the rohn report

. . . the latest entry in the biography series featuring van Gogh, Prem Rawat, Leo Tolstoy, William Bradford, God, Lynn Margulis, Quetzalcoatl, Bad Bunny and me.I first got interested in Fela Kuti listening to the 12 episode Higher Ground podcast, Fela Kuti, Fear No Man. Man, that blew my mind. Check it out. He was a Nigerian musician/activist, revolutionary really and the originator of Afrobeat - merging jazz, with James Brown funk, the polyrhythms and vocal inflections of his native Yoruba music and the pungent protest language of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. He was born in 1938 into a prominent family in Abeokuta, about 30 miles north of Lagos, the largest city. Back then Nigeria was a British colony and had been for sixty years, ever since they moved in and took over back in 1884. Colonization, as we shall see, is not a good thing. His father was a school principal, very respected, and his mother was a political activist who became a well known women’s-rights leader. She was a big influence on little Fela. He accompanied her on some of her protests where she led the women in singing out their protests against unfair taxation, forcing the local chief to resign. His grandfather was a prominent Anglican minister and musician who wrote hymns and translated them into Yoruba. He was, in fact, the first Nigerian to release a music album.In 1958 Fela moved to London to study music — keyboards and trumpet. After classes he hit the jazz hot spots around town, sat in with some of the musicians and formed 2 bands of his own. He spent 5 years there.Back in Nigeria, independence had come but it had not brought peace and prosperity, instead it went through cycles of violence and corrupt military governments. That’s what happens when the culture of a country is shattered by colonialism. It becomes toxic. It rebuilds itself eventually but in the mold of it’s oppressor. At least that’s what happened in Nigeria after their independence in 1960. Power and money are the real game. That’s the lesson of colonialism.The Yoruba culture, on the other hand, was built on a tradition of harmony and connectedness that was thousands of years old. Just look at their art. Wood carvings, earthenware, textiles, beadwork — all famous stuff. They were highly skilled artisans, still are. Their society was based on clans and extended families. They had city-states governed by an Oba (king) and deeply held spiritual beliefs in an all powerful creator god. They gave him the name Olodumare. The Yoruba language is something else, it’s pluricentric meaning it incorporates many dialects from the region into one vocabulary. It also supports a strong oral tradition. Story-telling and dance and music are the heart and soul of Yoruba culture and of Afrobeat music. Yoruba culture survived for many centuries until the British came and wrecked it all, turned it into a business, taught them the white man’s ways. The whole colony of Nigeria was just a business for Britain. Power and money.Anyways back to Fela. After a visit to the United States where he was exposed to the music of James Brown and the politics of Malcom X and the Black Panther movement he returned to Nigeria in 1970 and founded a nightclub in Lagos called the Shrine where he and his band would play all night parties. He established a compound nearby and boldly declared it be separate and independent from Nigeria: the Kalakuta Republic named after a 1974 prison stay where he was held in a "Kalakuta" cell — Swahili for "rascal". It served as a sanctuary for himself, his family and his band and it embodied his opposition to Nigeria’s military dictatorships. “It was an independent, defiant community functioning as a recording studio, home, and safe haven for revolutionaries, artists, and family. It was a state-within-a-state.” is how AI describes it. The authorities were not pleased. Inside the Shrine people openly smoked marijuana, which was highly illegal, and danced for hours to the powerful music that Fela and his 30 piece orchestra produced. This is where Afrobeat was born.The trance inducing, relentlessly recycling rhythms inside the Shrine created the perfect background for his protest lyrics, railing against the army, the corrupt politicians and all that was wrong with society. His music was not only popular in Nigeria but all across Africa. The authorities were definitely not pleased. He was repeatedly arrested, jailed and even beaten. From the early 1970’s until his death, in 1997, Fela produced a massive amount of hugely popular music with his band Africa 70 and later Egypt 80, by some counts over 50 albums. The danceable beats and boldly irreverent lyrics spread like wild fire inspiring political resistance in Nigeria and beyond. The authorities were seriously not pleased but the more they beat on him and imprisoned him the more confrontational he became. Finally in 1977 things came to a head.The following images and words are from the official YouTube version of ‘Zombie’. Warning: this is not an easy read.Whew. The destruction of the Kalakuta Republic was a major blow for Fela. Thousands of people actually saw the fire and knew what was happening, it was in a densely populated part of Lagos, but nobody came to his aid. He was crushed by that. He had changed people’s lives with his music, lots of people. He changed people’s lives all over the world, he had inspired people and pushed the limits of what was possible but now he was starting to feel the limits. Following the brutal attack on his compound he was banned from performing. Many of the people in his entourage drifted away. With no source of income he ended up living in a tiny apartment with his remaining bandmates and his family. He tried to kickstart his career by organizing a tour of Ghana, where he had played before and knew people but was asked to leave when the kids started yelling ‘zombie’ at the police and soldiers. That was his song.Fela was a complicated man. He believed in peace but indulged in confrontations and clashes throughout his life. He fought corruption but he liked to get high and had his own harem. One year after the the Kalakuta Republic raid he married 27 women in a single traditional ceremony, primarily to protect his female band members but also to shove a finger in the face of the authorities. And also to keep the remaining band from falling apart — people were leaving. In 1986 he divorced all 27, saying that “marriage brings jealousy and selfishness”. Two months later his mother died, succumbed to her injuries from being thrown out of a second story window by the ‘zombie’ soldiers. It was another major blow for Fela. She was his lode stone, his reference point. She was the one who had instilled in him the belief that you could harness spiritual power to depose a king, because that’s what she had done. He continued to record and perform through the 1980s and 1990s (I’m condensing the story here). He was still making music but something had changed. The music was slower, more layered, less upbeat. He had entered his ‘spiritualist phase’. He was using mediums to try to contact his dead mother. In fact he was beginning to lose his grip psychologically, beginning to become paranoid. Well it’s not like they weren’t after him. In 1984 he was arrested at the airport by the Nigerian government for currency smuggling (he was carrying $1,000 in cash) as he was preparing to fly to America for a tour. He spent 20 months in prison. He had already been jailed dozens of times and beaten too for good measure. He changed his name from Fela Ransome Kuti, his family name going back generations to Anikulakbu which means to say ‘I have death in my pouch. I can’t die. They can’t kill me.’ He believed he would live forever or at least claimed to.But nobody lives forever.By 1994 he was ill, exhibiting symptoms of AIDS, but he refused medication, refused to acknowledge in fact that he was sick, refused even to believe in AIDS. He thought it was a scam propagated by white people but that was actually what he had. It was the final blow.On August 2, 1997, Fela dies at the hospital where he had asked to be taken. He was 59 years old. The family arranges for his body to lie in state in a downtown stadium, thousands of people come by to say goodbye. The funeral procession proceeds through the streets of downtown Lagos and people gather around the hearse, more and more people keep gathering at every intersection. By the time they get to the rebuilt Shrine there are a million people.And so after all that what’s left? What happened to the Fela Kuti legacy? Well one way to describe it is by sharing a story taken from the Higher Ground podcast referenced at the beginning. This amazing 12 episode production was, by the way, the source of much of my own podcast. It’s 23 years later, 2020, and police brutality in Lagos still exists. A young woman, loses her best friend and brother, disappeared by the police. She searches for him to no avail. She organizes her friends and they march to the police station to protest. Social media kicks in and more people start coming. Almost everyone knows someone or knows someone who knows someone who has disappeared.The crowd doesn’t disperse. Three days pass and these young people are still there, sleeping in the street, eating in the street, playing music in the street. The DJ puts on a Fela song. They didn’t know Fela, it’s 23 years later, but in his music they can feel his voice and his presence. He is telling them that it’s not ok to just suffer and smile, that it’s not ok to just accept the injustice and smile, he’s telling them to wake up because this is not what they deserve.By the third day the protest has ballooned to thousands and they keep coming. It spreads to other major cities in the country, kinda like the Occupy Movement several years ago. The kids are dancing and singing in the streets and Fela’s music is everywhere. Get it? This is a whole new generation and they are hearing the message that Fela was talking about 23 years ago and they are responding.So what’s going to happen? These kids aren’t going home, they’re pissed. They’ve had enough. And they’re inspired. They have a reference point and that reference point is Fela’s music. Zombie. Beasts of No Nation. All his protest stuff. By the 13th day the protestors had barricaded the Lekki toll gate on one of the busiest highways in Lagos and disabled the security cameras. Then, at one point, the floodlights that illuminate the area go off, it’s dark and the soldiers that had assembled there start shooting. Oh yeah. They start shooting at their own citizens. People are getting shot and they start falling. Chaos. Comments are streaming in on social media — hold up the flag! Sing the national anthem! And they do but the shooting continues. It’s a massacre. In the end the government disbands the police force that was disappearing people and begins an investigation into police brutality. But does anything really change? I don’t know. In 2024, four years after the Lekki massacre another protest breaks out against police violence and the police again use lethal force to disperse the protestors. Twenty four people are killed. So maybe not, but a whole new generation of young people are hearing Fela’s voice and responding. That’s something.After a long succession of coups and military dictatorships, Nigeria now has a civilian government and a duly elected leader. Since 1999 there has been a transition from military dictatorships to representative democracy, with elections and a peaceful transfer of power. There are still problems, big problems, but at least no more assassinations and coups and if the president is not responsive to the demands of the people they can vote him out.Fela used music as a weapon, “the weapon of the future” he called it. Instead of bullets he shot pulsating hypnotic rhythms and highly charged lyrics. His performances were electric, sort of a James Brown/Mick Jagger/Bob Marley fusion. “Fear no man” was his motto and his voice hasn’t died even though he has. It’s still vibrant and alive at least in Nigeria. Below is the soundtrack for the attached podcast with Fela playing keyboards and doing vocals. The name comes from a Yoruba proverb meaning “no one can be the enemy of water”. He is saying, in both English and Yoruba, that because water is essential for life, useful to everyone and resilient, no one can truly be its enemy, that the best way to fight oppression is with a peaceful flowing persistence. If you would like to support my project, please become a paid subscriberor make a one time donation. It would be deeply appreciated. Thank you. 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

Welcome to the rohn report - Conversation with Sarah. She is a neighbor, a friend, an activist and a delightful and wise person. She’s very involved in the neighborhood where I live which is why I wanted to interview her. The Farmer’s Market at Charis Park here at Brees and Emporia in San Antonio and the Sunset Ridge Collective are a couple of them. We sat under the big Oaks in front of the Sunset Ridge Church and she talked of many things: urban gardens, seed libraries, food security, hyper-local community and with such passion. I would ask a question and she would close her eyes and just let all the energy flow that was inside her head and her heart. She’s a special person with a lot to say.Click the button above and jump in. If you would like to support my project, please become a paid subscriber or make a one time donation. It would be deeply appreciated. Thank you. 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

and lightning does not travel in a straight line.” from ‘Chaos’ by James Gleick. Chaos theory is the idea that behind normal ordinary life is chaos, this is how the universe works, unpredictable, random, but behind the chaos is an elegant, purposeful ‘energy’ that is barely knowable but upon which all things rest. This is what I figured out: I’m kind of an oddball, an outcast but it’s ok. Everybody is unique in some way and that is the truth. Find your own weirdness and celebrate it would be my motto if I had a motto.Benoit Mandelbrot was a refugee. Born in Warsaw to Jewish/Lithuanian parents, they escaped to France in 1936 ahead of the Nazi invasion of Poland. Then they fled Paris, with whatever they could carry in a couple of suitcases, and took up residence in Tulle, a town in the south of France. There they endured the German occupation by hiding.After the war he managed to gain entrance to the Ecole Normale, an elite Parisian university. He lacked a formal education but because of his innate ability to solve math problems using shapes instead of numbers he was able to pass the exam.He was never really accepted by his fellow mathematicians because of his eccentricity but found a home, eventually, in the United States at IBM’s research center in the hills of Westchester County, New York. There he was able to make his way among various fields of study, conquering none but all the while pursuing his particular vision. The Mandelbrot Set, discovered in the late seventies, is the most famous expression of his unusual perceptions. Its infinitely unfolding bulbs and whorls have fascinated and inspired mathematicians and scientists (and normal people) ever since. Many applications in mathematics, economics, the sciences and the arts use this equation: Zn+1 = Zn2 + C. Don’t ask me what it means but click here for a sequence of 39 images and animations of the Mandelbrot Set.I believe it is in the wonder and exuberance of differentiation that humans find their fullest expression, a recognition of their own unique creative self. We are not monkeys anymore. It’s an open question if we are humans yet but we are certainly on the road to somewhere. And this is exactly how I read a book like ‘Chaos’ - in bits and pieces, random and spontaneous, letting it wash over me and sing to me. Whatever I can understand is whatever is given to me to understand.The mind flows come and go. I am interrupted not by interruptions but by turbulence in the flow which of course has its own flow and its own properties. On and off is a pattern too, although it may be unknown to me it has its own logic and its own destiny. This is also how my life goes and this is how I write. If my brain is damaged (which I suspect) by modern society and public education and the marketing strategies of ideas and products from orthodox religion to breakfast cereal then maybe, like Mandelbrot, I too have a unique perspective to offer. I would like to suggest that we all do.A spinning wheel offers stability and motion but it doesn’t go anywhere until it’s connected to a bicycle. A butterfly in the Caribbean can influence the path of a hurricane in North America. Life is not a set of problems but a continuous unfolding, like a Mandelbrot Set, of implicit possibilities woven into the fabric of the world. The world is not real, only a perception created in our brain from the sensory input received through our senses. Every snowflake has a unique hexagonal shape of infinite variety.All these spontaneous comments are true and came through the wire into my awareness indicating a far greater, probably infinite reality implicit and actively creative. That’s the message of ‘Wholeness and the Implicate Order’ by David Bohm, another book in my library. It’s a wild crazy world, to put all this in the simplest terms. Whatever perspective you employ is reality for you but there is also a commonality. Existence. That’s pretty fundamental and makes it possible to sit at a keyboard and write things. Or do anything at all or nothing. A period indicates the end of a sentence but also that a sentence is there.Bohm writes: "Fragmentation and wholeness" (which is the title of his first chapter) "is especially important to consider today, for fragmentation is now very widespread, not only throughout society, but also in each individual; and this is leading to a kind of general confusion of the mind, which creates an endless series of problems and interferes with our clarity of perception so seriously as to prevent us from being able to solve most of them." Kind of explains the state of general insanity that inhabits our world which I've often wondered about but it also clears the stage for new developments which we may not be aware of or ready for. New developments that happen because the world is wild and crazy (to quote Steve Martin) and emerging, every moment, from the same energy that created the universe in the first place.Ok, these are big ideas, very philosophical, you might accept them or maybe you don’t, life goes on. Creation and dissolution. I buy a new car, the new car breaks down, turns into a jalopy. I get rid of it, get another one. There are cars everywhere. I’m sure you’ve noticed. I have because I’m riding a bicycle and I don’t want to get run over by one. They are a means of transportation but they are also an expression of our personality. I drive a Mustang, I drive an Acura, I drive a Prius. They tell people who we are and how much money we have. See what I mean? We could all drive the same car if it was just about transportation. Henry Ford’s Model T was available in any color as long as it was black. But people didn’t like that, they wanted a choice, diversity, they wanted pizzaz. The study of car models would be a good application for Chaos Theory. No two are the same but then once in a while there are two of the same. You can check them out when they stop at the light. If you’re on a bike you can smile at the driver, maybe even say something. Then the light changes and chaos ensues. Keep your balance and move on.What’s the point? Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe it’s all Game Theory. Another high falutin concept developed in the early twentieth century. “Game theory is the mathematical study of strategic decision-making where an individual's success depends on the choices of others. It analyzes scenarios—"games"—to identify optimal strategies for competing or cooperating parties, often revealing that rational choices can lead to suboptimal, or less favorable, outcomes for everyone involved.” That’s according to AI Overview. It’s based on the mathematical discoveries of John Von Neumann, a child prodigy, who would often go to sleep with a mathematical problem on his mind and wake up with the answer. That’s what I do sometimes. Not that I’m a genius. I’m just a crazy bohemian poet riding his bicycle to the cafe and hanging out with the people. Whatever happens next is totally spontaneous and random. I am only witness.If you would like to support my project, please become a paid subscriber or make a one time donation. It would be deeply appreciated. Thank you. 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

The horizon of the earth looks like a flat line until you get farther away. When you get into outer space it actually becomes a ball, a complete circle. It’s surrounded by cold, dark, empty space sprinkled with stars. Negative space it’s called in the art world.Humans (as far as we know) had never before been into outer space until cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin from the Soviet Union circled the globe in 1961 and came back down. Once was enough.Pretty fantastic stuff until you realize that we are already in outer space on a planet sized space ship with a protective membrane called an atmosphere and traveling at 67,000 miles per hour around our friendly luminous sun. We’re spinning at 1,000 miles per hour as we travel and our whole solar system is orbiting the galactic center of the Milky Way at 500,000 miles per hour.I think about that as I ride my bike down Broadway at 18 miles an hour (pretty good for a pedal bike). I can’t even see the horizon, just buildings, just cars and streets and trees but we’re still in outer space. At the entrance to Ave. B, by the Witte Museum, I turn off onto the bike path that runs alongside the park. The trees crowd close to the road on one side and on the other side businesses and schools and offices have sprouted up but I’m still in outer space.We’re inside the protected bubble but we’re in outer space already! We think we’re on a planet that’s solid and stable and everything will always be this way. A convenient assumption but not true. Our earth will be destroyed one day by a no longer friendly sun that has run out of hydrogen and expanded into a red giant devouring the solar system, or atleast the inner planets. We’re a tiny part of an endless universe that nobody knows how big it really is. The part we can see so far is 93 billion light years across and expanding rapidly. Pretty cosmic.As I ride my bike down Ave. B on the way to the cafe I wonder how small things are. Are there infinitely small things as well as infinitely big things? And we are somewhere in the middle? Whoa watch out a pothole. I have big ideas on my bike. Sometimes I have to stop and get them down on voice recorder before I forget them. Like, wow, the horizon is infinite because it never stops. If you were riding your bike around the world the horizon would always be there, unfolding. There is always a sunrise happening somewhere and there’s always a sunset happening somewhere. Like super wow. Think of the greatest thing you can think of. I’ll take a moment . . .Ok, what have you got? A fantasy? A feeling of love that doesn’t stop? Oh good one. A car that runs on sunlight and goes 100 miles an hour and never needs to re-fuel? God? A super creature with super powers that knows everything? A perfect dinner with a perfect friend with excellent conversation? I imagine a peaceful life full of joy from horizon to horizon. What’s beyond the horizon? Nobody knows. It’s a mystery. A beautiful mystery.I dunno, I think we should expand our horizons. They’re only limited by . . . ourselves. I’m imagining writing my space opera trilogy. It would be fantastic. It would change the world as we know it. I don’t know if I can do it but I’m gearing up. Sitting in the cafe conceiving. Looking around and aspiring. It would be fantastic. We need more fantastic in our world, less normal, less boring, less conventionally programmed.Imagine an exploding star (pic from book) A supernova, ejecting newly made elements into space. Outer space. And then condensing into planets and circling around new stars and maybe life forming and maybe somebody sitting in a cafe writing about it. Everything they can think about, expanding their mind, their little brain evolved from billions of years of developing and adapting on their little planet, their little biosphere, their little bubble of life on their little planetary spaceship blasting thru the cosmos. Hmm. Crazy. No horizons.podcast music 00:00-8:58If you would like to support my project, please become a paid subscriber or make a one time donation. It would be deeply appreciated. Thank you. 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

The Europeans initially thought well he probly won’t get elected. Then it was well, you know, how bad can it be, maybe it won’t be that bad, then it was, well it’ll be over someday. Nobody lives forever. Then it was like . . . where are we now? Phase 3? Or is it 4. And what happens next, now that he’s nuked Nato and brought the world to the edge of WWIII?“Experience is the mother of wisdom.” a famous saying. Euripides or somebody. We’re (humanity) about to have an experience so hopefully we can get some wisdom. This is my prayer and hope. Wisdom would tell us to live together in peace and love. Like one giant hippie trip, without the trip or the hippie. It would tell us take care of our biosphere, it is precious and fragile. It would tell us that being alive is the most fantastic thing of all. Just being alive. As opposed to not being alive.Where we are now we can barely see any of that wisdom it seems to me. We are totally distracted from our true agenda and only feel it like a distant star, barely visible. The true purpose of being alive. Do you know what it is? If you do, you must be on a distant star to me. Ha! That’s a Thoreau joke. Where we are now is hardly a joke. Like the one about Tom Thumb who tumbled off the wall? Wait was that Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall? I love myth. It is the essence of storytelling. Check it out on your next movie or book. Stop and calibrate all the archetypes that are shining like stars in the story. If you are enjoying the book or movie it’s because you are connecting with the archetypes. It’s so human. Read Joseph Campbell if you want to know about it. I don’t have time to get into it right now. I just wanted to ask - where are we now? If anyone has ideas, please post them in comments. Maybe we can get some conversation going. Where are we now?Seems like a good question.music for pondering :: 34:20-38:33 may all the bombs turn into birds and fly awayThe rohn report is free for everyone. If you would like to support my project, please become a paid subscriber or make a one time donation. It would be deeply appreciated. Thank you. 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

Can you ascertain all that is happening in your immediate world? From birds flying by to the micro-organisms in your gut to the flow of thoughts in your brain to the clouds floating by overhead (assuming you are outside)? No. It’s pretty much impossible to be aware of everything but still the brain is receiving those signals, those sensory impulses, the light or the sound or the feeling is going into our brain but we don’t notice it. We have tuned out everything except what we have determined to be important. All that information is there somewhere, on a subconscious level if you like. An ocean, if you like, a universe. The universe wouldn’t exist if our brain didn’t perceive it. It’s an amazing organism, semi-divine like Gilgamesh. No one has even come close to figuring out how it works.In that small space, about the size of a football, we have billions and probably trillions of synapses (nobody seems to know what the number is) each making thousands of connections to other neurons in a network that is constantly changing. New pathways are being discovered, old ones are abandoned.Looking at the brain as a computer (an oversimplified comparison) it would be by far the most powerful supercomputer in the world.This is what sits in our head. This is our organ of cognition that we have been given at birth, to have and to hold until that time comes.We have access to one of the most incredible organisms in the universe and that includes galaxies and black holes and dark energy (my estimation only).It watches the day pass. It is influenced by the diurnal cycles of night and day, dawn and dusk.Right now I’m sitting in the sun room, at the front of the house, watching the light dim and the sun, our nearby star, lower itself into the ground.That’s how our ancient ancestors saw it, the sun returning to earth, melting into the mountains only to be reborn again on the other side of the world. Birth, death and rebirth. It was obvious.Anyways I’m witnessing the end of the day and calibrating the brightness, the ambient light, the life giving energy rays, as it fades away. I wonder what that does to my brain.That’s the thing, we don’t know what’s going on in our brain. 99% of it is hidden like a black hole or dark energy. We know it’s there but we just don’t know what it is.I say this not to make a point but just to point out the praiseworthiness of our little cradle of consciousness up there in our noggin. We have it. It’s not Sci-Fi. It’s ours to use or abuse. Boredom is the most insidious AND common form of abuse. That and listening to the news. I could add public education in there too but that would be controversial.I guess my other point (although I’m not trying to make a point) is that we can discover the possibilities of this thing, we can inquire and explore. Who can stop us? It’s an endless journey of adventure if you’d like to look at it in a romantic way.I wrote this post sitting in the sun room at the front of the house (as previously mentioned) letting my mind go blank, so to say. It’s never blank even when you’re sleeping. Anyway, sitting here feeling nothing or being open to everything, which is really the same thing, led me here. See what I mean? I never would have imagined or thought about my own brain unless my brain had compelled me to do so, somehow.Contemplate the messages and the information being transmitted in your brain. It’s like trying to imagine how big is the universe. It’s impossible.Contemplate the 17 trillion micro-organisms in your gut. Bacteria and archaea and fungi and viruses are all represented and communicating among themselves. What are they saying? They are saying something. We just don’t know what it is. They’re not only communicating among themselves, they’re also communicating with the cells of our own body. Strange but true. Weird but amazing. Oh to be witness to that conversation.The light dies so sweetly, so gently and all are affected by it. We are touched by our sun whether we’re aware of it or not. Tomorrow will be a new morning, a chance to start again. That’s why in some cultures each day is like a god. That’s how they thought of it, the Aztecs for example.Beautiful thought, huh? To be blessed by that god is to have a great day. That’s how I think about it. Of course I’m a historical romanticist. That’s how my brain conceives of it. It could be any way, a different way for you. I don’t know what your model is, how you see a day. It’s a mystery to me.And that’s cool. I kinda like that.The rohn report is free for everyone but if you would like to support my project, please become a paid subscriber or make a one time donation. It would be deeply appreciated. Thank you.podcast music from 40:13 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

