: I will not let the anxious cultural ills dictate my pace, I will not let the endless noise drown out the truth of the season. The truth is that you have accomplished something. The truth is that you have made it this far. The truth is that you can rest in that knowledge.

First you need to take your victory lap, though.

The frost is here. The days will shorten further. The long rest of winter will arrive in its time. Not today though. Not yet. Today is for culmination and for you to take some kind of stock of your good verdant victory.

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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 the autumn equinox. This is significant not because of some spurious astrology but rather the real, tangible ways your world will change and some innate symbolism that natural world offers.

On the equinox your days and your nights will be more or less equal. Twelve hours of light. Twelve hours of darkness. This is good. In such unstable times, it is well that we are not also enduring the long dark-cold or losing ourselves in the bacchanalian joy of the two extremes, the solstices. This equinox is marked too by the invitation to start over offered by the new moon. Something about new moons always feels like an opportunity to begin again. When you take these two celestial events in tandem—the balance of the equinox and the opportunity of the new moon—it feels as though you are being invited by the natural world to step forward and reclaim some semblance of stability, to make a fresh start and regain your footing, to try again.

I walked with my now toddling daughter (13 months old) around our meadow this evening wondering what to tell you about this equinox, about how to become balanced again in such an unbalanced world. Would I speak of the adaptability of trees changing? The succession of flowers again? Migratory patterns? As I hemmed and hawed, contemplated and reflected there in the meadow, my little girl pointed to a small sunflower. I carried her to it, placed her down, and continued my ruminating. She tugged at the flower, realized she could not pull it from its root, and crawled to my lap. She did not fuss as I picked her up and carried her in my arms to the forest in search of more insight. It was there however, that I realized she had already given us everything we needed to know to keep our balance in this unbalanced world.

The Flower

As we walked around the field, my daughter spied a small sunflower from some distance and pointed to it, directing me to bring her there. When I placed her on the ground, she was not distracted by a butterfly nearby nor the approaching cat; she walked to the flower confidently and began to pull.

She knew what she wanted and she went for it.

As we are considering how to reclaim our balance in these uncertain days of grim headlines and constant alarm, it is wise to be like the very young child who sees what she wants and strides to it with an unwavering focus. Identify your goal and do not lose sight of it, ask those who support you to help you arrive to your desired location, approach, and seize what you desire.

The Familiar

When my daughter decided pulling the flower was in vain, she did not fuss. She realized uprooting it was beyond her and she crawled toward me and settled into my lap. One might expect an easy lesson here in the importance of asking for help, but that did not occur. My daughter—though very young—knows how to ask for things including assistance. She did not do that with her flower. Instead, realizing it was beyond her, that its roots were stuck fast, that it willed itself to remain planted, she returned to me and therein lies her second lesson for you:

When we fail, it is good to retreat to familiar ground.

Remember though (and this is very important) that she did not crawl to me crying or wailing, distraught at her defeat. She accepted what was and returned to what she knew. As the world becomes increasingly complex and unstable, things just won’t work sometimes. As my friend and fellow father Joe Norman at Applied Complexity Science likes to remind me, “complex systems are fragile systems.” This will only become increasingly true as our world becomes increasingly complex and many institutions, efforts, and logistical networks will break down. Failure abounds.

This sounds scary but it is fine as long as you have the familiar to which you may return.

Perhaps it is not a physical place like your father’s lap. Perhaps it is your faith or ethos or code of morality. Perhaps it is a person. Perhaps it is a book or tradition or biome. Whatever the case may be, if you have a touchstone, something to moor yourself to when the sea of life becomes too choppy, you will be able to regain your footing and try again.

Trust

After my daughter crawled into my lap and I stood and started walking away from her desired flower, she did not whine. We walked from the flower meadow to the edge of the forest. There, we spotted a flock of wild turkeys emerge in the far corner of the field to the south. The woodline curves there like the gentle arc of the sun over the western ridge this time of year, providing multiple opportunities for escape for a cunning wild bird. A fine and safe boreal cove in which to sun and rest. We stood there, listening to the scratchy call of a hen to her flock, watching the wild turkeys sun themselves in the curving corner of the field. The September sun was warm and there were no biting insects to distract us from watching the funny turkeys slowly waddle back into the forest, from reflecting on safety, from witnessing a moment of tranquility.

Although my daughter did not obtain what she initially sought, she was rewarded with something else. She trusted where I was bringing her and gained something good.

I will not tell you in what to put your trust. That is too personal and only for you to decide. There will be times when you feel as though nothing is going right however, when the imbalance has turned to a free fall. In these moments, trust in what you have sown before this time: the relationships you have fostered, the insurances you have set, the skills you have honed, all the good you have wrought. Perhaps this looks like reaching out to a friend, in leaning into your faith, in cashing in on some social program you have spent your life paying into. Whatever the case may be, you likely have more of a safety net that you realize, something solid in which you can trust.

As the equinox and new moon converge this Sunday, attempt to focus your mind less on grand systems or headlines and more on that small sunflower in the field, the little girl tugging at its rooted stalk, returning to her father’s lap, and later watching wild turkeys at ease in their woodland cove.

