the rohn report

There is a jungle in my backyard. In the dense foliage and among the pools and streams, the trees and shrubs, wild cats roam and nocturnal foragers forage (the Raccoons and Opossums). There are small monkey-like mammals called Squirrels jumping around in the trees. There are Doves and Mockingbirds and Cardinals, occasionally Hawks and Owls. There are screaming Blue Jays that sound like Macaws. The...

This post was originally published on February 22, 2024 and I’m reprising it here. It’s one of my favorites. Plus I don’t have the next episode ready yet. Whether you’ve seen this or if it’s new, I hope you enjoy it. You can listen to the original podcast (recommended) or read the text edition. Pacha Mama, Mother Nature, Planet Earth - unto you we sing and play. Cans and bottles and boxes and plas...

Ha! Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a monk’s cell. One of those tiny little cells like they have out at the Missions , or maybe in a monastery high up in the Himalayas. Praying to God all day. Living the simple life of contemplation and a bowl of gruel. Nobody bothering you. So my idea was to write about it, self-reflect as if I was a monk, which I think I kinda am, and see what I could come u...

All life on planet Earth, and probably anywhere else in the universe is based on carbon. It’s a simple little atom (number 6 on the periodic table) but it can form a vast number of compounds, more than any other element. Almost ten million are known and that’s only a small fraction of what’s theoretically possible. Because of it’s ability to easily form stable bonds with itself and with other elem...

On October 30, 1961, the Soviet Union detonated a hydrogen bomb over the Arctic Ocean which had the destructive power of 50 million tons of TNT, 1500 times more powerful than the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Everything within a 36 mile radius was vaporized. This bomb is in nobody’s arsenal, it was built for show back in the nuclear arms race days, before atmospheric testing was ban...

Every week the question arises - what should I write about for my Thursday morning rohn report? Nothing seems in focus, no inspiration. And then, inevitably, at some point during the week, something speaks to me and it’s like ok, I can write about that. This week it was on a Sunday that it came to me: oh yes, I shall write about that. In the morning I had a sleep paralysis event. I was in my bed,...

So, this week’s rohn report is about Rohn. I’ve been thinking about him. I feel like he’s newsworthy. Atleast for 5 minutes. My life has been guided by some deep underground current, I don’t know what it is. It swept me along and left me here. That’s not to say I haven’t had moments of decision, I have, where my life could have gone one way or the other. Oh my god, imagine if you were rich and fam...

It’s the one year anniversary of releasing my book to the world! Yes it has all kinds of wise quips and curious, humorous comments in it, of course, but it’s about being human. Wait a minute, I guess wise quips and humorous comments is being human. “ Humans have lived on this planet for 3 million years. ” it begins on the first page and then takes off on it’s journey thru many cultures, countries...

Stones come out of the earth, get broken down by mushrooms and become soil that all living things depend on from plants to caribou. Caribou actually eat lichen right off the rocks which also helps reduce them to dirt. Here some scientists are setting up their instruments to measure if Stonehenge was built to honor the moon as well as the sun. Those people were the first farmers so naturally they w...

That’s the question I posed. All friendly baristas ofcourse. Seemed like a good question and everyone had a unique response Some people were stunned by the audacity of it and had to look deep inside their own mind. Some people thought it was hilarious. Some people were clear as a clarion bell, some people couldn’t relate at all. Press is my common hangout. You can find me there or you can find me...

Most days my habit is to cruise the streets of San Antonio on my bike finding adventures and a thousand piquant things to observe. Did I say a thousand? a million, as many as the eye can see, from tiny to huge, squirrels to murals. This town is rife with murals, large and boisterous, provocative, ubiquitous, beautiful, startling - on the west-side, downtown, near north-side, south-side, east-side,...

Jane walked into the room and turned on the light. The telephone was on the copy editor’s desk just a few feet away. She started to move towards it and then hesitated. ‘Maybe not a good idea.’ she thought to herself. Instead she reached into her purse for cigarettes, drew them out and opened the case. She placed one of the cigarettes between her lips but didn’t light it. This is how you start a st...

