Hearth Fathers

About Hearth Fathers

Reflections on family, nature, and tradition from the end of a dirt road in Vermont. oldhollowtree.substack.com (https://oldhollowtree.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Ryan B. Anderson

Category

science · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

13 Apr 2024

Latest episode

2 Jul 2026

Latest episodes

59 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   2 Jul 2026

   The Liberty of Rootedness

   Here in the hills of inland New England, you could wander down the road this weekend into the village below. You will be going down to watch the fireworks with your family on the bridge that spans the lake as your friends and neighbors light them from a dock. It will be a little dusky as you walk down along the tree-lined road through the tunnel of green and everyone will be too excited, too full of anticipation of the night to come, to even mind the biting bugs that hatched in the humidity of the past week. That humidity brought hot days and brilliant nights of thunder and lightning that your children did not even mind for they were too exhausted from the long days of playing and swimming and doing all the good green things that children do. On your way, the widow who lives nearby may ask you to help her lift something. You oblige without thinking. The woman who lives behind the church with her ducks will wave even though she doesn’t quite remember who you are. This is fine; you can remind her again as you have a dozen times before. You will exchange some pleasant words with the new people who moved into the nice house down by the inn where your friends lived until recently. They were getting older though and moved to be closer to their children and grandchildren a few states away. Your own child will tug on your sleeve and remind you the fireworks are starting, interrupting your reflection. The show will be fantastic, of course: gold and red and blue illuminating the silhouettes of the tall maples and pines at the lake’s edge and they’ll go on longer than you think possible. You will not notice that a family member or neighbor or old friend handed your children sparklers amid the spectacle, and they will beg to light them in the dark heat. This is fine; you’ll walk back up the hill and light them for your children on the front lawn before putting them to bed. Ah, but then all the rogue displays from the families scattered around the hills will begin to peek up through the distant trees and you will relent as your little ones plead to stay outside for just a little longer to get a better look. The fireflies will begin to wander into the field from the woodline. There, amid all those good lights both man-made and green-grown, you may find yourself thinking about liberty. We say the word so often this month, this week that it loses its edges a bit, becomes some ephemeral banner instead of the blood-red real thing it actually is. Indeed, what are we celebrating here in the village when the sky lights up over our good green hills? Our wounded modern world has an answer ready of course. First, some will tell you there is nothing worth celebrating at all, that the country has strayed too far from its initial ethos to still be considered valid. This is so cynical and defeatist that you justifiably reject it outright and do not give it a second thought. Beyond the rage and the gnashing of teeth however, another more insidious and consumptive yet subtle answer to the question will be presented to you: liberty as optionality. Ah yes, freedom is the open road, the life untethered, the ability to leave anything and everything in a moment for something better. Your hometown is dead or dying or the politics are so corrupt that it is irredeemable. Your parents and older relatives are so extreme and their views so outdated that they are no longer worthy of your contact. All the old institutions, civic, religious, and otherwise are so eroded that the only thing worth your consideration is the interstate highway system. These, of course, are all lies. Yes, there is a kind of freedom in leaving your place and the people who raised you. It is the same sort of freedom shared by a leaf torn from a branch, tumbling wherever the capricious wind declares. You can watch that freedom, that liberty as defined by our wounded culture, hollow out the old hills. Watch as the windows in the homes of aging parents darken and their shingles fall, the yards grow conspicuously silent in the absence of the laughter of grandchildren. You can experience it yourself when you return for the old home days and struggle to name half-remembered faces from a lifetime ago. The millennial generation that kept every option open now lies scattered across a dozen cities, free as leaves in the wind, as the towns that raised them die alone. Yes, this is what the liberty of optionality builds. Nothing. Building requires staying, and staying is the one option it can never choose. There is an older liberty of course, the liberty known by the men and women of 1776. The cynical reader will be quick now to remark that their ancestors too had left. Yes, they left England and had crossed an ocean in ships that half-killed them, but we must mark the sort of leaving that was, the nature of it. The leaving was one-way and it was binding. They did not hop on the interstate for better prospects or better liturgy or better night life in an established coastal metropolis. The men and women who left England sold everything, boarded an unforgiving ship, and planted themselves in a brutally dark wilderness with no road back. We must be clear here: they left one home forever in order to build another one forever. This was not the same consumerist modern impulse to pick up and leave when the prospects grow thin. Indeed, by the time of the Revolution the men signing their names to the Declaration of Independence were the