Rohn, the early years

I stopped by Katie’s Rose Hip Coffee the other morning. There was a bunch of people gathered there, I thought maybe it was somebody’s birthday or something but no it was just a buzzy morning crowd after the brilliant rain storm that had swept thru the neighborhood at 4 am washing everything clean, reviving and renewing humanity after the long hot dry drought of the summer. I met a cafe friend (forgot his name) and we started talking. The conversation turned to haircuts (I had just cut mine) and the warrior princess story that I had shared with him in our earlier encounter (and will share with you here) and the rohn report itself. He suggested that I do a story about ‘Rohn, the early years’, and that he would love to read it. As a general rule I like to avoid talking about myself so I can remain mysterious and inaccessible to people’s assumptions and expectations, but then there’s Thoreau’s dictum which he includes at the very beginning of his famous work Walden. “Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.” Ha! So people like to know your personal story, then, who you are, where you come from and how you came to be who you are. I’ve been writing this newsletter every week for two years now, so maybe it’s time to give an accounting of myself. I was born on September 26, 1950 at 6 AM in the Howell Hospital in Howell, Michigan, 8 miles down the road from the small farming town of Fowlerville where my family lived. The transition was, apparently, successful. I don’t remember any of it. My father was the minister of the Baptist church there and our house, the parsonage, was located directly behind the church and on the other side of the block facing Ann Street. I remember playing in that street with the neighborhood kids on the long twilit evenings that seemed to go on and on forever in Michigan, especially in the Fall. The Armstrong kids across the street from us were considered to be of a lower class, at least culturally (they couldn’t have been much poorer than us), but they were also the only playmates on our block so we played: hide and go seek, some form of stick ball as I recall and other such games as we could make up. That street was our park. Actually, come to think of it, that was a defining feature of my childhood, the idea that we were somehow superior to the unsaved and unbaptized around us. I mean I didn’t feel that way myself, necessarily, but that seemed to be the official policy of the family being representative of the one true religion based on the Holy Inspired Word of God. To that effect we were proscribed from going to movies, dancing, playing cards and other activities that might invite demonic possession or lust. This was considered to be our witness to the community. It may also have been the reason why the congregation of our small Baptist church remained small. It was all normal to me but looking back I can see what a narrow, rigid childhood little Rohn had between Baptist church 4 times a week and public school the rest of the time. I refer to him in the third person because I can hardly relate to that little boy now. I know he was me but he wasn’t me yet in another sense. I had yet to become myself. Anyways the street was our park. We made snow forts and tunneled into the snow banks where it piled up along the edge of the street in the Winter, we burned mounds of fallen leaves in the gutter come Autumn (and roasted marshmallows in the glowing coals), we roamed up and down that street (and others) on Halloween, totally unsupervised, hunting for candy and sweets from the neighbors. And it was on the sidewalk next to that street where I learned to push off from the stone retaining wall, find my balance and ride a bike all on my own. I don’t recall feeling underprivileged or overprivileged, my traumas and dramas, while peculiar to me, seemed not more or less than any other kid growing up in any other place. It wasn’t until much later that I realized how boring and bizarre it really had been and began the process of finding myself. That took awhile. I had to lose my faith, question everything, travel the world, do psychedelics, make a million mistakes, find my mentor, realize I was somebody (as opposed to nobody), realize, infact, that I was way more than I had ever dreamed I was and that I needed way less than I ever thought I did and infact that I already had more than I would ever know. But I’m getting ahead of the story. After Fowlerville we moved to Newaygo, on the banks of the Muskegon River. That was a cool town but a different kind of congregation. I guess we never really fit in, or maybe my dad didn’t have the same youthful charisma he had in Fowlerville. I don’t know but he lost that ministry and along with it his avocation and began a long slide into rough times, including depression and financial difficulties. For us kids it was all masked and hidden but there was definitely something wrong with the picture, something that we really didn’t understand but could feel. Eventually we ended up in Sparta, a small town near the city of Grand Rapids, where we were no longer preacher’s kids. My big brother, my little brother and my little sister were the only ones left of the original clan. The oldest two having moved out, either to start a family of their own (Carol) or to join the Air Force and travel the world (Jim). We no longer had to bring a note from our parents excusing us from PE class because they were learning how to square dance, and my father was able to find gainful employment in the big city and little Rohn, now 6 1/2 feet tall, attended high school and played sports and ran the mile like his dad did. I got pretty good at that. My best time was 4:45 and I remember the exhilaration of being ‘in shape’ and feeling like I could run forever. My basketball skills, however, never matured much beyond grab a rebound and try not to drop the ball. I didn’t have any moves and couldn’t jump. Well anyways I hope that wasn’t boring but that’s what happened. And that was pretty much the end of my career as a dutiful preacher’s kid type kid. Somewhere around that time we went to Ann Arbor (home of the University of Michigan) for the state track meet and I wandered into a head shop with black light posters and paraphernalia and crazy stuff I had never imagined or seen before. It blew my mind. Around that time I also read a book that I found in the carousel in a bus station called ‘Daybreak the Autobiography of Joan Baez’. She talked about vegetarianism and non-violence and meditation, also things I had never thought about before. It occurred to me that there were many things I had never thought about before and knew nothing about and that infact everything I believed that I did know (although obviously they were all true) were not true just because I believed them. It was a short hop from there to the idea that truth, obviously, existed independently of my beliefs. That was like a crack that appeared in this giant wall that had been right in front of my eyes my whole life. The wall was everything that constituted my reality, everything that I knew to be true and then I watched in fascination as the crack widened and widened until, shockingly, the whole wall collapsed. It was shocking but kind of cool at the same time. I figured, ok, if truth exists, and it must otherwise why am I even searching for it, then it also must be discoverable with or without my beliefs. This turned out to be not only a brilliant insight but the beginning of on… 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