Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree

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-dappled light do not hesitate to protect and tend to their young. Every creature, from bear to bird, gently shelters and guides with a good instinct that points to perennial truths. The creatures of the wood raise their young with remarkable care, attention, and dignity.

Yet, beyond the wood line, in our wounded modern world, we have forgotten how to do the same for our own young children.

Over the past decade, we have experienced a profound hyper-focus on social justice. We have reframed dehumanizing language, deliberately designed spaces for marginalized groups, and viewed people holistically with a fierce protection. This all-encompassing social justice movement has rapidly changed our culture, transformed the physical world we inhabit, and shaped the way we communicate.

It has also quietly, blindly, tragically excluded our children.

Listen to conversations about children and you will hear dehumanizing terms. Carefully consider the next public place you visit and you will see we build spaces that ignore their small bodies. Read any media and note how we view them as not children, but as incomplete adults. This cultural neglect, this silent tragedy, this betrayal, haunts our shared humanity. It deepens our collective wound. We need to think hard about how our language, public spaces, and narratives fail our children, diminish their dignity, and erode the warmth of our collective life.

Our culture casually accepts dehumanizing language for young children, a practice tolerated in ways no other group endures. Terms like “brat,” “little tyrant,” or “animals” pepper parenting blogs, social media, and advertisements, framing children as chaotic nuisances rather than the vulnerable humans they are.

We do this easily, almost reflexively. The post pictured above was written by someone who is normally even-keel, considerate, who has raised children. The speaker is not an evil, malicious person, they are merely a victim of the dehumanizing culture that has so permeated our language and very minds. Contrast this instance of “unsocialized animals” written with ease, that went relatively unchallenged, with our cultural labor to retire and forbid terms like “thug” for black men or “hysteric” for women, driven by earnest and good social justice advocacy to honor a person’s inherent worth. For children, however, dehumanization is ambient, slipping by unexamined. You may not have noticed it until now just as a fish does not notice the water in which it swims it is so common. This betrays a culture that has drifted from the respect we have learned to give others, leaving our youngest outside the protective ideals we champion. It is a loss that echoes in our words. We should grieve this behavior, as it diminishes the vibrant humanity of our children. When we use dehumanizing language for any group, something deeply sinister happens: our willingness to neglect and even harm the targeted group becomes ever so slightly greater. Consider when we refer to children as “burdens.” We subconsciously frame them as liabilities, something from which to liberate ourselves. How about “mouths to feed”? You’ve heard it hundreds of times, and each time some part of your brain reduced children to mere consumers of resources. These are but standard examples said daily. There are infinitely more vulgar terms for children used which I will not write. Ultimately though, even the most innocuous slip of “brat” or “spawn” strips children of their humanity. It is the last acceptable language of dehumanization and that dehumanization subtly invites harm. Every atrocity in history started with this shift in language. We would do well to remember that.

Beyond the language we use to neglect a child’s humanity, we also neglect their physical being. Public spaces, particularly bathrooms, expose this neglect, designed for adult needs while treating young children as mere afterthoughts, their small bodies invisible in our plans. Most restrooms lack toddler-sized toilet seats, step stools for sinks, or changing tables, forcing parents into awkward, often undignified improvisation. Considering the ease and affordability of 2-in-1 potty training toilet seats and stools, there are some extremely easy wins to be had for those who own any sort of public venue with a modicum of will.

We prioritize inclusive designs for other groups: wheelchair ramps, braille signage, gender-neutral stalls. To not have a stall accessible to a person in a wheelchair would be unthinkable for a restaurant or library, yet we shrug when a child cannot sit on the toilet without falling in. It is clear we, as a culture, value social justice commitments to accessibility and dignity yet we do not have the will to extend this justice to children. Why? These adult-centric spaces, cold, unwelcoming, unreachable, assume children’s needs are temporary, unworthy of the care we extend to others. Their presence is but an inconvenience in a world built for adults. This oversight, rooted in seeing children as not yet whole, sidelines them from our vision of a shared, inclusive world, a loss etched, screaming in the very bricks and pavestones of our architecture.

Our most haunting failure however is our cultural narrative of young children as “incomplete adults,” raw material to mold rather than whole beings with rights deserving of dignity now. Parenting media, children’s books, and campaigns fixate on what children will become, overshadowing their present humanity. Raising Good Humans Every Day (2024) by Hunter Clarke-Fields offers “mindful practices” to shape toddlers into “future successes,” with chapters like “Building Your Child’s Future Self” that prioritize adult traits over present emotions (Amazon reviews, 2024). The Wonderful Things You Will Be (2024 edition) by Emily Winfield Martin imagines what children “will be” (brave, wise, kind) while rarely celebrating who they are now. A 2025 parenting podcast, Good Inside with Dr. Becky, framed preschoolers’ tantrums as “obstacles to future resilience.” These media, though well-meaning, reflect our collective unease with children’s impulsive, emotional now, casting them instead as potential simply waiting to be shaped. We are no strangers to affirmation however. The last two decades saw fierce advocacy for affirming present identities for adults especially related to race or gender. We celebrate adults for who they are. We see children as seeds, however, only ever viewing them as the people they will be. This is a lamentable lens that fades the child’s vibrant today, denying them the dignity we champion for others. This narrative overlooks young children’s full humanity, valuing only their distant tomorrow, a loss that dims our collective heart.

In the woods just past the meadow where my daughter plays, the animals continue to honor their young. A doe does not ask what her fawn will become before shielding it, a bear sow does not wait for her cub to prove its worth before teaching it, a vixen is incapable of viewing her kits as anything but what they presently are. These animals, guided by instinct, by the good green pattern of the natural world, nurture their young with fierce, present care, a lesson our sophisticated culture has forgotten. We have championed social protections like reframing language, building inclusive spaces, and honoring one’s present identity, but in our fervor we have left the children behind, toler…

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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 begun to quiet their courting songs; dusk brings a quieter chorus at the woodline than it did even a week ago. The frogs are settling in. They have found their mates. Amongst it all, amid all the songs lilting and fading, there are those in the meadow and among the hedgerows bearing earnest witness to the oaths declared and the songs of celebration:

The children.