Focus on what these anecdotes symbolize.

Pursuing what you desire with clarity, returning to the familiar when you cannot uproot what will not yield, trusting that the path still offers good things—these three movements are enough to steady us when the world feels increasingly unbalanced.

You cannot control the whole earth teetering on a knife’s edge. You can walk toward the flower, rest again in the familiar when it will not come loose, and trust the hand that carries you toward what you do not yet see.

You can reclaim your balance.

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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 blush along the edges of the field as if the bees told it a risky joke. Goldenrod reigns over every field. The light has sharpened, no longer softened by June’s hazy gauze but instead casting crisp edges on leaves, stones, and weathered fences. The sky feels closer to November’s stark clarity than midsummer’s languid glow now. A faint browning creeps into the green, signaling the year’s inevitable turn toward more balanced days after summer’s wild sunlit bender. This is late August’s arrival, subtle and without ceremony, leaving most of us to ask “Where has the time gone?” It is a good question and we seem to remark on it often. People will tell you that time keeps speeding up for them as they age, that the days are long but the years are short. They ask “How did my children grow so big?” The days are so full, the weeks just float away and there is the ever-present lament of “I need more time.” They are common complaints and questions. Rarely do you hear that we can slow the turning of that old grindstone, however.

It seems to be a secret well kept, hiding in plain sight.

We can slow our perception of time. It is not arcane or difficult, but it does require practice that, like all good practices, eventually forms into a benevolent habit. The secret to slowing time is twofold: first in deliberate attention, in actively attempting to simply notice what is changing before you. Most people rush past the season’s signs, distracted by screens or lamenting summer’s end, only to find themselves at Labor Day or Halloween, asking, “Where did the time go?” Time can be stretched however, made to linger and burn slow like a well-tended fire, by noticing the small shifts that mark the turn. This, in part, is why it becomes important to attune yourself to a place, to stay there for a long time and become intimately familiar with its seasons and its signs. Do you know the birds at your feeder, the weeds in your ditch, where the moon rises over the ridge this time of year? Here in Vermont, late August has many little omens and signs: goldenrod fills the fields while asters bubble up from the ditches and roadsides, their purple and yellow blooms complimenting the fading green. Corn in the fiend stands tall, tassels dry and rustling, while dairy barns glow with the soft light of evening routines. We have lost over an hour of daylight since the summer solstice and those lights are now necessary. In the woods, the understory shifts; wood nettle fades, jewelweed scatters seeds, and birch leaves curl on the forest floor. Along roadsides milkweed pods are just beginning to split open, their silken threads catching the wind. Each day offers a detail, a small slow secret to anchor the moment if you but pause to gather it.

The second element you need to slow time may sound ironic. It is filling your days with good work. Imagine each day as a wooden chest placed on the riverbank. The river is time, always flowing, always pushing, apathetic to what it carries off. The chest is your days. A chest left empty is light; it is carried off easily, swept downstream before you have even marked its presence. That is how whole months can vanish unnoticed, how years slip past with the haunting sense that you never truly lived them. A chest that is filled with the weight of good work, of perennial tasks, of hours well-spent building, making, growing for your family cannot be rushed away. It settles into place, anchored by what you have placed inside with care. The day remains regardless of the rising river and its rushing insistence. You can prove this for yourself. Work a property hard for a single year on evenings, weekends, whenever the light allows, and by the following autumn it will feel as though you have been there for decades, even generations. The soil will know your hand, the fences your hammer, the animals your presence. This good work does not mean frantic busyness, nor endless striving, but rather keeping with the good green pattern of the world: tending bees, stacking wood, pruning apple trees, raising children. In the city you may achieve this as well, though it may not feel as intuitive. Instead of splitting wood, you may have more agency around the relationships you build or the initiatives you take to improve commonly held spaces like parks, or the old rituals of your faith you steward. Whatever the case may be, you place good weight in the chest through these acts. They belong to the perennial cycle, the tasks that root you in a place and in a rhythm beyond yourself.

Fill enough chests this way, and the river of time still flows, but you are no longer at its mercy.

The days remain along the bank, solid, waiting, part of a lasting pattern. The chest of each day is so full, so well-weighted with effort and care, that time itself seems to lengthen around you, yielding to and flowing around the chests you placed and filled. This is the gift of good work. It thickens life with a welcomed heaviness, a vigor that cannot be pushed and pulled by the whims of culture or time.

The modern world thrives on distraction, urging acceleration and feeding on the despair of time slipping away. It prefers you scroll rather than watch the moon rise over a quiet hill, count emails instead of fireflies flickering in the twilight, fight instead of love. This rush erodes the river bank while simultaneously causing you to forget to fill your chest, leaving it weightless. To slow down time is to resist this current, to live as though each day carries intrinsic value, as though the good green pattern of the world and its cycles of growth and decay, its fleeting moments of beauty, were drawn out for you to witness and build upon.

You can start simply.

