the rohn report

I wish you a happy New Year. May peace and contentment be yours. May you feel the internal feeling that everything is ok. It’s a beautiful feeling, placed there by the life force itself that gives us life. Here’s the bad news. The international weapons trade is booming. Recently, President Emmanuel Macron of France paid a visit to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia, two of the super r...

It’s the Christmas season at Travis Park in downtown San Antonio at Jefferson and Pecan. People are out and about, having adventures with their clan. Celebrating the crisp weather, the Christmas lights, the Christmas music. Family is in from out of town, some of them can skate. Some of them can’t - the locals. Around and around they go until they find a landing spot on the railing or fall on their...

Katie’s place is just down the street from me in the parking lot of the Sunset Ridge Church of Christ on Brees. She just started up a month ago. Two Mexican eagles perch on the steeple and look down on the goings on. A few days after she opened, a deer walked thru the parking lot. A gnarly old wise looking oak presides over the space. It’s kind of enchanted. The music is Makambo-20132 by Geoffrey...

Christmas started long, long ago. Well, with the birth of Jesus of course. Jolly old St. Nick bringing presents for the children and the adults celebrating with mistletoe and wreaths and Christmas trees is a more recent development. Originally it was a take-off on the Roman festival of Saturnalia, the winter solstice, and of course the solstice has been celebrated since forever, ever since humans...

i thought i’d write a poem about good newson my weekly newsletter news with letters and a letter with the newsthere’s enough of the negative stuff  don’t you think so ?every day it assaults us more than enough to last a lifetime how can you build a life or a culturewith only bad news ?? as if the monotony of every day’sbad news informs us of our place in the scheme of thingsand we buckle right dow...

Of all the issues that occupy my mind in the course of a day . . . this one rarely finds its way to the top. Among the sports scores and the virus surge and the war in Yemen and the Christmas sales and the minutiae of my life, it seldom occurs to me - gees, I am alive. It’s Fall and the leaves are turning. A new season appears and I am here to witness it. When I was born, it was the Fall. I don’t...

Wow. Human beings. Something else, man. Really. I mean how did we get to be so stupid and so smart at the same time? That’s something I truly do not understand. I have asked University professors this question. They didn’t know either. The COP 26 Climate Change Conference just concluded in Glasgow. That’s in Scotland. I guess they figured for some reason they would have a better chance of coming u...

I’ve been writing this newsletter for a little over a year. I figure maybe it’s time to introduce myself: my status, my credentials, my philosophy of life. My friend Thoreau expects every writer to give an account of themselves. He says at the very beginning of his famous book Walden published in 1854: “Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account o...

So I’m in Nowhere Books on Broadway and there on the counter, sitting in a plastic display stand, is a small squarish shaped book with an irresistible peach colored cover. It grabs my attention, obviously, since it’s the only book on the counter. Written in large letters that occupy the entire front of the book are the words ‘HOW TO RESIST AMAZON AND WHY’. An upside down Amazon smile underlines th...

Halloween is supposed to be scary but is it really? Our dearly departed loved ones come back to visit us and we have a picnic in the park, or the cemetery as the case may be, with all kinds of tasty treats. Atleast that’s the tradition around here, the Mexican style Day of the Dead. There are altars set up around town with calaveras (skulls) which sounds very close to calabaza (pumpkin). Hmm, is t...

I heard that the other day and it’s been ringing in my mind ever since. Talk about pungent. Talk about concise, precise. Talk about mind bending. Existence is for joy. That’s a sentence with some resonance. Let’s talk about string theory. Turns out (according the the string theorists) that everything is made out of tiny vibrating strings, all the matter in the universe and the forces that act upon...

It was singing last night - one lonely little frog. It wasn’t a whole chorus like in the springtime but it was chirping away, thrumming its tune. I thought about it, how it had survived the trepidations of Kybo the cat, the ardent and stealthy hunter, and not only that but its progenitors had survived as well. A remarkable and fortuitous accomplishment. There was a time when there were no frogs in...

One of my long time fantasies is to see a New York Times front page headline that says - ‘No More War’ or possibly ‘Love One another’ or maybe ‘May peace and harmony prevail’. It would be so radically strange and alarmingly different. Well it sort of happened recently with the publication of Tish Harrison Warren’s essay, ‘ How I learned to shut up and be still ’. Right there on the front page of t...