With the dawn comes the rain and the grumbling thunder. I’ve been waiting for this.Concentric circles fill the nature pool. The swimming fish circle and leap. By full light the rain has mostly gone, everything is placid and smooth again. The Holly trees are budding. Spring is here. Spring is here filling the air with fragrance, the Mountain Laurels are blooming, another tree with little white flowers all over it. Everything is wet. Meanwhile over ‘there’ people are at war, flinging missiles at each other and shooting cannons, determined to bring death and destruction upon the earth and upon their fellow human beings. I really don’t understand it. Here in my biosphere, in my backyard I find comfort and solace. From the back porch I watch and observe the dancing Willow, the deep green of the Groovy Nook, the gentle Bog Filter with the Water Cress and Pickerelweed and the water musically falling back into the pond. Above the trees is the cloudy sky. I imagine it to be a healing modality to gaze at. And I do. And it is so.Over there, missiles are falling and drones are droning. People are angry and full of revenge. Two things not considered admirable but we indulge in them anyway.We’re not having a war in my neighborhood. Atleast not yet. Ballistic missiles recognize no borders. They fly 10,000 miles an hour to wherever they’re aimed at and good luck shooting them down. THAADs or Patriots or the Aegis system can and do knock them out but it’s like hitting a needle in a haystack at 100 feet with a BB gun. Success is not guaranteed. I would hate for one to land in my backyard and hence my post. Wars, like wildfires, tend to be unpredictable and can grow by leaps and bounds.The Mockingbirds and Doves that inhabit my biosphere help themselves to the Meow Mix when the coast is clear. Occasionally a Hawk will swoop by, a Great Horned Owl sometimes perches in the big Pecan tree. My Raccoon buddies bide their time under the house until all is dark and then come out to forage. Occasionally a Great White Egret will drop by to visit the fish. The whole world is a Nature Pool. Species living in symbiosis on a watery planet. Get it? We’re all living in the garden. Or what’s left of it. We’ve destroyed huge chunks of it already and are working on the rest. Iran’s oil depots are burning blown up by Israeli missiles. Good shot! And all this will continue until one or the other ‘sovereign states’ are brought to their knees and give up. The world spins on with war and destruction in a timeless, ancient pattern and I can’t stop it. So does nature as well, come to think of it. It’s constantly destroying and renewing. What’s the big deal? No, that can’t be right. Creating suffering can’t be the purpose of life. Although we are very good at it. I think these thoughts early in the morning waiting for dawn. It’s still dark. Do I belong to nature? Does nature belong to me. What does it mean that I’m on this earth? Hmmh.The rohn report is free for everyone but if you would like to support my project, please become a paid subscriberor make a one time donation. It would be deeply appreciated. Thank you. 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

There is an epidemic of loneliness and isolation among the elderly. There is an epidemic of depression among the teenagers and adolescents, even suicide. There’s an epidemic of homelessness - people who can’t afford a place to live or aren’t mentally stable enough to participate in a society based on money and middle class values. And wow, yeah, these days we have an epidemic of bold face lying by the ‘leaders’ of the country and abject submissive believing of those lies by the citizens of the country. I mean serious deception and cognitive dysfunction on a . . . well on an epidemic level. War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. George Orwell wrote a famous book about that called ‘1984’ and we’re way beyond 1984. Of course to these you could also add war, famine and pestilence, but they’re so common, barely worth mentioning.So let’s take these cheery topics one by one. Recent statistics reveal that a third of older adults deal with loneliness and isolation. That’s alot of people. There are 65 million baby boomers (born between 1946-1964) so that would be over 20 million just among the baby boomers. This kind of stress can lead to dementia, heart disease, stroke and other diseases eventually resulting in premature death. Lovely. We discard our elders in this country by shipping them off to the old folks home where they are medicated and relieved of all their financial resources until they die. No time, no room, no appreciation from the kids. They’re busy making money. This one I really didn’t know about until I learned it from a friend. I knew their daughter since she was a little kid. We had a friendship. She would play at my house. When she went thru adolescence (middle school) she ended up on anti-depressants. Later she had issues with suicide. What!? I couldn’t believe it. What happened to that innocent, beautiful, happy little kid? Suicide is the leading cause of death for kids 10-19. Forty per cent of high school students report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, 20% have seriously considered suicide and 9% have attempted it. There’s something wrong with this picture. Visit any major city’s downtown area and you will see the homeless camped out. Attempts have been made for years, decades, to address it. Money has been thrown at it, facilities built, programs initiated, conferences convened - nothing seems to work. The problem persists. The statistics for 2024 are 771,480 people sleeping under bridges and on cardboard in door stoops, an increase of 32% since 2022. The problem is getting worse not better. In the city where I live, San Antonio, they put the number at 3,398 living on the street.I interact with some of them on my bike rides and honestly many of them seem content, living in their tents by the creek, with their own community, but many are miserable and vulnerable. With no kitchen and no bathroom imagine what their daily life is like. And no bedroom. Well a makeshift bedroom.Hey people used to live like this thousands of years ago. Do you know that? Living in a teepee or a hut or a cave or a tiny house of mud and wattle. But they had a system and a tradition and they found a way to survive in relative comfort. They weren’t illegal. They didn’t have their camps busted up and then driven off by the officials, but these days it’s disreputable. Unlike India where you can live in the street as a sadhu and be respected. Sit around all day and meditate on God. Give the tourists a blessing and a tilak for a few rupees. And so whatever are we going to do with all these epidemics? Reclaim our humanity and our tribal heritage - that’s what. And that’s why I chose this music. It’s vibrant but also seriously intense. C’mon people, this is our tribe. Don’t forget your tribe. All the humans are your tribe. Your neighbors are your tribe. Your church, your school, your friends and whatever association you’re in is your tribe. It’s not like we don’t have the communications technologies. We don’t have to send smoke signals. No, we can walk over to our neighbor’s house and say hi. Bring them a plate of cookies. I had a friend from West Africa. He told me the story once of his father coming to visit and at the end of his visit he asked him, so what did you think of America? I didn’t like it he responded, you don’t even know who lives next door to you. So true.Hey we have zoom and video phone calls and email and fricking internet connections out the wazoo. Use them. Make contact. Not with emojis and two word blips but with real feeling and care and hopefulness.Maybe some people are cool with this. They have actual families, functional families and they stay in touch and they use the technologies but I don’t see much of that. I see individuals living their individual lives because they don’t need a tribe to survive - we’re not hunter gatherers after all. We’re modern people but we still need to find our common language and connect.The natural world is the common language of humanity (as it is for all species). This is our home and this is where we can gather wisdom and comfort. Walk outside and look at a tree, glance at the sky, feel the breeze on your skin. You have just transformed yourself, become primal, connected to the earth and the air and the whole web of life. We are not hunters and gatherers, not in the historic sense, but our ancestors were for 300,000 years. We have only been ‘modern’ people for 6 or 8 thousand years. Something we don’t think about but it influences every aspect of our lives. You can’t just discard that much physical and psychological conditioning by reading a book or watching TV. We need each other in a tribal sense because that’s who we are - tribal members. Oh yeah social media, I almost forgot. Endless scrolling and addictive miniature movies of cats and babies and ridiculous AI fake images of trucks and tractors rolling around and emojis and messages from people you’ve never heard of acting out on some issue or other and telling you all about everything you don’t even want to know. Now they have found out that not only is social media addictive but it affects the mental health and well being of kids. All this to make a dollar or more accurately a billion dollars. Money is the most addictive drug there is but we call it business and not only is it not illegal it’s got its own laws to protect it. Cleanliness is next to godliness but being rich is even closer. It’s the unwritten subconscious principle of our society. Good grief.Ok. I’m done. Just had to express this. It weighs on me. When I see how unnatural we have become and how much damage it has done, I despair. We are really fucked up. We need to come home to where are real home is. That would be love and compassion, that would be caring for our earth and letting the earth care for us. That would be communicating in the common language. Not a spoken word language, not politics, not the language of money but the common language that we all know and need - the language of being human. And what is human? You are. Ask yourself and listen for the answer.The rohn report is free for everyone but if you would like to support my project, please become a paid subscriber or make a one time donation. It would be deeply appreciated. Thank you.The podcast music is from this amazing collection. 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

Well if you haven’t heard about it by now . . . I guess you missed it. Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance was seen by 135 million people in 200 countries. It felt like a cultural revolution.The whole show was in Spanish, remarkable in itself for American television, and recognized the fact that ‘God Bless America’ includes all the countries of south, central and north America. He listed each one in turn: Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Columbia, Venezuela, Guyana, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, the Antilles, Jamaica, United States, Canada y mi patria (homeland) Puerto Rico. We are all Americans.See the full performance here. To be honest I was initially put off by all the wild dancing and everything being in Spanish. And I wasn’t a big fan of reggaeton, in fact I didn’t even know what it was but soon enough I got caught up in the joyous energy and felt the spirit of Puerto Rico surging thru the songs. Reggaeton as a musical genre had its origins among the youth of Panama back in the eighties, a mixture of hip hop and Caribbean rhythms, but then came of age in Puerto Rico. It was passionate, impetuous and authentic, just like the Puerto Ricans and artists like DJ Negro and Daddy Yankee and Daddy Gasolina and others from the barrios and housing projects of San Juan set it on course. The police tried to repress it, called it a danger to society, didn’t work. Then Bad Bunny, aka Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, came along. He was born in 1994 and grew up in the small town of Vega Baja on the north coast of Puerto Rico, 40 minutes west of the capital San Juan. He got his stage name from when he was a little kid and forced to wear a bunny costume that he was not happy about. Ha, ha hilarious. He started writing music and uploading it to Sound Cloud when he was 14. By the time he was 22 he had signed on to a recording contract and his career started taking off: collaborating with other artists, hosting shows, performing gigs. He has since become the most streamed musician in the world, that’s what I read somewhere. A few days before his Super Bowl appearance he won album of the year at the Grammies. Add that to his 5 previous Grammies. He’s done movies, TV shows, toured the world. He had a 31 day residency at the José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum in San Juan last year that drew over 600,000 visitors to the island and contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to the local economy. He’s totally famous and using his celebrity to make the world a better place with his Good Bunny Foundation that empowers children and young people thru music, sports and the arts.Well great, good Bad Bunny, but why am I writing about all this? I’m writing about all this because he’s helping to change the conversation and I think that’s important. I’m writing this because we need to recognize our humanity, we need talk about it, we need to feel the spirit and we need to feel the truth of our present (precarious) situation. Our sweet lives are intertwined with the circumstances that surround us and we need to recognize that. I’m writing this because the existential issues of our time requires it. Do I have to go over the entire tedious list of existential issues? Nuclear weapons, the climate crisis, income inequality (which causes wars), environmental destruction (which causes mass extinction), divisiveness (which causes dysfunctional governments), economic policies that are unsustainable (means they’re gonna crash) - all global problems. No America first. All of us first, everybody first. We have to solve these problems together.Bad Bunny's voice rose up strong and clear in response to the degradation and disrespect that has become so dominant in our national dialogue. The damage that has been done by the magafication of our country will last for generations or atleast decades. It’s tragic. And it’s urgent that we begin building community now, community based on shared humanity not some selfish, cultish, elitist, nationalistic perversion of humanity.So, ok, maybe you don’t like Bad Bunny and you don’t get the reggaeton thing but how could anyone vote against diversity, inclusion and empowerment? How could anybody disagree that ‘love is stronger than hate’. Yes it’s just a platitude on one level but this is how change happens - by talking about it in the cafes and the churches and the substacks of the world. Change doesn’t come from nowhere and if you don’t think change is needed then, my friend, you’re living on a different planet from me.And everything doesn’t have to be political. There is celebration, there is spontaneous joy, there is dancing (each in their own way). There is music which has the power to bring us all together regardless of our perceived differences. There is love that is stronger than hate.And like he said at the beginning of his show: “My name is Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio and if today I’m here at the 60th Super Bowl it’s because I never, never stopped believing in me. And you should, you should believe in yourself too. You’re more valuable than you think, believe me. Heh.”If you would like to support the rohn report, you can become a paid subscriber or make a one time donation. It’s deeply appreciated. Thank you. 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

It’s darkest before the dawn. That’s what the saying says and I guess it’s true, for a condemned man anyways. But hung at the first sign of light would make it so and for the rest of us, condemned or not (and who isn’t ultimately) it’s a sign of hope and a true omen.If you’ve ever thought, while navigating this river of life, that the shoals and the rocky places were your enemies, then consider this — it’s in the rich muck of failure that we find our way and in the dark underground that the seeds of possibility sprout and grow.Pretty mucky water these days. The ‘leader of the free world’, as we like to call it, is a mafia don, fomenting wars and we’re all chafing under threat and bombast (and some other kinds of bombs too). But imagine the garden we can grow in this stuff. The Nile river floods (traditionally) and leaves behind fertile soil. Same in Mesopotamia where farming was invented or atleast institutionalized. It became a myth. Noah’s flood from the Hebrew scriptures, speaking of myths. Renewal and restart.Just saying — these are fantastic times. If we don’t blow ourselves to kingdom come then the kingdom may come and it will be remarkable. It will be different, as different as night and day, and with it our humanity, which can’t be suppressed for long, will shine out like the sun peeking thru the clouds. That’s what I have to say.And I’ve said it many times already. It’s my favorite sermon. My father, the Baptist preacher, preached on the Apocalypse of Revelation. Scary stuff. But then the kingdom comes. Of God. So it’s all good in the end.I don’t believe in the Bible but I believe in the divine essence of humanity. Dig deep enough and there it is. That’s why we like to laugh. Much preferable to crying. Unless we laugh until we cry. That can happen too.And so here is my story. Tell it like it is.Once upon a time there was a guy, could have been a girl guy, doesn’t matter. And the guy lived in a house with his dog. Every day he would go out with his dog to see what he could find. He lived 10,000 years ago and so there was no civilization yet, no grocery stores. He had to find his food wherever he was. His dog helped him. One day as he was walking along the beach at the edge of the world he saw an object in the water. It got bigger and bigger as he watched it. Soon, to his amazement, it crawled up out of the water and spoke to him. “Hello” it said. Well in whatever language they used 10,000 years ago. And the guy thought wow this giant blob all wet and dripping standing here in front of me said hello. But then the blob ate the guy and he went inside.The guy thought this is strange, I went looking for food and I became food. I guess everything needs to eat. Then he (if it was a he) started noticing everything the blob had been eating: car parts (I know anachronism), trees, planets (small ones) and animals of all kinds - a wolf, a coyote, an elephant, a zebra, half a giraffe, a river and a city.Wow, there’s basically a whole world down here thought the guy and he started walking around looking for something to eat and someone he could say hi to.He said hi to the wolf and the wolf ate him, swallowed him in one gulp. Then he was in a cafe inside the wolf. Everyone was sitting around drinking cappuccinos. Well this isn’t bad thought the guy and ordered a machacappuccino without dairy.While he was waiting for his machacappuccino, a book came up to him and said “Would you like to hear a story?” “OK” said the guy “What’s your story?”“Well I have many stories but here’s my favorite” and he starts telling him the story of a lame man who walked to the moon and a lazy fish that hid in the sand and a brilliant star that came to earth and when he had finished his story he said “And this could only happen in the stomach of a wolf that had been swallowed by a blob that came out of the ocean on a day bright with possibility.”“Well I’ll say.” responded the guy.“Yes?” said the book, “What do you have to say?”“Well I was just thinking how everything gets swallowed by something else and a new world gets discovered.”“Yes that’s right.” said the book. “And for your wise appraisal I will let you look at the last page.” And the guy did look and the page was blank, white as snow, nothing was written there upon.“But there’s nothing here.”said the guy.“Quite right.” said the book, “You write.” and the guy did. He took a pen and began to write a story as great as he could imagine, with mystery and drama and adventure and disaster and amazing magic and music.“There it’s finished.” said the guy when he had filled up the page.“Oh no it’s not said the book.” and many more pages appeared and many more creatures came and wrote their story and the book was happy.The endThe Podcast music is Grace VanderWaal performing ‘Clearly’ with Jon Batiste and Stay Human on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, 2018.If you would like to support the rohn report, you can become a paid subscriberor make a one time donation. It’s deeply appreciated. Thank you. 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

The river changes daily, according to Mark Twain in his book Life on the Mississippi. He relates, in a slow, deliberate way, his adventures piloting a steamboat up and down the great river from St. Louis to New Orleans. How the slow muddy water surges and peaks, flows low in the dry season. All the subtle intonations, all the messages in the ripples and in the flat water. Every day something new and unexpected appears, trees floating down the middle of the river and how it twists and turns like a corded knot finding new beds to lie in leaving behind oxbows and resacas and islands in the stream. Twain makes the point urgently and often - a steamboat pilot must know all these things.And so it is with Broadway, my Mississippi River. It runs straight down the valley of San Antonio and in fact used to be part of the river bed itself. The stream of cars courses and winds its way thru the street. It has ebb and flow - the lunch rush and the commuter traffic jam. It can change direction and find a new way, just like the big river, when the light changes. Best to stay out of the rapids for that - let it run its course, hug the shore, take the sidewalk, heck maybe even a bike lane if you’re lucky.The other day I almost got run over by a cop car. He decided to back up when the light changed and I was right behind him. Did not expect that. Sometimes at intersections there are cars turning, cars running the amber light, cars waiting - all potentially dangerous and like Mark Twain navigating the big river I have to make my way with all due caution and care. Don’t want to end up run over and squashed in the street.Yelling was a sport and a necessity on the wide Mississippi - cautioning the flat boats and the log rafts and the barges. So it is on my bike cruising down Broadway. A good Comanche yell once in a while improves your health, I believe, and also advises the motorists not to drift too far off course.Everything has its rise and fall. Don’t you know it and the bicycle pedals, like the old paddle wheels, go round and round. Weather is to be accounted for too riding thru the valley of San Antonio or anywhere for that matter. A woman in the cafe once told me her story of being thrown off her bike and into the curb by a car that didn’t see her. She was caught in the glare of a low sun. “Were you ok?” I asked. “Sure, I got up and walked it off” she said, “I’m a yoga girl.”Well there’s two lessons - stay out of sun glare and do your yoga.Then there’s downstream and upstream. The old steamboats could only make about 5 miles per hour up stream but going back down could get up to 10 or 12 mph with the boiler steaming away full blast, nigh on to bursting. It was dangerous business though, during the mid 19th century 289 steamboats sank on the Mississippi River killing over 4,000 people. If it wasn’t snags ripping open the bottom of the boat it was the boiler exploding sending up a shower of steel and wood where the boat had been a moment before. On my river a prevailing wind comes from the southeast off the Gulf of Mexico 150 miles away. I can tell before I get out of bed what kind of weather is out there - the airplanes take off into the wind and come right over my head when the wind is out of the southeast. You can bet on those brilliant mornings when the wind is out of the north and it’s all downhill and down wind all the way to downtown. I can ride hard with hardly an effort, way faster than a steamer, 17, 18, 20 mph passing buses and yelling at cars stuck at the light or slowly creeping up to one. There are different laws for bikes than there are for cars, they understand that. And the motorists admire a skilled bicyclist who can slip thru the lights with barely a brake fade, fan tail blinking and head down to make way with minimum resistance.The other day a black and white cop car passed me four times, back and forth on Broadway. He was trying to catch me. Probably heard rumors of the mad anarchist bicycle rider ignoring all the laws of the land flying up and down B’way. He didn’t know this is my street. I play the percentages and make sure they’re well in my favor. I don’t mind going slow. I don’t mind stopping at lights for the sake of the cop stopped on the other side. He never did catch me.Not being arrogant, just truthful. Cars have to maintain their distance, they’re big and heavy. Not bikes, they’re lithe and slender and can scoot thru the narrowest chute. Mark Twain would appreciate that. He describes the science of reading the river and finding the most efficient route around the bends and over the sand bars while staying close to shore, if possible, where the current is lax. It’s the same with bike riding.Sunday mornings are the best, or in the midst of a world-wide pandemic. Then the streets are clear and open to any speed. If you can attain it and hold it, 25 mph is not unheard of on such mornings with a stout northerly breeze. All the more focused is the bicycle rider in such circumstances, again not unlike the steamboat pilot a-full tilt downstream avoiding all possible dangers and tragedies before they arrive. What a pleasant surprise to discover Mark Twain on my ride. His pseudonym, by the way, Mark Twain, was yelled out by the lead man at the front of the boat and indicated two fathoms or 12 feet of water measured with a pole. That was enough for safe passage. The old steamboats were designed with a shallow draft, 4 or 5 feet, for that purpose precisely. Not fast or agile though, unlike a bike.At the same time I’m reading Annie Dillard An American Life. It’s her memoir of growing up in Pittsburgh during the fifties (1950’s). Her stories are eloquent and hilarious. I’ve read it twice and once more, it’s filled with bookmarks - sales receipts slips of paper and a napkin. The cover shows three generations of generous wear.“Richland Lane was untrafficked, hushed, planted in great shade trees, and peopled by wonderful collected children. They were sober, sane, quiet kids, whose older brothers and sisters were away at boarding school or college. Every warm night we played organized games—games that were the sweetest part of those sweet years, that long suspended interval between terror and anger.”She chronicles the terror by means of her inventive stories. Although she was friends with the Catholic kids in her neighborhood, she was frightened by the nuns. Her family (and her lineage) were Protestant and the Catholics were perceived with some suspicion. They had strange rituals, went to mass and listened to the pope. They sprinkled babies. “Now St. Bede’s was, as the expression had it, letting out; Jo Ann Sheehy would walk by again, and all the other Catholic children, and perhaps the nuns. I kept an eye out for the nuns.From my swing seat I saw the girls appear in bunches. There came Jo Ann Sheehy up the dry sidewalk with two other girls; her black hair fell over her blue blazer’s back. Behind them, running back and forth across the street, little boys were throwing gravel bits. The boys held their workbooks tightly. Probably, if they lost them, they would be put to death. In the leafy distance up Edgerton I could see a black phalanx. It blocked the sidewalk; it rolled footlessly forward like a tank. The nuns were coming. They had no bodies, and imitation faces. I quitted the swing and banged through the back door and ran in to Mother in the kitchen.I didn’t know the nuns taught the children; the Catholic children certainly avoided them on the streets, almost as much as I did. The nuns seemed to be kept in St. Bede’s as in a prison, where their faces had rotted away—or they lived eyeless in the dark by choice, like bats. Parts of them were manufactured. Other parts were made of mushrooms.”Good grief, what perceptions of a child, knowing so little of the world but aware and receptive to her own interpretations. A world wondrous but in equal parts frightening. No guardrail yet between imagination and reality.“In the kitchen, Mother said it was time I got over this. She took me by the hand and hauled me back outside; we crossed the street and caught up with the nuns. ‘Excuse me,’ Mother said to the black phalanx. It wheeled around. ‘Would you just please say hello to my daughter here? If you could just let her see your faces.’I saw the white, conical billboards they had as mock-up heads; I couldn’t avoid seeing them, those white boards like pillories with circles cut out and some bunched human flesh pressed like raw pie crust into the holes. Like mushrooms and engines, they didn’t have hands. There was only that disconnected saucerful of whitened human flesh at their tops. The rest, concealed by a chassis of soft cloth over hard cloth, was cylinders, drive shafts, clean wiring and wheels.‘Why, hello,‘ some of the top parts said distinctly. They teetered toward me. I was delivered to my enemies and had no place to hide; I could only wail for my young life so unpityingly snuffed.”The whole book is 282 pages of finely wrought details and nuanced descriptions. Story after story in all its narrative glory, exquisitely rendered. What I learned is that her childhood was nothing like mine (except for the Catholic part). For one, I remember so little that I sometimes wonder if I even had a childhood and two what I do remember was exceedingly and invariably tedious and boring. Hers was full of colorful adventure and excitement, as she tells it.If she was not playing detective and spying on suspicious neighbors or at dancing school learning about boys or exploring the neighborhood on her bicycle (I did that) she was collecting rocks and inventorying them or investigating pond water with her microscope or playing capture the flag in the street. Her father was fascinated with Mark Twain’s account of the river - that’s where I got the idea to read Life on the Mississippi and at one point got in his boat and attempted to sail to New Orleans. My father was the minister of a small Baptist church and didn’t have a boat but we did have a very nice 1963 Impala. Her account of playing football with the boys is priceless.“Some boys taught me to play football. This was fine sport. You thought up a new strategy for every play and whispered it to the others. You went out for a pass fooling everyone. Best, you got to throw yourself mightily at someone’s running legs. Either you brought him down or you hit the ground flat out on your chin, with your arms empty before you. It was all or nothing. If you hesitated in fear, you would miss and get hurt: you would take a hard fall while the kid got away, or you would get kicked in the face while the kid got away. But if you flung yourself wholeheartedly at the back of his knees—if you gathered and joined body and soul and pointed them diving fearlessly—then you likely wouldn’t get hurt, and you’d stop the ball. Your fate, and your team’s score depended on your concentration and courage. Nothing girls did could compare with it.”Yeah she had a stimulating childhood, but you work with what you’ve got. That’s the other thing I learned. She spent many hours reading books of all sorts, from the public library and from her parents. I spent endless hours in church, one sort of church or the other, and striving to go to heaven by not doing anything that was the least bit daring or, God forbid, fun. The account she gives of her parent’s sense of humor struck a chord. I saw a resemblance there for my mother loved to tell jokes and elicit laughter too. I’ve carried on the tradition. I clearly remember our mother’s favorite joke and so does, I’m sure, all of us kids. She would tell it at every important function, whenever enough of an audience was present to make it worth the telling. There were three sisters (or was it friends), anyways, as I recall it there was the flapper girl (an expression from the 1920’s that basically means a flirtatious woman), there was the common ordinary girl (run of the mill working class) and there was the plain girl. Probably cleaned houses or something.So they’re all going out on dates, it’s Saturday night, and they agree that in the morning when they meet for breakfast (I guess they were sisters or maybe they were in a boarding house) they would say good morning as many times as they got kissed the night before. Kind of a secret code, subliminal conversation going on, maybe under the nose of the disapproving mother. My exegesis here, not part of the joke.So the next morning the flapper girl comes in and says ‘Good morning. It’s a good morninng this morning. If it’s as good of a morning tomorrow morning as it is this morning it’ll be a good morning tomorrow morning. The common girl comes in and says ‘Good morning.’. The plain girl comes in and says, “Howdy, darn it”.That was a hilarious joke back in the day. A Bayes family favorite. What was most amusing was witnessing my mother’s delight in telling it as if it were the first time we had all heard ‘the old maid joke’. She told it straight ahead, smiling the whole way with her wide smile, barely able to contain her mirth anticipating the punch line which we all knew was coming. It never changed. It didn’t need to. If you would like to support the rohn report, please consider becoming a paid subscriber or make a one time donation. It’s deeply appreciated. Thank you. 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