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.” From “The Sayings of Muad’Dib” by the Princess Irulan Sounds about right. That’s the epigraph on page 459 of my library copy. I’m reading it in bits and pieces, a few paragraphs here, an epigraph there, can’t seem to make it thru the dense underbrush o...

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...

It turns out all plants need dirt. For their roots to absorb nutrition they need dirt. The beginning of the food chain begins in the dirt. Turns out that the first dirt maker for the first plants was fungi. The mushroom people. They ate hot rocks which was about the only thing there was above the shore line back then and turned them into dirt. The only life on earth was in the water for the first...

This podcast was originally published on May 4, 2023 but I’m sharing it again because I don’t have anything else ready and also because I love it.  The music is powerful and so sweet. The words are right in synch like it’s supposed to be. The message rings out like a clarion call on a bright morning from the hilltop overlooking the village. People scrambling around, waking up and the church bell p...

So, here’s how the story goes. I’m on my way to Theory on a Thursday morning and I notice the concrete arroyo on the side of the road. That used to be a free flowing creek, atleast in the rainy season . I say to myself. Now it’s a concrete culvert. After the ritual of the credit card and the kidding around with the baristas and the cupa cappuccino, I’m done. I’m ready to ride home, down Nacogdoche...

I’m not writing about Fiesta and I’m not writing about Earth Day. Earth Day has already happened on April 22 and Fiesta is still happening. I’m writing about . . . writing. I enjoy writing. Making marks with my pen like I’m doing now. Making marks that mean something is writing. I’m using a Pilot G-2 10 point. I like this pen but people have used a stylus (cuneiform), a quill pen (the old signers...

When I write I try to do three things: be simple, be honest and celebrate some great truth of being human. I mean otherwise what’s the point of the exercise? So when this was posted by a friend on Facebook recently it inspired me. It’s from Eduardo Galeano, an Uruguayan writer upon his receiving the Stig Dagerman Award in 2010. And it goes suchly: “May we be worthy of desperate hope. I wish we cou...

I rode my bike a few miles out west to Woodlawn Lake for the total eclipse last Monday. It was the best I could do. It wasn’t total but it was plenty dark for a couple minutes. It was weird. Twilight and sunrise don’t happen that fast and my eyes couldn’t adapt, they couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing. Basically a sunset and a sunrise all in about 20 minutes. It seemed to happen in quant...

pick a moonless cloudy nightbring some stickslittle ones and biggather some kindlingshredded tax documents from 2019work just fine put the little sticks on firstand spark it with a fire starter blow on itdon’t let it diecarefully place more larger sticks on tophopebring your intention and your aspirationto the making of the fire get a little fire goingand let the wind blow it aroundkeep the smoke...

I originally published this post on May 26, 2022. Two years ago. I just came across it recently and decided to re-publish it cause it’s really good. Well also because I didn’t have anything ready. It was an early experiment in soundtracking, trying to complement the words with the music. Music is sound. Words are sound. They merge somewhere in our brain and find a common source. I find that fascin...

It’s Spring. The equinox has just passed us by. Days continue to grow longer and warmer. My little ranchito here in the suburbs of San Antonio is fully alive and thriving. Last summer I was sitting in my office and gazing out the window at my ranchito. There had been 3 or 4 months of hot, dry — I mean very hot, very dry weather. The front yard had become a desert, totally barren. It’s like I could...

Tulum is a city of monkeys dressed up like human beings. They are grabbing at the tourist dollars like monkeys grabbing at bananas. Well that’s not really accurate, monkeys stop grabbing when they are full, the monkeys of Tulum are never full. Infact they will chop down the jungle and pave over the mangroves to get more bananas. Sorry to be so harsh, Tulum, but it’s true. Of course I lived here in...

Welcome to the rohn report reprised. This post was a deeply personal endeavor. Maybe that’s why it goes on for 28 minutes, the longest rohn report ever. I am a historical romanticist, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true or somewhere close to the truth or somewhere in the general vicinity of the truth. The point is we need to envision and imagine the people who lived here before us. We would benefi...