Tag: Vault

Lets choose wisely

NB: Each week I’m posting something from the archives of my more than 20 years of writing on the web. Sometimes it’s a social media post, sometimes a blog post, or (like today) it’s an excerpt from a newsletter issue originally published in February of 2020. Each entry gets updated with some modern context or point of view. – HH

The news is exhausting. The election is exhausting. Winter is exhausting. Social Media is exhausting. The wanton destruction of the planet and the hopelessness it brings is exhausting. 

It is all so much, and there seems to be no sign of letting up. And it is at times like this I am tempted to give up, to give in, to resign myself to our circumstances, and just try to survive. ButI can’t bring myself to do it. Because I know the truth: That while the world is full of suffering and pain, it is also full of the overcoming of it. 

Show me capitalism run amuck, and I will show you Bob’s Red Mill being given to its employees. Show me Antarctica being at record highs, and I will show you urban farms on blighted land in Baltimore, Detroit, and Jackson, MS. Show me cynical talk show hosts and I will introduce you to a wonder-filled 7 year old. 

There is as much evidence out there that we are a wonderful species, capable of doing amazingly beautiful things as there is that we are a trashy invasive species hell bent on destroying the planet and each other, but it’s not as well distributed, and it’s often hidden. 

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy received two conflicting cables from Moscow. One was threatening, and the proper response to it was war. One was peaceful, and the proper response to it was de-escalation. They each had equal evidence as being the “real” cable. Kennedy chose to believe the one that led to de-escalation, and thus we avoided nuclear war. There is a lot of conflicting information out there. I’m not talking about science or climate change or vaccines or the efficacy of essential oils, but conflicting information about who we are, and what we are capable of. And every time, we get to choose what we believe about the world around us.

I hope we choose wisely.

Update:

I wrote this just weeks before the pandemic shut everything down, almost six years ago now. And yet it feels like it could have been written yesterday. I think it’s even more important than ever to choose what we believe about the world around us, and the people around us, and to be very clear what we are looking for – because we will almost always find it.

Endurance

NB: Each week I’m posting something from the archives of my more than 20 years of writing on the web. Sometimes it’s a social media post, sometimes a blog post, or (like today) it’s an excerpt from a newsletter issue originally published in October of 2025. Each entry gets updated with some modern context or point of view. – HH

A thing many people do not know about me is that I love Old Roses. Note the uppercase letters—I’m not talking about roses that are long in the tooth, but roses that have been in cultivation for a really long time—the term is usually applied to those roses introduced to the public before the introduction of Hybrid Tea roses in 1867. 

These roses are tough, are not grafted, and can withstand neglect. One garden writer calls them roses even dead people can grow, because in the US South, they are often found in old country graveyards, surviving on rainwater and little else. I have six rosebushes that are true Old Roses, and another six that were introduced later than 1867, but are still tough and hardy and grow on their own roots. Then there are some Knockouts I rescued on clearance in the big box garden center, but hell, I like them too. 

But my favorite rose is also the oldest in my collection—Old Blush. It’s the first Asian rose introduced to Europe, way back in 1752, nearly 30 years before the American Revolution. But in China, it had been cultivated for more than a thousand years at that point. 

But here is the thing you might not realize if plants are not a big thing in your life. Named varieties—like Old Blush—are prized for their attributes, such as the color of their flowers, the number of petals, or their size, for instance. But if you take seeds that develop from rose hips on an Old Blush bush, and plant them, you don’t get an Old Blush baby bush. You get a random bush that may or may not have the same attributes, just like how if you have red hair, your kid may, or may not, have red hair.  

The only way to get an Old Blush rose bush is to take a cutting from an existing Old Blush bush, and then root it, and then plant it. You are cloning the existing bush. It is 100% genetically identical to the “parent” bush. 

So, the Old Blush bush in my front yard, which blooms periodically throughout the year but reliably into late fall every year, is genetically the same bush that was being cultivated in China 1200 years ago. It began life as a cutting from a bush that was a cutting from a bush that was a cutting from a bush and so on, all the way back to 700 AD or so. 