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They are there signing their own little songs learned in playgrounds and in their mothers’ arms at bedtime after long May days of scraped knees, bug bites, and dandelion picking. While we adults hang our heads in our hands, weighed down by all manner of modernity’s artificial anxieties, they are watching the birds flit about calling to one another, they are listening to the mystery of the dusk-song from the trees. They are present, fully and freely, in the perennial pattern of the seasons, of the goodness of the world.

It is a wonder then, in this season of matrimony, that we have begun to exile them from our weddings.

There is a concerning trend of weddings, once a rite that wove together families and futures, having become something curated and adult-only, sterilized of giggles during the vows, of small hands dropping petals, of the accidental holiness of a child falling asleep in a pew. The child, who once danced between tables and yanked at Grandpa’s tie, is now unwelcome, a perceived interruption to the ambiance.

We say it's for simplicity. For elegance. We convince ourselves we’re doing it so the parents can have a night off. In truth though, it is grim reflection of a deeper discomfort with which we have not reckoned. It is a cultural abandonment of inheritance, of challenge, of continuity. In leaving out the children from our hallowed rite, we leave out the very ones to whom the promise is meant to extend. We blind those whose witness is most unselfconscious, most earnestly given.

One can read the lifestyle articles, the blogs, the various defenses of this practice. They are well-intentioned. The defenders of childfree weddings will point to a sense of preserving the special moments, make the case that children are not well suited for formal events, and expecting them to remain quiet and composed throughout a wedding is unrealistic.

Perhaps the problem is the expectation itself. Perhaps the disruption is the point.

It is often said that if a parish never hears the occasional cry of a baby or the chatter of a toddler during Sunday Mass, it is a parish on the brink of death. It is a grim but clarifying reminder that we are always but one generation away from losing the values, traditions, and promises we do not pass down. Whether or not you are religious, this principle applies. A wedding is about continuity. There is deep comfort in knowing that when your love matures, when your parents are gone, when the blush of youth gives way to gray and to gravity, there will be young adults in your life who will remember something essential about you.

They will remember that you made a vow.

They, as children, may not remember the details of your vows. They will not remember what you said. They will remember that you took them however. They will remember that magical words that bound you to another were exchanged. They will remember that something sacred happened.

This memory becomes a compass, a north star, for both them and you. These future young adults are not your peers who may succumb to the same societal pressures, trends, and pitfalls you do; they have a different perspective, a cultural antibody you do not possess. They will not fall in the same way you do. This is invaluable in holding you accountable, in keeping you true. They benefit as well. As they bear witness to your oath, they begin to craft a story they will carry into their own tangled seasons of adulthood. A story that can guide them when our wounded world inevitably tells them that commitment is naïve, irrational, or even disposable.

The children need to hear your vows.

An argument for childfree weddings we often hear is that they are both costly and deeply personal, that it is a day entirely focused on the happy couple and therefore their wishes are paramount. It should be about them. Yes, weddings require immense effort, planning, and sacrifice. They are charged with emotion, with meaning, with the uniqueness of a couple’s story.

However they are not exclusively yours.

This is jarring to our individualistic and owner-oriented western sensibilities, but a wedding, no matter how tailored or costly, is not a curated expression of self. It is a public act of union, a covenant made in the presence of others. To exclude an entire population from that witnessing, especially the youngest and most vulnerable among us who carry the future of that community, is to diminish the very nature of the union. As a brief but serious aside, we also need to ask ourselves plainly why is it only children we feel free to exclude? Try substituting any other group: “No one over sixty, too disruptive you know.” “Not for those earning under $100,000 a year. Too risky.” The suggestion is absurd. Offensive, even. Yet with children, we’re comfortable saying they’re too risky, too noisy, too inconvenient. Why? Ask yourself and you will find an uncomfortable answer.

Regardless, here lies the heart of the matter: weddings, while personal, are not private performances. Ultimately, a union made without witnesses becomes something fragile. A union seen, remembered, and carried by others is more enduring. It lasts.

This exclusion points to a deeper cultural malaise. It is not quite selfishness, but it something close. Perhaps it is a kind of compartmentalization, or a form of toxic individualism, where even our most sacred rites are folded into the logic of consumer choice and personal branding, of identity. When every aspect of the day is curated down to color palettes and filtered lighting, the messy, holy reality of life, the surprise laugh, the toddler’s shriek, the communion that spans generations, is treated as an inconvenience. A wedding is not a brand extension however. It is not a performance. It is a deeply human and hallowed rite. It is a sacrament rooted in something older than trend, older than taste. It is not about control. It is not about ambiance. It is not, ultimately, about you.

It is about your union and the people who will hold you to it. The ones who will remind you, decades from now, what you promised. The ones who will grow up remembering they saw something sacred, something good, something worth aspiring to. When we invite children to our weddings, we invite the future to bear witness.

That is worth a little noise. It is worth a little song.

If this essay spoke to something deep and true in you, if you long for more reflections like this, grounded in beauty, tradition, and rebellion against our wounded world, consider becoming a paid subscriber to Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree. Paid posts go further: deeper essays, practical insights, and enduring truths by which you can live and pass on. This is writing that builds what the world is busy tearing down. Build it with me.

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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, you become wealthier, and you even live longer. Your very heart tells you it is good. By all accounts, you and everyone you know, rational and Romantic, should understand this thing is good. If you would like, it can even cost no money and very little time to perform. Despite this, an overwhelming amount of young people from every class and creed walk away from the ritual, the good old tradition, every year. They cite financial hardship, a desire for personal growth, prioritizing their profession. When your mother was a girl, nine out of ten people took part in this ritual. Now, about three out of ten do.

This ritual is real.

It is marriage, and young people are walking away from it.

How did we come to this? How did we get here? What can, or even should, be done? Everything stated in the opening paragraph is true; marriage causes us to live longer, have reportedly fewer and less extreme mental health problems, and has been a cultural keystone for longer than any historian can remember. We are, in many ways, defined by marriage. Yet now we stand at the precipice of abandoning the good old tradition altogether. We need to explore why, where we stand, and where to go from here. We owe ourselves this.

