Rabbit Holes

Let's go down a rabbit hole of thought together.

An actual rabbit hole is a little dugout den that rabbits make. They can use them to hide from predators like the hawks that fly above my house, and I’m just far enough from the city that rabbits will dig these little holes in my back yard, even depositing brand new little baby rabbits in those little dugouts.

Dachshunds are natural enemies of rabbits in many ways. The breed was initially created in order to chase small animals down holes (badgers, mostly, but this certainly translates to rabbits as well). This largely explains their “wiener” shape.

I was able to catch one of these deadly predators in action right in my own back yard a couple of years back. Here’s Twopert, our incredibly sweet foster dog, showing his primal instincts:

In dogs, these primal instincts are usually apparent. Dogs will bristle and bare their teeth if they’re threatened, for instance. With humans, these instincts will often manifest as emotions. Fear keeps us from jumping off of a high cliff, and nobody ever needs to teach us to be afraid of heights.

There are lots of these sorts of things everyone knows, and your body has its own independent operating system, quite apart from the conscious brain. This OS runs everything in the background so you can pay attention to things like Monty Python’s large wooden rabbit as an analogy for the Trojan War.

There’s a good chance you already know that Monty Python had an enormous impact on me growing up, although maybe not quite as much as The Incredible Hulk or, collectively, the Marvel Comics universe of my childhood and adolescence. I taught myself to draw by copying comic book artists at first, and that set my life in a particular direction. The quirky humor and scathing social commentary from Python was a huge comfort during any times of adversity, and a seed was planted then that would one day become me.

Seeds come in a wide variety, and we humans consume an awful lot of them. Not all seeds are the same, though: coffee beans need to be processed like crazy before we can drink the final product, whereas sunflower seeds can be eaten straight away, raw, just by picking them off of a ripe sunflower.

The sunflower has become a very recognizable symbol of Ukraine. This seems like a very sensible outcome, since Ukraine is one of the leading producers of the sunflower oil that comes from those seeds. Somewhat recently, in 1996, sunflowers were planted at a former nuclear missile base in Ukraine to symbolize the country's commitment to nuclear disarmament and peace.

Today, the sunflower symbolizes Ukraine’s fight to continue to exist, and the symbolism goes much deeper than that, too. I will defer to folks who know this part of the story much better than me, like

Daniel Nest

, whom you can see in the comments here most days.

Comments are amazing, by the way. I really appreciate being able to put an idea out there, spend some time learning about it, and then learning much more from folks who add to the conversation. That sort of dialogue is one main reason I wanted to start writing in the first place: I felt as though conversations were getting shorter and shorter, and nuance was being lost.

Meanwhile, the world was (and is) becoming more and more complex. While folks want to communicate in memes and very short videos, we need to have deeper, more meaningful conversations about the world. We need to swim against the grain, so to speak.

Grains, as it happens, are a type of seed—specifically, the dried type. Let’s plant a seed today that can grow from this rabbit hole.