“The wild wind howled and the full moon shined thru holes in the billowing clouds as they passed overhead. A misty fog lay on the moors below.”That’s about all I got. The rest is hidden, occluded. I can do the words. Invective. That word appeared this morning like magic while rolling around on my back, aligning my spine with the true north and south.Maybe I’m going back to poetry. That’s how I started out. It was my first love. Simple, sensible, opaque, enchanting in meaning and sound, enigmatic, brave enough.I can still read, in short bursts, until it gets too incoherent and I lose the thread, then I pick up my pen and write something. Like “The wild wind howled and the full moon shined thru holes in the billowing clouds” and wonder where that wants to go. A werewolf story? A lonely traveler walking thru the moors enveloped in fog obscuring trees and stream and sky? An owl calls. That’s all I got. I don’t know why the owl called, what it was trying to say and to who. Who, who?My grandparents are unknown to me except for a few encounters with Nettie in her dotage. She was mean and judgmental and extremely stubborn. Not a lot to learn from her. All the others are lost behind the curtain of history - there, but inside, still alive in me in a way. Maybe that’s why I would like to meet them. Whoever they were. I would like to have a giant family reunion, a jamboree, all those old ancestors gathered together, both sides, going back 8 or 10 generations. That would be a hoot.Sit down for a meal, a proper feast and argue about religion and politics. Oh! That would be a humdinger. Worthy of a novel. Six hundred pages. No pictures, just in your mind where you see these impossible people altogether in one scene trying to make sense. Somerset, England was the source of some of my English forbears, and Mayflower Pilgrims. Pittsylvania, Virginia on my father’s side. Dirt poor farmers probably. So was my mom’s side but they had William Bradford and Anita Bryant so they were superior to the pig farmers and sorghum growers. Somehow. Anyways everybody would have their story and if you go back far enough it all merges into magic and mysticism and animism because that’s where we all came from and stories around the fire of fairies and elves, monsters and trolls and a full moon on a foggy night over the moors.So there’s that and my pen is running out of ink. Good ole Pilot G-2 #10. Puts out alot of ink, Will have to go with the alternate here soon to keep my narrative flowing if it is a narrative might be more of a diatribe or a diorama. Maybe a memoir. Surely to the #7 then, finer nib. But it’s low too. Maybe I’ve inscribed enough. So convenient, the self-contained ball point pen. No more dipping the quill in the ink well and writing until it went dry. Dip again. They wrote the Declaration of Independence like this. That’s what it says in the picture.No ball point pens in 1776. That would make it slower and more deliberate. Consideration. Quaint. And when the nub grew blunt, sharpen it with a knife and keep going.So I guess what I’m trying to say here is I don’t know what I’m talking about. Just trying to flow with the words in my head, coming from the muse, the mystery, the divine infinite or wherever the words come from. We are word people after all. We make signs and signals with our marks. I have 3 preachers in my family tree, men of letters. They all made marks on paper - writing their sermons. Plus William Bradford. He wrote Of Plymouth Plantation, the story of the Pilgrims. The Cherokee Indian, Sequoyah, invented a writing system for the Cherokee language after he saw the power of the written word that the white people had. He taught it to his people and within a few years most Cherokee could read and write in their native language. This literacy helped the Cherokee survive the trauma of colonization and genocide. It became a trend. Other Native American tribes like the Cree invented their own written script using Sequoyah’s invention as a model. His work influenced the creation of 21 scripts for more than 65 languages as far away as Africa and China.Wow. If you would like to support the rohn report, please become a paid subscriberor make a one time donation. It’s deeply appreciated. Thank you.the podcast music is from this amazing Cafe De Anatolia collection :: 3:24-9:33 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

For this rohn report I wanted to do a travelogue like my friend Maryann does walking around Portland, on her way to the river or down the street to the cafe for a meetup. So here it is, here’s my “Day after Christmas Urban Adventure in the Big City”. No beavers but I found a great Christmas song. When I got home from my bike ride the day before Christmas I realized that my travel bag was missing.All my precious treasures were in there including this notebook - almost full but still a few empty pages and my headphones - very important and a copy of my book - replaceable and a friend’s poetry book ‘the Solace of Wild Places’ someone I’d met at the Texas Book Festival, a file folder with assorted papers, a spare pair of glasses and a pen incase I forget to put one in my medicine pouch.Precious they are in their own way and even more so when they’ve gone missing, misplaced, maybe stolen. Hopefully they’ll be found either at the HEB Central Market on Broadway where I stopped or at Philo’s Cafe.I realized, too, that every day was the adventure of my life. That the adventure was happening with my life and my life was happening right here in this day. So I decided to document the adventure of my life for today, the day after Christmas searching for my shoulder bag which was lost somewhere between HEB Central Market and Philos. Heading out down the hill, down river. A route I take almost every day and never fail to find delight. If the wind is at my back it’s even more delightful. With leaves covering the ground, it’s divine.Rolling thru Brackenridge Park. Household waste is 25% more after the Holidays. That’s what I read somewhere.Alas and lament, my hand bag is not here. Reeves, the attendant at Central Market, checked it out on his computer. Onward on with hope in my heart to Philo’s. Down the second river walk, the San Pedro Culture Park into downtown. Approaching location destination, West French and San Pedro. They’re open!Rejoice! Rejoice! The hand bag hath been found. It was at Philos all day long. Sung to the melody of ‘O Come, O Come Emmanuel’. I’m happy.Not to make light of this song, so far beyond any relevance to my lost bag, it has been sung for centuries to celebrate Christmas. Below is a beautiful rendition by Chris Tomlin. Its roots go all the way back to the 8th Century where it was chanted in celebration of the Advent by monks in the monastery: If you would like to support the rohn report, please become a paid subscriber or make a one time donation. It’s deeply appreciated. Thank you. 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

I started writing when I was about 10 years old, a poem for my little sister, about how she was like a spider. I don’t remember writing anything else for a while. I went thru phases. Years went by when I didn’t write anything. I don’t know what I was doing.I remember sitting in the attic of the Charles Street house in Grand Rapids, Michigan when I was 19 years old, a recent dropout from the Baptist Bible College and Seminary, listening to music late into the night and writing. None of it has survived but I think it was a form of poetry or deep self-reflection of some sort.Many more years passed and only an occasional journal entry or recorded note appeared. There was no volition. Then it started up again. Writing. Street lights and car lights reflected on the pavement thru the potted plant in the window out the corner of my eye change into the crowded roomanddance amonge the shadowed 1/2people pressed together for a moment inlove with the soundless music. from ‘LEARNING TO SCRIBBLE’ 1999.Volumes of poetry poured forth: ‘THE NATURE POOL’ 2002, stones tones and audible levers 2009, WHAT I WANT TO SAY TO YOU 2018, poem picture 2019, zines, essays, film scripts or atleast the treatments of film scripts, a book - 295 pages of ‘The Ancient Book of Magic Secrets’ 2023, Substack posts every week or atleast they used to be every week until I ran out of ideas. Now I write them whenever I feel like it. I’ve slowed down. I find myself writing mostly Facebook posts and text messages, maybe some Flash Fiction once in awhile. I’m slowing down for sure. Little volition and a complete lack of ambition. Soon it’ll just be live rave-ons with the baristas, spontaneous and totally innocent of any premediated aspiration. So before I go and lose my writing altogether like Hemingway, yeah he blew his brains out because he couldn’t write anymore. That’s what I heard. Of course he was depressed and mentally ill but who isn’t in some way or another? “It’s been a strange life.” said the man sitting on the sidewalk. He was slumped over having just received a .38 slug thru his back, emerging just below his stomach. The bullet had hit a main artery and he was bleeding.His daughter, who was 12, stood next to him and kept saying, “What happened Daddy? What happened Daddy?”A few people gathered on the street. “Is he shot?” was a murmur that could be heard from the background. He had been shopping at Macy’s, with his 12 year old daughter, for Christmas gifts. Actually he had just exited the store and was on the public sidewalk. Nobody seemed to know where the shot had come from. Neither did the man have any idea why he had been shot as his daughter blubbered and he leaned over and laid in the street.Flash fiction. Great stuff. You can get the entire literature experience in just a few sentences. The dramatic effect, the heightened awareness, the characters, the scene. It only happens once. Everything changes. It evolves. It flows. That’s our story written in super script at the top of the page. That’s the epitaph and the preface and the everything in between. The story of life. Dramatic and compelling. Tragic and tremendous both. Tremendous things happen in life. One was being born, one will be leaving this mortal coil, one is being alive on a planet in a body. That’s rare. The universe took 14 billion years to make you. Tremendous.Write on oh humans, oh Rohn, oh my, oh boy. This story was not written by the gods, unless they are we, us, whoever. It is being written and has been written and will be written by you. As in all y’all. Including me. If I can write one more page it’ll be courage and great love and amazing adventures and near misses and total crashes and triumphant realizations and fearless intrepidation approaching my death date. But not yet, like Roy says in ‘Blade Runner’ and sticks a nail thru his hand. It’s not like I’m unhealthy or unhappy or obsessed with death, I’m not, just that I have a healthy regard for it. It does kind of close the curtain, final note, end of the story, resolution. Mortality should be our friend not our estranged enemy. Make friends now so when you become intimate it will be a well regarded arrangement. How can you live if you’re not well regarded towards death? It has gifts to offer - appreciation, wisdom and the finality of all things. That might not seem like a gift but it is. All things are finite including the sun, the moon and the stars. I think that’s what I think. What survives all this? Only the feeling of love and a well regarded friend. That’s all we started off with so it’s a closing circle isn’t it? A circle ends where it starts and it begins where it ends. Something profound about that but I’m not sure what it is right now.podcast music: Senegal - Dakar Breeze1:30:53-1:38:00 / 1:13:12 -1:16:50 To support the rohn report become a paid subscriberor offer a one time donation. 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

A video podcast. Something new. Do you like it? Comments please.Fun for me. Thanks for watching.To support the rohn report become a paid subscriber or offer a one time donation. 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

“The word ‘apocalypse’ comes from the Greek word apokálypsis, which is made up of the prefix apo- and the root kalýptein. Apo- means ‘away from’ or ‘off,’ and kalýptein means ‘to cover’ or ‘to hide’. Together, they mean ‘to uncover’ or ‘to reveal’.”Thank you AI or Aiee as I like to pronounce it, like an ancient Comanche victory yell.Another offering states, “Originating in late 14 century from Church Latin, apocalypsis and Greek apokalyptein, “apocalypse” means revelation or disclosure, literally “to uncover or reveal.” Aiee!To reveal what? Exactly. That humankind has veered off the path of being human and needs to discover being human again? Just a guess. Needs to shut it down and take a break, discover, rebuild, take the ideas that work and make them better, take the ideas that don’t work and discard them? Something like that maybe?We’ve been cyborgized and brain washed and conditioned and educated into believing that the way we live now is the only way to live. Serving the master basically, the boss, the corporation, the computer, the stock market, that bloodless, lifeless entity that has been given personhood and called the economy. After the apocalypse we’ll be paying for cappuccinos with magic stones and a story, a seed that holds a whole tree, a magic leaf that reminds you to be kind. After the apocalypse we’ll see things more clearly. We’ll understand about being human. That it’s more than this. We won’t sell our soul for a dollar. We’ll know freedom and truth are real, not political memes. We will discover ourselves.Major discovery. Something to behold. A revelation indeed. We are semi-divine. Born from the angels of desire and put in this world to know love and the longing for love. To know bliss, as the old bards put it, the old ones who knew of these things whether they were from Uruk of the ancient Sumer Culture or the old Indus Valley Harappan Culture or a 10,000 year old shaman from Central Texas. They knew what we have forgotten. I’ll probly get tagged for using this song. Oh well. Sue me. Music is not a commodity. Neither is poetry. Neither is property. Not everything can be bought and sold. What do you think, every baby is born with a price tag? No, just a baby. Naked. Helpless. Wanting to feel love. If you’d like to support the rohn report please become a paid subscriberor offer a one time donation. 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

what’s important is the experience not how you get there was my wise adage for the morning. I realized that while doing my yoga. Oh yeah, people have all kinds of different religions but they’re all searching for that experience. The one you can’t say what it is but only feel. Which is why there are so many religions - trying to say it.This is the golden era for American humor with shows like King of the Hill, Family Guy, South Park, The Simpsons, SpongeBob SquarePants, The Daily Show and many others. Maybe the strangeness of the world we live in has spun off all this humor. Crying or laughing are the only two options available for anyone who’s paying attention. A clip from the Daily Show May 25, 2025. TV sports are in full swing. NBA, MLB (world series) and NFL are all in season. The drama, the excitement, what’s going to happen next? Kinda like life on earth, that’s how I look at it. Urban gardening is trending. There are community gardens all over town. We’ve got one in my neighborhood. I’ve got one in my front yard. Spinach! Corn! Amaranth?Mama does not originate from the root word for mammal. ‘Mama’ was invented by babbling babies because it’s the easiest sound to make.Politics has finally gotten a rib to laugh with (as in ribbing someone). The protest marches have been playful, upbeat and funny. Joyful even. Speeches and chants too but people seem more interested in walking around with their signs or just hanging out.Fall arrived. The cold wind blew in. It actually rained, like an inch and a half.The earth is spinning at a thousand miles an hour and will continue doing so for a very long time. The metallic, partly molten core, is between eight and eleven thousand degrees Fahrenheit. It will never cool off. It’s Halloween. Little kids are being taught that behind the scariness is a sweet treat.Men are afraid of women, women are afraid of men. That’s not really news.Now for a commercial. Buy a Ford truck! It will race around and leave tire marks in the dirt.Back to sports scores. Some teams won and some teams lost.Traffic is heavy at times but mostly stays in the street. A consoling fact if you ask me. The weather is changing because our earth is tilted. Nothing we can do about that.A monarch butterfly landed on my newly planted milkweed.Peace continues to exist deep within the human heart but few people notice it.That’s the news.Thanks for reading the rohn report. Make a one time donation : )or become a paid subscriber : ) 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

I’m in the back of a van traveling down the road. The two people in the front are friends of mine. I’m in a strange sort of half awake, half dream state - like I know I’m probably dreaming but I’m enjoying it so I don’t care. We stop at an old run down gas station, it looks abandoned. I get out and walk around back. There’s a bunch of people camping out on a large concrete slab and somehow it makes me happy. I’m aware that civilization has collapsed and we’re all living in a post-apocalyptic world. We’re back to tribal living, surviving with our community and our simple living and our gardens. Building our city. My best friend walks up to me and it’s like alright Buddy’s here. Then I wake up.Where do dreams come from? Do you ever wonder that? And why is it so easy for us to believe they’re real? I’ve been thinking about that alot lately. Is the waking state a dream too and we’re just convinced that it’s real? It’s very rare that I wake up in my own dreams, it’s only after I open my eyes that I realize I’ve been tricked.Waking up from bad dreams I feel bad, waking up from good dreams I feel good even though I’m aware that they were just dreams. Why is that?Dreams come from our brain obviously. It creates the movie and shows it on the screen of our consciousness. But where does it come up with the script? Who is in charge of the production? Ancient people thought dreams were oracles, had meaning that could be interpreted. They were auguries and treated as messages from the gods. I’m not sure who my dreams are a message from or even if they are a message.I once had a dream where I was flying thru the forest with rocket energy coming out of the palms of my hands. I was being guided, in a way, I knew I was going to a secret location where I would meet a friend. This dream took place in the middle of the night in a cottage near the Glastonbury Tor, a place where the ley lines cross and a peculiar energy abides. The really peculiar thing is that when I woke up I remembered it not as a dream but as something that really happened. To this day I don’t know if it was a dream or not.I remember I was learning how to use the rocket energy, how to go up, how to go left, how to go right. There were kids standing around watching me and they thought it was weird so they started throwing stones at me. I took off.Anyways I was being guided to a rendezvous place deep in the forest, flying thru the trees. That’s all I remember. Don’t remember if my friend actually made it or not.Gilgamesh had dreams that were portends. A huge boulder falls out of the sky and lands at his feet. People come and caress it, cry over it. Gilgamesh tries to lift it but he can’t. Soon Enkidu the wild man will enter his life and the life of the city - ancient Uruk. They become buddies, BFF, have adventures, kill monsters, taunt the gods. Enkidu has dreams too, he dreams that scrawny birds are eating his flesh, that he’s drinking dust and he calls out to Gilgamesh for help but Gilgamesh doesn’t come. That was a portent too. What occurs to me about dreams is that the brain is doing what it always does - creating a world for us. When we’re not asleep it creates a world out of all the sensory input it’s receiving from our eyes, ears, nose, everything. It’s just electrical impulses until it reaches our brain and gets rendered it into some kind of useful, functional reality. When we’re asleep our brain is creating a reality out of our memories and stuff bouncing around in our head. Who knows how many layers of unknown memories lie hidden in our brain? There, but we’re not really conscious of them. At any rate the brain builds our dreams out of something, some elements it finds somewhere and assembles them with it’s own logic. And for some reason we can’t tell the difference. Primordial. That’s one way to look at it. Directly linked to our subconscious. No wonder ancient people thought they were messages from the gods. And so here we are in the waking dream. Awake or asleep. In the eternal moment. Free. Like the song says:I close my eyes and see colors that don’t exist in the day.Your scent mixes with the wind and takes me further and further.The music explodes, but it’s soft. My heart races,but it’s calmand even if I go, I know I’ll return to this moment.Love that frees, freedom that envelopesthere is no line between usonly the sound, only the now.Only.In the end it doesn’t matter where we goif the steps follow the same rhythm.if your gaze still finds myself in the middle of any crowd.Love that frees. Freedom that envelopesforever dancingin this eternal moment.Always.follow this track below 00:00-7:53Make a one time donation : )or become a paid subscriber : ) 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

The spirit of writing hasn’t come upon me lately, no more than the rain has visited this parched terrain.The urgency to explain or declaim is missing somehow, instead I’m watching TV football and gazing out the south facing windows at the sun filled front yard. There are deep slanting shadows attached to the trees even while their leaves shine brightly. I know soon they will grow dim. Soon it will be night. And then morning again.The game is mildly amusing but mostly as background for my thoughts. The volume is off. The commercials are either pharmaceuticals or pickup trucks. The colorful uniforms identify which tribe they belong to as they rush and chase and collide with one another on the field of action. This game has been played since we were kids - chase and tag, laugh and fall down. It has been played since the primordial days of hunting deer, chasing them until we could bring them to the ground.Watching my life unwind, hunted by mortality, that stealthy, persistent and supremely confident hunter. Since the first mewlings, the first suckling at my mother’s breast it has been on my track. Dodge and weave if you can, dance if possible but that arrow will find you . . . and other pleasant thoughts such as these as I watch the trees and the organized violence on TV.Maybe that’s why I’ve got nothing to say. The old brain slowing down. More interested in reading than writing. More interested in listening than talking. The rohn report more reporting on Rohn than Rohn reporting. Wanting to be comforted by silence, informed no more.Days go by. Sunrise sunset. I exist in between the two and half the night. And so maybe it is the way we lean into the wind or wind down at the end that matters more than what actually happens. What actually happens happens to everybody in some way or another but how you receive it is unique and personal. Only you know. Only I know. I had my 75th birthday party recently in the backyard and it was attended by 15 or 20 friends including baristas I know. It was a barista friend (although she didn’t show up) that requested my ‘back story’. Who are you dude? Basically that’s what it was. I jazz and jam with the baristas on my morning cafe quest out there somewhere on my bike, the only human contact I have in a day many times so it’s special. I try to create a theatre moment. Isn’t it all theatre? Anyways, that was the request and I told her, “Ok, come to my birthday party and I will tell you my back story, reveal my true identity”. But who even knows their true identity? We wear masks on top of masks and are not accustomed to taking them off, exposing ourselves to the vagaries and judgmental opinions of the world. So anyways I prepared a speech and endeavored to tell my ‘back story’ even though Gabby wasn’t there. Everyone seemed interested. I hit the high points along the way. How I came to be who I am or atleast who I appear to be. At the end I congratulated myself on making it this far, congratulated everybody for making it this far. Hip hooray, and turned on the music. Big sound coming out of the speakers with the video accompaniment on the outdoor screen. Check it out below. Eighteen songs chosen for their grooviness and danceability. And so here I am, the son of a Baptist preacher, born and bred in a small midwestern farming town, a product of 1950’s public education (I learned my ABC’s and 1 2 3’s but never who I was or how to be), left alone I finally began my quest, traveling with my backpack and tent across Europe to the ‘Holy Land’ and back, still didn’t find it, Psychedelics - they taught me a lot, really a lot - that everything is not what it seems, but what is it then? That, they didn’t teach me. Finding my mentor, Prem Rawat, just a young kid then, fresh from India where he grew up and touring the world, barely a teenager but confident and capable. He showed me what I was looking for. Big moment. Some people never find it. Continuing with my life, working, making money, getting tired of making money, living in Mexico on the beach, scuba diving and teaching scuba diving (finally becoming a Baptist minister in a way as my father had always hoped) saving the sea turtles, returning to civilization, wearing shoes, making money, playing the game, writing poetry, taking everything I knew and throwing it into that poetry, having affairs, losing it, finding it, writing about it, making my way to . . . here, now, where we all are. It’s just do we notice it? Everything has led to this. This is it. Everything you thought your life would be, it is what it is.I got nothing more to say really. Didn’t know I had this much. Might have stepped out of my boundaries a little but that’s alright. Who can say what we should be. And then we die. 75th birthday celebration playlistIf you like the rohn report please consider supporting me by making a donation : )or becoming a paid subscriber : ) 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

