I got an email last week from Kevin Freiberg that an old friend of ours had passed away in India. I say "old friend" even though I never met him. But when you spend three years writing about a man's life and work, it's hard to think of him in any other way. (Above, Kevin [...]
There’s an old Zen story about a young monk starting out on the path of enlightenment. From time to time, he notices an older monk, the oldest in the monastery, working quietly in the gardens and it occurs to him that in the decades the old monk has been practicing, he must have some valuable [...]
Memorial Day 2022 (also posted on Reservoir.llc) It's a holiday morning and I'm sitting outside just after dawn writing in my journal, which I've titled, "Life Fitness." It's an important and valuable transition from my morning meditation and the events to come in the day, whether that's writing an article, planning a course or playing [...]
The Birth of Being Essential Being Essential is a book that wanted to happen, and it wanted to happen in a powerful way that was not entirely visible to me until I was well into writing it. It happened in a series of what seemed like coincidences that seemed to invite more coincidences, synchronicities that [...]
I noticed this on my third cup this morning: Andrew Giambrone writing in The Atlantic says new research seems to suggest that coffee drinking isn't as much a personal choice as a genetic choice. A study released last Tuesday by an international consortium of caffeine scholars may help explain why some of these customers visited more [...]
Eden, Australia – December 31, 2019: Tourists, a father and daughter at the beach in Eden by the evacuation center. (Joachim Zens) In the winter of 1961, my family moved to Frankston, a small beach town on the southern coast of Australia. Frankston is the last suburb south of Melbourne and in those [...]
John Sebastian (c) Baron Wolman On August 10th, I'm hosting a conversation on stage in Santa Fe featuring two legends of Woodstock: John Morris, who was the festival's Head of Production and Baron Wolman, who was the Chief Photographer for Rolling Stone. It's an insider's look at what went on, leading up to [...]
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horse walking warm Out of the whinnying green stable On to the fields of praise. Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill At the first gate, the walk did not look promising. A low overcast sky shadowed forbidding [...]
In the light of a July morning, I crossed a bridge over the Tiber that was built in the year 62 BCE and wondered if, in all the Earth, there is an older bridge still in daily use? Standing there with that thought, I saw a large seabird, a kind of grey gull or maybe [...]
No, not forever. What did you think I meant? Just for a vacation. Remember those, when you went somewhere amazing with your family for two weeks because, well, obviously, you could? And because you wanted to see the world and find out if you need to know anything about it. Seeing the world is important [...]