common ground

So, this week’s rohn report is about Rohn. I’ve been thinking about him. I feel like he’s newsworthy. Atleast for 5 minutes. My life has been guided by some deep underground current, I don’t know what it is. It swept me along and left me here. That’s not to say I haven’t had moments of decision, I have, where my life could have gone one way or the other.Oh my god, imagine if you were rich and famous because you made all the right decisions. People would want to stop and talk to you, try to stump you if they were politically inclined and who’s not at that level of society?No, I’m just me, unadorned and unattached, moving freely in the current of time, finding my right depth and something to eat. A weird combination of a Baptist preacher and a rave poet. Like old Ezekiel in the wilderness, or was it Jeremiah, can’t remember, there were so many back then, Elijah that’s it. Elijah in the wilderness after his showdown with Jezebel. He knocked out her priests because they were worshipping the wrong gods. Knocked em off, burned em up and then took off for the hills knowing she would be coming after him. She was the Queen. Of half the nation anyways. Enough power to track down one dopey loudmouth prophet and cut his head off. Yeah. That’s me.But mainly what it’s been like is waiting for something really good to happen and then realizing it’s already happening and then trying to figure out how to enjoy it. If that makes any sense. Are there other people like that? I have heard no reports. Only my own. I hope it’s interesting or atleast entertaining My friend Mary Ann did a post recently called Soul Renewal where she was just paddling her kayak downstream to downtown and meandering along and mentioning all her observances along the way. It wasn’t really about the eagle and the deer and the tree roots, though, it was about Mary Ann. That’s what I felt. She embraced the journey and the journey embraced her. It gave her what she needed at the moment which she may not have even known what it was.Memories of my youth are like a faint smudge on the window of time. It happened, but I don’t remember it. There may be some mercy there. Slow and boring became normal. Little Rohn became assimilated, his youth assassinated. That much I can infer. I’m a good inferer. Cast adrift, is how it seems to me now, turned loose in a way but still conscripted and scripted and drilled and tested. What is for a child, is what is. There’s really no way to compare it, you don’t know anything else. You don’t know that you’re rich or poor or fucked up or fucked over. As a child everything that is, is normal.It’s only later that you start to notice things. What I notice is that my life has been incredibly tragic and incredibly blessed. Ample amounts of both. Amazing amounts of both. Hard to even appreciate amounts of both. So much amounts of both that I don’t even know how to write about it amounts of both. It’s been deep and swift like the river Ar in The Wizard of Earthsea, flowing down out of the snow covered mountains on the island of Gont, the place of wizards. My youth was rife with crimes against humanity: public school grades 1-8 (resulting in my short little attention span), vacation Bible school twice a week during the summer (when I should have been swimming in a lake), an abusive older brother who stole my energy, distracted parents who thought raising kids was feeding and clothing them and seeing that they were educated and baptized, that was about it. Not that it was all that different from any other kid’s life back in 1950’s, small town, midwestern America. I’m not complaining, Remember the scene with Frodo and the hobbits where they’re looking for Gandalf at the Prancing Pony, and the black horsemen are chasing them, and he’s not there. But Strider is. Remember that? Strider is empowered. He helps them because they are carrying a burden. They are carrying a heavy burden. They are carrying it for all of us. The ring of power. Anyways they make it all the way to Mordor, two of the little hobbits do. Actually 3, Gollum was in there too at the end. They make it to Mordor and they are successful in their quest. Pffst! Flash! No more ring. Balance is restored. It was a long road and a dangerous one. But that’s what heroes do. They restore the balance. All the myths say so.music from 00:00 - 9:30thank you Tomoko and Koku again for this amazing soundtrack https://koku-music.bandcamp.com/ This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rohn.substack.com/subscribe