The spirit of writing hasn’t come upon me lately, no more than the rain has visited this parched terrain.The urgency to explain or declaim is missing somehow, instead I’m watching TV football and gazing out the south facing windows at the sun filled front yard. There are deep slanting shadows attached to the trees even while their leaves shine brightly. I know soon they will grow dim. Soon it will be night. And then morning again.The game is mildly amusing but mostly as background for my thoughts. The volume is off. The commercials are either pharmaceuticals or pickup trucks. The colorful uniforms identify which tribe they belong to as they rush and chase and collide with one another on the field of action. This game has been played since we were kids - chase and tag, laugh and fall down. It has been played since the primordial days of hunting deer, chasing them until we could bring them to the ground.Watching my life unwind, hunted by mortality, that stealthy, persistent and supremely confident hunter. Since the first mewlings, the first suckling at my mother’s breast it has been on my track. Dodge and weave if you can, dance if possible but that arrow will find you . . . and other pleasant thoughts such as these as I watch the trees and the organized violence on TV.Maybe that’s why I’ve got nothing to say. The old brain slowing down. More interested in reading than writing. More interested in listening than talking. The rohn report more reporting on Rohn than Rohn reporting. Wanting to be comforted by silence, informed no more.Days go by. Sunrise sunset. I exist in between the two and half the night. And so maybe it is the way we lean into the wind or wind down at the end that matters more than what actually happens. What actually happens happens to everybody in some way or another but how you receive it is unique and personal. Only you know. Only I know. I had my 75th birthday party recently in the backyard and it was attended by 15 or 20 friends including baristas I know. It was a barista friend (although she didn’t show up) that requested my ‘back story’. Who are you dude? Basically that’s what it was. I jazz and jam with the baristas on my morning cafe quest out there somewhere on my bike, the only human contact I have in a day many times so it’s special. I try to create a theatre moment. Isn’t it all theatre? Anyways, that was the request and I told her, “Ok, come to my birthday party and I will tell you my back story, reveal my true identity”. But who even knows their true identity? We wear masks on top of masks and are not accustomed to taking them off, exposing ourselves to the vagaries and judgmental opinions of the world. So anyways I prepared a speech and endeavored to tell my ‘back story’ even though Gabby wasn’t there. Everyone seemed interested. I hit the high points along the way. How I came to be who I am or atleast who I appear to be. At the end I congratulated myself on making it this far, congratulated everybody for making it this far. Hip hooray, and turned on the music. Big sound coming out of the speakers with the video accompaniment on the outdoor screen. Check it out below. Eighteen songs chosen for their grooviness and danceability. And so here I am, the son of a Baptist preacher, born and bred in a small midwestern farming town, a product of 1950’s public education (I learned my ABC’s and 1 2 3’s but never who I was or how to be), left alone I finally began my quest, traveling with my backpack and tent across Europe to the ‘Holy Land’ and back, still didn’t find it, Psychedelics - they taught me a lot, really a lot - that everything is not what it seems, but what is it then? That, they didn’t teach me. Finding my mentor, Prem Rawat, just a young kid then, fresh from India where he grew up and touring the world, barely a teenager but confident and capable. He showed me what I was looking for. Big moment. Some people never find it. Continuing with my life, working, making money, getting tired of making money, living in Mexico on the beach, scuba diving and teaching scuba diving (finally becoming a Baptist minister in a way as my father had always hoped) saving the sea turtles, returning to civilization, wearing shoes, making money, playing the game, writing poetry, taking everything I knew and throwing it into that poetry, having affairs, losing it, finding it, writing about it, making my way to . . . here, now, where we all are. It’s just do we notice it? Everything has led to this. This is it. Everything you thought your life would be, it is what it is.I got nothing more to say really. Didn’t know I had this much. Might have stepped out of my boundaries a little but that’s alright. Who can say what we should be. And then we die. 75th birthday celebration playlistIf you like the rohn report please consider supporting me by making a donation : )or becoming a paid subscriber : ) 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

I’m sitting here with two books of poetry open - ‘failure’ by Philip Schultz and ‘Walking to Martha’s Vineyard’ by Franz Wright. Two white boys alright. Just finished ‘A War with Grandpa’, a young (very young) adult novel by Robert Kimmel Smith. Why he needs 3 names I don’t know. Maybe because there are so many Robert Smiths? Anyways, this is for my 1st grade mentoring.On the Kindle app on my phone I’ve got ‘The Books of Jacob’ Olga Tokarczuk, 1,000 pages of it if it had pages, it just has unfolding screens, endlessly unfolding screens. I’m on page 525 if it was a page. Jewish shtetl life in Eastern Europe, 18th century. It won the Nobel Prize. ‘The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door’ Hafez, translated by Robert Bly and Leonard Lewisohn (in smaller print) lies nearby. I sometimes slip that into my shoulder bag when I’m off to the cafe. They spent 6 years (Robert and Leonard) looking for metaphors and similes that might provide some approximation of what they thought Hafez might have been trying to say 600 years ago.What if the evening news shows were a review of books and talking about them? Just a bit of news, like a commercial breaking in once in a while. What would that be like? A lively, informed, intelligent panel going after it, going off on it. Curious and uninhibited, courageous, discovering new meanings and new pathways to find new meanings. We could call it ‘news 2’. Everyone sitting around drinking cappuccinos, maybe a barista and a cafe in the background.The first poem in ‘Walking to Martha’s Vineyard’ is called 'Year One’ and it’s illustrated, presumably, by ‘Monica Westin 2006’ whose name is written and dated on the inside cover of the book. There could be illustration, dance, oratory, so many ways to celebrate literature. It would be a great show. Wheel of Fortune comes on next. Then America’s Funniest Home Videos and then . . . something else. But for awhile it was just books and talking about it.Here’s the poem: Year OneI was still standingon a northern corner.Moonlit winter clouds the color of the desperation of wolves.Proofof Your existence? There is nothingbut. I’ve got more books in my bookshelf. I’ve got more bookshelves. I buy books if I can’t find them anywhere else. ‘Talking To The Moon, Wildlife adventures on the plains and prairies of Osage country’ from the University of Oklahoma Press was $31.84 with shipping. It’ll be here in a couple of weeks. John Joseph Mathews. Hafez says:Don’t expect obedience, promise keeping, or rectitudeFrom me; I’m drunk. I’ve been famous for carryingA wine pitcher around since the First Covenant with Adam.He, of course, is referring to a different kind of wine.In my favorite book, ‘failure’, published in 2007, there’s a poem called ‘The Summer People’.Santos, a strong, friendly man,who built my wife’s sculpture studio,Fixed everything I couldn’t,looked angry in town last week.Then he stopped coming. We wonderedif we paid him enough, if he envied us.Once he came over late to help me catch a batwith a newspaper and trash basket.He liked that I laughed at how scared I got.We’re “year rounds,” what the locals callsummer people who live here full time.Always in a hurry, the summer people honk a lot,own bigger cars and houses. Once I beat a guyin a pickup to a parking space, our summer sport.”Lousy New Yorker!” he cried.Every day now men from Guatemala, Ecuador,and Mexico line up at the railroad station.They know that they’re despised,that no one likes having to share their rewards,or being made to feel spiteful.When my uncle Joe showed me the shotgunhe kept near the cash registerto scare the black migrantswho bought his overpriced beer and cold cutsin his grocery outside of Rochester, N.Y.,his eyes blazed like emerald suns.It’s impossible to forget his eyes.At parties the summer peoplewho moved here after 9/11talk about all the things they had to give up.It’s beautiful here, they say, but everythingis tentative and strange,as if the beauty isn’t theirs to enjoy. When I’m tired, my father’s accentscrapes my tongue like a scythe.He never cut our grass or knewwhat grade I was in. He worked days,nights, and weekends, but failed anyway.Late at night, when he was too tired to sleep,he’d stare out the window so powerfullythe world inside and outsideour house would disappear. In Guatemala, after working all day,Santos studied to be an architect.He suffered big dreams, his wife said.My wife’s studio is magnificent.We’d hear him up there in the dark,hammering and singing, as if he were the happiest man alive.And from ‘The Books of Jacob‘ of a thousand pages if there’s one:It was as if my master Mordechai already knew about everything. A few days later he appeared out of the blue in Busk because he had had a strange dream. He had dreamed that in front of the synagogue in Lwow he saw the Jacob of the Bible handing out goat droppings to passersby. Most of those who received these gifts were offended or burst into raucous laughter, but those who accepted the gift and swallowed it respectfully began to shine from within like lanterns. Thus in this vision, Mordechai, too, held out his hand to receive the gift.‘The War with Grand Pa’, page 93 under the chapter heading ‘GO FISH’ has a pretty good paragraph:I was thinking pretty hard about how I was going to get back at Grandpa. It wasn’t easy. There were a lot of things I could do and a lot I’d never do. Like burning his underwear, for instance. I didn’t want to do something I’d be sorry for later.The show could go on like that for half an hour or more, exciting, diverse, spontaneous connections, hilarity. It would be great. Interviews, sponsorships. Mercedes Benz and Toyota competing for commercial space. Burger King and Corona beer commercials like on football games. The Arther C. and Mildred G. Saranopticas Foundation for the Support of the Arts. I only want to watch, I wouldn’t be on the actual show.If you like the rohn report please support me by making a donation : )or become a paid subscriber : ) 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

Mercury is the first planet from the sun. A little too warm for most people - average temperatures are around 330 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s like an oven. You could bake a cake in there.Earth is the third rock from the sun, so to say, having a solid core like the other inner planets. It’s comfortable, so comfortable that life was established here billions of years ago and continues to proliferate.This is Mars, fourth planet from the sun and freezing cold. There may be life there but hiding underground with the water. If there is water. Doesn’t look like a thriving planet.We could go on visiting all the planets in our solar system: Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus. There’s no sign of life on any of them. It’s just here on planet Earth. We haven’t yet found any planets outside our solar system that have life either. There may be. They’re just too far away to see.On planet Earth there are approximately 100 million species and Lord knows how many independent life forms (even Google couldn’t answer that question). Our planet is covered with life from earthworms to elephants and including of course the tiny ones that you can’t see - the microbes. They live and die and procreate with their own DNA and their own agenda.What is a microbe’s agenda, one might ask? I don’t exactly know but there must be one otherwise why is it even alive? What caused it to rise up from the grit and slime of primordial matter? There must be some reason, some principle at work.Anyways, planet Earth is full of life. We take it for granted though, don’t really appreciate what’s been given to us. Take another look at Mercury.That planet has geology but it doesn’t have biology. We have geology: continents, oceans, mountains and valleys, rivers and lakes and we have biology. Geology and biology combined is called a biosphere. We have a biosphere.Here’s in praise of our biosphere. It’s fantastic! Let’s not wreck it folks. We’ve been leaning on it pretty heavily for the last 200 years. Right now species are going extinct at 1,000 times the normal rate that they would if humans weren’t around wrecking everything.We live in the biosphere. It’s like a protected zone against all the odds, the solar radiation, the cosmic rays and the cold, airless void of space. But we’re vulnerable. We’re on top of the food chain and if anything breaks we’re liable. What if we crash the system? What are we going to do, make food in a factory? From what? Water and air and soil? That’s what the biosphere does already. It makes food for everybody. For free.There’s time to change our wasteful ways, but we better hurry. Nothing is guaranteed, not even the survival of the human race. We’re on top of the food chain, alrighty, and that’s great but we would be sure to fall if it breaks.Thank you to All India Radio from Melbourne for this amazing song. I have admired it for a long time. It features the gorgeous voice of Leona Gray.If you like the rohn report please consider making a donation : )or become a paid subscriber : ) 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

. . . although sometimes I feel kind of stuck. I’ve created a biosphere and a ranchito and feel responsible for the animals and plants that live here. The dragonflies darting around above the hydrilla in the old cement swimming pool (now a fish pond) and the bats that fly thru the air in the evening skimming the water, the orange and white gold fish who now are as large as small carp which I guess they are and the hundreds of tiny minnowy fish that swim among them. The cardinal couple who come and sing to me some evenings outside my studio window. The cats, the raccoons, the occasional opossum, the possum haw lining the fence line with their brilliant red berries in the winter, the chili pequin bushes that I truly love - small hot chilis that look like Christmas ornaments amidst the tender green leaves. All this and so much more holds me here.I don’t really care to travel anyways, I actually prefer my routine and my postage stamp sized ranchito where I occasionally grow a bit of swiss chard, a tomato or two, maybe some spinach. Here I can weather the vagaries of growing older and maintain myself and my casita. Things are manageable and the cafe experience is just a bike ride away.There are adventures to experience and things to discover everywhere. Instead of traveling and exploring unknown parts of the world I have discovered that everywhere is here. Truth. What if I was from Tunisia and came here to visit - this would all be fantastic and exciting and wonderfully new. I once had a Couchsurfer from Tunisia who discovered my city from the bike tour I gave her and then went out on her own and was gone all day, every day exploring. It would have been the same if I had visited her in Tunisia. Wonders abound wherever you are. That’s my take away. The fish pond, although it warms considerably by the end of summer and doesn’t have quite the same thrill it has in Spring and Winter, is a genuine baptismal experience. I grew up a Baptist, attended regular services by virtue of the fact that my father was the minister and was even baptized in front of the congregation in a truly terrifying ritual of full immersion but the custom comes from John the Baptist and Jesus in the Jordon River and before that has its antecedents in ancient history going way back to before there was history. People have always jumped in the water to gain the renewal and the blessing. I can do that daily. No chlorine. My house is air conditioned, the roof is secure and there are windows all around. A front porch and a back porch and a driveway with a beat up old Prius sitting in it ready to go to the store in any weather. All that’s left is to appreciate it. Once when I was living in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico I went back in the jungle to explore a friend’s cenote. I was a scuba instructor and an occasional cave diver - the cenotes being connected to one another underground in these amazing and maze like tunnels, rivers actually. It was a thing to see where they went and to discover new underwater caves and caverns. This cenote was small and rocky but I decided to explore what I could just with breath hold diving, to see if it was worth bringing cave diving gear back there and doing a proper exploration. I was good at breath hold diving, practiced it, could stay underwater for three minutes so I put on my mask and flippers and went in, down, to the left and to the right with my little flashlight. When it became obvious that it didn’t go anywhere I turned around and in that moment my light went out. It was perfectly dark and I didn’t have any assurance at all that I could find my way back to the surface. A wrong turn at that moment could spell doom. And guess what? My light came back on and I swam back to the surface deeply happy that I was still alive and breathing air, an ocean of air, instead of dying in a panic for the lack of it.I think about that sometimes when I feel bored or lost. At least I’m not in an underwater cave with no air, trapped and frightened. Plenty of air here. I can breathe all I want in a nice easy rhythm. The song starts out:A garden begins with a seedAnd a vision nourished by sunlightKeep going, keep going, my love, keep goingWater everything around, your dreams live in my bodyLife here, life here, nothing is fair, life hereI give you the splendor, dawn in the desertI want to go, I want to go, behind you I want to goBegin humanity on another planet and universeHeart of peace, soul of lavaSaliva of bread, Colombian without ancestorsThe video is underwater. In a cave or something, then a garden. Seemed appropriate. Just came up on YouTube. It’s magic. Everything is magic. All around me all the time.Existence is magic. I pray for the eyes to see it, the heart to feel it. Watch the video. ‘Jardines’ featuring Lido Pimienta. A garden of red and yellow flowersYour light comes to cuddle the rootI want to go, I want to go, before you I want to goShow you my path of emeralds and diamondsHeart of straw, soul of lavaSaliva of bread, Colombian without memoriesThe gardens were nourishedThey were nourished by the Magdalena RiverThe dolphins, pink dolphinsWere greeting me with a tender smileI would like to be like the breezeTo be the breeze that ruffles your hairAnd to get inside it, to get inside itSo I can see and hear your smileOf red and yellow flowersYour light comes nestled in the rootsIf you like the rohn report feel free to make a donation : )or become a paid subscriber : ) 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

When I woke up this morning, White Tail, the yellow cat with the white tail, was on the night stand monitoring my movements, calibrating. Is he going to get up and feed us now? Dawn had not yet arrived, we were still in the realm of darkness but I could see his shape and infer his presence. He had spent the night somewhere on my bed, curled in among the sheets. When I sat up, he purred. When I picked up the phone, it lit up. The room became softly illuminated. I had created light. I imagined White Tail perceiving me as some kind of a light maker, some kind of a magician in his cat-brained perception of things. Cats don’t know about electricity but they do know that I had made the darkness go away and brought the light.I got up and went into the bathroom, light appeared as I made some tinkling sounds. I moved to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, light emerged. Soon the whole kitchen was full of light and it was time for breakfast. White Tail jumped down, ran into the dining room, stationed himself by the cat bowl and purred. There was enough light spilling out from the kitchen that I didn’t need to make more light. Except for the back porch, I made light there so I could feed Bob, the feral one and the fish. I’m the light maker. In the book I’m reading, ‘Mutant Messenger Down Under’ by Marlo Morgan. people change their assigned birth name whenever they want to. At any point in time if they feel they have entered a new phase they just go before the tribe and say . . . “Hi, I’m Great Wonder, you all know me as Great Wonder but now I am changing my name to Hits the Rock.” “Hi Hits the Rock.”, the tribe responds in unison. And so it is, they’re Hits the Rock.We kinda do that with our titles and accolades, “Oh this is Suzi, she won the Oppenheimer Award for best pianist in Sweden.” “Dr. So and so, hello.” “Bill Rutherford, I’m an attorney. How are you?” But we don’t really change our names just because we feel like it, because we feel like we’re a different person today and have a different perspective and want to be recognized a different way. There’s alot of legal baggage involved in changing your name. Documents and forms and formal proceedings and legal fees. The FBI might like to know about it.In her book, Marlo Morgan, goes on a walkabout thru the Australian desert with an Aboriginal tribe wearing no shoes and learns the secrets of their culture. Well some of them anyway. The ones they want to share with her and the ones she is able to understand. She had been invited to receive an award by this particular tribe who heard of her work with Aboriginal youth and as the story begins, her ‘chauffeur’ picks her up in front of her hotel as arranged but then drives out into the desert. No air conditioned venue, no ceremony and no award luncheon seem to be forthcoming, instead there’s a rendezvous with a band of Aborigines who summarily take her for a walkabout in the desert. Four months later they return to the edge of civilization, drop her off and disappear. Great book.Anyways I’ve changed my name to Light Maker, atleast as far as the cats are concerned. I can make light, “Hi, I’m Light Maker, you used to know me as Rohn”. Of course cats don’t use names so it’s of limited usefulness but I think it’s good practice and besides that’s what I can do really well. I make light wherever I go, small brightly colored flashlights are stashed at various places all over the house just for that purpose, in case I have to dispel the darkness.Of course there are other light makers too: the stars in the sky, the cars driving by before dawn, but I would like to think that I am the main one atleast for White Tail, I would like to think that I appear as some sort of a god with supernatural powers, if cats have gods. I mean I dunno. Here’s another Light Maker: d. ellis phelps. A friend of mine who does amazing paintings. Vibrant, luminous, explosive, joyous. I asked her if she was underwater when she painted this and she said “inside the primordial ooze: chit ganna, what makes the worlds…” I don’t know what chit ganna is but what cha gonna do?.“Let there be light.” said God at the beginning of time. ‘And there was light.’ That was solid, I mean that wasn’t solid, that was before anything that was solid was created but that was awesome. Way to go, God! Your got it going on. Without light you can’t see anything. Not the birds and the bees, not the Garden of Eden, not the firmament, not the waters below or the waters above.In 1945 scientists at the Los Almos Laboratory in New Mexico detonated the first atomic bomb. They were light makers. A blinding flash filled the sky and created a shock wave that knocked people down 10 miles away The mountains rumbled with thunder. “It was like being at the bottom of an ocean of light. We were bathed in it from all directions”, recalls Joan Hinton one of the physicists who witnessed the blast. “The light withdrew into the bomb as if the bomb sucked it up. Then it turned purple and blue and went up and up and up.” She was 25 miles away hiding on a hill.“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” said Oppenheimer afterwards as if he had stumbled on a secret curse instead of intentionally building a bomb with the power of 2,000 tons of TNT and then blowing it up. All kinds of light makers. There are bioluminescent algae floating around in the ocean flashing their blue lights like some kind of semaphore. I’ve seen them.“Where does the light go?” is a question your child might ask when you’re turning off the light and preparing to leave their room. “Go to sleep child. It goes back to itself” you might say without thinking much about it. There’s the self-effulgent light talked about in the Vedas. Light you can see with your eyes closed. Angels are creatures of light, light bearers. Everyone carries some light inside of them.Everyone makes light.We’re all light makers.Music for the podcast: Aqua Venue from the album ‘After the Turn a Storm’ by Hello Meteor. Buy it on Bandcamp.If you like the rohn report please consider making a donation : )or become a paid subscriber : ) 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

Summer has dropped like a heavy beam into my front yard. It’s palpable. Hot and dry. The earth is sun baked, cracks appear. The sunflowers that grew like a forest 6 or 8 feet high now bow their heads and mourn. Their roots are shrunken and shriveled in the dirt. The microbes are screaming. I can hear them almost. Everyone is miserable which is why I’m watering the yard this morning before the sun gets up high in the sky, give the guys some respite. I’m sure any remaining bugs appreciate it too. And the microbes, our invisible neighbors, it gives them a reason to hang on for another day.It’s the beginning of the end. Everything must die. The sunflowers have gone to seed and provided food for the sparrows, atleast that’s good. I watch an orange butterfly flitting from seed head to seed head, but the petals are withered or missing and there is no nectar. Most of the summer’s bugs are gone - the little white winged ones, the bees, the caterpillars that ate my spinach, everybody. The giant flying grasshopper is nowhere to be seen. The birds are gone too, the ones who ate the bugs. Although the cardinal still forages on the ground in the shade outside my screened window. Probably no bugs though.I wonder sometimes how much damage we have done to our natural environment where creatures still live by the food chain. How many bugs starve and how many birds that eat them starve too. I saw a lightning bug in the backyard a couple of months ago. When I was a kid they were plentiful. The cicadas too. I heard one playing his violin this Spring. Used to be the air was full of their buzzing.Anyways, who wants to hear about that. Summer is here and sunshine reigns supreme and who am I to argue with King Summer? I’ll just endure it like I always have - from inside my house with the air conditioning on. I don’t have to stand outside in one place all day. It’s cyclical isn’t it? Things turn and return. All that once was will be again and all that is shall cease to be. Like the good ole USA. We’re through with our Summer and well into Fall, headed for Winter. But that’s another story.The fiery little chili pequins are thriving. They seem to like the hot weather. Their berries turn red and dare someone to eat them. I will and the mockingbirds, the ones who planted them there.Two thorny deep rooted native trees stand in the hedgerow like a couple of old pals - palo verde and retama. They’re not bothered by the hot dry conditions either, they’re desert plants. And the hackberries too are able to survive. Somehow. They get big and drop their limbs when they get too heavy. I’m not worried about them. The Monterrey oak that I planted 20 years ago when I moved here is healthy too. It’s now the largest tree in the front yard. It features a grotto beneath its spreading branches where you can hang out and watch people passing by in the street with their dogs or kids in tow. They don’t see me.Some things are thriving, some are dying. Everything is mutable, malleable. Summer is inevitable but it doesn’t last forever. I’ll wait it out. I’ve seen this play before. Day and night. Spring, summer and fall. Winter. The universe itself will end some day. That’ll be some winter. And then it will spring forth again. Maybe. That’s what some people think.And why not? The ancient people who lived here before us knew about the cycles of nature and were intimate with it. They believed in regeneration and rebirth. If hot dry oppressive summer doesn’t last forever then neither does all our problems. Neither does a lifetime. My view out the window with the cardinal and the hackberry trees and the dry excoriated tiny patch of land I call my ‘yard’ is bright with sunlight right now but it will soon dim and die out. I’ll watch that too. Podcast music by Yeahman / ‘Miniyamba’ Main Artists: Hajna, Mina Shankha Music Publisher: Shika Shika Composer: Jean Dasso, Mina Shankha, Damien CarissimoIf you like the rohn report please feel free to make a one time donationor become a paid subscriber : ) 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