The Old Ball and Chain

We have had access to mass media, television, for less than a century. In that time, our regional culture, accents, music, and traditions have rapidly homogenized. There is no arguing that television has affected our society immensely and the content of it has influenced us. For the last seventy years of American programming, men who openly despise their nagging wives have been front and center. One could even go so far as to argue that “I Hate my Wife” is not so much a trope as it was a full on genre. It was most prominent in sitcoms from the 1950s to early 2000s and, although modern shows tend to avoid it due to evolving norms, one must wonder what damage to our society, institutions, and culture has been caused by having an entire genre of sitcoms starring resentful husbands and domineering wives blaring in every American home for the last seventy years.

You may roll your eyes at this assertion, but ask yourself how our culture would be different if we had been constantly inundated by respectful spouses who were enamored with each other, courtly romance, or faithful partnerships built on mutual admiration and a shared goal. What if, instead of laughter generated from bitterness, these programs proclaimed that love could deepen over decades, that family life was not a trap but something which to aspire?

Media forms us more than we care to admit. We are not immune to propaganda or even the subconscious erosion of our morality by everyday tropes. When every punchline is aimed at the same sacred thing, how long before we learn to laugh at it too? Something is wrong.

Bachelor Night

Years ago, before my beautiful daughters were born, my wife and I, recently wed, owned a small home in a city. She left for a weekend to a work trip (a conference for historians I think) and, to dull the edge of loneliness, I met up with some friends at a bar. A new acquaintance with whom I was unfamiliar joined us and I explained to him my wife was out of town. His face twisted, he leered, and offered with an earnest growl “Heh, bachelor night, am I right?” and gave me a knowing nudge and wink. There was an implicit understanding that I was supposed to do something unfaithful while she was gone, let loose, engage in some sort of debauchery and this man was inviting me into his confidence expecting to hear my dark plan that did not exist. I brushed him off and asked him if he was married. He explained he was too busy living his best life, chasing goals, and “keeping things chill” to tie the knot with anyone. Maybe one day, but right now, he was good flying solo and not being tied down. His explanation stuck with me all these years for one reason: nearly everything he said conveyed a sense that he equated marriage with a loss of freedom. In his eyes, to be married was to be tethered, domesticated, diminished. It was clear he saw marriage not as a declaration of love but rather a limitation.

After fewer drinks than I would normally have, I said goodnight to my friends and went home early to our empty house. When I went inside and closed the front door, I thought about this man who was mistaking detachment for independence. I looked around at the evidence, the artifacts of the life my wife and I were building together. The photo of our wedding reception where she is grinning amidst a tangle of hair and a flower crown. The back yard we were landscaping, figuring out the right plants for a climate to which we were both strangers. The large table frequently crowded with friends and family. I was building something good with someone I loved, and nothing about that felt like a cage. It felt good and it felt right.

What Can We Even Do?

As I stood there in my house, preparing to go to bed, thinking of my wife, I considered how marriage was not just inherently good, but how it was fun. So much of what we have been conditioned to think about marriage from popular culture equates it to a loss of freedom, a loss of agency, a loss of self. In exchange, we are taught, we gain a perpetual responsibility or are doomed to a slow emasculation by way of nagging. It’s not just television; you see this subtly, insidiously boil to the surface in every aspect of our culture. An off-handed remark from a neighbor, a commercial that portrays the husband as a bumbling fool, a social media joke that gets thousands of likes for reducing a wife to a burden or a husband to a child. You do not even notice this just as the fish does not notice the water in which it swims. It is too engrained.

So how do you counter it? How do you dispel the snake-whispers promising freedom and regain the good old attitude that marriage is an institution worth preserving?

You have fun. You kiss your spouse in front of your children and laugh as they groan. You carve your initials into a tree and let them ask why. You dance together in the kitchen. You laugh together, build together, flirt in front of blushing company. You make visible the joy of your union. You show them that responsibility and romance are not enemies, that they are not diametrically opposed to independence. You show them that freedom is not found in avoiding commitment, but in giving yourself fully to something worthy, that the work of loving a person and your place together is hallowed.

The children will call you cringe and gross while they quietly feel the warmth of security wash over them. The riotous love you display transfers to them. When you kiss your husband or wife, your child feels it. They feel everything.

We don’t reclaim the image of marriage by arguing about it, by writing essays and hosting podcasts. We reclaim the image of marriage by embodying something worth coveting, by living something to which our children may aspire.

We evangelize through loving our husbands and wives with reckless abandon.

We win back the good old thing, the innately good timeless ritual, by living marriages that speak for themselves, marriages full of laughter, devotion, joy, sacrifice, and fierce, grit-tooth…

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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 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 here:

Thank you for being here, for walking this good green path with us.

Today, it began. Year one, day one.

Last year, my wife and I resolved to continue my family tradition of beekeeping. It was our test year—“Year Zero”— to see if we had the patience, resilience, and skill for it.

We decided to go all in.

After a year of classes, studying, missteps, and successes, the true genesis of our beekeeping operation began today with the arrival of twelve packages of bees—each one weighing three pounds and containing more than 15,000 honey bees. It rained the moment I returned home, a steady spring downpour that trapped us indoors and filled the air with suspense. The bees waited in the back of the SUV, twelve boxes humming with warmth, promise, life.

There is something strange, arcane in keeping bees. Before you even open a package, you're confronted by the sheer vitality of them—the vibration in the air, a smell like warm beer, their shocking heat. Most people don’t realize how warm a colony is. Each package radiated with the biological furnace of fifteen thousand small bodies pressing together, wings and legs flicking gently, trying to understand where they’d gone and when they would be let loose. With twelve boxes packed in, my vehicle felt like a roiling crucible. As I drove, the windows nearly frothed with humidity, the thrum of 100,000 little lives drowned out the engine, the whole vehicle threatened to boil over into a mass of golden light.

