Good morning!

I am Hugh Hollowell, and this is Life is So Beautiful, a newsletter about finding the beautiful when it's hard to - and maybe especially when it's hard to.

The shorter days, combined with the early morning chill on my walks and the accompanying stiffness in my joints serve to remind me that winter is coming. But winter is a relative term here in Central Mississippi, with occasional bursts of truly cold weather, but most of the time between now and next April being what in our house call hoodie weather.

Of course, if you are an ADHD riddled Chaos Muppet (like I am), then what happens is you put the hoodie on in the morning, over your t-shirt, and then it gets warm, so you take the hoodie off at some point during the day and put it in the backseat of your car, where it lies because you forgot to bring it in at the end of the day. This situation then repeats itself until you have no more hoodies in the house and are forced to go to the car, shivering, one morning and don a cold, damp hoodie.

Or maybe that’s just me.

But this weekend, I sat in the swing in our front yard at dusk, watching the colors change, as the subtle shifts in light happened and the red tailed hawks soared far overhead and the neighbors walked down the street, costumed kiddos in tow, as they hopped from house to house in search of treats. A half hour later the hawks were gone, but the bats had taken their place, doing their frenetic aerial dance in search of a meal of mosquitos and other bothersome (to us) insects. Between the two scenes, a lone hummingbird flittered about our yard, late in the season, searching for nectar.

Amidst it all, I felt a sense of calm and belonging that is hard to describe, and honestly, rare, making it all the more welcome when it shows up. It is times like this when I am convinced that Emerson was right – every day is the best day of the year.

Five Beautiful Things

• In the original manuscript copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (then titled Alice’s Adventures Underground), Lewis Carrol illustrated it himself. These were more reserved and less caricatured than the more famous Tennille illustrations that the published version received, and which we carry in collective memory.
• Impressionistic oil paintings on canvas of Star Wars scenes. Either you are the sort of nerd that thinks this is cool, or you don’t. (If you are a different sort of nerd, the same artist also did scenes from Lord of the Rings.)
• This sculptor recreates famous paintings (like Starry Nights, by Van Gough) in clay. The textures here are what does it for me.
• An ultra-high resolution long exposure panoramic image of the Milky Way Galaxy that took 12 years and more than 1200 hours of exposure to make happen.
• An hour long tour of Antarctica, as seen from a helicopter, mostly without commentary. This is beautiful, and the perfect sort of thing to show on the screen in the background at a cocktail party (back when we had those sort of things)

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