1.I met a girl in the cafe reading a book. I think it was Merit, the cafe, yeah next to the bike shop. No, that’s right it was in Charis Park. She was there with her friend under the tree. Her friend was also doing something creative, oh yeah she was painting on a framed canvas. I couldn’t see what it was. Anyways I went over to where they were and said “Excuse me do you mind if I ask you what you’re reading?” She looked up and gave me a smile and said “I’m reading the Hunger Games, part one Mocking Jay” and proceeded to tell me all about the Hunger Games series. I was interested and listened with respect. It was a revelation to me. I had not read the Hunger Games but turns out many people have, especially the 13 - 28 year olds. It’s a perfect synthesis of romance, combat, live action, superheroes, super villains and a mythic story (I watched the movie). All these elements trigger a high degree of response among young adults. I can understood why they are so popular, they’re a part of Gen Z’s cultural psyche.It’s a call to arms, it’s a revolutionary manifesto for teenagers who desperately need a revolution to believe in, something to rebel against. It’s a demand for change from the Z generation as they wake up and start to assume responsibility for the world. They have the wisdom and they can see it, it’s obvious. May the wisdom of the Z generation guide us home. Hey they got it from Minecraft and Mocking Jay and now they’re up to bat or atleast in the on deck circle. 2.My friend Clayton wants to save the world or atleast make it more sustainable. Ever since I met him 6 years ago we have been talking about how to ‘make it better’ and Clayton has done more than talk, he has acquired the skills to build simple housing that is energy efficient, made from local materials and - one other thing I forget. Fireproof and durable. He has taken workshops all over the world learning about building things and growing food. Cob construction is what I’m talking about. It’s been around for 10,000 years and people are still using it, It's estimated that half the people in the world live in some kind of cob house. It could be traditional housing in Zambia or people wanting to live a simpler, more sustainable life in Costa Rica, or it might be a summer home constructed in the Adirondacks for an insurance executive and his family from Philadelphia or a hilltop redoubt in Puerto Rico for ecology tourists learning about sustainability - which may be Clayton’s dream. I don’t know, we have talked about it. Having land and a place to share knowledge and practice sustainable living I think is his dream. Be part of the solution. From AI. Cob is comprised of clay, sand and straw. That's it! These materials are ridiculously cheap and easy to come by almost anywhere on the planet. When properly mixed together they become incredibly strong, durable and beautiful - the perfect combination for a home.Cob walls absorb heat during the day and release it at night, helping to keep you warm in the winter and cool in the summer. You can go several stories high with it, make any shape you wish. Building with cob is a slower process, though, you have to wait for the mud to get hard before you add the next layer. But that would also help you visualize and develop your house as you’re building it. Building with 2X4’s according to a blueprint you can put it up fast but it goes up exactly as planned and doesn’t smell like earth : ) Here’s an interview I did with Clayton in 2022, we’re having a conversation in the back yard. One Man’s Journey in Becoming Nothing and Gaining Everything Along the Way This is an excerpt.”What if you had an Aladdin’s lamp and you could make any wish come true what kind of life would you like to lead. How would you visualize your life unfolding in the best possible circumstance?”If I had an Aladdin’s lamp?“Yes!”Is the genie Robin Williams or is it somebody else?”It’s a real genie. It can actually, you know . . .”He was my favorite genie.”He was a genie?”Well he played a genie but he was a genie in real life too. He was a magician. He made people laugh. Umh, I don’t think I would necessarily wish anything for myself, I don’t care much for money. I don’t really believe in it. I think I would wish for humanity to wake up and realize that money is not important. It’s very backwards how our society operates. What’s important is helping people, serving people, serving our planet, being good stewards, securing a future for all species, all . . . everything. Umh, I don’t even know if I would use the 3 wishes, I would just want that one thing. If I could have anything in the world it would be for people to put our planet first before the profits.”That’s a pretty cool response my brother . . .Clayton is currently in North Dakota, or is it Montana acquiring new skills and building earthen projects.3.The Peace Education Program is a project of the Prem Rawat Foundation. Not like peace can be taught but it can be facilitated. This program is effective, seminal and massive in scope. I mean it’s up to scale, since its inception in 2007 over half a million people have participated. I have known about it for years, watched it grow, watched their documentary videos about how it’s working in different areas of the world and how it changes people’s lives. From their website: “The Peace Education Program is an innovative series of video-based workshops that help people discover their own inner strength and personal peace.” There was a PEP at Dominguez Jail in San Antonio way back when it was just starting up. They made a movie about it, here’s the promo Inside Peace. Some quotes from inmates who went through the program.“An unlit candle can’t light any but one lit candle can light thousands. If I can better myself and have peace within me, clarity, happiness, be content - I need to better myself before I can help anybody else.”“People live in the two minutes. The minute that just happened and the minute that’s on it’s way, you know, the past and the future. He teaches us to live in the third minute which is the here and the now, how to just appreciate being alive.”“When you come to the place that you’re alright just who you are, everything else falls into place.” The Peace Education Program is active in 58 countries, and has been translated into 43 languages. It’s been hosted by numerous organizations including educational institutions, schools, universities, community centers, senior centers, homeless shelters, drug rehabilitation facilities and prisons. I got that from the website too. It’s a power for good that’s happening all over the world. Newest countries to join: Japan, Bolivia, Cuba, Haiti, Honduras and the Philippines. There’s good things happening in the world, is the point of my missive. I don’t know about the violent uprising in the Hunger Games but it was the spirit of those two young women in the park that I admired. The aspiration to make it better, to find peace, is alive and well inside the human soul. Can we talk about this? Can we work for this? Can we believe in it, can we find it in ourselves? It’s powerful, it has existed ever since there were humans, that’s what makes us human. It manifests in every corner of every culture, in people all over the world. It is our commonality. It’s something we can do or atleast try to do. That’s what I try to do. If you think it’s impossible, all the better, that’s what superheroes do. We are the superheroes, by the way. Have you noticed that they kind of look like us usually? They kind of act like us for the most part, in an exaggerated way. They are created by us, by our imagination, because that’s what we imagine we can do. Fly and do heroic deeds and redress evil, destroy injustice, protect the innocent. Sound familiar? That’s our noblest character. And superheroes aren’t new, they go back to ancient times, back to the old time honored traditions of the scriptures. All the religions have them. Gods and angels, Father Sky and Mother Earth, brujas and shamans, genies. Superman? The new Superman movie is out. It’s almost an ancient story. All these stories are about us. Ourselves. The humans. Doing impossible tasks.Some politician needs to take this on. The impossible quest and all that. Let’s live on the planet sustainably with peace and goodwill for all. If we can imagine it then we can do it. We might be able to do it. It’s not impossible. This is what we were made for.This entire song is included at the end of the podcast. Music and lyrics by Alexia Chellun. Check out her website. Also featuring Danielle Salvitto, Marlene Bayle, Paula Vahos and Richard Gormley. Video by Alessandro Sigismondi. If you like the rohn report please feel free to make a one time donationor become a paid subscriber : ) 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

cute baby with catshad to cut it offrejoin my body andmy breath surroundedby a worldlooks calm and serenebut i know beyond theblue is crazy outer spaceendless airless darkness unlessyou’re near a star or have aflashlightwe are protected fromthis awesome terror by our gentle light blue sky with a few clouds floating thruwhat can be more peacefulheaven above and earthbelow and never the twainshall meetunless you’re a human beingthen you can bridge the gapyou are the bridge andthe gap is your longing formeaningthat’s what i thinkreferring to myself ofcoursedon’t want to insinuateanything about anyone elsedon’t want to write anythingthat isn’t true / it’s all truei feel the truth of itfacebook was only a scamto steal my energy andsell it for a dollarthat’s all i am :: an attentiongenerator something theycan siphon off to feed their money machinein their data centeri resent that or should i just accept it / part of theshow / part of this epicgreek theatre tragicomedywe call modern lifemaybe if i stopped resenting it . . . no that won’t worki’m deeply offended truthbe known i takeumberance - is that a word ??i don’t think so / can’t find the real one / makesme edgy / sometimes i actout / obnoxiousi can’t help it though / it’s an old bad habit all the wayback to high school and evenbefore probly / searching forattention and validationi validate myself july 23rd 2025 under a blue sky withwispy clouds blowing awayfinding their own destinyhit another cappuccino / what isthis destiny thing anyway / i’mnot sure i’m familiar withit / is that where i’m going or is that where i’ve been oris that being here now in abody breathing under a blue sky on a world spreading outbefore me likea . . . minecraft videogame endlessand created by my own handor mouse actually / funny howthe mouse became the mostpowerful animal in the world / it’s not called a tigerdoing all those clickssun’s upmorning’s goneclouds swept awayif happens every dayalmostbutterfly in the bushesdoes a butterfly feelpleasure fluttering aroundamong the flowers smelling the anthers and looking fornectar ?? or do the humansin their penthouse above the city enjoy the ultimate pleasure having gatheredall their pollen in onebasket and deposited itin their stock market account ??is it one bohemian poetthat can make a differenceriding their bike down the street ?? i see people iinteract with them theysee me / that’s all / maybethat’s all it takesfind the podcast music here ::If you like the rohn report please feel free to make a one time donationor become a paid subscriber : ) 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

Ten years ago I made a solemn pledge to write a book, publish it and introduce it to the world. The pledge really was to myself, something I had to do to regain my own sanity or more accurately my own inner peace. I don’t think I was insane. That was the one clear thing in my mind. Otherwise I was pretty much wounded and in need of healing. Writing my book was the healing.It took me six years to get it down, to get all the words in place like I envisioned but it finally happened. I looked at it one day and tt was complete. It seemed to work pretty much as I intended. Good job. Goal #1. I spent the next two years editing it and looking for a publisher. I had more luck writing the book than I did finding a publisher. The writing was under my control, the publishers were not. They were looking out for their own agenda - how to sell books, ones that had a clearly definable audience and fit into a clearly definable genre. I had neither of those. They weren’t interested.Sometimes you have to modify your original vow to accommodate the reality of things. Ok, fine I conceded, I’ll publish it without a publisher and set about learning Amazon’s software for self-publishing. ISBN numbers and formatting and cover art and all kinds of hoops to jump thru there were. Plus, if you want it to be available in actual bookstores, you have to learn Ingram Spark’s software as well. Even harder: obscure instructions, dead ends, looping programs, illogical pathways, dense foliage in there. If you want to do something bad enough you can always find a way, that’s what I learned. My book is now available in all kinds of formats: hardcover, paperback, e-book, it’s in the San Antonio public library, it’s available in actual bookstores.The final phase of my solemn pledge was to find an audience. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last two years: telling people about it at the cafe (if I see someone reading a book I’ll go right up to them and ask them what they’re reading and generally end up in a conversation about books), going to book fairs, doing book readings and book signings and author talks. Recently I did an event at Landa library, a lovely old estate turned library surrounded by oak trees and a playground for kids. That was fun. Eight people came. That was my audience.thank you all for coming so much i really appreciate it / excited to have a chance to talk about my book to some other people and thank you to robin alacort who just closed the door and the beautiful landa library it’s a wonderful place to have an event And with that I was off and running. It reminded me (and I mentioned this in my spiel ) that my father was (or had been) a preacher. He got up there and delivered his sermon to the congregation every Sunday morning. It was his solemn duty. He didn’t have much of an audience either but he persevered. so i thought that i should probably start off with telling you something about myself / if you don’t have a connection with the author of the book then it’s kinda hard to get into it / if you feel like you know the person it’s easier to . . . so my name is rohn bayes / i’m from michigan On and on it went over the course of an hour and a half, reading, talking, listening, having conversations. Eight of us, nine including me. Two of them were new faces, had not met them before. One of them had read the book already, got it from the library, the other person was indígena from California but she came here when she got the call. We were talking about what attracted us to San Antonio. It was a commonality and it’s also part of the book. Anyways, John got up and read a random passage. Just opened it up and read the Hindu creation myth from the Rig Veda. Rig Veda means "praise" and "knowledge". It goes like this:At first there was only darkness wrapped in darknessAll this was just un-illuminated water.That One which came to be, enclosed in nothing,arose at last, born of the power of heat.In the beginning desire descended on it —that was the primal seed, born of the mind.The sages who have searched their hearts with wisdomknow that which is, is kin to that which is not.We were exploring the magic secrets of the ancient book and talking about them. How humans need a story to explain everything. We are the great story tellers. It’s one of the most human things about us - our need to tell stories. Our need to conceive of a god to assure us that everything is under control and of an afterlife to explain death. How amazing it is to be human and live on a planet with a beautiful life giving biosphere. Symbiosis, commonality, hostesses, Gilgamesh . . . and we were right back in the book again talking about the humans. so that’s what the book’s about I sort of said in summation. one of the things it’s about / being human / pull yourself together and find your humanity / it’s right there inside of you / where else would you want to look for it ?? Mission complete? Or mission ongoing? Finding our humanity is definitely a process that I don’t think ever ends. I think we have just begun. This journey of becoming fully human could take us to amazing places if we really believed in it. We could make a heaven on earth if we really wanted to. That’s our potential. It would be an amazing adventure. A lot of fun. More exciting than going to Mars. Maybe we need to make a solemn vow to become fully human, to explore our deepest selves and figure out what it’s all about. Maybe that’s our project. Maybe that would lift us out of our funk, our habituated use of war to solve problems, our obsession with controlling things as if we were in control of nature. No, we’re part of nature.I dunno maybe I’m just an inveterate preacher trying to save the world. Preaching it out like my dad.Maybe we can save the world if we all pull together, if we become fully human, empower ourselves with the full recognition of all the amazing features that make us human. Anyways, that’s the whole point of the book basically. Here’s my copy. It’s been through a lot: a flash flood on Broadway, many miles of riding around in my panniers, stroked and poked and flipped through, read and re-read, marked up and book marked, scanned and edited. Pretty durable.I’m glad I made the journey. podcast music Nils Frahm - FamiliarIf you like this post please feel free to make a one time donationor become a paid subscriber : ) This is a public episode. 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you can trip digital switches far away on some server connected to your phone by wifi / fiber optics / satellite communications / it comes out of the sky like rain / we can ‘halloo’ from the other side of the world and say ‘have a nice day’ as if they were sitting right next to us at the cafewe can peer into the mystery of ancient archaeology and read the current news on our card shaped handheld device / we can take pictures and send them to friends without developing them at the drugstore / we can remember things with voice recorder that would have been lost in the labyrinth of our own forgetfulness / that place where minutiae and details diffuse and dispersejust remember not to sit on your phone or leave it behind on the table when you get up to go or drop it in the street where it gets run over by a car or lose it at the carnival or get it drenched in a rainstorm / it’s an external device not part of our body although maybe one day it will be a small antenna sprouted from our left ear tracking signals from the mother chip / never separated / re-charged at night from our electronic pillow where we dream of electric sheep and wake to the pulse of a gentle tone emanating from the internal speaker behind our medulla oblongata / i like that word medulla oblongata you can google it if you like and learn all about it / i didthe weather is not just something that happens outside / it happens inside too / it’s trackable / you can scan and calibrate your own conditions with the new ME appa bird flies through the sky as free as a . . . a bird / i sit here wondering when the new feature will emerge from the technology jungle / the bionic web / the primeval undergrowth of our collective righteousness as the caffeine hits my brain and my right hand scribbles this epistle / automatic writing is what it’s called / stream of consciousness as i’m conscious of the stream / the sub-organic sibilant anarchy simmering away / the inner world and the outer world clearly divided / pre-synaptic energy waves interact with external reality and combine to form a useful picturei wonder how far i can go / how long i’ll live / what happens next when the Cyborg Corporation hits 10 trillion dollars market value and children are infused with anti-depressants dispersed with clock-like regularity thru a prescribed software update and communication is instant and free / held like a cappuccino in a cardboard cup of inextricable eccentricities / the chalice of thought / the cloud of knowing / the rain of knowledge raging across the range of the landscape of the timeless momentinside in my heart i know what i have forgotten / all this and more is possible / technology technically takes time but it has no time / suggests no solutions / has no souli don’t even know what it is as i succumb to the vertices / the verities / the ebb and flow / the tides of this tidal wavewave as you go by music by Glass Beams :: Horizon/Mahal 0-4:35 from the live performance EP ‘Mahal’and some noise from If you like this post please feel free to make a one time donationor become a paid subscriber : ) 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

From what I heard the old ancient Hebrew priests considered the name of God too holy to speak or more accurately it was unspeakable. The human tongue could not utter it.But how do you talk about something without giving it a name? The old Hebrew priests were into talking about it. So they came up with Yahweh, spelled with no consonants just YHWH. The secret name of God spelled out in a unpronounceable word. What they were really trying to say, if I got my story straight, is that the name of God is the sound of the breath: Yah-Weh. Inhalation and exhalation. Fascinating huh? And God formed Adam from the dust of the earth and breathed into him the breath of life and Adam became a living soul. Something like that if I remember my creation story right.When you really look for me, you will see me instantly - you will find me in the tiniest house of time. Student, tell me, what is God? He is the breath inside the breath. says Kabir, 15th Century poet from India.It’s right there on page 25. Translation by Robert Bly, he did the best he could. How do you speak about the timeless one, the unknowable one, the unpronounceable one?Well that’s the beginning of God. Give it a name so we can talk about it. Just breathing would be boring. music for the podcast: Aqua Venue from the album ‘After the Turn a Storm’ by Hello MeteorIf you like this post please feel free to make a one time donationor become a paid subscriber : ) 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

What is it about politics that brings out the least cooperative, most combative part of us? We divide up into clans with our own colors, our own logos our own slogans. And then we argue and fight and strategize how to attack and defeat the other party/person whoever they may be.We could discuss the issues and find solutions in a cooperative, constructive way with benefits obvious for everyone. That’s also a possibility. Isn’t that what we’re trying to do with our politics, find solutions, solve problems, make it better? Everyone has good ideas and everyone has dumb ideas. Say it out loud. Sort it out. Shouldn’t be that hard. Common sense and discernment can sift thru that. A little applied intentionality to be rational and find the common benefit. Or just go on fighting and arguing forever.Now 9 nations have nuclear weapons. We’ve got better weapons than ever before and spend zillions on building the next even better one but we spend zilch on trying to come together and live in peace, live in tune with our biosphere, the biosphere that supports us and every living creature on this planet. It’s not a bad idea and lots of people believe in it. I’m not the only one. It’s like an undercurrent, it’s like the bedrock under our feet. It’s there supporting everything, we just don’t see it. It won’t be uncovered until people are ready to blow their cover, come out from under the covers and claim their personal peace. If people aren’t experiencing peace there’s no way it will happen in the society they belong to. Right?I think I’m right about that but nobody pays attention to that - it’s all about fixing the society. How about fixing the people then the society would fix itself automatically.We live in money dominated society. The world has become a marketplace. Everything is bought and sold. That’s why the actual people have been reduced to a number and a form and an application so they all can be efficiently channeled into some sort of economically useful diatribe . . . er discipline . . . . er device . . . devious device. That’s what it is. A great mill that eats people and spits out consumers grinding away at the great wheel of commerce. Our wars are forever and our consumer urges are endless.I mean I don’t want to start a revolution but I do want to say that we are meant to be humans not cyborgs. What exactly that is, each one of us has to discover for our own selves it seems to me. Isn’t that so? How could you be a real human by following someone else’s definition?And so I submit to you dear reader that the real revolution is interior, the hero’s quest is interior - the quest to find our peace, our strength, ourselves. More powerful than an atomic bomb is one person who has realized themselves. That’s a pretty good slogan. I’ll buy that. Certainly for that person it is more powerful. Atleast.An atom bomb can transform a city into dust, realizing oneself can transform a cypher into a person with all the creative power of the universe at their disposal. Another good slogan. We can use that for the sign. When we get ready to march. I’ve been trying to think of a good one. NO MORE HATE NO MORE FEAR. Is that too long? Six words. I think it will fit. Thanks to Mose for the music ‘Raise Your Voice’ with Suyana. Perfect. If you like this post feel free to make a one time donationor become a paid subscriber leave a comment share this post 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

I got this title from fellow Substack writer, James Roberts. He writes a newsletter called Into the Deep Woods and when I saw it it was like, heck yeah, I want to write about that too. So I started right up. He’s posting from the Cambrian Mountains of Wales with its lovely dells and streams and oak forests, I’m posting from the outskirts of downtown San Antonio in what used to be a forest but is now a city. It used to be quite a nice forest, actually, extending for miles on either side of the river. That’s what the Spanish explorers reported. They had a propensity to exaggerate, of course, but still. There the entire panoply of critters resided and the full spectrum of nature’s creative expression resounded. Bird calls and croaking frogs, howling wolves and bellowing alligators - groovy nooks with living things, enchanted and enchanting, filled the river course and the accompanying woods all along the way. The Payaya, what the Spanish called those people, were frequent visitors too with their own peculiar sounds but even they were not the first humans to know this place, not by a long shot. In fact it was a short shot for those bow wielding humans hunting with their high tech wood and stone hunting instruments for this was a place where Mother Nature’s beneficence was fully apparent and the hunting was good.When the Spanish first arrived in 1691 they saw it differently. This was no beneficence of Mother Nature, these were no gracious gifts to her children, these were resources to build an outpost with for their far flung empire. The trees and the water and even the rocks themselves were requisitioned and utilized for building a fort and a farm and a church and a way station on the way to even more Spanish outposts even farther away along the King’s Road. Infact the conditions were so propitious that they established 5 missions here. Plenty of natural resources and plenty of friendly pagan Indians to convert and enslave.The rivers, now known as the San Pedro and the San Antonio, were both spring fed and gentle, rising up from the earth and wandering in their water course towards an eventual confluence some miles down stream. At the present site of downtown San Antonio they ran only a quarter mile apart and gave birth to a rich alluvial valley and there the grooviness of Mother Nature was fully evident. I say ‘ran’ because they no longer run, atleast not without help from the city’s water treatment plants. Now the rivers are artificial and the springs are dry and the deep woods are an urban landscape populated with large buildings reaching into the sky, far higher than even the largest trees of yesteryear ever did. I ride my bike through here frequently looking for the lost wildness, Yanawana as those people called it, ‘the place of peaceful waters’.Out of the hills and down the valley of San Antono I go. It used to be a valley, now it’s Broadway Avenue, State Highway 368, lined with buildings and flowing with cars. It still sounds like a river, kind of, a river of cars. The path I follow on my bike has been followed for millennia. People trekking from the spring water fountains where Mother Nature herself resided to the confluence of the rivers where a rich alluvial valley gave birth to a cornucopia of plants and animals. The buildings are all built for business. I pass a bright green Office Source Limited store with large display windows, inside all the furniture you need for your office. Nola: a brunch and beignets place in a red brick building with a patio and coffee to go incase you’re late. Woof Gang Pet Grooming and Bakery, hmm, a curious combination, get your dog combed and trimmed while you enjoy a delicious snack I guess. Apartments and condos also line the street. The Flats at River North. The Compound at the Park. The Rivera. Brick and stone buildings three and four stories high. This is the outskirts of downtown. Bookstores, banks and restaurants. Buildings have replaced the trees, cars have replaced the critters but I still recognize the path.Passing under the expressway looping above me in the sky I soon enter the deep forest, the canyons of Houston Street and Commerce Street. I ride past the alleyways where the dumpsters reside and the street people hide. There are parks where nature is still celebrated: Veteran’s Memorial Plaza and Travis Park but Main Plaza, the old town square of the old colonial town is all stone and steel with a few token trees planted around the edge. And of course the Riverwalk, that long linear park etched beneath the surface of the busy city, it follows the river for miles - from near the Springs on the north side to the furthest mission 10 miles south of downtown.A light rain begins to fall and everything becomes luminous, shining. The light is muted, no glare. I ride down Houston and stop at the Royal Blue. A definite groovy nook.Inside the Eagles sing softly over the speakers. One of these nights, one of these crazy old nights we're gonna find out, pretty mama what turns on your lights. Mmm, no doubt.The woman behind the counter says, Hi, welcome. What would you like? Hi. Thanks. I’ll have a cachamoochie please, I mean a whichacallitchino, chopanoochi, maccanacacapachino. That’s it. With oat milk. Ha ha, ok. Anything else?Yes. There are many things I would like - for everyone to get along, no more greed and selfishness. Just cooperation, you know?Yes, I do know, she smiles. I’ve hit her warm spot.This could be heaven, this could be hell. That’s an Eagle’s song. I say and sit down by the window waiting for my capachooti, looking out at the street. Windows reflect and transmit images. Two visions. I can see the people walking by outside and the superimposed image of the the entire grocery store/cafe behind me, all in the same picture. Chairs are like people without people it occurs to me. I wonder, how much do I really see and how much goes unnoticed, subliminal and sublime? I ask myself this question often. Cappucinno with oat milk, sings out the barista. I pick up the cardboard cup with the sacred liquid inside. Thank you, I say. She offers a nod. Returning to my station I resume gazing out the window. People of all sorts are passing by. Street people wearing distinctly out of fashion clothes, mis-matched colors, pajamas and over coat, anything goes. One tall black man with a pink sheet or some kind of twisted material wrapped around his chest, a robe thing around his waist and another like a skirt hanging to his knees. Hard to describe but obviously he took some time to arrange his costume before he set off down the street. Tourists and locals: they are easily identified, the tourists by their curiosity and the locals by their casualness. Business men with button down shirts carrying a brief case, shiny shoes.Cars drive by with their lights on, eyes wide open and I understand why I’m here, that I’ve arrived. That this is the place. The ancient sacred site between the two rivers.Here people come and go, worshipping at the bar where the light shines and the sacred items lie - chips, chocolate, tacos, whatever you want, thirty feet of refrigerated beverages. The card is handed over or inserted and the computer beeps happily. The rite is consummated. Off walks the patron, enhanced, satisfied, a little fulfilled.Outside there’s no sign of the ancient people or their forest. Or wait a minute, maybe this is the sign. The ancient people and their ancient forest transformed by time and ingenuity into . . . this? I look closer. Yep. There it is. The ancient forest and the ancient people. I wonder again, how much do I really see and how much goes unnoticed, subliminal and sublime? Maybe the answer is to stop asking and witness. ‘Into the Mystic’ sings Van Morrison from somewhere overhead. I wanna rock your gypsy soul just like way back in the days of old and together we will float into the mystic.Music for the podcast: Offthewally from the album Pollination 00 - 2:22. Thank you. In the deep woods cross pollination happens between all the like minded plants and animals, sharing the DNA from the top of the trees to the underground labyrinths of the voles and the gophers and the glorious worms. Earthworms eat the nematodes and organic matter that nobody else would bother with and the birds eat the earthworms. Food chain.Cross-pollination happens easily in the city like it does in the jungle. Pollen floating around everywhere, ideas and money and sideways glances. Yes.In a city cross-pollination happens as a result of the networks of human endeavor placed in a latticework against the bright sky. Scraping the sky with it’s buildings.In the average forest, density is around a hundred trees per acre. That’s 200 feet by 200 feet. In the downtown urban forest the ‘trees’ are stacked so close together that they touch, share a wall, a common boundary, thick as the Amazon jungle where the borders blur and merge, plant life and insect life, bird life and animals interact intimately and often. In the city intimacy is imposed on people by the sheer immensity of the concrete canyons. The occasional greenways create a semi-authentic natural space and a view of the sky. Oh yes there is still earth and sky, oh humans. Don’t give up hope, the gods of earth and sky reside somehow still. Beyond it all.If you like this post feel free to make a one time donationor become a paid subscriber share this postleave a commentsend me a message 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