sons of the sons who chose to stay. They were men with specific acres and specific obligations and specific graves to tend and they were defending ground their families held for a century. In short, they were men of place. Despite this, we are quick to myopically claim that the American way is to strike out onto the dark frontier, to chase fortune in lands unknown, but the fortune two hundred and fifty years ago was a farm of which you could walk the bounds in the grey light of a single morning. Indeed, liberty in its oldest and truest sense is the freedom to root yourself, to choose the place and the land and the work and to stand behind that choice with your whole weight for the rest of your good life. Conversely, the modern man with no true obligations is not free. He is merely loose. Ask him what he would defend and he has no answer, because defense requires a threshold, and a threshold requires a home, and a home requires the one thing he has spent his whole life avoiding: the closed door, the planted flag, the decision that forecloses all others and in doing so finally means something. Ultimately, the seed carried to ground is not the leaf tumbling in the wind. The loose man will protest, of course. You have heard it first hand if you come from a small rural place. He will tell you that rootedness is a fool’s bet, that you will sink your life savings into a forever home only to watch the taxes triple, the politics grow impossibly corrupt, the economy die, the drugs ravage the masses, and the malevolent yuppie foreigner arrive. He will tell you that no place in America is stable enough to justify such profound investment. You will see this argument grow in volume as our systems are rocked by instability, as political discontent grows on both sides of the aisle. Notice however for what the loose man’s liturgy of cosmopolitanism is actually advocating: a guarantee before commitment, an iron-clad promise that the ground will never shift. No honest man can offer him this, no such system and no such standard survives contact with the blood and dirt and marrow of life. Is your councilman corrupt? Your world is malleable and your will is strong; unseat him. Is your school or your church or your gazebo on the green disappointing? Perhaps it is but waiting for you. Indeed, you have no guarantee your wife will not sicken, your children will not break your heart, your own body not bend and betray you before its time. Marriage, children, land, your very calling: every one of these a reckless concentration of risk in a single unhedgeable position. Every one a reason a life means anything at all. No heroes were ever made by hedging their bets. Note well too that the loose man is no safer than the rooted man. When the hard times arrive (and they do arrive everywhere) the man who survives them is not the stranger moving to his fifth state in a decade but is rather the man whose neighbors know his name, who has fed people from his garden, who belongs to a vast web of obligation thick enough to hold aloft the terrible weight of crumbling marble columns as the systems fail. Our deepest error, our modern culture’s deepest lie, is this: we should wait for a stable place to justify our commitment. Stability has never been the precondition of rootedness, however. It has always been the product. The good town you cannot find anywhere in America is not found. It is made by people who stayed and made it, none of whom had a guarantee of success. To look at the risks and walk away is merely asking to inherit what you refuse to build. You know this in your body, marrow-deep in your very bones if not yet in your desires or inclinations. Every one of the most binding choices in your life, the marriage, the children, the mortgage on the old place with the sagging barn, every single one of them narrowed your options and every one of them made you more free. Your apple tree will not bear fruit the year you plant it, yet you plant it all the same for children who will pick fruit from the boughs you will never see at their zenith. The act of planting the tree has not limited your freedom but it rather has exercised it completely. The man who plants for the harvest he will never reap has escaped a sort of tyranny of self. You may yet witness it this weekend still in whatever small town you watch the fireworks or the parade. The volunteer fire department grilling on the green, the old man who mows the abandoned house at the edge of town without anyone’s consent, the young family who came home when everyone told them to go. These people are not trapped in the slightest. Indeed, they are the freest among us because they have made a choice with roots and a thing with roots cannot be blown away by the cruel caprice of the ever-shifting world. Is this all to say you should return to your childhood town? No. I (sometimes) know better than to advocate for that; there are too many unknown factors and you have likely made up your mind over where the wind will blow you. That being said, the next time you are faced with ceding your ground, surrendering your place, for the next better prospect, you may pause and reflect on the old liberty rootedness offers. The good town you cannot find anywhere in America is not found. The fireworks will end and the echo will fade off the ridge. The smoke will drift over the meadow and the fireflies will resume flickering their ancient, soft light at the woodline by the old stone wall. Carry your sleeping children inside. Stand for a moment on the porch in the dark of your very own place, in the town you chose, inside the life you built by closing a few rotting doors. This is your liberty, American. The kept ground. The planted tree. The freedom to stay. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit oldhollowtree.substack.com/subscribe (https://oldhollowtree.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   1 Jun 2026

