the rohn report

I was watching the Ken Burns documentary about the Holocaust a few nights ago on PBS. He covered a lot of history - from the rise of Nazism to the persecution of the Jews to the expansion of Germany into Austria and Czechoslovakia prior to WW II. They make the startling observation that much of what Hitler did in Germany was copied or emulated from America. Our campaign of genocide against the nat...

Clayton and I have shared lodging for several months and I asked him if he would do an interview for the rohn report on the eve of his departure for Puerto Rico. He doesn’t necessarily consider his life to be that noteworthy but I disagree. He’s going through major transformations in lifestyle and in how he views the world and I think it’s a compelling story. I love this guy, to be quite honest, a...

This was my introduction to Prem Rawat (AKA Maharaji) in 1972. It was a poster stapled to a telephone pole along the sidewalk in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This image resurfaced recently. Someone on Facebook posted it up. Someone in New York commented, “Thank you, Don. I've been looking for this for weeks now. It was used as a hand-held sign/poster back in NYC.” Ha! She couldn’t believe it made it al...

This is how my mornings go here in the urban metropolis of San Antonio. I get up on my bike and roll out before it’s too hot and hit the energy centers. It could be Katie’s Rose Hip Coffee down the street in the parking lot. It could be Press, the only cafe in town with a vaulted ceiling made of glass. Must have been a greenhouse or something. The super friendly baristas are always ready to listen...

I stopped by Katie’s Rose Hip Coffee the other morning. There was a bunch of people gathered there, I thought maybe it was somebody’s birthday or something but no it was just a buzzy morning crowd after the brilliant rain storm that had swept thru the neighborhood at 4 am washing everything clean, reviving and renewing humanity after the long hot dry drought of the summer. I met a cafe friend (for...

It’s a preposterous title for a preposterous book. The authors basically attempt to re-write the entire history of humanity. Instead of this linear development from monkeys living in the trees millions of years ago (actually the cousins of monkeys) to a creature walking around on the ground, our head held high, inventing things like stone tools and mastering fire and developing tribal societies so...

I’ve often thought about outfitting a van and traveling around, living in it, sleeping in it, self contained like a turtle. Living the nomad life, no address, following the seasons and the currents of life. I’ve watched van life videos on YouTube (of which there are hundreds). For example, meet Frank and his cat Sunny: I’ve reviewed different designs, dreamed of owning a Mercedes high roof diesel...

This post is about a song. Two songs actually, Bliss and Dunia, both playlisted by Buddha’s Lounge on YouTube. It’s also about the power that music has to cause transformational effects to our normal reality, to take us to a new level. It’s not just emotional, it’s a real life transformation that happens. You find yourself changing into something you weren’t before, a new experience, a new feeling...

Yeah, so I’ve been publishing ‘ the rohn report’ for two years now, 117 posts. I’m proud of that so I’m including the very first post below, as a sort of celebration and because I’m sure most people haven’t seen it. A nice compliment to the one published yesterday which was basically about the end of the world. I mean the END of the world; Opeth’s song ‘ Ending Credits’ which is admittedly naive,...

“I just thought I’d throw myself a curve ball” said Jim. “Something straight down the line but unusual.” “Yeah, I know. I do that. Just to be weird or whatever.” “No. Being weird is different.” “Straight down the middle isn’t being weird?” “It is but in a non-weird way.” “I like the way you define everything according to your own dictionary. No I think it’s adorable.” said Sally. It was their firs...

Now that it’s 100˚ every day with no relief in sight, I guess it’s summer. I don’t like it much. I’m a rainy day guy or even better yet a cool drizzly day guy. A blazing sun and a cloudless sky just makes me feel like hiding inside somewhere until it goes away. Tedious. I’m suffering. Meanwhile, Sydney Australia is hit with it’s fourth major flood in 18 months. Now I know where all the rain went....

I don’t have a sense of adventure like Ko and Masa, my couch surfing guests who stayed at my house a few days ago. They’re riding their Walmart bikes thru the Chihuahuan Desert in the 100 degree heat, live streaming to their friends in Japan along the way. While they were here they were doing live telecasts from downtown San Antonio rolling around looking at murals and exploring everything. It’s b...