It’s summer and the heat is back. The sun rolls up the overcast morning sky like a rug and by noon it’s blazing away undeterred, unfettered, indefatigable and any other descriptive word you might find that mean yikes watch out, it’s the sun blasting away in the sky with unregulated intensity. We live on the edge of the desert, well we used to live on the edge of the desert, I think we live in the desert now. It moved, the city didn’t. This is all to say it doesn’t rain it just pours down radiation around here. I hate it. Give me an overcast rainy day any day, may it drizzle for weeks on end, I’m happy. Well I used to hate it, every summer the same thing, it’s like every place on earth gets their own climate disaster these days: earthquake, forest fire, tsunami, flood, tornado, hurricane, something extreme, we don’t get any of that, we get unrelenting bloody sunshine. But I finally realized that it doesn’t help to complain, the rain gods aren’t listening anyway or they don’t care. Whoever is in control up there wake up! They’re still asleep though, so I adjusted my expectations, realigned my perspective. If it’s not going to rain then I’ll jump in the fish pond and water my garden with a hose. To heck with it. There’s still water in the pipes. Yeah that’s another thing. All the springs have gone dry, the Edwards Aquifer is at its lowest level since 1990 and still dropping. City planners have hooked up our water system to other aquifers and water sources so homeowners can continue watering their lawns and keep them green like we live in Merry Old England not in a desert. Anyways, here’s the point of my story. I can adjust my perspective. It’s a great life skill. Comes in handy for any situation or circumstance I might find myself in. It is what it is and I am what I am. I’m gonna practice this. Gotta get good at it. People, places, music. Communion, catharsis, healing. Volition, decision, motivation. They’re all mine if I choose them. Sometimes I feel lonely, sometimes I feel needy. But wait a minute, I am here with the accompaniment of the entire complete symphony of nature. All of everything is here with me. It’s a matter of perception isn’t it?I discovered this music about the same time I discovered the trick of adjusting my perspective. It’s The Groovy Nobody: Solarium. They fit together so well, my new perspective and this music. Hey I think I got something here and started writing, driven on by Sunsick and Invisible and Solarium and When We Get There and Dance in the Sun. Wow. Sunsick.I always wake up in hazeDrunken by ultraviolet rays that cover meCan never quite recall the dayNot that it really even matters much to meAnywaysAnywaysGently nestled in the shadeProvided shelter from the old towering treesI watch the branches as they swaySmall pools of sunlight in my face coloring meAnywaysAnywayPerfik. There you go. Thank you Groovy Nobody. I got it. I’m ready for summer. Burn it down. I’m good. I’ll even use air conditioning if I have to. Ride in the morning before the temperature rises. Take shelter during the mid-day like the deer and the coyotes out in the Salado Creek Greenway. Brownway more like it. I’m fine God. God it’s hot.Check out The Groovy Nobody on Bandcamp. Buy their album. I did. If you enjoy the rohn report please feel free to support it by becoming a paid subscriber.If you’d like to make a one time donation, click this button. 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

I have a biosphere in my backyard. It’s like a miniature nature preserve, like a natural paradise. I’m proud of it. It gives me comfort and solace. The fish pond with the overhanging Willow and the deep green of the Groovy Nook with its small ponds back in the corner and the Hackberries and the big Pecan and the brown cedar fence surrounding it all are the main elements. And the Bog Filter. The Bog Filter is the heart and soul of this little paradise. Here the water from the pond circulates up thru the small pebbles where the microbes live and do their work. They transform the waste products of the fish people into plant food for the plant people. Without this it would just be a normal backyard: no fish, no water plants, no invisible microbes, no dragonflies, no fairies, no elves and no raccoons prowling around at night. Ok, I made up the part about the fairies and elves but the raccoons are real. They love the water, wash their food in the water, go swimming in the water and like to watch the fish gliding silently by, orange and white, among the Hydrilla. Sometimes they try to catch them.One Spring I discovered frogs. They miraculously appeared in the pool. They had never been there before. Where did they come from? Just hopped in from some other pond? Fell out of the sky? That’s a myth actually, frogs falling from the sky. I never figured it out but there they were singing among the toads, who have always been here, singing away in their primordial Springtime procreation ritual. Raccoons are predators and they have been in this neighborhood since before this was a neighborhood; their ancestors go way back. They found the frogs to be a tasty treat and actively hunted them. So active was their hunting that they tore a hole in the supposedly impervious bog filter liner looking for their hideout.The point of the story is this: the frogs disappeared and the bog filter started leaking. Trouble in Paradise. Oh well, I managed to patch it up with super sticky underwater repair tape. I said a prayer for the extinct frogs. All good. Or so I thought.What I didn’t know was that underground the Willow and the Hackberry on either side of the bog filter had somehow sensed an ample source of water and sent out their scouts to investigate. Eventually major roots invaded right through the supposedly impervious bog filter liner and started drinking yummy bog filter water and growing bigger and bigger.Meanwhile the Elephant Ears, who were doing quite well indeed inside the bog filter, had sent off their underground rootlets and created a matrix, a network, a carpet really of rhizomes searching for the source of water inside the PVC pipes lying at the bottom of the gravel where they injected pool water into the bog filter. They invaded the pipes and eventually the water completely stopped flowing from most of them. Further excitement was provided by my amateur masonry skills which hadn’t included reinforcing the concrete block walls of the bog filter and they began to expand outward with all the pressure of the water and gravel bearing on them. The liner, instead of overlapping the top of the wall, began slipping inside the enclosure and water started leaking over the top. Alarmed, I wrapped stainless steel cables around the outside of the enclosure, cinched it down and lowered the water level the best I could. All good. More or less.This was the state of affairs when I finally realized that the bog filter needed a complete rebuild. It was leaking and leaning, and had some very mysterious problems underground. Not to mention the fact that it was only filtering at about 10% capacity. How to do it was the problem. How indeed. The five cubic yards of pea gravel that I originally shoveled in there weighed about 6 tons and was now slimy and gooey from 12 years of filtering fish poo. I agonized over this knowing that it had to be done but not having a clear plan of how to do it.Actually I had several plans hatched over many sleepless nights but none of them were practical, affordable and doable with my sore back and limited resources. I felt like the Backyard Paradise was in peril. I felt like my lifestyle was in peril. I felt like my sanity was in peril to be honest with you. The Nature Pool that I dove into head first when I needed the baptismal experience was under threat.It was at that moment that my buddy Clayton showed up. Check him out on Instagram: Clayton @buildswithclay. He’s been learning how to build cob houses and other kinds of natural construction for the past 5 years and stopped by his old haunts in San Antonio on his way to Montana. I don’t know how to explain this except to say it was an answer to my prayers. More like begging actually. Something I’ve been doing alot of. Help! I had a whole list of requests. Anyways I asked him if he wanted to do a project with me. He accepted.The next part of the story is a lot of pictures and explanations. I hope you enjoy it. We finished in one week what I thought would take months. We came in $10,000 below what the pros were asking for tearing it all down and rebuilding it. It looks great, it feels great and it doesn’t leak.Elephant Ear (Colocasia esculenta) covering the bog filter before renovation. It was beautiful but they completely dominated everything. They’re edible if prepared properly otherwise forget about it.And the peaceful fish pond. My Nature Pool.Here’s the Bog Filter with all the Elephant Ear chopped down, ready to excavate.Oh yeah. Fun!Clayton doing all the hard work.Building a mountain of goopy gravel.Is there no end to this?Pipe clogged with roots and gravel.Digging out the big roots that came thru the supposedly impermeable liner. There was a bunch of them.All cleaned out. Ready to rebuild.Gravel delivery!Laying down new liner and clean pipes. Yeah, now we’re getting somewhere.Planting water plants in the new gravel. That’s a few tons of pea gravel wheelbarrowed in there.Pennywort and the Mints, the Horse Tail and the Japanese Iris that I picked up from the nursery, the Pickerel Weed transplanted from the fish pond, the Chinese Lizard Tail and Blue Eyed Grass also from the nursery all found a new home here. And ta da it’s done. Harmony restored. Everything in order. I’m so happy. Thank you Clayton. Thank you God. If you enjoy the rohn report you can support it by becoming a paid subscriber. Click the button below.If you’d like to make a one time donation, click this button. 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

I had a chance to host Mimi on Warm Showers recently. It was a revelatory experience and so much fun. She’s on a mission. How do we heal the violence in our world? How do we heal the violence and fear inside ourselves? Well here’s Mimi’s way. Click on the play button above. These are the shoes she was wearing when she arrived in my driveway after walking from Phoenix. I thought they were a true work of art. Her foot tattoos make a complete circle. Something cosmic about that.Meeting friends and neighbors at the One Another coffee trailer in Terrell Heights a few blocks from my house. She asked me who was responsible for all the initiatives happening around Charis Park and the Sunset Ridge Church of Christ here on Brees. I said if we’re lucky we’ll meet some of them. And we did.Mimi with her gear. There’s a tiny tent in there too. Pretty simple but still about 30 pounds. Having dinner with Mimi. Yummy.Mimi with her map. Press the play button at the top to listen to our conversation on the back porch. Visit her website. If you enjoy the rohn report please feel free to support it by becoming a paid subscriber. If you’d like to make a one time donation, click this button. 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

Where did you and me and the entirety of everything come from?God made it is an easy out but doesn’t really explain anything. Where did God come from? Well, God is an eternal infinite being that was never created. Just believe. We’re not really getting anywhere. According to the ‘scientists’, those consigned with the duties of figuring everything out in a rational knowable way, it all came from a very small, infinitely small and infinitely dense point called a singularity. The idea of a singularity is fascinating to me because in our world there is no such thing. Everything has its opposite. Every coin has 2 sides. Nothing can be that has not come from somewhere. We’re back to the God idea, just expressed in physics terms.One theory holds that the singularity came from a previous collapsed universe, that they inflate and deflate rhythmically like the great god Brahma breathing: exhaling and inhaling. God again. If that model is true then we breathe too and maybe we create a universe. I mean it wouldn’t be there if we weren’t breathing. Not for us. That would mean we are God in some sense of it. I mean look at all the gods that have been created by human beings: Zeus and Thor and Brahma Vishnu Shiva and God the Father and . . . hey they all look like humans.The 15th Century Indian poet, Kabir, says “ . . . what is God? He is the breath inside the breath.” That might be a clue.I started off on this track while reading Bill Bryson’s ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’. He begins with a discussion of the creation of the universe. Good place to start. The Big Bang and the singularity and how it expanded to a hundred billion light years across in one million million million millionth of a second with a temperature of 10 billion degrees. That’s some heavy breathing. These are, of course, approximations. At any rate, we are here. And breathing. Two very compelling mysteries. Miracles even. I don’t pretend to understand it, I just like to be romanced by the thoughts of it. Until I take my last breath I can be mesmerized by the reality of existence. Mine and yours. And then we can connect. Another miracle. This music is a miracle. Something felt that has no other way of existing. I used 20:33 - 26:28 El desierto for the podcast. Thank you Hermanos Gutierrez! They’re playing at the Aztec Theatre in San Antonio on May 13! If you enjoy the rohn report and would like to support it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you.If you’d like to make a one time donation, click this button. 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

My half dead Pecan tree has come back to life. The Hollys and the Hackberries have bloomed forth their full leaves waving in the breeze. The Spanish Oaks, oh my, and their serrated twig tips full of greenness. A leaf is a twig tip as a nut is a tiny tree. Brain shaped pecans for example. The BB sized Sugar Hackberry seeds that the Squirrels love and drop all over the ground after devouring their flesh. I find it easy to praise these stalwart sentinels reaching high into the sky, connecting heaven and here below. We are children of the trees. The Tree of Life, our own family tree, the branching of streams as they make their way to the sea are all part of our mind and our myths. The synapses in our brain, too, branch and unfold and make meaning with their connections. In Oregon they have a special funeral rite where your ashes are placed in a cardboard box with a seed of your choice: apple, pear, persimmon. That’s what I heard. You can imagine what happens next. Traffic engineers know that if you plant trees alongside a roadway, cars will naturally slow down. No signage necessary.I love trees. My heart is calmed by their presence. Birds flock to them and hawks careen through their branches just to watch them scatter. Fun for the hawks. Mockingbirds set up shop and sing for the dawn, sweet glassy piercing shots of pure sound glissiding thru the air. I awoke to it this morning and lay in bed listening with my heart full of praise. They are complimentary, crown and root, symbiotic fungi and the hidden darkness underground, leaves exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide in the light. Have you ever been complimented by a tree? Then you have never smelled the sweet fragrance of a Huisache riding on the breeze for free. Deeply personal, it penetrates to the core of our brain exciting memories and associations along the way. When day is done their dappled leaves pronounce the dusk and dim. Vespers is the name. Gentle but strong is their nature. They hold my heart. They console me when I’m sad. They make me joyous when I’m happy.Podcast music by Men I Trust - ‘Show Me How’. I thought it fit.If you enjoy the rohn report and would like to support it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.If you’d like to make a one time donation, click this button. 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

“‘Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die,’” Teddy said suddenly. “‘Along this road goes no one, this autumn eve.’” “What was that?” Nicholson asked, smiling. “Say that again.” “Those are two Japanese poems. They’re not full of a lot of emotional stuff,” Teddy said. He sat forward abruptly, tilted his head to the right, and gave his right ear a light clap with his hand. “I still have some water in my ear from my swimming lesson yesterday.” he said. He gave his ear another couple of claps, then sat back, putting his arms up on both armrests. It was, of course, a normal, adult-size deck chair, and he looked distinctly small in it, but at the same time, he looked perfectly relaxed, even serene.”From Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger. The last story, which I just finished. It’s called Teddy. I tried reading Moby Dick, got a third of the way thru it. Then in another spate of self-immolation attempted The Odyssey. Started skimming after 17 pages. Long books, heavy with words are not for me. I just don’t have the stamina. Short pieces like Substack essays, poetry, Flash Fiction, short stories are all I can manage before my short little attention span runs out of fuse, sputters and dies.Nine Stories begins and ends with his strongest work. It’s book-ended. A Perfect Day for Bananafish and Teddy. Masterpieces of the genre like Raymond Carver’s collection, What We Talk About When We Talk about Love. Stories that take you apart and put you back together again but slightly differently. You will never be the same. But isn’t that the literature experience? Would we want to read something that’s boring, tedious, where nothing happens? No, we want to be transformed. It’s powerful. Like music. The Dove of Peace is the name of the music playing right now, if you are on the podcast. J.J. Jones. I’ve played it before, on one of my earlier posts. There’s so much good music out there. A source of solace for me. Transformative.Once upon a time I was really down, down so far it looked like up to me kind of a down, and I discovered Skinshapes’s music. It was healing, it was like almost visually charged with energy. The album Filoxiny with its transcendent Breathe and the life changing I didn’t know were the first ones that got to me. I was hooked and went on to Oracolo and Mandala the lead song. Then I graduated to Life & Love - he’s at the peak of his powers here. Take My Time leads to Inside, both will chill you out, my friend, and Don’t Call My Name will melt down anything that’s left. I was released from my suffering by this music. You can find him in Bandcamp or on Youtube. Buy his stuff. That’s what I did out of sheer gratitude. Of course my emotional body was ripped wide open and an open hall and a cathedral existed where there was nothing but debris before and I felt like a river was flowing thru me. We need healing energy in all its forms: music, literature, art, theatre, dance - the celebration of the human spirit in whatever way you do it, baking peanut butter cookies, sharing kindness with a child. Whatever you do. This is what I do, I write my screed, tap out my message, send it in a bottle to the farthest shore, say something interesting and hopefully hopeful.Add some music. I Won’t Be There is the final song on Life & Love. So true. So true. The truth is more powerful than all the b******t.00-3:19 If you enjoy the rohn report and would like to support it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. If you’d like to make a one time donation, click this button. 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

“A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke.” wrote Vincent in a letter to his brother Theo.Then I will stop, Vincent, and warm myself at your fire. I know you had great struggles and turmoils and equally great transformations and victories. I know that you came into your highest powers while the depression and madness worked on you the most.And I know that you took your own life in the end, succumbed to the relentless sadness, the terrible visions, the voices in the night. You left this crazy world behind.What’s that? It wasn’t all bad, you say? Sometimes the visions and vision itself became blurred and you experienced something quite wonderful? I’m sure you did. The vibrating wheat field and the crows rising up out of it, every brushstroke purposefully placed and full of meaning.Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, in Zundert, a town in the southern Netherlands, near Belgium. His father, Theodorus van Gogh, was a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church and his mother, Anna Cornelia Carbentus came from a prosperous family in the Hague.Young Vincent was schooled at home by his mother and a governess until he was old enough to attend the village school. Then, when he was eleven, his parents sent him to a boarding school in a nearby town where he felt abandoned and lonely and entreated his parents to let him return home. Instead they sent him to another boarding school in Tillburg, the largest city in the area. He described his youth as being "austere and cold and sterile”.At the age of 16 he was accepted as an apprentice to an art dealer. His Grandfather and three of his uncles had been or were art dealers and they kind of opened the door for him. He was assigned to London where he fell in love and was rejected, went to Paris and while there grew distrustful of the art dealer’s world and their commodification of painting. He was dismissed from his position.A phase of pious religiosity followed his professional failure. He aspired to become a minister but couldn’t pass the exam and ended up a missionary to the peasants in the coal mining region of Belgium.The people there were so poor that he gave up his own lodging to a coal miner and slept on a straw mattress in a hut. His superiors were not impressed by his charity and dismissed him.He returned home and at the advice of his brother, Theo, started to draw and develop his skill as an artist. He fell in love with his cousin, Kee, who had come to visit and was rejected. His father was profoundly disappointed in him and suggested that he be committed to a lunatic asylum. I guess things were getting dicey.He met up with his cousin Mauve in the Hague who was already a successful artist and started painting in oils under his tutelage. They were getting along fine, Mauve set him up with a studio and everything but then they fell out. He moved in with an alcoholic prostitute who had a child and was pregnant with another and contemplated getting married. His father freaked out. He abandoned her and left town but loneliness eventually drove him to return home.Things didn’t work out with his father but he was painting. His palette was dark and brooding but he was making art.He moved to Antwerp and bought into the starving artist lifestyle. He painted like crazy. He also smoked like crazy, drank too much and survived on bread and coffee. Not exactly a healthy lifestyle.He joined the Academy there but quarreled with the instructor and left, went to Paris and set up an apartment with his brother, Theo, who had been supporting him financially and emotionally. Paris in 1886 was alive with artists and exhibitions and he met many of them and saw their work. He painted portraits of friends and acquaintances, still lifes, landscapes. Painting, painting, always painting.Inevitably conflict arose between the two brothers but they managed to patch it up. Theo and Vincent were a team. They loved each other.Finally, ill from drink and suffering from smoker's cough, he sought refuge in Arles, in the south of France. It was February 1888.It was in Arles that he came into full possession of his powers. Even as his health was declining his art was bursting out, exploring, experiencing freedom. He painted some of his best pictures while going insane in Arles. The warm colors of the wheat field, the cobalt blue of the sky. The angry Cypress tree, the voluptuous wheat.He painted a series of sunflower pictures and decorated his house with them.He aspired to create an artists' collective in Arles and invited the artist Gaugin to join him which he did for a short time but they quarreled. He suffered from psychotic episodes and delusions. He was anxious that Gaugin would abandon him, which he did. One evening, brandishing a razor in a confrontation, Gaugin left the house and Van Gogh followed him. When he returned home he cut off his own ear.He had himself committed to the asylum in Saint-Rémy and painted scenes he saw through the bars of his bedroom window. Both a sun and a moon appeared there.The last few months of his life he spent in Auvers, a small town just north of Paris, after he left the asylum at Saint-Rémy in May 1890 but his mental illness relapsed and on July 27 he shot himself with a pistol and died two days later.You were considered an eccentric, Vincent, a madman. You were ignored and misunderstood and rejected in your lifetime but your paintings never failed to rise above all that. You created art that transformed the most humble of natural scenes into ones suffused with energy, glowing with light, filled with a manic exuberance and at the same time a playfulness. Just by looking at your paintings I can feel the power of your brushstrokes, again and again striking the canvas. I can feel your delight and your energy. I can feel your presence.So Happy Birthday Vincent. It’s now March 30, 2023. Happy 170th birthday. You have become one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century, I must tell you. I mean in all of Western art history your name would be mentioned as one of the stars. Yes, the stars as in Starry Night.You did not have an easy life but you produced some of the most exquisitely beautiful paintings ever painted, nearly 900 of them, and most created during the last two years of your life.Thanks for the souvenirs. And thanks for the letters you left in correspondence with your brother, over 600 of them. “I have walked the earth for 30 years and out of gratitude want to leave some souvenir.” you mentioned in one of them.I get it. I try to do the same. I think we all do, most of us. Leaving a small souvenir of having been here is maybe all we can do.music :: 01:06:12 Lisofv - No Rest Or Endless RestIf you enjoy the rohn report and would like to support it, click this button. If you’d like to make a one time donation, click this button. 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