Life is really chaotic right now. It feels like our nation is collapsing, and our way of life is ending, and for some of us, it’s really dangerous right now. At times like this, being the caretaker for a rose that is genetically 1300 years old, which has seen the collapse of empires and survived genocides and has outlived tyrants and stood watch over the graveyards of patriots seems really important right now, and gives me hope that we too, can not only endure, but be beautiful while we do it. 

UPDATE:
My nation is still clown pants, and October seems so quaint – before we invaded Venezuela, before we watched Renee Good get murdered on video, before we *checks notes* are threating to invade another NATO country.

But the thing Old Blush teaches me is still the same. There is always an empire. There are always tyrants. There is always someone who seeks to watch the world burn.

But there is also always someone fighting the empire. There is always a resistance movement. There is always someone with the water to pour on the flames.

Me say war

NB: Each week I’m posting something from the archives of my more than 20 years of writing on the web. Sometimes it’s a social media post, sometimes a blog post, or (like today) it’s an excerpt from a newsletter issue published in 2019. Each entry gets updated with some modern context or point of view. – HH

Back in 1992, Sinead O’Connor caused a sensation when, on Saturday Night Live, she tore up a picture of the Pope in protest of clergy sexual abuse. She was a young star on the way up, and it seriously set back her career and cost her a lot of fans. This was more than a decade before the worst abuses of Roman Catholic clergy abuse would come to light.

In retrospect, she wasn’t wrong, merely early. 

Two weeks later, she was at Madison Square Garden for a Bob Dylan tribute. She was introduced by Kris Kristofferson, who praised her integrity. The audience began booing her and would not let up. She stood there, stone faced, as they booed her. Finally, she asked for the mic to be turned up, and she launched into an a cappella recitation of War by Bob Marley.

Over the haters, she nearly shouted into the mic:

Until the philosophy

Which hold one race superior and another

Inferior

Is finally

And permanently

Discredited

And abandoned

Everywhere is war

Me say war

And when she finished, she walked off the stage, giving them her back, as my Latina friends would say, and fell into Kris Kristofferson’s arms and sobbed. 

It is one of my favorite images: a 25-year-old woman, in front of a hostile audience, standing firm to her principles, refusing to be cowed. Afraid, but convicted. Not without fear, but standing up for what she believed despite that fear. Speaking the truth, even though her voice shook. 

UPDATE:

Another tidbit about this story that I love. In the picture I used for this piece, Kris is whispering in her ear, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

Sinead replies, “I’m not down.”

It’s then she asks for the mic to be turned up.

It’s been six years since I wrote this. A lot has changed. Sinead has died. Kris has died.

But much hasn’t. It’s still war. And we still need people to speak, even when your voice shakes.

Sitting for Ideas

From the vault:

Today I am going to share a secret with you – my superpower, if you will.  I sit for ideas.

A mentor once told me, “Hugh, lots of people in this world are going to tell you that you should work on your weaknesses. But if you do that, you just get a lot of strong weaknesses – things other people would be better at doing anyway. I think you should outsource your weaknesses, and focus on what only you can do.”

I have thought a lot about this advice over the years. And while I see the limits of it (and also remember that said mentor died of alcoholism and estranged from his family and thus, perhaps was not equally brilliant in all areas of his life) it really has served me well.

And sometimes, I have learned, you can modify a weakness so it becomes a strength. An example is meditation.

I like the idea of meditation. I like the outcomes. I even like the practice of meditation – for about 2 minutes. Then my mind goes all ballistic – the Zen practitioners call this “monkey mind” – and ideas rush in at ballistic speed.

Now, I’m not alone in this. Many people report this experience, and as I said above, there is even a term for it. But I also noticed something: Some of my best ideas happened during this time. Game changing ideas. Career changing ideas. Ideas that rocked my world. Ideas that apparently had been floating around in my head and co-mingling with ideas like, “We should eat dessert first” and “I need some new socks” and ‘It’s time to weed the flower bed.” Until one day, I sat still, closed my eyes and created space, and the idea finally saw a wedge of space and showed up.