So I just had my 71st birthday this week. Wow and I’m feeling it. I thought I was bullet proof. I would live to be 120. Not. When I was a young whippersnapper I thought I would live forever. Why not? Just cause everybody else died didn’t mean I would. Actually it was a rejoinder to my religious friends who wanted to make sure I was going to heaven. It doesn’t apply if you never die, right? That wa...

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I was traveling the world seeking adventure and whatever came my way. My destination was Israel, the Holy Land, for no other reason than I had stared at the full color maps of the ‘Holy Land’ in the back of the Bible while sitting bored in adult church service for (way too many) years of my life. I made my way there, over land and over sea and in the air and foun...

So I’m thinking, gees, maybe I should be a little less philosophical and more funny like Garrison Keillor; talk about normal things not GOD and buffalos. I lost three subscribers after I published ‘GOD’. I’m sitting in the cafe reading Guy Noir stories (one of Garrison’s creations) from his Substack newsletter ‘ Garrison Keillor and Friends ’ and laughing quietly to myself so as not to annoy the o...

Everybody believes in God, right? Most people do. I don’t. Not that one anyways. The super-hero God of the religions. The story book character God with super powers that we read about in the scriptures. And God slew the Minnownites. And God blessed Kajeeziel. And God created the earth and the universe and the light and the dark and then he rested because he was tired. God might be something but pr...

We killed off all the buffalos. Have you ever thought about that? There used to be millions of them roaming the vast prairies of the American West; from northern Mexico to Canada, from Idaho to Pennsylvania. The white European buffalo hunters with their .50 caliber rifles hunted them to near extinction in the late 1800’s, partly to force the Indians into submission. They depended on the buffalo fo...

In the cafe is where I write. Where I collate these random thoughts into something readable, edit them, fashion and trim them, cut out the fat and add some salt. Oh wait I don’t need all that - er just collate them then . . . but that sounds kind of formal, wait what’s a better word for formal? academic? no even worse let’s start over . . . It goes like that until I come up with an image and a fee...

One of my heros is Garrison Keillor of Prairie Home Companion fame - a serialized radio show that he hosted for many years. It was based on the old time radio variety shows from the twenties and thirties and all the way up into the fifties when television finally took over and killed them off. The Prairie Home Companion had alot of singing and musical guests and featured 3 segments of storytelling...

I just wonder . . . if your house burned down in one of the mega-fires out west if you would change your mind about the climate crisis? Let’s say you staunchly believed it was a hoax perpetrated by the left wing media as an excuse for the government taking over our lives but then you lost your house and all your stuff and infact the whole town you lived in burned up. I wonder, if someone who ended...

Everybody wants to be heard. Everybody wants to be acknowledged. Everybody wants to be in some sort of a conversation. Unless you’re a hermit living on top of a mountain, but then you’ll be talking to yourself . . . and answering. “ Hello. How are you today? Oh yeah . . . grunt, org.” and various other barely intelligible thoughts and sounds. The world we live in is full of conveniences and entert...

I live in a house in the suburbs of a large American city. I have next door neighbors on both sides and up and down the tree lined street. My neighbor, Mark, is a landscape architect, well I suppose that may be the reason why he doesn’t talk to me. I never do landscaping of any kind, I just try to control Nature. A little bit. Trim and shape. On the other side, the Gilbert’s with their daughter, t...

We encounter truth everyday, we just don’t recognize it. That’s what I think. The reality of our lives is truth. When Prem quoted Tulsidas at the event ‘whatever your eye can see, it’s all illusion’, I thought about it and realized it was true. Whatever your eye can see will disappear one day, poof, like it was never there. Prem at the event was brilliant. We were all in tears by the end, Prem, th...

There’s no air. There’s no soil. There’s no people. There’s no trees. There are no golf courses, although you could hit the ball a long ways. The internet connection is slow, about 10 minutes to get a signal to Earth (depending on the planetary alignment). There are no cafes and no friends anywhere except for your acquaintances in that little space ship sitting in the dirt. The temperature outside...