   The Green Conspiracy

   The canopy leafs out and we are suddenly reminded of June’s benevolent conspiracy, its invitation to hide amid the green. The bare, brutal skies of November are on the other side of the year and we can take solace in a little concealment, a good green refuge. The world softens in these weeks as the stark silhouettes of winter blue ease into the froth of leaves unfurling. You grow weary in those grey days from so much exposure amid the stripped limbs and nude skies, but there is a sort of mercy now in the hills and hollows, now in the green. There is a starkness to November you feel when its wicked winds rip through the high places, tearing away leaf and cloud alike, leaving nothing between you and the void of space. It feels as though you are more vulnerable then, more scrutinized by the world and all its wounded ways, judged harshly for the faults that are not wholly your own. It is hard to describe, but you know the feeling; the trees are bare, the sky contains but distant stars apathetic to your condition, and it seems you are weighed and measured in a way that is not fully fair. Winter arrives whether you are ready or not and there is little leniency given for the ill prepared bare in the cold light. Not so in the early days of June. Here you can walk along the old stone walls amid the just-born calves, the fully-leafed maples and birches creating a protective tunnel for you. There in the green places, shielded from the uncaring harsh-light of space and sin and the wounded world, you are able to slow and notice creation again. The salamander, the moss, the fiddlehead fern. Those ferns, not fully unfurled, resemble something nearly arcane in these late spring days: a shepherd’s crook, a crozier, a staff. Sheltered away from the demands and neon noise of the modern world, strolling or even sitting amid those ferns more appropriate for a fairy tale than real life, you may even allow yourself to contemplate the not-wholly-real. A day dream, a fantasy, even magic. You remember, however faintly, the sort of imagination you possessed as a child before adulthood narrowed, blended, and reshaped everything toward the greasy grey ease of utility and speed. The green world quiets everything just enough so that part of you, the part that still dreams and wonders, can knuckle up back from the wet loam into the light for a little while. Such is the conspiracy of June, the offering here at the start of summer: a promise of respite. A place to recline in the bough-dappled light, a green refuge away from the din and the drone and the grind. A moment to allow your mind to wander. Yes, there is work still to be done (always work!) but June does remind us that life cannot subsist upon labor alone. You require beauty and silence too. You yearn for shade and birdsong and the green and gold of bough-dappled light. You require places where the soul is not pressed constantly beneath the weight of headlines and schedules and fluorescent light. Rest beneath long limbs. Watch the wind rock the canopy. Listen to the peepers rising from the wet fields at dusk. The world, for all its wounds, still contains good green sanctuaries. Your refuge remains. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit oldhollowtree.substack.com/subscribe (https://oldhollowtree.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

3. 