Boom.

So I asked myself, “What would happen if I was actually intentional about sitting still, closing my eyes and waiting – would the ideas still show up?”.

Yes. Yes, they did. Later I would read that Thomas Edison did something very similar. He would spend an hour a day, alone, in solitude, without distraction or noise, waiting for ideas to come. He said, “Ideas come from space. This may seem astonishing and impossible to believe, but it’s true. Ideas come from out of space.”

Here is how I do it.

  • Set aside 10 minutes or so. Longer is better, but even 10 minutes has value.
  • Eliminate as many distractions as you can. Sometimes, I put in my earbuds and use a white noise app, because the inner-city can be noisy.
  • Assume a position of comfort, but not total relaxation. I usually sit upright in a kitchen chair, feet flat on the floor.
  • Have a paper notebook and pencil beside you (in order to capture the ideas).
  • Pretend to meditate.  – I’m sorta kidding here. But seriously though. Close your eyes. Notice your breath. Relax. Your mind will begin to drift. But instead of calling it back, like you would with meditative practices, you let it roam.
  • Enjoy the ride.

Your brain will go everywhere. Things will pop in your head you haven’t thought about for years. People you haven’t seen. For me, anyway, it feels like body surfing in a sea of thought, flitting from idea to idea, never fully landing, just surfing.

Until it hits you. The connection you make you wouldn’t have made before. The solution to that problem you had last week at work. The idea that could revolutionize your industry. It will hit you like a ton of bricks. And when it does, pay attention. Look at it from all angles. Notice the colors, how it feels – and then, quietly, calmly, open your eyes and write it down. And keep writing until you have the idea down. And now, it’s yours.

Now you just have to do something with it. But that is another blog post, for another day.

Dictating How People Show Up

I’m republishing things I have written elsewhere in the past to archive them here. I think of them as tales from the vault. This is one of them.

I recently observed something that suddenly made me understand something I have struggled to understand for years: That people who want more diversity to happen in their groups also want to dictate how the diverse people act, and would put limits on those people.

Who the hell do they think they are to do that? And then I realized that for older folks especially, that is how they have observed change, and then they assume all people in that group should act that way.

A thing I see *a lot* – especially in people and groups that have seen themselves as historically progressive, that fought early battles for inclusion of people previously excluded – is how they point to the non-combativeness of the first person from that group they included and then expect that will be the way all people from that group will behave.

Example: I have had a personal conversation with a famous minister who personally knew William Stringfellow. For you who do not know, Stringfellow was an Episcopal layman who was incredibly influential in the 1960’s, and was a major influence on Walter Wink. Stringfellow was also gay, and lived with his partner.

This famous minister held Stringfellow (who was not officially out, but it was known to his friends) as the model for how gay people should act. I.E. They should leave all of their sexual identity in the closet.

Because Stringfellow had to (and let’s be honest: chose to) act straight in order to get published and to have a lecture career, because he chose to diminish himself in order to overcome prejudice that would have otherwise silenced him, that is seen by people who knew him as the model for how Queer people should act.

Or the woman minister I know in my denomination, who was the first woman minister in her regional body, who is praised by her contemporaries as “knowing how to not be confrontational” and “knowing how to meet the group where they were”. They praise this as if it is the model for how a woman minister should be, rather than acknowledging that this woman had to diminish herself in order to be seen as non-threatening, OR recognizing that this particular woman had the choice, personality, and support structure that allowed her to do this.

Some people who are members of oppressed peoples have the desire, giftedness, support structure, and mental health to purposefully choose to diminish themselves in order to advance the group they represent. Bless those people. But that doesn’t mean it should be normative for us in the dominant culture to expect that, nor does it obligate them to perform in ways that do not threaten our dominance.

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