Don’t do it by yourself.
One of my favorite stories: A salesman was driving through the country on his way to his next appointment. He took a curve too fast and ended up in the ditch. He had no cell service to call AAA, and…
Hugh's Blog
Hopeful in spite of the facts
Hugh's Blog
Hopeful in spite of the facts
The myth of inevitable progress
Our species has been on the earth for more than 200,000 years. 30,000 years ago, there was a sort of explosion of art and cave paintings showing up on multiple regions and continents. 12,000 years ago we began to build…
The important people
My father and I never had one of those father-son pissing contests that so many seem to have. Growing up, I thought (and still do) that the sun rose and set upon my dad. Mom would often go to bed…
Plod on
It was January of 2008. I had been doing this work for about five months or so, and I was already burnt out. I had no money. None. I was surrounded and overwhelmed by the immense amount of need I…
Learning to learn.
In a meeting with an intern a while back, she complained that the things she was studying in school didn’t seem relevant to our work. “After all”, she said, “how often do we use algebra here?” I told her she…
Unitize your time.
Those of us who are in the helping professions seldom end up having 40 hour, structured workweeks. Instead, we are often responsible for creating our own schedule, which always involves other people’s schedules, which can lead to long, unstructured days.…
Trash and Time
Take some leftover chicken bones, add the tops and trimmings from a carrot, the peel of some onions and the broccoli stalks you aren’t going to eat and put all that in a pot. Add enough water to cover it…
Making things makes us human
Once upon a time, we humans mostly did work that fit into discreet time periods. Land was measured by the amount a man could plow in a day. Craftspeople worked on one piece at a time – if you were…
30 Days of Spoons
A few weeks ago, pandemic isolation was getting to me. But then again, the dead of winter is always hard on me. First there is the lack of sunlight. Seasonal affective disorder is real, and does my depression no favors.…
7 things for 2021
In the last 12 months, I wrote exactly 2 blog posts on this website, so, if nothing else, 2020 taught me that lack of time to write is not my biggest barrier to writing. However, I did write many sermons…