When I arrived home, it was pouring. This forced patience. I could feel the bees were eager to escape their cramped quarters, eager to stretch their wings, relieve themselves, drink deep of fresh water. There was nothing for me to do but to leave them in the car with the windows cracked and wait for the sky to clear. I passed the time by putting my baby down for a nap. As I laid beside her, her entire little body tucked into the crook of my arm, I told her what was about to happen. I told her about the rain and how her great-grandfather and her grandmother kept bees. As she fell asleep there, I thought about why we were doing all this in the first place.

Family. Nature. Tradition.

We waited for the weather to align to our small designs, listening to the rain pitter-patter against the metal roof to our little cottage. There are many lessons to be learned from bees, but patience is one of the first. You can rush a job, but you cannot rush the natural world, the good green pattern.

When the clouds finally broke and the drizzle faded into mist, we moved quickly. Every pair of hands went to work. We opened up the hives, removed the sugar-syrup jars that serve as a sort of cork from the packages, pried loose the queen cages, and prepared to dump thousands of bees into their new homes. Despite all our enthusiasm, my eagerness to get them housed before the rain returned, all the commotion, the bees were gentle—perhaps tired from their journey from California, perhaps content with knowing they were about to be home in a little meadow in Vermont. Bees are not so different from us; grey soggy days cause them to be grumpy, temperamental, short on patience. Today however, they met us with calmness and offered us grace.

This is not just a story about our family starting twelve hives though. Not really.

It is about the start of any good, green, bold thing.

It is about launching something good and true and beautiful in your own life.

We live in a wounded world where we are slowly killing ourselves with ease, where we are swimming in the artificial, where we are disconnected from real consequence.

Surrounded by the thrum of 100,000 bees today in our humming meadow, this is what I learned and what I hope you can take and use in your own good green way:

1. Creating something real requires patience.

It will rain. You will wait. Then, without warning, the rain will stop, and you must act quickly. This is true whether you are planting a garden, writing a book, starting a business, or, yes, dumping 40 pounds of bees into wooden boxes. The waiting is not wasted though. The stillness becomes your preparation, your moment of quiet reflection to slow and remember why you are doing this good thing. Do not be afraid of it.

2. You cannot do this alone.

My whole family helped today. Even our baby, wrapped in a blanket, laughing at us as we scurried around, kept the mood light. A project worth doing invites others in. If you want to build something that lasts—something real and grounded—it must become a generational act. My mother kept bees. Her father did, too. Now it is my turn, and I am doing it with my wife. Our children are watching, helping, learning. Your version of this may not be beekeeping, but you need to think about who stands beside you when the rain lifts.

Author’s note: The lesson does not stop here. In the full essay below, we will explore three more enduring lessons gleaned from the apiary that apply to your life, from which you can learn. There are also two demonstration videos of installing bees into a hive and a voiceover of the entire essay. It is worth it.

If you have ever wanted to live more intentionally, more beautifully, more in tune with the perennial patterns that have shaped better lives, this essay is intended for you.

Reports from the High Wood is a place for that kind of reflection, for grounded wisdom in a wounded world. This is not just about bees or family or tradition; it is about building a meaningful life from the roots up with dirt on your hands, hope in your heart, golden light glittering in your eye. If that resonates with you, I would be honored if you joined as a subscriber and read the rest of this lesson.

Thank you.

3. Warmth matters.

The first thing you notice when you handle a package of bees is the heat. They keep each other warm, they huddle close, they hum with internal fire. They have little woodstove hearts and there is something ancient and comforting in their ember-light. In your own work or home, ask: what are you doing to preserve that sense of warmth, of communal effort? The warmth of shared labor, shared promise, shared hope? If the work you’re doing is cold and isolating, perhaps you need to return to something that throws off heat.

4. Even the queen needs to adjust.

Every package of bees arrives with a queen in her own small cage. She is not immediately accepted. She must be introduced slowly so the colony adjusts to her pheromones. You hang the cage gently in the hive, making sure the candy plug is facing out so the bees can eat through it and release her over a few days.

That, in a sense, is leadership. In a family. In a project. In a company. You cannot storm in and demand obedience. You are introduced, you are earned, and if you are wise, you give your people—your team, your children, your spouse—time to adjust to what you bring.

5. Start small and allow your failures to not be failures.

Each hive today began as a different hive that grew until it could be split. They are small now, but in a few weeks, they will have drawn out comb, raised brood, stored nectar. In a few months, we will be harvesting honey. In a year, some of these colonies may split themselves, creating new hives. Last year we had two hives and they died in the winter, but those hives built out 32 frames of comb and filled them with honey and space for brood. The new bees are being launched with this inheritance and will have weeks upon weeks of work already done for them. Did we fail last year when our bees died? Today as I slipped honey-heavy frames into the new hives, it felt like success.

You need to start. Even if your version of st…

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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 around befuddled, notices the parcel, reaches in and pulls out a piece of chocolate that made its way under the flowers. They look up and down the neighborhood street but the girls have hidden behind a nearby bush, stifling their laughter behind cupped hands.

This is a May basket, and it is a tradition we are rapidly forgetting. It is a tradition we are losing.

The merry month of May approaches and with it May Day or Beltane depending on your pleasure. Nearly every culture in the northern hemisphere has some kind of celebration of fertility around May 1. How could they not? Life abounds. My aunt told me a story today of how she and her sisters would go “a-maying” to collect whatever wild flowers were blooming to decorate their door and the doors of their neighbors, leaving them in little baskets made of paper or just tied to the door. Some variations of the custom require anonymity, a sort of ding-dong-ditch. Some involve candy, baked goods, or even small trinkets. It is a sort of reverse trick-or-treating which is incredibly appropriate knowing that you are on the opposite side of the year from Halloween! Whatever the case may be, a May basket always has flowers and it is always given to herald the good green spring.

Traditionally, farmers in Northern Europe would turn their cattle out of the barn into the fields this time of year. The old Celtic tradition would also involve passing the livestock through or over fire as a sort of ward against an ill-fate. Young men and women too would jump over the fires to improve their virility or fertility! Some farmers around me still have parties this time of year to celebrate releasing their cows or other stock out to pasture. Growing up, we always had a bonfire and still do. There is so much to celebrate this time of year and yet we barely talk about it, let alone actively observe it. When you talk about May baskets, a-maying, “bringing in the May” or some other variation of the May Day tradition, someone will inevitably remark “Hey, my mother did this!” or “We did this as kids but not anymore.”