Frank had a hard time finding anything he was passionate about for the mid-term exam in Public Speaking 101. Everyone had to give a 5 minute speech about ‘something you’re passionate about’ and nothing came to his mind. It was disconcerting. Finally he came up with “How Frightening the World Is”, not because it was something he felt passionate about, exactly, but because he was truly bewildered. H...

In my backyard sits a fairly large in-ground swimming pool encased in concrete and tile - the home of 10,000 fish. I haven’t counted them all but there’s a lot. The little dark ones at least. The goldfish are fewer in number but much larger. In aggregate they form a biological community that swims around all day and eats algae off the walls of the pool as well as the fish pellets I throw in there....

I’ll let someone else point out that systems based on greed will inevitably crash. It’s not my job to mention that living unsustainably on planet earth will result in turbulence. It’s up to the pundits to point out such things. They’re smart after all. They have experience in such matters. I’ll just say that it’s gonna be a wild ride. Hold on and buckle up buckaroo. If you enjoy the thrills and sp...

Honestly, lock down and covid restrictions have suited me just fine. I’m happy to stay home and be a hermit, listen to music, read and write; garden and ride my bike when I need to get out of the house. Right now I’m enjoying a tasty Cafe de Anatolia playlist. From 1:27:09. Yes I’m privileged but I worked hard for this. I did my time in the workforce, working for the man even when I was the man. T...

So I’m having this big long Facebook conversation about the evils and virtues of the vaccine. And he says Is it my right to choose not to vaccinate myself and my family? And I say Yeah it’s absolutely your right but then what is your responsibility to society knowing that you’re most infectious before you even have symptoms ? And back and forth we go searching for common ground and not finding any...

Happy Memorial Day, if you can say it that way. Here’s a special edition I published for paid subscribers a while back. It’s kind of an essay poem. With music. I like it alot so I wanted to share it with everybody. No more war. here we arein the 21st centuryfighting with each otherlike this was biblical timeslike this was the medieval agelike we were childrenarguing over a toy the toy is this worl...

So, as it turns out, we can’t experience the world at all. All we know of it is what our brain assembles out of the nuanced cacophony of electrical impulses surging along our optic nerve, thru our auditory nerve, and all the other nerves from their attendant stations on the periphery of our body. They relate to something, yes, but they make no sense until our brain paints a picture with them, crea...

Listen to this podcast on your favorite platform with the podcast app above In his famous poem, Yeats goes on about sailing the seas to ‘the holy city of Byzantium’. Once there he proposes to escape the bonds of mortality and find new life as some sort of a magical bird ‘set upon a golden bough to sing’. That’s how I read it anyways with a little help from Andrew Spacey . Byzantium of course was t...

Ever since history has been recorded, pandemics have visited their destructive power on humanity - viruses and bacteria running amok, crossing borders, seas, mountain ranges, empires, and killing massive amounts of people. Smallpox, one of the most pernicious, is (or was, it has now been eradicated following a global vaccination campaign led by the World Health Organization) a tiny little virus th...

Ah ha, I intended to do this podcast without music, unsure if people like the music I use or not. But I couldn’t manage it. When I heard this it was like, this is it! This is the rhythm of the river; or the rhythm of the natives living around the river more accurately. If you haven’t listened to the podcast version, I recommend it. It’s 11 minutes. You can download the podcast app or play it from...

A big shout out to all those who have subscribed to the rohn report. We have reached 100! And a special thank you to the paid subscribers, all 14 of you! I am deeply appreciative of your patronage. Well we finally got rain. Felt good. It rained for several hours, soaked into the ground and fed the little roots of the little arugulas and the spinach and the collards and the kale and the sweet corn....

I’m so into music. It has healing vibes. Borders, countries, language, culture all separate us and define us. In fact our identity is based on what divides us. Even though we live on one planet, we don’t think of ourselves as ‘planetarians’. Even though we’re all humans we don’t think of ourselves as human first, we think of ourselves as American, German, Swedish, Dutch, Irish, Russian, Japanese,...

Days go by and weeks go by. Years go by. They don’t stop. After awhile you’re old. Everything that has happened in your life has happened in the past and everything that is going to happen in your life is in the future. It’s just that your future is a lot shorter than your past. My perspective has changed a lot over the years from ‘ I’m going to live forever, hey how do you know I’m not? ’ to ‘ I...