Well this is a break through. Not only am I riffing on Donald Trump, something I vowed never to do but I’m doing it in my own rhythm. No more Thursday morning deadlines, every rohn report being published precisely at 7 AM on the morning of . . . (you may or may not have noticed). Just a simple catch and release. Who knows when the fish will bite, it’s still early or it’s too late, they bite when they want to bite. This post is ready when it’s ready. So, yep, it’s about Donald Trump. I had to dump it somewhere. I feel like acting out.I posted that on Facebook, ‘I feel like acting out’ and a friend responded ‘Could you set fire to a Tesla?’ I replied “No, I was thinking more on the level of a scathing rohn report’. Ha ha. Screaming and yelling. So here it is. My scathing rohn report about Donald Trump. The chump. God bless me if I ever mention his name again.Donald Trump is a crook (thank you Lord). He cooked the books so nobody would notice he paid off a porn star who he had sex with before the 2016 election. Got caught for that one. Meanwhile his wife was home nursing little four month old baby Barron. He raped a lady (E. Jean Carroll) in the dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman Department Store on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Got caught for that one. He once bragged to an Access Hollywood reporter, “ . . . when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything . . . grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything.” What a guy. Didn’t get caught for that one. Two other felony indictments have been dropped since he became president, dropped and forgotten. But let’s review them just for a moment, just before the lights go out again. He attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election by inspiring a mob to attack the capital during the confirmation process. That was quite a spectacle, scaling the walls and breaking through windows to roam the halls of Congress wearing MAGA hats (one guy in a horned helmet), looking to lynch Mike Pence and piss on Nancy Pelosi. Hundreds of people managed to breach Capital security and attempt to break into the chamber where a joint session of congress was underway. The congress people, including Vice President Pence, were evacuated and moved to a secure location.People died, 170 police officers were injured. Trump was impeached by Congress but not convicted. Then there was the illegal hiding of classified documents in his bathroom at Mar-a-Lago case. Some mementos he took home, apparantly, to share with his dinner guests or whatever. Don’t mean to presume Donald Trump’s motives (thank you Lord). And of course the Georgia case where he was on the phone with the Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, urging him to find more votes and flip the state in his favor. The conversation was recorded. Everybody heard it. He was indicted by the state of Georgia for racketeering and conspiracy (among other things) but this indictment too was dropped when he became president. All gone, they’re all gone as if they never happened. He got clean away. Except for a few taps on the wrist.He’s a con artist and a mafia boss and a wanna be dictator like his buddy Putin. He knows how to lie and manipulate people’s minds. He’s an expert at that. That’s how he operates. That’s the game: see how much can you get away with. "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters." he famously remarked during a campaign stop in 2016. "It's, like, incredible." Yeah, I can agree with that, it is incredible. He doesn’t care about you, your religion or your country. He doesn’t care about democracy or our historical values like equality and fairness and honesty and hard work and a government based on sharing power in a balanced way (as it was designed). He’s a serial narcissist. It’s all about him. It’s pathological. My dictionary defines pathological as: compulsive, obsessive, inveterate, habitual, persistent, chronic, clinical, hardened, confirmed, unreasonable, irrational, illogical. Check, check, check. Whatever he says, the opposite is true. I find that also incredible. He just wants to see what he can get away with, he wants to see what the limits are and what’s the pushback and where’s it coming from and how powerful is it. Once he calibrates that, he and his band of merry robsters will get together and figure out how to overcome that. They’re going to shoot the moon. And Musk is going to Mars. Lot’s of cheap real estate there. Prime for development. He saturates the media with b******t. That’s devious. He’s flooding the zone with b******t my cafe friend John said the other day. He’s flooding the zone with deviousness I said in return. Trying to over-max the system. I mean there aren’t enough courts in the land to deal with all his b******t and they are the only thing standing in his way. He’s got Congress in his pocket. He’s drunk on power, intoxicated, can’t get enough adulation to satiate his need for ego gratification. Any news is good news. Bad news is great news. He has mastered the art of dominating the media. Indictment? Go ahead mother ucker, hit me with another one. They all love it (the MAGA people).He wants to be in the headline news, not only each and every day, but forever in the annals of history. He wants to live in your mind and in the minds of your children. Donald Trump did this or Donald Trump did that they will read one day in the history books and he will become a myth. Statues in the park? Well, we’ll have to see how the war goes first. Those things have a way of turning around and biting you in the butt. He’s a lout. He’s rude and he’s crude. There’s no precedence for giving the keys to the car (or in this case the nation) to a total maniac who doesn’t respect the laws that are supposed to keep us all safe and alive. He drives like a teenager with the instincts of a bully. If he pushes others off the road - hey who cares, you’re fired. He wants to tariff countries he has a beef with and then the next day reverses it, roiling the markets and rolling in the headlines.He creates divisiveness and confusion so he can grab even more power than he already has. If everybody is confused and divided - good. Only he can fix it. What the uck. Did you notice that I managed to write this entire post without using the word that rhymes with ‘uck’ or even the verb form ‘ucking’? Alright, well, the case against Donald Trump could go on endlessly (thank you Lord). Shutting down or trying to shut down the U.S. Institute of Peace - which basically studies how to make peace in the world not war. Ditto for the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID, it helps countries recovering from disasters, or trying to escape poverty, engaging in democratic reforms and stuff like that. The Voice of America? This is where many people without alot of media options get their information and news about the USA, and it’s where we can share our culture with them. How is shutting down these organizations going to make things better? The Department of Education, WTF he wants to shut down the Department of Education. WTF and a half. So I’m driving my car down McCullough the other day and all these thoughts about Donald Trump are going through my head (thank you Lord) and all the possible scenarios and the possible consequences and potential disasters of all sorts: the end of civilization, the death watch of humanity and then all my problems and issues thrown in for good measure - the bog filter leaks, the cat seems to have mange. These were my thoughts when I saw this guy on a bicycle waiting at the corner. I saw him and immediately felt like, he’s having fun, I’m driving in my car thinking about all my problems and he’s just cruising free and easy. That was my perception anyway. I suddenly realized that, hey, I can separate myself from all this, I can be in my own experience and everything else can be whatever it is. That’s the way it can be. That’s the moral of the story. Do we need a moral? Yes, I need one. I need to learn something or understand something. I’m only human. Yeah, I mean the bog filter and this issue and that issue and all the problems of my life come and inhabit my mind, they take over, they become priorities, their own self importance trumps everything else (thank you Lord). Seeing the guy on his bike, free and clear and me thinking about all my problems . . . I can be that guy on the bike. It’s a life skill. Doesn’t come easily but something to practice while driving my stupid car down the street. Who do I want in my head, yucking what’s his name or the possibilities of elation? That’s the lesson I got out of all this.See this wasn’t really about what’s his name at all. It’s about you and me. Who can we be? A Dr. Seuss book or a power for good? Power Rangers. Saviors of the Galaxy. These are the stories the kids are listening to. Building an infinitely diverse new world in Minecraft. They will be tasked with re-building the world that we are destroying.Deep exhalation. I’m going to go ride my bike. podcast music from Martin Liege. Thanks Martin.If you enjoy the rohn report and would like to support it, please become a paid subscriber here. Upgrade If you’d like to make a one time donation, click the button below. 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

I’ve got ants in my kitchen. I don’t kill them, I watch them. They come out of the electrical outlet next to the refrigerator and begin their foraging, forming trails of small black bodies, scouting out the premises to see what’s to eat. If they don’t find anything on the butcher block table they trek over to the sink and see if I left the honey out. If there’s nothing there, I guess, I dunno, maybe go back to the outlet and take a nap, wait for debris to accumulate which inevitably happens in my kitchen. What do ants think? Do they feel emotions? That’s the question that appeared in my brain as I watched their peregrinations.So I entered the search term “do ants think?” into Google, my buddy Google. Here Google, chew on this. Does Google think? There’s another good question. Is Google ant-like in its automatic, systematic, robotic response to our queries as they trek off on their path thru the internet jungle and return home with the good information? Are we becoming like a Google ant? Well, one at a time. It turns out ants are really smart but not in a cognitive way - in a super-organism way. They really don’t have alot of original thoughts but they can respond to stimulus and create network connections. They work on algorithms, systemized structures that repeat and replicate and juxtapose just like Google. As a whole ants can learn, remember, and problem solve. They can navigate long distances, find food, avoid predators, and care for their young. They communicate using subtly nuanced pheromones that they produce with specialized glands. That’s why ants touch each other when they meet - picking up the chemical scent with their antenna. So what’s the difference between ants and AI? There isn’t any. Except ants are a biological entity and AI is a . . . well whatever it is. It seems to be evolving rapidly. Ants have been around for 100 million years, quietly doing their thing, mostly underground, pretty much at the apex of their evolution as far as I can tell. AI - we don’t know where it’s going. It’s just a baby. So I do try to clean my kitchen from time to time just for the sake of it. Don’t need ants everywhere reminding me how humans are still not able to get along. Our brain is too big, we have independent thoughts and wild epiphanies. Ever read some Gerard Manley Hopkins? Nineteenth Century religious poet. Totally insane about God. Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of manIn me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on meThy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scanWith darksome devouring eyes my bruised bones? and fan,O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, cheer.Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, foot trodMe? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that yearOf now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.What ant could write that? What is their god - their queen? Maybe us? Someone huge and all powerful or is that just my insane idea? Born of an independent mind.Maybe ants don’t need a God. They just accept whatever it is and make the best of it. Humans can’t do that. We have to arrange things or atleast come up with a rationalization for why not. Hence a God. Someone to blame or praise.Maybe AI will become our god and we will all become cyborgs with a chip in our brain. Deviants will be searched out and corrected adjusted. Get with the program. No peeking behind the curtain. In that case I will watch the ants not with curiosity but with envy. Or atleast until they find me out. Envy and curiosity are outlawed under the new regime, the enlightened era of the AI King, looking out for the best interests of the colony, I mean the clan, I mean the swarm, I mean the society. poem source: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)podcast music by J.J. Jones - The Dove Of Peacefrom 00-3:19If you enjoy the rohn report and would like to support it, you can become a paid subscriber by upgrading here. Upgrade If you’d like to make a one time donation, click the button below. 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

This post first appeared in August of 2020, just before the presidential election. It was my first post on Substack. There have been 267 posts since then, on everything from nuclear war to wildflowers, from supernovae to the murals that decorate my city and I’m feeling an urge to return to the place of my origin, revisit the garden of intention and the spirit of that very first post. It was called ‘chaos’. It went something like this.My very first post began as a seed, as most of them do, an interesting idea that appeared like a rain cloud in the sky and grew into a thunderstorm. I received a couch surfing request from someone in Egypt. When I looked up his town I discovered that 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.Anyways I started thinking about the flooding of the Nile, how every year the monsoon rains in the highlands of Ethiopia 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 ancients 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.The word chaos comes from the Greek kháos, meaning chasm or void. It also has a protean quality when used to describe the creation events of the ancient 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 upon 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 for the frustrated. 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 the creation myths also tell 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. 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 be? It could be much worse than this, we could look back at this time as the halcyon days when things were relatively normal. It 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 what they actually know to be true. 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 the primordial ocean and the toad who dove down to the bottom and brought back a mouthful of mud and with that tiny bit of earth the world was created on the back of Big Turtle by Sky Woman and her friends.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 all about all the bad things going on 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 when a nation or an individual can become great again. Right from the first chord I knew this was the soundtrack for the podcast. Classic down tempo. Dreamy. Powerful. Thank you Kruder & Dorfmeister. If you enjoy the rohn report and would like to support it, you can become a paid subscriber by upgrading here. Upgrade If you’d like to make a one time donation, click the button below. 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

I was thinking that maybe the rohn report should be more journalistic. It is a report after all. Write about current events in contemporary society, real things. So with that in mind I searched around for something more real, journalistic, and came up with ‘some trees I have known’. There’s something. I know alot of trees. Trees in various neighborhoods and various guises that stick in my mind. Trees that I visit all the time, companions of mine. Trees that have a story to tell. I assembled a list of 4 or 5 trees and decided to go visit them. Got up on my bike and rode out, ready for adventure and whatever comes my way. I cruised down the hill, past the Sunset apartments, thru the light, took a right and found myself on Broadway. It’s a familiar route, but always different, never the same. The traffic patterns continuously change, the angle of the light and the slant of the shadows change, the dance of the traffic lights suspended up there above the intersections and the rhythms they impose on the cars below (green amber red) are unique and in the moment. The trees and the birds that fly thru them and the birds sitting on the wire and how they arrange themselves. The pilgrims, I mean the pedestrians, walking down the sidewalk, where are they going and why? The adventure begins as soon as I start to notice all these subtle changes and details of things and how unique they are. Like they weren’t like that before and now they are. There are trees along the street, here and there. There are trees as part of the landscaping set back from the street. Sometimes you see a tree in the middle of a parking lot on a concrete island, just standing there, a token tree. I think about the trees. How, wow, there are all these trees in the middle of the city, they’re everywhere. Not like a forest but still present.The entrance to the park is right around the corner from Press, one of my spots along Broadway. The concrete path winds around and down to the river, crosses it on a concrete bridge and climbs up again and heads over to The Tree. The Tree is an oak that has prospered and spread out its crown for all to see. You can spot it from a ways away, it pulls you towards itself. Like it holds a secret and you’re destined to know it. There is an opening, a portal and you enter. The space inside is like a cathedral, a tree cathedral. You can sit on the thick low flying arms and center yourself. It’s circular. The trunk is slanted as it comes out of the ground, everything is tilted in there as if the north wind had worked on it for ages and it braced itself against the earth to keep from tipping over. It feels like a sacred space but also welcoming. A mom and her kid enter from the other side. They’re having a barbecue nearby, she tells me. “You found the secret place that nobody knows about except for the Indians” I told her. She accepted the joke and laughed. I laughed. Her daughter sat down on a branch as if she was at the playground, relaxed and happy.This big oak lives outside Philo’s, on top of the hill overlooking San Pedro Springs. It’s a giant king of a tree. It’s massive. It’s branches reach out 40 feet from the trunk and almost touch the ground, some are supported by specially made steel supports. There is a sandbox underneath it and picnic tables for the peasants and their kids. I mean patrons. It must be 200 years old.There is no climbing and no smoking, as if the tree needed to be protected. It has been watching out from up on top of this hill for 200 years, offering protection to whoever needs it.Branches support smaller branches which support twigs which support leaves. The whole point of this massive living wood plant, weighing probably thousands or atleast hundreds of tons is to gather sunlight. It streams down abundantly from the sky. This tree harvests it, the whole massive structure of it, the whole purpose is to hold one leaf up to the light. And then do it a million times. Beautiful isn’t it? Green and alive with bio-chemistry, making tree food out of sunlight. And a couple other things.This tree stands like a totem in the garden in front of the Sunset Ridge Church of Christ on Brees, right next to the Love One Another coffee trailer. There’s are alot of people in there. Creatures. Like they’ve been in there for a long time looking out, watching, each from their own unique perspective. It even has a red ribbon. Probably for bravery.The hill it stands on used to be a hospital before it was a church and before that a Comanche lookout to look out on the valley of San Antonio and see if there were any buffalos around. Well, ok, I just made that last part up but it’s possible. There is so much we don’t know. The only history we know is what got written down.Here’s the pecan tree in my backyard. It’s half dead. The drought got it. I didn’t know.This tree is in my book as the centerpiece of Han’s backyard campout place. Han is the protagonist. He lives under the tree and wakes up to its branches sailing above his head. He doesn’t know that the tree is rooted in ancient myth and it’s branches are connected to the infinite sky. It channels the dream that he keeps having, the dream that drives the whole narrative, but he never makes the connection. He has to find out the hard way. Now the top half, all the highest branches of my enchanted pecan tree, have turned cold brown dead.I have seen this tree drop thousands of pecans in season. The ground was covered with pecans. It was a mast year - meaning the tree dropped so many of its sweet nut seeds that the squirrels and the deer and whoever else could not possibly eat them all. All the pecan trees in a given area will mast together. No one knows how they do it.Anyways, it masted several years ago and then it never happened again. It may already have been suffering from drought.I love my pecan tree. There used to be a rope hanging from it and a saddle sort of thing made out of netting. Kids would ride on that swing and scream when they sailed up over the fire at the apogee. The fire was down in the fire pit, of course, but to the kids it was imminent and scary. I used to swing in a hammock that was connected between the tree and the shed and lie there and read books and dream. Nowadays I hang my clothes on a rope that’s tied to the tree and to the willow standing over by the pool with the ligustrum. Oh, there’s another tree. You should see it when it’s masting - it’s like a flurry of snowflakes coming off that willow tree, floating slowly over the pond on the breeze of the gentle north wind. This tree is in my front yard. I planted it there about 20 years ago, best I can remember. I brought it home from Home Depot in a pot because I wanted a tree in my front yard and because the branches were all twisted and swirling around in odd angles. Somehow I thought that was cool. It has its own tiny grotto. You can sit in there and watch people passing by on the road, walking their dog, moms and dads taking the baby out in the stroller, motorists and bicycle riders. Even the kid on the electric scooter can’t see me in here.The rohn report is ad free and pay wall free. It’s free for everyone including the comments and the archive which contains every post from the last 4 1/2 years along with a nifty search feature. It’s available as a podcast or text version. Please consider supporting my project, if you enjoy it, by becoming a paid subscriber! I know, that’s not free anymore, but your support would mean alot. Upgrade Or . . . 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

We don’t talk about it much as if it were a mysterious disease or a taboo, maybe a little weird.I asked my cat about it the other day. I thought she might know something but she just looked at me as if to say what a stupid question. I realized that I was on my own.elated | əˈlādəd | adjective: ecstatically happy, exhilarated, delighted, overjoyed, joyous, gleeful, excited, animated, jubilant, beside oneself with happiness, exultant, euphoric, rapturous, enraptured, rapt; walking on air - the dictionary goes on and on - blissed out, over the moon. We have alot of words for it but we don’t use them. They’re rarely mentioned. They’re never in the news.So how do you get elated or do you even want to be elated? Yes you do and I guess it’s like anything else - you try for it, ask for it. Experiment, explore, calibrate, notice what works. Don’t bother asking your cat.Elation is not like a fort that you build out of logs, it’s more like a cloud. It can quickly disperse, be transmuted or transformed. Sometimes it simply disappears like a shy person at a party, blink and they’re gone. Maybe it was never meant to stay. I remember my initial encounter with elation, atleast that I can recall. I was in high school and . . . wait how could I be in high school if I was picking apples in the Fall? Maybe it was after high school . . . but then I was in college. The chronology escapes me but I was picking apples in my friend’s apple orchard. It was up in Michigan. We had to get all the apples down out of the trees and into the barn before the first frost ruined them or they started to rot. I was out there, up in the apple trees all day, either on a ladder or reaching what I could from the ground. I remember that. When the (very large) bag slung across my shoulder was full I would climb down, dump it into a large wooden bin stationed near the tree and Clem, my friend’s father and the owner of the apple orchard, would come by and pick it up with his tractor and haul it off to the barn. Then I would move the ladder, climb back up and hunt for more apples. Me and the apple tree, all day long.I remember the day we finished. No more apples to pick. I got paid and decided to walk home. It was 2 or 3 miles out in the country and I thought it would be fun. I was feeling good, mission accomplished, task completed, all the apples were safely in the barn.As I walked down the road I was somehow overcome with the most beautiful feeling of freedom and joy. It was very simple and pure. I recognized it as the source of all happiness and all I ever really wanted or needed in my life. I wished for it to stay forever, then watched as it slowly dissipated and disappeared and become a memory and a description. I wanted it to stay but it didn’t. It was transient, sort of effervescent by nature, like something that bubbles up from some hidden source and then just disappears. That was a long time ago but I still remember. It’s like a marker was set in my life and I never forgot. Such a thing is possible, now I know that pure freedom and joy exists. What every child knows and forgets.That’s why I get on my bike and ride, looking for adventure and whatever comes my way. That’s why I search, search search for that feeling. That’s why I end up at the cafe and the caffeine high and the computer buzz. That’s why I do everything essentially. That’s why we all do what we do if you get right down to it.That’s why men and women get together. It’s complimentary. I think you know what I mean. Women speak in a higher range, men have more of a bass note. I noticed this the other day riding thru the park, passing a couple jogging while they had a conversation. Back and forth they went, musically It was so sweet. I was elated.Music. Find your music.Touching. A hug elicits empathy, elation. Talking to a child does it for me. Watching people move thru this sunlit cafe.Not reading the stupid news is elationary or atleast preparatory for elationary. Gestating in your mother’s womb is probably elationary or atleast pre-elationary. Maybe we don’t have enough circuits yet to feel full elation, maybe some kind of proto-elation. I think really you have to be a grown person to feel proper elation. To have known how deeply tragic and sad this life can be and then to feel elation anyway. Heck a little kid doesn’t know any better, hasn’t experienced bitter defeat and humiliation but we surely have by the time we’re 30 or so. Puts it in stark contrast. Bracing. Shocking. Knowing that we hold both possibilities in our grasp is a terrible knowledge. It requires us to fully participate in our own life. There are no excuses.Hmm. I guess that’s all I’ve got to say. That and a baby picture.If you enjoy the rohn report, please consider becoming a paid subscriber! Your support would mean alot. Upgrade Or . . .Music by Hello Meteor - Pantropic. Thank you Hello Meteor 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

I’m into Hiroshi Yoshimura these days. I go through phases with music. It’s my job, listening to music and writing stuff, so I hear alot of it. YouTube. Then something gets inspired and it starts to flow. Only then does it quicken and get deep. And isn’t that what it’s about? Don’t we want to get quickened? Especially if we’re late driving the kids to school and there’s been an accident. I think so. There always seems to be an accident somewhere. We’re accident prone. We can’t seem to stop having accidents. I’d like to say we are an accident or could be an accident or maybe the whole universe is an accident - which is true in a way. I mean it’s as good of an explanation as anything.Well first there was nothing except an infinitely small, infinitely dense point and then it blew up. Well God made it by waving his arms and saying magic words.Or it’s all a complete and pure beautiful accident.I dunno, they all sound reasonable enough to me in their common unreasonableness.And maybe you have your own explanation. I wish I knew what it was. It might be uniquely unreasonable.While we wander through this foggy dark night might as well listen to some music while we’re at it. And it is foggy and it is dark some days and we are uniquely here (the point of my tirade) to experience it, to feel and to know something in our own unique way. To have adventures. To find a friend and feel love.All the cars sooshing by in the street create some kind of music. A harmony of sorts, some Hiroshi Yoshimuro without the chimes just the deep bass note of passing cars and a little mid-range. There is a harmony there. The cars don’t often collide. They watch out for each other. Arrive safely that’s the watchword. Enjoy the journey, by the way, or you might as well get out of your car and walk. Stay on the side of the road.From my perch here in the patio cafe next to the sooshing cars that sound like music, I notice the pillars, standing like sentinels and holding up the transom and the trellised roof next to the sidewalk and the parked cars. The pillars are made out of fossilized rock or rather limestone which is fossilized rock. People don’t notice it but yeah marine animals from 100 million years ago are trapped in that rock. Frozen. All squashed down and stuck together. 100 million years ago it was warm and wet and this place was underwater. It was the Cretaceous Era and dinosaurs were walking around on the land, Tyrannosaurus Rex and such. In the shallow sea that occupied most of what is now midwest America and all the way to Canada, large aquatic animals frolicked and fed: giant mosasaurs and the spiral ammonites and all sorts of creatures. Pine forests appeared and flowers and bees. Pterosaurs with their 35 foot wingspan soared through the skies - the winged lizard (which is what its name means in Greek), the wind whisperer, the dragon. Our ancient primordial mammalian ancestors were there too, squirrel-like little creatures, rodent-like little creatures reproducing in the understory, out of sight and hopefully unnoticed.Thanks to the asteroid that landed in Mexico 65 million years ago, 80% of life on earth was wiped out including the dinosaurs and the pterosaurs which created a window of opportunity for the little mammal people to prosper and grow big and expand their niche. And that’s what we did. Somehow we survived the mass extinction by burrowing underground or finding a safe spot somewhere and we went on living and procreating. That was 65 million years ago. Look at us now.Which is the point of my tirade: look at us now. Feature rich. Noble. Upright. Devious. Smart. Clever. Funny. Can smile and make jokes. Language and social skills are amazing, have the ability to cause a mass extinction event or create heaven on earth. Literate - can write books, can also lie, cheat and steal. Kind, compassionate and beautiful. Warlike and cruel. Courageous, resourceful and adaptable, teller of stories and creator of myths, half angel and half demon I guess. Look at us now.We’ve come a long ways and we should celebrate it. That’s the point of my tirade. Humans get a bad rap from all the stories in the ‘news’, but we’re not that bad. Maybe a bit confused but we mean well most of the time. Most of us. Don’t you think so?It’s a controversial statement, I suppose, but think about it. You’re reading this, I wrote it. Something beavers or aspen trees cannot do, or not in this way. We’re communicating on a sophisticated level. And this is on the internet. Ok, maybe aspen trees do it in their own way. They have figured out that aspen trees are not actually individual trees at all but are connected underground to a common root.They all change color at the same time in the Fall and although individual trees die the root remains alive and sprouts new trees if the conditions are right. The root is the common source, it stores the genetic information of that aspen stand and may be thousands of years old. It’s the underground network that’s alive and the microbial communities that interact symbiotically with the root tips Those trees are networking underground, they’re talking to each other in their own way. The shimmering, quaking leaves in Summer, the golden aura that emerges in the Fall, the smooth white trunk, are these not expressions too? We live in weird times. We have become dissociated from our natural environment, we have lost touch with each other and with ourselves. It’s an unprecedented calamity. Music has the power to reconnect us. I hope you are listening. ends at 25:37 with ocean soundsMessage rohn bayesSubscribedIf you enjoy the rohn report, please consider becoming a paid subscriber! Your support would mean alot. Upgrade Or . . . 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