Yeah, so I’ve been publishing ‘the rohn report’ for two years now, 117 posts. I’m proud of that so I’m including the very first post below, as a sort of celebration and because I’m sure most people haven’t seen it. A nice compliment to the one published yesterday which was basically about the end of the world. I mean the END of the world; Opeth’s song ‘Ending Credits’ which is admittedly naive, or at least that’s how the band’s front man, Mikael Åkerfeldt, introduced it. Anyways back then, two years ago, I was looking for places to publish my writing other than Facebook and personal emails and self-published books, and discovered that there are lots of online venues out there, virtual magazines if you like: The Sun, Medium, Elephant Journal to name a few. Each one is a little different in their publishing style, but like magazines, you can browse through them and access a wide variety of interesting subjects (although that is of course subjective). Medium is an open collection but whatever you submit is competing against thousands or at least hundreds of other articles. Writers get paid according to how many views they get and other nuanced analytics.The Sun requests submissions which they then consider and approve or disapprove. They pay writers and pay well. Their about page reads, “We publish personal essays, fiction, and poetry. Personal stories that touch on political and cultural issues are welcome.”Elephant Journal publishes everything but edits it to fit their audience, adds advertising in between the lines, changes the title and provides an illustration, which you may or may not recognize. For payment you will receive personal gratification if you have any left. If it sounds to you like I have personal experience with Elephant Journal, you would be right. Then my friend Jewel mentioned Substack to me. I checked it out pretty thoroughly including listening to podcasts with the founder and CEO Chris Best. It seemed like a good fit. It offered the independence that I was looking for and a way to build an audience, a local network. It was completely untethered from Facebook’s machinations and the evil algorithms of Google. It also offered a payment option through a subscription service. Was my writing not worth something? I believed it was. Would people pay for it, even $5/month? Good question. I decided to find out.This post was born after I received a couchsurfing request from a person in Egypt. When I looked up his town I discovered he was living in the delta, where the Nile river flows into the Mediterranean. Most people in Egypt live in the delta, as it turns out, or nearby and have since the time of the Pharaohs. I started researching the Nile river and got fascinated with it’s history. The Nile river, of course, gave rise to the ancient Egyptian civilization but it’s source is deep in the heart of Africa’s tropical zone, in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro. It flows out of Lake Victoria and travels 4,000 miles through 11 nations before it arrives at the Mediterranean. It was a mysterious and compelling adventure back in the mid 19th century to try to find the source of the Nile. “Doctor Livingstone, I presume.” and all that.I started thinking about the flooding of the Nile, how every year the monsoon rains would raise the level of the river so precipitously that it would inundate the valley down river, destroying everything in its path, but it would also bring fresh silt and enrich the land where the Egyptians planted their crops. In their myths they represented that event as a story about the death and rebirth of the god Osiris. I realized, In fact, that all the ancient creation myths have a similar theme - from chaos comes renewal, from the void comes the world. That was my little adventure and here is my story. Note, this was written two years ago, July 2020. Donald Trump was president and the campaign was raging.chaosThe word chaos comes from the Greek kháos, meaning chasm or void.  It also has a protean quality when it’s used to describe the creation events of the old myths like Babylonia’s primeval sea, the chaos of Egypt’s recurring floods, the Iroquois’ water covered world and of course the Hebrew version: “The earth was without form and void; darkness was on the face of the deep.” Our country is in a time of chaos.  Instead of truth and guidance and inspiration from our government leaders we get lies and obfuscation and blame casting.  The idea of a unified nation seems to be on no one’s mind, instead we create divisions and cliques and define ourselves by the conspiracy theories we believe in.  Social media, instead of being a place to socialize, is inundated with political memes and outrageous, attention grabbing posts that have little to do with verifiable facts.  Extreme opinions have become trendy.  It’s a form of acting out, a kind of self expression.  The uncertainty of our times has created anxiety and the anxiety has created all kinds of strange behaviors.  It’s a fear reaction to changes that we sense are happening but can’t control. But our creation myths tell us the story of renewal and rebirth from the chaos. “Then God said ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.”  That was a positive development.  The Iroquoian Sky Woman fell from her island in the sky, but landed on the back of Big Turtle floating in the primordial waters that covered the world.  Osiris, the Egyptian god, was killed but then was resurrected from the dead with perfumes and magic spells performed by his devoted queen, Isis. The Babylonian's battle with the watery chaos that was all around them was won by their hero Marduk.  All the stories of our ancestors proclaim not only rebirth but renewal.  Our chances of coming out of this chaos are 100% if myth is a reliable guide. And how bad is the chaos going to get?  It could be much worse than it is now, we could look back at this time as the halcyon days when things were ‘normal’.  It just depends on how much fear and anxiety we choose to carry around with us.  As can be seen from Donald Trump’s spectacular rise to power, people’s fears and anxieties are easily aroused and manipulated.  The same technologies that were supposed to make our lives easier, more productive and more fun, have enabled massive brain washing.  That’s not a nice word but appropriate.  People don’t know the difference between opinion, preference and truth.  There are facts and there are ‘alternative facts’.  There is news and there is ‘fake news’. I would call that some pretty rich chaos.  We should be able to make something out of that, like the Iroquois story of Sky Woman who fell out of the sky onto the back of Big Turtle floating in the primordial ocean. There was no earth and no land back then, just sky and water and all the animals came to help her. One by one they dove down to the bottom of the ocean to try to get some mud so she could make the world. Muskrat tried, beaver tried, duck tried, one by one they all tried but failed to bring back any mud. Finally, the smallest of them all, toad, dove down to the bottom of the ocean, grabbed some mud in his mouth and brought it back and with this tiny bit of earth the world was created on the back of Big Turtle by Sky Woman and her friends for all the animals to live on.  Maybe that’s what we need, story time around the old campfire, telling each other the stories of who we are and how we do it.  I know we have TV and movies and they kind of do that, and the evening news tells us about all the bad things that are happening in an entertaining sort of way, but maybe we could have some discourse amongst ourselves.  Maybe, when the fog lifts and we stumble out of the chaos into the light of a mid-day sun, we’ll be able to do it again - remind each other of who we are and how we do it. We are the human beings (spoiler alert) and we do it with a wide range of amazing behaviors but our most celebrated, our most sublime is when we do it with kindness and compassion.  That’s also when we are the most content.  That’s also when we are at our most powerful and creative.  And that’s also when a nation or an individual can become great again.music :: 41:35 This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rohn.substack.com/subscribe

In this week's episode, I will invite you to reflect on the power of enthusiasm. Inspired by the recent event, which happened on my last day at work in a restaurant, I am going to consider how being enthusiastic has helped me to overcome challenges, achieve multiple successes, and improved my relationships with others. I will talk about Jim Rohn's point of view regarding enthusiasm and offer you a few points on how to find your source of enthusiasm within. We will also recognize the steps, you may want to take to become more enthusiastic and therefore more successful in your life's journey. Of course, I will also offer you a challenge for the week, and give you a healthy dose of optimism necessary to make your time worthwhile. All the love, all the power, all of the time! Also, as I have mentioned, if you'd like to support my work, please follow this link: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=RSXTAGFY2QPSG Sources to explore: The Keys To Success: Amazon.co.uk: Jim Rohn: 0009380227779: Books 7 Strategies for Wealth & Happiness: Power Ideas from America's Foremost Business Philosopher: Amazon.co.uk: Rohn, Jim: 9780761506164: Books Jim Rohn On Purpose, Self Confidence, Enthusiasm, Expertise and Preparation - YouTube

Beth talks about the upcoming Community Book Sale and other events at the Moravian Church. Guest: Beth Rohn-Habhegger