Well, why not? You can and you may need it now more than ever.

We should be reveling in the abundance of new spring life, heralding it in, shouting its arrival. We have become too staid, too fearful of seeming odd or off, of having our joy being mistaken for weakness and used against us. Our culture claims to celebrate random acts of kindness, but when was the last time you saw one? Something beyond a perfunctory volunteer opportunity or donation to the thrift store, something that showed a neighbor or someone in town that they were considered, thought of, loved for a brief moment?

So, how do you even make a May basket? Ultimately, the goal is to celebrate and remind your intended target that spring has arrived and we are the better for it. It needs to include the wildflowers blooming around you; daffodils, forsythia, hyacinth, anything that is bursting with life. You can buy them—sure—but harvesting the flowers yourself, especially on the evening of May Eve (April 30) would be in keeping with the good old way. You can make it into a bouquet, wrap it in a little twine, and hang it from a neighbor’s door knob. It can be that simple. If you want to take it a step further and give your children something to do, you can fold construction paper into a cone, fill it with flowers, and slip in some candy or even something you’ve baked. Maybe something to really evoke spring like a lavender cake or cookies made with honey.

Perhaps you really want to keep things as organic and low budget as possible while delivering your May joy. Find a forked branch, tie twine around the two legs and set your local wildflowers therein. This also works well as a standing decoration if your branch is long enough.

Whatever medium you choose for your May baskets, the point is not perfection: it is participation. It is choosing, deliberately, to acknowledge and celebrate the good green pattern unfurling before you, to lend your own small voice to the chorus of good things that grow. It is so easy, in a world so drawn to the novel and sleek, to forget the old ways, the quiet ways that once wove neighbor to neighbor and neighbor to land. These traditions, these good old ways, are not so far from us as we think. They lay quite literally at the roadside, in the fields, the forests, waiting for you to reclaim them.

If you remember even a scrap of this tradition from your own childhood, if your mother or your grandfather or a forgotten neighbor once left a basket on your door, then you already carry the ember. You already know what to do. If you do not remember, if this is your first whisper of May baskets and a-maying, then all the better. You have the honor of reviving it, of giving it fresh life with your own hands.

There is no committee coming to save these things. There is no special interest or lobby eager to revive the customs of your ancestors. No official proclamation will decree that May baskets must be made, that flowers must be gathered, that neighbors must be gladdened by some small, ridiculous, beautiful gift on a bright May morning. It is ours to choose. It is ours to lose.

Choose.

Go a-maying. Run wild and good and secret with your children, your friends, or with your own happy self. It does not matter if you are a grandmother with her children’s children or a young bachelor with his rowdy friends; snip the flowers by the roadside, fold the paper cones, tie the twine. Knock and run. Laugh behind the bushes like the good old things can still happen. They can. They can because of you.

Anything good that can happen will happen but only if we let it. Only if we reach out our hands—mud-streaked, pollen-dusted, treat-sweet, thorn-scraped—and make it so.

May is almost here.

Make the basket.

Surprise your neighbor.

Keep the tradition alive.

Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Author’s Note: this week, our usual schedule needed a small shift. You’ll receive the premium Report from the High Wood on Wednesday, and the free Echo from an Old Hollow Tree today. Imploring my readers to make May baskets was too important to wait until Wednesday, as May 1 is Thursday. Sometimes people need time to pick flowers.

If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, now is a wonderful time to join. The exlcusive Reports from the High Wood offer practical lessons, hard-won insights, and a deeper look at the real work of tending land, family, and tradition—all shared so you can carry something steady and useful into your own life.

There’s something special on the horizon: on May 3, we’ll be receiving twelve new packages of honey bees for our hives—a major leap for us, and the largest expansion we’ve ever undertaken. We’ve never scaled up like this before, and the lessons we’ll be learning (and sharing) will be real, raw, and hard-earned.

This is a rare moment, a once-only season of growth and challenge that won’t come again in quite the same way. Paid subscribers will get a front-row seat to it all—and the insights, mistakes, and victories we gather along the way will be yours to carry into your own work, homestead, or dreams.

Thank you for walking this old path with us.

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We are running now, running toward the halfway point between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. Easter has come and the green blade rises along every hill and dale. Our days are long.

They are long and they are good.

Walk through a field or forest this time of year, along the stone walls and hedgerows, scan the the hillsides, and your wandering eye will be met with nothing but green, long desired and now present green. You become imbued with the sense that there is an incredible prejudice in your favor, that you are going to win. Here, now from the warmest meadow to the darkest ravine it is undeniable: anything good that can happen will happen.

The bluebirds are back in the meadow. They flicker from bird house to the antique hay rake sinking into the field, their color so vivid to illicit a gasp. One pair has claimed the birdhouse on the knoll and they slip in and out of its little hole like a secret kept between them, the ever-growing grass, and the wind. A mated pair keeps watch, one atop the house, the other atop the hay rake, its rusted tines tangled with the dark stems of last year’s goldenrod. That rake hasn’t turned a field in generations, but now it holds a different purpose, an altar of sorts for these feathered harbingers of bright days. To watch a bluebird land there, on iron made useless by time but still offering itself to beauty, is to believe the world is ever-conspiring inevitably toward grace.

Then, come evening, the peepers begin. They begin all at once anywhere there is still water until the woods vibrate with their insistence. They call from the vernal pools that formed in low places, their voices threading through the spaces between dusk and night, between cold and warmth, between winter and summer. You never see the peepers. It is a chorus that seems to rise from the ground itself, and if you stop to listen, really listen, it becomes clear that something more is being sung. A thinning occurs here, in the lull between light and dark, when you can almost feel another world brushing up against this one. You walk the edge of the pond or the woodline and feel it, the marrow-deep memory of something just at the periphery. Something good and slow and green. These frogs know something we don’t. Something we so easily forget: that, despite all the wounds in this world, it is still safe to sing, the light will return, that the good things are on the move with a passion.