   11 May 2026

   Rebuilding Home

   People will tell you that “you cannot go home again.” What they mean is that time moves in one direction; the old people die, the stores close, the fields grow over, and the little places that once anchored a childhood lose their shape beneath the capricious whims of modern life. A man returns years later looking for what he remembers and instead finds vinyl where there was once canvas, particle board where there was once pine, disposable things stacked beneath fluorescent lights where there were once shelves lined with goods meant to last a lifetime and beyond. Yes, much of modern America feels temporary now, as if everything around us has been designed with the quiet assumption that it will soon be thrown away. Still, home, the very concept of place and what roots us there, is more durable than people admit. We are not so lost yet. Across New England there was once a weight to ordinary things that is difficult to explain to anyone who did not experience it. The old L.L. Bean boots lined up by the door felt indestructible. The Hudson Bay striped wool blankets stacked in cedar chests carried the smell of campfire and salt air. The mugs in the kitchen cabinet were thick clay that held heat in your hands on cold mornings. Sturdy wooden tables bore the marks of decades of use and nobody thought twice about it because things were expected to age alongside the families who owned them. Everything felt rooted and was built with the assumption that permanence was not only possible but the assumed default. It is easy to write this off as materialistic nostalgia, which would be both cynical and short sighted. These objects mattered; they were expressive of the local, seasonal ethos. They served as conduits for the values of the people who made and kept them. A home deserved honest craftsmanship, natural materials, durable beauty. Care mattered. Stewardship mattered. A person repaired things instead of replacing them because there was dignity in maintenance and continuity, dignity in handing something down instead of throwing it away. The objects themselves reinforced a broader cultural confidence, a belief that families and communities were building toward something enduring rather than merely consuming whatever passed through their hands. That confidence has eroded alongside the objects. Modern life prizes convenience above nearly everything else. Fast shipping, fast fashion, fast entertainment, fast food. Entire industries now exist to eliminate friction from daily life, yet so many people feel exhausted and untethered despite the omnipresent convenience. Homes themselves often feel temporary, filled with furniture nobody expects to survive a single move and products nobody intends to repair. Even the language surrounding modern goods reveals the problem: Disposable. Single-use. Content. Stream. Feed. Everything passes through our hands as sand and leaves no imprint behind. You were not made for that kind of rootlessness, that impermanence, that loss. A home changes when the things inside it are made with care. A wool blanket folded over the arm of a chair changes a room. A beeswax candle lit at the dinner table softens the harshness of a hard evening. A handmade mug asks a person to linger over coffee for another minute instead of rushing toward the next thing. These may seem like small details, but a life is mostly composed of small details repeated over time. So too a culture. That is part of what Humming Meadow (http://HummingMeadow.com) hopes to recover. Honey was simply the clearest expression of something older and more enduring that still survives beneath the surface of American life. Family. Nature. Tradition. Those words sound quaint to some people now, maybe even embarrassingly archaic or even politically charged, but they remain among the only sturdy foundations left (https://oldhollowtree.substack.com/p/the-final-stronghold-of-civilization?r=28sts3) available to a wounded culture increasingly organized around speed, novelty, and disposability. The hunger for something more enduring is visible everywhere now. Young couples plant gardens behind small homes. Families learn to bake bread from old cookbooks stained with flour and butter. Men restore old trucks instead of financing plastic new ones they cannot repair themselves. Women search antique stores for quilts and cast iron and old wooden furniture built before planned obsolescence became standard practice. People are searching for weight again. Texture. Friction (https://www.instagram.com/p/DN3GuFv3Imp/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==). Permanence. They want homes that feel lived in instead of staged. This longing is often dismissed as nostalgia, though nostalgia is not quite the right word for it. Nostalgia traps people in the past. What is happening now feels active and intentional. People are searching for the old ways because many of those ways produced healthier homes and healthier communities than the wounded culture surrounding us now. They are searching for patterns worth recovering. Slowness. Stewardship. Craftsmanship. Shared meals. Real materials. Local identity. They are searching for ways to root themselves again in a world that increasingly asks them to float. They are searching for a reclamation of what America was. That old America is still out there. It remains in the hills and along the coast, in the old stone walls and the salt-stained piers. It remains in old hardware stores and diners and church suppers. In barns smelling of hay and machine oil. In homes where the lights are warm and the tables are full and the objects have stories attached to them. It remains wherever people still believe that beauty, permanence, and stewardship are obligations rather than luxuries. You are told “you can’t go home again.” Perhaps going home again was never really the point. Perhaps the real task before you is rebuilding it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit oldhollowtree.substack.com/subscribe (https://oldhollowtree.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

11 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

10 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 27 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

33

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

51