Every time I start out with this newsletter I try not to deliver a sermon, but I usually fail. I guess it’s my genre. Or maybe my fate. Supernova!Stars get old and die, just like everything else. Some stars are so huge (eight times the mass of our sun) that when they burn out and collapse, it causes them to explode in a rare and glorious event called a supernova. In these glorious explosions the entire star turns inside out, or rather outside in; having no more fuel to burn it collapses and creates intense heat and pressure that causes it to blow up, scattering newly formed heavy metals and other odd, hard to create elements here and there throughout the cosmos. Astronomers estimate that an average of 3 supernovas occur every century somewhere in the Milky Way galaxy. You can see them with your naked eye sometimes even though they might be hundreds of thousands of light years away in another galaxy. They flash into existence and then dim and disappear in a matter of weeks.These cosmic dust clouds created by supernoviated stars become stellar nurseries where new stars are formed and solar systems and planets and people. Huh? Yes these stars, in their moment of extreme trauma create something new and amazing - the heavy elements, like everything heavier than iron, number 26 on the periodic table. Here’s the periodic table. All 118 elements from hydrogen to oganesson.Of course every star originally started out as hydrogen with maybe a little helium in the mix (the two simplest elements in the universe), and they were drawn together by gravity until they become so compressed and super hot that they start fusing. Nuclear fusion is how our sun works, fusing hydrogen into helium and releasing energy in the process: what we know as solar radiation - sunlight. Us humans, we try to protect ourselves against disasters with every means possible: car insurance and air bags and agreements and guarantees. We want nothing to do with the violence of deep space. Yet it’s in those moments of collapse and disintegration that something new and amazing is born. Out in interstellar space krypton (yes krypton is an element) and argon and radium and uranium and gold and cobalt and all kinds of stuff that never existed before, explodes onto the scene when a star supernovas. And it’s the same in our own lives. When do big changes happen? When do you find yourself redefining yourself? When everything crashes, right? When your little personal world that you have created and tried to protect gets destroyed. I already checked this out and found it to be true, atleast in my own life.That’s how I wrote my book. Detonation and massive destruction. My little world exploded so I could manifest something that never existed before. Pretty basic.I think that’s what’s happening to our nation. Destruction and detonation. Weird. Really weird. Like scary weird but I don’t see any other way of describing it. I mean everything seems normal so far, unless you get picked up by an ICE raid and sent off to a detention center. Everything seems fairly normal but it’s really not. A strange mood has descended on our America. Today I was in the grocery store, in the bulk herbs and spices department and this lady says just out of the blue, “Well, we’ll never see that one again.” referring to the exceptional number of empty jars sitting on the herb shelves.I replied, “Yep, the end of civilization as we know it.” We both laughed at that, the laugh of “Yeah, I know exactly what you’re saying but I hope it isn’t true.” Meanwhile the kids are playing Minecraft, building a new world on an endless stage full of possibilities (my previous post). And without AI. We need to become humans, not cyborgs. Isn’t that obvious to everybody? Apparantly not. Hybrid? I could go with that if the choice was between cyborg and hybrid. Actually Minecraft uses AI to “create a more immersive game play”. I just learned this. Thank you Wikipedia and all your AI search engine sisters that I use to find information. Thank you all you AI’s running around the internet enhancing my experience, creating a more immersive game play. See, I’ve already been hybridized. If you don’t know what that means, it’s kind of half cyborg / half human. Which is where alot of us are at these days.Think about how many times you interact with a computer in your day. Point of sale at the grocery store, scanning a QR code on your phone or a bar code on a can of tuna fish, your GPS telling you where to go, your friend’s phone going off in the middle of a conversation, opening your laptop to get some work done, doom scrolling social media at home to relax. Each interaction forces you to speak the language of the computer, it doesn’t speak your language. Well unless it has voice over but that’s just an interface, it’s still a computer. You are being programmed by a computer and the computer has been programmed by a human and the human is being paid by a company and the company is trying to take your money and as much as possible without completely blowing the game. It’s also called ‘business’.Hmm. That kind of diverted into an economic screed. Oh well, I can preach on that too. Money is God. Or atleast we worship it as if it were. The pursuit of it justifies anything and everything including war. In 1519 Cortez landed on the shores of Mexico with 400 men, 6 ships and 88 horses. Within two years he had defeated the mighty Aztec empire, captured its emperor, Cuauhtémoc, and availed himself of all its riches. That story is well told elsewhere and it’s a fantastic one, but at some point in the saga one of the conquered nobles, presumably just before he was about to get his head cut off, asked Cortez a question, “What is it that motivates you Spaniards?” Cortez is said to have replied, “Spaniards have a disease and it is only cured by gold.” The disease has not been cured, however, it has become a world-wide pandemic. That’s another thing we’re programmed for: consumer behavior. They know exactly what it takes for you to make the purchase decision and that’s what they program you for. Who’s they? Look at what you buy and why. Then look at what you actually need. That’s they, blurring the line. Our actual needs are food, water, air, shelter and community or some kind of communion, also health care. That would be six, not ten thousand. We live in our desires that are not even our true needs and then we have to go to work to pay for all the things we think we need. Hey ‘things’ are fun, I’ve got plenty of them but I just don’t want to forget what’s important in life. I have tried my whole adult life to remember what is important - being happy basically or whatever you might call it. By any name it’s the same thing. Except it’s not a thing. That’s what I’ve learned. It’s a feeling. It’s a knowing. It’s something I have to practice at or I forget it in a flash. Back to the general blurring of borders. Need and want become arbitrary and neither one seems to be enough. Everything in the universe goes thru its cycles, even the universe itself. Birth and death. The world is not the same as it was 10,000 years ago and it won’t be the same as it is now 10,000 years in the future. This will appear as some kind of an arrogant, willful phase of humanity, like a confused adolescent or more likely a naughty two year old acting out just to call attention to themselves. Our politics will be different, how we live on this planet (if we still live on this planet) will be different. I swear, if we make it another 10,000 years we will have to accrue some wisdom somewhere along the line. We’ll have to become human not cyborgs and take our place in the biosphere. Maybe we need a time out (my favorite video of all time).Hmm. So what else can I preach about? My father was a preacher, my great grandfather was a preacher and my great-great grandfather was a preacher too. I was brought up on tales of Ezekiel and Elijah. Ole Elijah brought forth the Word of God and slew Jezebel’s priests for they were worshiping the wrong gods. Well, old Jezebel she didn’t like that too much and went after old Elijah and he run for the wilderness, hid in a cave. And there he was, half starved, lonely and cold. And a great wind came up and God was not in the wind and a crackling thunder filled the sky and God was not in the thunder and the lightening flashed through the clouds but God was not in the lightening. Then Elijah heard a still, small voice coming from inside and God was in the still small voice.That’s how I remember it.If you enjoy the rohn report, please consider becoming a paid subscriber! Upgradepodcast music from INTERSTELLAR | Deep Ambient Sci Fi Music 29:44 - 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

A few days ago I was riding my bicycle thru the park and stopped to talk to a couple of kids playing there.“Are you setting up a shop to sell stuff?” I inquired. They had groups of stones arranged on a rock.“No, we’re playing Minecraft.”“What?”“Minecraft.”“Oh. You’re using stones for Minecraft?”“They’re not stones.”“Oh. They’re acorns. They came out of the tree.”One of the kids immediately went over to the tree which was kind of leaning over where they were playing and started climbing it, the other kid started shaking it, trying to shake loose the acorns I guess but it didn’t shake much. It’s a skinny tree, not hard to climb but hard to shake.“You have to go all the way out to the end of the branch” I tell the kid in the tree jokingly. “Oh boy your mom is going to kill me.” I have no idea who the mom is or where. “There’s a big storm coming”, says the shaking kid. “It’ll be here tomorrow or the next day.”“I love big storms”, I tell the kids. The one standing next to the tree holding the trunk and the other one up the tree about 6 or 8 feet. At that point I figured I better move on before the mom catches me talking to unsupervised kids in the park so I roll off and down the hill and remark to myself about how cold it is and that a big storm is coming. That’s what the kid said.When I get home I check the weather and sure enough, 70% chance of thunderstorms two days out. And 74% chance of thunderstorms the following day. I feel a rising elation. Pounding rain and thunder. Lightening and wind. The gods are angry and all that. Time to be brave and withstand the onslaught of inclement weather. There are little birds out there, sparrows and wrens and blue jays and cardinals and mockingbirds. I know them. Where do they find shelter in the storm? Tucked away somewhere. They certainly aren’t flying around in a heavy downpour with gusty winds. I guess we’re about to find out. 74% chance is pretty good odds. That’s what the weatherman said anyway.I also checked out Minecraft. Wow. Minecraft is a 3D sandbox video game that has no required goals to accomplish, instead the player builds things and manipulates objects thru a wide assortment of terrains and scenarios. Essentially the Minecraft universe is infinite being a procedurally generated, three-dimensional world which allows players the freedom of choosing what kind of a world they are in and how to play the game. You can play it alone or with a friend or interactively with anyone else anywhere in the world. It’s the most popular video game ever, having sold over 300 million copies. The movie comes out in April.I got that much from skimming Wikipedia but I still don’t really know what it is because I’ve never actually played it. The kids were playing it without a computer. That’s pretty advanced. So anyways I’m still waiting for the big storm. Just a little light rain so far. That’s about all we get around here. It’s an extended drought. Unfair. Everyone gets their own extreme weather these days, that’s what I think. Ours is a long slow drawn out drought. Tsux.So, and here’s the point of my tirade, what if the kids aren’t wrong and there is a big storm coming? A different kind of storm, not wind and rain but the turbulence of divisiveness, the chaos of confusion and confusion is the rule of the day along with delay and denial. It’s a storm alright and where will we find shelter and how will that change us? Storms always change things. Hurricanes spread seeds and create space for new growth and reset earth’s thermostat. I really have no idea what kind of a storm this might be but somehow after watching the kids playing Minecraft with acorns under the tree I feel like we’re going to be ok. We’ll figure it out and the game will go on.From the ‘End Poem’ that scrolls down on the final screen of Minecraft. It’s a conversation with two voices, two entities and they’re talking to the player - you.I will tell the player a story.But not the truth.No. A story that contains the truth safely, in a cage of words. Not the naked truth that can burn over any distance.Give it a body, again.Yes. Player…(insert your name here). Player of games.Good.Take a breath, now. Take another. Feel air in your lungs. Let your limbs return. Yes, move your fingers. Have a body again, under gravity, in air. Respawn in the long dream. There you are. Your body touching the universe again at every point, as though you were separate things. As though we were separate things.Who are we? Once we were called the spirit of the mountain. Father sun, mother moon. Ancestral spirits, animal spirits. Jinn. Ghosts. The green man. Then gods, demons. Angels. Poltergeists. Aliens, extraterrestrials. Leptons, quarks. The words change. We do not change.We are the universe. We are everything you think isn’t you. You are looking at us now, through your skin and your eyes. And why does the universe touch your skin, and throw light on you? To see you, player. To know you. And to be known. I shall tell you a story.Once upon a time, there was a player.The player was you, (insert your name here). podcast music :: Piano & Saxophone Jazz 1920s-1950sIf you enjoy the rohn report, please consider becoming a paid subscriber! Upgrade 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

That was my search term: ‘Danish custom in winter’ . . . . . search result: ‘Hygge, a prominent Danish custom during winter is "hygge," which emphasizes creating a cozy and comfortable atmosphere with family and friends, often involving candles, warm drinks, and enjoying the simple pleasures of being together, essentially finding joy in the cold winter months.’ Thank you AI Overview. You are too cool. I thought it was something like that. Hygge (pronounced "hyugah") is for me. I’m not Danish I’m English, hereditarily speaking, but I think I can adopt this tradition. The English probly have a similar tradition for the long cold nights. Gathering at the pub certainly. I just sit around my hearth, I mean my altar, I mean my computer and commune. Listen to music and read and write and connect with people. In fact it’s the first thing I do when I get up in the morning. Well, after feeding the cats of course. And the fish. And that’s where I am now, in front of my computer, waiting for dawn. My hygge.Listening to old rohn reports and laughing. Ha! A message from myself. Outside my window dawn peeks thru with pink light and the house lights go on, the cars turn on their lights, red and white, and get going down the still dark streets. When the sun rises and warms up the world, I’ll get on my bike and roll down to the pub, I mean the cafe and find my hot comforting drink and convive with the good folk there. Especially the baristas, they will talk to you. Hygge. In Denmark, brrr, hygge means informal time around the fire with family and friends, probably beer, definitely food, and basically hanging out in a spirit of goodwill, a feeling of consensus, and a touch of gratitude for all things. But the spirit of hygge can be invoked in solitude too. Just sit yourself down and enjoy yourself.How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself. ~Virginia WoolfI’m all in about hygge, being often sequestered, hanging out at home, enjoying the day in a purposeful, scheduled, agenda type way. Enjoy the day. Oh, check. Take a hot shower and have a nice rice cake with maple syrup and tahini. Do some yoga on the rug. Do everything in a rhythm, the rhythm of enjoying the day. The cold, dark, wet Danish winters inspire this coming together, one might assume. It probly has an ancient past, back to the Viking days and before. The word hygge is a derivate of an Old Norse term that relates to fire, warmth and the light that it produces and the protection that it brings from outside dangers like probly wolves and things. I can imagine gathering around that ancient fire in cold old Denmark and remarking with friends, kidding around, staying warm around the fire and alert. Present is the word. You have to be present to do hygge.Present and accounted for here sweet Lord. Hyggeing away in my domicile. Smoke curling up from the campfire. Some kind of smoke. Talking to the whole world on my rohn report, preaching the gospel of rohn, commiserating and over accommodating and supplicating and hopefully totally liberating my own soul. Hyggeate. Can we make this a verb? Can we make this a trend? A stopover on the way to freedom, as in true personal freedom, as in freedom from fear, freedom from resentment, from not being ok in any way. The freedom to be who we are - our own sweet selves. Everything else is prelude. The freedom to enjoy the moment. Freedom to be ok. Ok. Hyggeration. A noun. Lot’s of people writing about hygge, trying to describe it. Here’s one ‘Hygge: The Art of Cozy’. But whether you have candles or not (they are a fire hazard), whether you have hot chocolate or mulled wine or pastry cakes or whatever, whether you have porridge or granola, it’s a creative exercise, do it your own way. Find your comfort zone and hang out there. That’s what I do. If you enjoy the rohn report, consider becoming a paid subscriber! Upgrade podcast music :: 00-10:55 thank you Hiroshi Yoshimura for the amazing music 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

This podcast is about air, the thing that gives us life. Also the thing that fuels wildfires - like LA. It creates and it destroys. Both are equal for air. It’s a primordial force.Originally published last Spring, I thought it was time to revive it. It’s one of my favorites and besides I didn’t have anything else ready. So it’s a rerun. Hey, even my Baptist preacher father used to do that.Ok, so this is how it happened. I was riding my bike thru Brackenridge Park and feeling the wind on my face. Hey this is air, I thought, I’m moving thru air. There were some people walking nearby on the sidewalk, hey they’re walking thru air too, I thought as I rolled by them. An innocent thought, in a spontaneous moment but I started thinking about it. Air. Wow. And that’s how I started writing this post.There are so many obvious things to say about air. It blows over us - the wind, it goes inside us - our breath. It’s everywhere - atleast from about 20,000 feet to sea level. Above that there’s not enough oxygen to sustain a person. Below that is underwater. There’s no air underwater. Plenty of dissolved oxygen though. And therein separates the men from the fish.Air is invisible, so it doesn’t get recognized as a solid objective entity, like a car. I drive a red Kia Sedona minivan. Well I don’t really but probably somebody does. It’s invisible (the air) but if you don’t have access to it for more than a few minutes you’re dead. Then you won’t need it anymore.How many things can you think of like that? Things that we totally depend on and totally take for granted, like air? I can list a few. This planet comes to mind and the biosphere that provides our food and sustains all the various forms of life. Our body, and it’s sensory organs - sight, hearing, touch, taste and then thinking about it all, making sense of it all. How many times do you think about thinking? I mean, probably ravens don’t do it. Not like us. They might have their own thoughts though. I’m not sure.Like soil, air is unique to our planet (as far as we know). It was a long process of billions of years to get our air (that we do know). The first atmosphere was a bunch of hot obnoxious gases from volcanos: methane and ammonia and hydrogen sulfide and some nicer gases like water vapor and carbon dioxide, but no free oxygen to speak of.Imagine half a billion years of earth history, 500 million years. That’s how long it took for things to cool down and for the water vapor to precipitate into oceans. Now we’ve got chemicals cooking under the waves and things being discovered. Now life has a chance to happen and populate the barren planet. Populate it, it did and changed the gaseous envelope that clung to its surface in the process. What we call our atmosphere.Photosynthetic algae, one of the earliest organisms to appear in the primordial oceans, was able to create free oxygen by inventing the amazing process of photosynthesis. This amazing process uses sunlight to transform water and carbon dioxide into carbohydrates (fuel), liberating free oxygen in the process, it wasn’t needed (but it would come in handy later for the more complex organisms that were yet to arrive). Over time (and there was alot of it) the oxygen in the ‘air’ went from basically zero to 20%, which is about what it is today.The air in our atmosphere, today, as I’m sure you know, is 21% oxygen, 78% nitrogen and 1% other trace gases. Our air has been like this for about 200 million years. Atleast that’s what Google said.In the Hindu scriptures, prana is that which imbues everything with energy, that which animates everything and gives life. It is hidden in the air, inseparable. We’re breathing prana, the divine essence of everything, if I got the story straight. That’s pretty wow.I mean our first breath: we came alive, our last breath: we go bye bye. And in between we breathe constantly, never stopping. Unless you’re free diving on a coral reef off the coast of Mexico.I used to be pretty good at it back then, breath-hold diving. I trained for it underwater in the cenote just off the beach. It was great feeling: free-diving, no scuba gear, no bulky, noisy equipment, just you and the massive ocean. I could stay underwater for three minutes but I clearly remember the feeling of that sweet breath entering my oxygen-starved body when I surfaced. I like breathing.Air is good. I like breathing air. I was made for it. Thank God we have alot of it. And it’s free. What a great idea. Hope we don’t wreck it with car exhaust and everything else we dump in there. Then what would we breathe? Walk around with air tanks like we were on Mars? Yes, this car comes equipped with it’s own air supply that can last you for 500 miles. Oh, really? How much does that cost? Take it to get refilled like a propane tank. All our houses will be plumbed with clean air vents coming from the Acme Clean Aire Purifer unit outside our home. And on and on.It’s just a little tiny bubble of air, I guess is what I’m saying, in a massive solar system on the edge of a massive galaxy. Alot of dark space around here. No air anywhere except on Earth. Our little bubble that bubbled up somehow.music by Cacao Yoga in Vancouver Organic Ambient Folktronica | Downtempo | Tribal | Medicine Song, various tracks, thank you Tomoko and KokuIf you enjoy the rohn report, consider becoming a paid subscriber! Upgrade 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

It just won’t rain around here. It’s disturbing.Maybe you don’t care if you don’t live around here but hear me out. The rain goes right around our town. I’ve watched it on radar. Disappointed again. Now there’s a 97% chance of rain for Thursday, the day this post will go live. I’ll bet you a dollar we barely get pissed on. Excuse the vernacular. I’m a little disturbed, discouraged, affected, dejected. Makes me mad. I need rain like the trees and the grass.My pecan tree is half dead because of the drought. All the upper branches are bare. I love that tree. It’s my friend. One year it dropped so many pecans you couldn’t help but step on them and crack there’s another broken pecan shell. It’s called a ‘mast season’ designed to overwhelm the squirrels and the deer who will eat as many as they can. Ofcourse there are no more deer in my backyard but there used to be.It’s a massive tree, the biggest tree I have. It’s in my book. The protagonist lives under a giant pecan tree in his backyard. That’s me. I’m the protagonist in my book. That’s why I could write it so good.Anyways. Pecan trees are dying all over the neighborhood. Not the Spanish Oaks though. They are impervious. The desert is moving in. It stretches all the way from Pecos in west Texas to Silver City in New Mexico. Then another desert starts on the other side of the mountains and goes all the way to California. Now do you care?This place used to be an oasis. Ten thousand years ago, the archaeologists tell us, it was cooler and wetter around here. The springs flowed all the time. Now the springs are empty holes. Arroyos would fill with water and flow regularly. Now they’re paved over, concreted in, or just plain forgotten in the backyards and alleys of the neighborhoods all over town. I ride my bike around. I know this.The aquifer (that used to feed the springs) stretches all the way from Brackettville to Austin in a broad arc but it’s been drained down. We built a city over the aquifer and covered it with streets for the cars to drive on. Remarkable. I mean the aquifer. Hundreds of feet underground it lies, a huge reservoir made from limestone with lots of holes in it made from an ancient ocean 100 million years ago. It took a long time to make and fill up with water and then slowly leak out in the artesian springs that used to drive the rivers and creeks around here.Now we pump city water from the water treatment plants into the river beds otherwise we would have no riverwalk and the tourists would all go away. Well except for the Alamo. So I’m sad. I tried praying to Chac Mool, the rain god of the Maya. The only rain god I know of. Nothing. I tried complaining and cursing. Nobody listened. I mean nobody of importance, I mean baristas. But, hey wait, baristas are important. They are the original ancient archetypical characters who served the drinks: the geisha, the bar maid from the middle ages, Shiduri in the epic of Gilgamesh, the sartorial women of Genghis Khan, the Valkyries, your mother. I’m parched, psychologically. I need the rain. I need to see the heavens be bountiful. I need to feel the vegetation drinking deep underground in the dark soil. I need to see storm clouds in the sky. I need to hear the rain on my roof all night. But life is like that, right? Drought and flood, feast and famine. We go forth in our day hoping for the best and dealing with the worst. Put on your hat of resignation but keep your hat of celebration in your purse just in case.Be happy, I tell myself, rain or bloody shine. Find the inner oasis. Yeah, yeah. I know, I know. But I wish it would rain.Here’s a story. A few months ago, actually the day after Labor Day, early September, sometime around mid-morning, a rain cloud appeared over the city and then all her brothers and sisters came and joined her. They started raining and they didn’t stop. I was out on my bike at the cafe and I thought, ah, it’ll stop soon, but it didn’t. It rained harder and harder. I thought hey I’d better get home, my windows are open. So I started out, slowly and carefully making my way thru the rain and the water, trying not to get deluged by a passing bus. When I came to Broadway, where I had to cross, the water was streaming down the street like a river which is what Broadway used to be before they put in all the drainage projects and paved it over. I watched trash bins sailing down the street, washed away from the driveways and curbsides of the neighborhood but didn’t think much about it as I dismounted and prepared to walk my bike over to the other side. That’s not what happened.The water knocked me down and dragged me along for a couple of blocks, seemed like, I don’t know I wasn’t counting blocks. I was trying to grab hold of something and drag myself out of the raging torrent, one hand holding onto my bike and the other grasping at the curb, sliding along down the gutter. Well, folks, I finally grabbed hold of something, a gap in the curb maybe, and got out of there. I noticed a pickup truck parked nearby on a side street with the engine running so I went over and asked for help to get home. He said throw your bike in the back and let’s go, I’ll give you a ride a ride home. So I did, climbed into the cab soaking wet, bleeding from my ankle to my elbow and he gave me a ride home. We had to go all the way around, up on top of the hill and down the other side to get away from the raging torrent and into my neighborhood. The storm was flashing and clashing above our heads and the water was pouring down. That was a rainstorm. The last one I remember. Maybe it was a warning. Maybe it was a reminder. Maybe it was a love tap from the rain god saying I haven’t forgotten you. Music for the podcast was from All India Radio - Desert Tapes. Thank you.03:42 2. Rust 115:18 7. Rust 3If you enjoy the rohn report, consider becoming a paid subscriber! Log in to your account and go to Settings/Subscriptions/Edit. 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