Walk into the forest now, past the blue birds in the meadow and through the frog song at the tree line. It is dark here, and the echo of winter whispers still. These hills are old and they have leveled with age but there are still deep places, dark places. Deep in the High Wood, there are steep hillsides where rivers have cut their long, slow will. Down in these ravines, where the sun barely reaches and the snow lingers longest, another quiet resurrection is taking place. It feels secret. It feels old. First the ramps. They are up now, bright green spears pushing through last year’s leaf litter. They’re bold and young, like swords thrust triumphantly toward the heavens. Optimism incarnate. Alongside them the fiddleheads uncurl slowly, their tight spirals relaxing with the warmth, their velvet skins still damp from the thaw. They are older, eldritch and staff-like in their spiral, their mystery. These are the foods of old stories, of first harvests, of foragers who walked softly and listened well. You have to stoop to find them, to get close, to enter their world for a moment. When you do however, it’s hard not to feel that the ground itself is giving you a gift. It is unearned, yet given freely all the same. In the dark places, the deep places, life has returned, simultaneously ancient and new.

And so we run on, toward the halfway point between the equinox and the solstice, toward long days filled with light and promise. Easter has passed, but its echo remains. The green blade rises, and with it, so do we. The good things gather now not in isolation, but in chorus. Everything good all at once, overwhelming. The meadow, the marsh, the ravine…they all speak the same voice. This is not coincidence. This is not accident. This is the good green pattern of life declaring it is wholly good.

Anything good that can happen will happen.

And it is happening now.

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Months ago, I read as someone scoffed at the photographs depicting the life of a man I admire, Simon Sarris. Simon is, like me, a father in New England who loves the natural world and appreciates beautiful things. He is a photographer and writer whose home and family seem to exist in a state of timeless, composed grace. The cynical detractor wrote something to the effect of “His life is only beautiful because he deliberately staged it that way,” as if that were a valid criticism. As though deliberateness, intention, design were somehow deceitful, or beauty less meaningful if it did not happen accidentally. I thought about that comment far more than I expected over the last few months, how it relates to the nature of beauty, and ultimately what makes something beautiful or at least memorable. Now, as my wife and I design packaging for the honey our bees will make this season, I find myself mulling it over in my mind yet again.

I want to make a world that is full of the work of magic for them, full of beautiful places to play and find each-other. This extends beyond roses of course, to the orchard, the meadows and streams, the barns I build, and all the hidden places those things create together. - Simon Sarris

When one looks at Simon’s photography, it is clear he puts a great deal of care into choosing two things: the material of every object in his home and the light that fills it. Look at the link there and note how the hardware of his cabinets match the brackets that hold up his shelves. This may seem simple but it does not happen by accident. I look at the door knobs in my own home I bought and note three different color metals in one room. Not exactly something to create discord, but it does not lend itself to beauty either. Note too how he does not drown his room in light. Someone remarked to me recently that their childhood feels so distant and alien, even the very light of rooms and buildings feels different. We discussed this for a bit and concluded that yes, the quality of bulbs has changed but also people just have a tendency to turn their lights on earlier, not allowing the soft glow of evening to catch the hair of their children or to gently spill shadows across the floor. There are many elements that make Simon Sarris’s photography beautiful, but ultimately for me, it comes down to intention.

We can look at a man’s life and analyze what makes a photograph of his beautiful, but it is likely a conversation that requires more than a paragraph in a Substack essay. Perhaps a doctoral thesis would be appropriate. Let’s look at something smaller then that also derives its beauty from intention. Consider this hang tag that came attached to a sweater I received recently from Kiel James Patrick. You could slap any hang tag on to a sweater, attach it with a bit of plastic, choose whatever font is default. Maybe add in some clip art of an anchor and check to see if its centered. It would pass but it wouldn’t be beautiful.

The string evokes ship rope. Kiel could have used jute twine or kite string but this particular string and the knots used reminds you of a rope tied to a dock, brings you back to a summer you spent as a kid at the Cape. The shape echoes the silhouette of a ship’s hull. The brass grommet makes the whole thing feel more durable, lasting. All these sensations transfer to the sweater itself and you’re left wondering if you should even through away the tag. Probably better to keep it as a bookmark for The Sea Wolf or Moby Dick.

Our own work is slow but satisfying. There are a hundred tiny decisions to make: the shape of the hang tags, the string that fastens them to the glass honey bottle, how the mailer boxes are cushioned with wood wool instead of bubble wrap. Every detail is a chance to say something about our little meadow, our family, our tradition. Every detail conveys what we value. I think about Simon and Kiel while I browse packaging and fiddle with print shop menus. I think about their choices. The fixtures in the home, the little details of the tag, the golden light.

It would be easy to dismiss Simon’s photographs as staged or Kiel’s work as overly affected.

And of course, they are staged, it is affected. But that’s the point. These are men who saw the world as it was, were not satisfied with what they beheld, and decided to make their own little corners of it more beautiful then when they arrived. They optimized for and prioritized photographability, aesthetics, beauty.

We are constantly curating our lives, whether we realize it or not. The music playing in the kitchen, the dishes on the table, the sweater in the drawer, the way we greet a loved one at the door…these are all just little moments. Over time though, they accumulate. They settle in, take root.

The moments compound.

A day is just a summation of moments. A life a summation of days. If we fill our moments with small, sincere acts of care, if we hang the tag with the right string, if we photograph the drawer with the matching fixture, if we set the table with candles on an ordinary night, we are not performing beauty.

We are creating it.

Follow me as I reflect on the changing seasons every Wednesday and as we document our family tradition of beekeeping every Sunday.

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My littlest girl stirred late last night. Just a minor fuss, a pouty lip and a tiny toss. Enough to wake us up however, enough to get me to blink the sleep out of my eyes, to look outside and notice the snow falling thick in the moonlight. Yes, it’s still snowing on and off here in the hills of Vermont. The winter has been long, cold, proper. The daffodils are beginning to sprout, the crocuses are already on the lawn, and the foxes and hawks are out in force. Despite this, despite all these sure signs of spring, we received a few inches of snow last night. No matter. The good green pattern—life—is on the move now and it cannot be deterred.