Watch as the sky’s evening slides from gold to pink to gray, stars emerging one by one. Invite a neighbor over. Listen to the crickets. Remember an old tradition from your childhood, however mundane or sacred. Learn the smells of the season: cut grass cooling in the evening, apples softening in ditches, their ferment a promise of autumn. Notice a child’s laughter carrying across a field or the weight of their hand in yours. Keep a journal, even just a line, to note the first asters frothing up in the low places, the morning mist coiled in the valley, or a fox darting across your path. Writing these moments anchors the day, adding a little weight to the chest you keep at the river’s banks. Do this and you will not look back in November, startled, wondering where the season, the very year went. Instead when you fill each day’s chest with timeless things and good work you ensure it sits heavy in your memory, not lost to the flotsam and detritus of distraction. The practice of noticing is one of quiet rebellion, a choice to dwell in the present rather than race down the river toward the next milestone, to believe that each day matters.

The temptation this time of year is to grieve summer’s fading ease or allow the current to sweep you toward autumn’s glory, but the wiser path is to dwell here, in the thick and forgotten briar of the present, considering each day with intention. Walk the roadside and taste the tart bite of a wild apple. Cut a bouquet of whatever wildflowers remain for your table. Watch for small shifts: the first red leaf, the slant of light across a barn that was not there a week ago, the cool breath of evening. Let these acts ground you. They require no great effort, yet they imbue the days with an endurance otherwise lost.

Ultimately, we do not need more time. We simply need to pay attention.

Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree offers a free reflection like this every Wednesday. Paid subscribers get access to additional lessons on how to live a more grounded life in our wounded modern world.

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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 makes it feel right that this post should be available to everyone.

Here are some of our past beekeeping posts that will give context if you are new here:

"You could charge for this, you know." The kind woman I did not know remarked as she cut a handful of zinnias and marigolds from our meadow. She was visiting from another state, staying with my friend and neighbor who I saw swimming earlier. I invited them to walk up to our home and cut flowers. Her comment caused me to reflect not only on the possibility of tourists cutting flowers and taking photos in our meadow for money, but the morality, authenticity, and general ethos of the idea. Two weeks ago, another friend walked up from the village with her daughter and her daughter's boyfriend. These beautiful teenagers spent one of their final evenings together before leaving for college by putting the flowers from our meadow into each other's hair. I smiled as they stood there in the field, looking like Oberon and Titania holding court, unaware of summer's fade. Could I ever bring myself to charge a stranger for such a thing? Would it be right? Would it be better to leave the meadow a secret for friends and friends of friends to come and leave with a bouquet for their table? What is even the purpose of the Humming Meadow?

We live in a time when everything is bent toward transaction. The smallest pleasures are weighed for their commercial potential, packaged, branded, and sold back to us as a curated experience. Even the flowers are not spared; wild bouquets and meadow walks appear on glossy flyers promising wellness, mindfulness, reconnection. To resist this “agri-tainment” not easy. We are told we must monetize the hours we spend, the skills we carry, even the beauty that happens to fall on our land. I am not immune to this. I write here, I keep bees, I tend a homestead that asks for both labor and investment. Yes, we care deeply about beekeeping, the land, and creating something good and perennial but there is also a practical wisdom in selling honey, in asking readers to support words worth writing.

Yet there is also a line that must be drawn if one hopes to live in alignment and equilibrium with the good green pattern.

Not every moment, not every experience, not every gift of place should be folded into the ledger. Our wounded modern world may need fewer things for sale and more things given freely, without calculation or branding, without the heaviness of an exchange. There must be some part of our lives—a table set for family, a forest path known only to neighbors, a good old ritual—that remains unpriced.

Perhaps this is because, while in the meadow this evening, I sensed we are actively living in “the good old days”. I know it in my bones when I watch my daughter chase after our black cat through the meadow with an armful of zinnias. I know it when I see my wife at dusk, standing barefoot in the grass, holding our youngest while moths relieve the butterflies’ watch over the meadow. I know it in the steady rhythm of the hives, in the sting and the sweetness that mark this work as ours. These days are fleeting, precious, lit with a kind of unselfconscious joy. The business is still small enough that it does not consume us, the children still young enough that they do not pull away. Even the meadow itself feels fragile, an ember of soil and seed that could easily be snuffed out by carelessness or greed. Were I to charge for entry, to make the flowers a product instead of a gift, I would lose something essential. I would no longer wave to a stranger who has wandered up the road from the village and mean it when I say, “Take some home with you.” I would no longer welcome a friend of a friend with scissors in hand and feel no need to count the stems. These are the years when such hospitality is still possible, when the gate is open, when we do not guard ourselves against loss because what we have feels abundant.

In time, this ease will change. The children will grow, the business may harden into necessary edges, the meadow will pass through its seasons and become something else. I do not fool myself that the wheel will pause here. The dandelion gives way to the clover, the clover to the goldenrod, the goldenrod to the asters. So too with us. What we hold today will be asked of us tomorrow, and if we are wise, we will give it gladly. To cling too tightly is to miss the gift of the season we are in. Better to live as the flowers do, spending themselves fully while the light is theirs, trusting the good green pattern to carry on. If we can live this way, even for a time, we will have left enough behind—honey in the jar, flowers in a stranger’s hands, memory pressed into the hearts of children—for something beautiful to grow after us.

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