Nor can we.

Take a walk from my home down the dirt road to the old village below and there you will see a lake. Patches of ice have begun to break around the edges and dot the middle—little windows into the cold lack-light of the lake. When this begins, there is no turning back. The mercury can plummet below freezing, the snow can fall with a fury, it can sleet and spit sideways but the truth is that lake will not freeze further. The ice will not reform. There will be no ice skating and any more angling this year will happen from the shore. Indeed, if you took that walk down to the lake with me today you would have spied a young man with more pluck then sense casting his rod. I mock him but let us be honest: he had the right idea and, in truth, I am grateful for him.

One cannot see a young man defiantly fishing here in our Fool’s Spring and not feel a sense of unbridled optimism. Like the robins in the field or the snowdrops in the yard, he is a good herald of the green things to come. The snow was a setback but the young man braving the cold for a chance at a trout kill will not return to winter. He stands before a New England spring of peepers at the woodline, bonfires built of winter-fall, dockside Adirondacks draped in blankets of fine wool. The good green things—the enduring pattern of everything just and right—is on the move. The setbacks, the sigh-white snows and hail, cannot hold the momentum back now. We may well lose the rest of April to the grey; the farsighted forecast calls for weekends of snow and of rain. Tomorrow will be warmer though. Soon the gardens will be turned with heavy hoe and eager hand, the children will wander past the threshold into the fields and forests further, the light will grow longer. Then one fine day, we’ll look up from our little chores and realize we haven’t thought about winter in weeks. Maybe it comes as a smell at first, a patch of rich loam hit by the sun. Maybe spotting the first bud on the lilac. Perhaps we will be surprised by the sound of frogsong swelling from the ditch, or blindsided by the sudden blur of barn swallows cartwheeling past the shed. There will be laundry on the line again. The screen door will slam with the joy-rush of children. We’ll find ourselves walking barefoot across the porch and thinking only of what to plant next, what to grill for dinner, how to stretch the daylight just a little further past May Day toward the solstice.

Let the snow fall one more time. Let the firewood stack shrink a bit further. Let us be shaken from sleep by our children and stirred by the reflection of moonlight off a snow covered field. The world is waking, the green is coming, and like the young angler with cold fingers and steady heart, we cannot be denied our spring.

Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree is published for free on Wednesdays with premium posts about what we are growing, building, and doing here in our forest and meadow on Sundays. I hope you subscribe and join me through all the changes of the seasons.

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They loom, the buildings. Impossibly tall and getting taller, plastered with flashing advertisements that never cease, urging, urging, urging you always to consume more. Our technology is wearable and in some cases even embedded into our very flesh. The mega corporations have outsized control, reaching for the stars while people hunt for pennies in the gutter. Simultaneously growing ever further from the good green earth and encroaching upon it, every natural boundary and border is broken down as birdsong is drowned out by booming speakers and the roar of the highways.

We are lost in a cyberpunk dystopia, a fake neon world of high tech and low life.

It is not a sci-fi fantasy anymore.

It is an open wound and it is bleeding.

We look to our screens for answers, scrying our little black mirrors. There we find the calls of influencers to “RETVRN” to a traditionalist way of life, to break free to the country, to reconnect with the natural world.

What if you can’t?

What if you are young and urban-bound, your hungry heart encased in a steel cage with blinding neon filigree? What if you are stuck in the neon wasteland at risk of forgetting the natural world and being swept away by the fetid tide of our modern culture?

What then?

You begin by reclaiming what is real.

How do we know we have entered into this cyberpunk dystopia, this nightmare warned of by authors like William Gibson, Orwell, and Bradbury? Consider first our tech saturation. Ubiquitous screens are obvious, handheld supercomputers are maligned to a cliche, and AI is very much accessible; not only do you have a little palantir in you pocket that allows you to communicate with world, it now also contains a tiny familiar with which you can have an earnest conversation and research all of human knowledge. Grok and ChatGPT are already superior to Google. How long before the inconvenience of having to pick up your phone to access these tools becomes too much to bear and people start embedding the tech in their flesh? We are already there in some cases as fringe transhumanists test the boundaries of what is possible. Social decay is another signature of cyberpunk; beneath all the chrome, wealth, and abundance there is want, desperation, and crime. You can find a new story of a corrupt politician’s scandal every hour of the day. Justice though? Seems to be the only thing in short supply. How about artificiality? Fake food, fake bodies, fake connections. A disconnect from nature, urban sprawl, social isolation, surveillance, the list of dystopian signatures scrolls ever on. If only we could escape it.

Therein lies the trap though. We make it sound so easy. Find any number of articles on this very site titled something like “How I Bought my House in the Country” and it might offer some staid tips like frugality, lowered expectations, and compromises made. The truth is though that land is expensive, rural life is out of reach for most after the mass migration to rural enclaves during the last pandemic (how’s that for a cyberpunk storyline?) and even visiting national or state parks require the time and money people simply do not have.

So what do you do? Imagine you are a young man reading Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree. You’re in your 20s, stuck in a tiny apartment surrounded by glass and steel feeling the weight of an urban world that is somehow simultaneously too loud and too empty. You dream of acreage, of the agency a little property affords you. A place to try your hand with animals, grow a garden, start a family. Maybe you’ve even got a tech job and could swing working from home. You boot up your real estate app and remember Ol’ Anderson waxing poetic about New England but…there’s just nothing there. You broaden your criteria but the grim socioeconomic reality hits: you just can’t swing it. You’re a young man in a city that’s killing you and you’re stuck.

The sad truth is that many people missed their shot. 2020 was a groundswell for property prices in the US that caused prices to explode and the traditionalist mantra of “reject modernity, return to the land” sounds noble but ignores very real barriers. It is ultimately a Romantic dream that can feel like a taunt to the powerless. Similarly, like a diet, we tell people to just detox from the artificial digital world as if it were a panacea. Yes, "unplug" or even "make something real" is good advice but it’s temporary at best. Most people can’t quit jobs tied to screens and even if a bonehead influencer tells them to make something real to fight back against the ever-creeping artificial world, the truth is that many people just do not have access to workspaces or tools. All of the advice given to people trying to escape the neon wasteland are just masturbatory fantasies, escapist entertainment. It assumes freedom of movement or resources that people just do not have. The dystopia isn’t optional. It is a cage and it is cruel advice to give.

If there is little chance of escape, if there is no cottage in the meadow awaiting you, what is to be done to survive the neon wasteland, to endure the ever-churning sewer-tide of our wounded dystopia? It is cruel to suggest buying property. It is even unreasonable to suggest mooring yourself in the artificial tide by crafting something real. A young man reading this could have little but an apartment with a cooktop. Who am I to tell him to make something when space to exist—let alone craft—comes at a premium? The reality is many may only have the space for small things.

That may be enough however.

There are small, beautiful things in our world that have been forgotten by the dystopian cyberpunk culture, that no longer have a place in our wounded neon world. They were created years ago with care but, in many ways have been forgotten. I look around my own house and find them on the mantle and on shelves. Small, beautiful, once-useful objects that may yet find purpose again.

A spool of thread. A key with no lock. A stained and creased recipe card.

A thimble. A button. A bell.

Pick up one of these tokens of yesteryear and roll it in the palm of your hand. It had a purpose once. It is gifted with form. It was crafted with care. These small forgotten objects lost in the blinding light of modernity are not unlike people. We have purpose, we are gifted with a beautiful form, we are made with care. There is a timeless, stalwart nature to the human condition that endures the capricious whims of the age. These discarded objects, knickknacks left in the back of drawers, could be picked up today and yet utilized still.

If I were the young man in the steel tower, living in a cramped studio apartment, dreaming of green while afraid of losing my mind to the neon glow of our wounded world, I know what I would do. I would try to ground myself with one of these tokens and wield it like a talisman.

An old straight blade razor, sleek and sturdy, once offered a ritual of care. A sewing needle, unnecessary now in the era of fast fashion, once used for mending and making. A cast iron paperweight in the shape of a pig, absurd but useful for anchoring to a desk your fleeting thoughts.

I would remind myself that there are timeless things that embody tradition. I would take solace in knowing they, like me, have been left behind by the culture of the age. The wounded neon world wants us to forget. It wants us to dissolve into its glow, to trade our roots for its wires. But these small things—these discarded, beautiful things—quietly say no.

They sit on your shelf, in your hand, they endure.

And so do you.

It is a cold comfort, but in a unceasing, panicked age that screams for more, in our fake modern dystopia, you can clutch your key, light your…

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We demand so much of poor March. The equinox arrives, we whip out our smartphones, and tap the weather app: our winter-pale faces illuminated by the glow of our little oracles. “It will be fifty tomorrow!” we feverishly, frothingly declare. We eye our gardening tools and put the heavy winter coats away in their trunks. Lured by the promises of warm weather we step outside expecting fields of golden daffodils and instead find ice underfoot. We check the modern oracles again. A snowstorm is promised to arrive by week’s end. This is when the stages of grief set in. “This can’t be right. It will blow past us. South of here.” we deny. Later that day we angrily throw the final wood from our pile down through our cellar doors to the stove. Perhaps we pray or just clench our fists and declare that we’d happily take another week of dire mud or slither-slick rain if it meant buds and blooms the following day. We give in. We’re burnt out. Winter has been long this year and maybe it’s best to just take a few days off and do nothing. Then, the spring in our own hearts finally arrives and we accept our lot as creatures of this earth. We know the good green pattern is beneath the late March snow pushing, pushing, ever pushing gently but surely through.

March is volatile and capricious. Despite this, year after year, it always plays the same tricks. It is volatile but it is predictably volatile; it teases us with warmth, retreats into cold, stretches the thinning veil between seasons at the thresholds. We too are consistent; we fall for these tricks every single year and every single year we go a little mad with green-ache longing for life to spring forth. This annual gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair at the bait-and-switch of March is our own fault however, a symptom of living in our wounded modern world. The predicable challenges of muddy roads, of lingering snows, of sleet-gray skies become a monotonous purgatory in a culture that demands instant results while offering chemical and virtual escapes. The glow of screens promises weather updates, the hum of traffic pushes us forward, the expectation that spring should arrive on our terms endures. We should not escape however. This capriciousness is to be embraced with a knowing nod and weathered smirk. We know we will have to wait.

By this time of the year however, waiting for all the good green things has left us weary. Wait-weary. Winter-weary. The snow is barely holding on to the last shadows in the forest, the days have stretched on beckoned by the equinox fires, but the full bloom of renewal—the first real boom of green—is elusive. This waiting drives us mad. Again, however, it shouldn’t; the madness is a symptom of the culture we inhabit. If your culture demands productivity always, then it sees waiting as a failure. The earth makes us wait though and the season teaches us to trust the process if we are but willing to listen. We pace the gardens eager to break the frost. We look to the bird houses eager for signs of life. We stand at our thresholds straining our ears for the hint of spring peepers. It is useless. Better to walk the wood line of the field again, to wait, to breathe and say “Calm, dear heart. Soon. Soon. Soon.” This patience is a virtue modernity has forgotten but the good green pattern insists we reclaim.

Our culture—the wounded neon modern world—urges us to never wait, to rush, to solve idleness. We can buy industrial greenhouse-grown flowers, we can curse the snow, we can live unmoored from the earth. We can return, however. Take a breath, stand in the mud by the red dogwood, wait under barren trees. Close your eyes. When they open, they may just spy a robin or bluebird in the field. They may see snow coming over the hills. Whatever the case may be, the earth will unfurl on its own terms. You may recoil at aligning with its rhythm, it may feel like surrender as you wait. It is not surrender though. It is alignment. It is harmony. Through this, we release our demands and begin a rooted rebellion against the cultural clamor, find a fierce peace that steadies us until we too can only be moved on our own good terms.

Pause the clamor and wander the woodline with me week by week, in step with the good unhurried rhythm.

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