the rohn report

I learned how to run the mile back in high school. Four laps around the track. I remember the feeling. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes exhilarating. For training we used to run the ‘big block’: six miles out in the country, past the apple and peach orchards of southwestern Michigan and back into town. Sometimes we’d run the ‘little block’. That was out around Bettis Hill and back. Just depended on...

Two of my favorite things. This is Avram Fefer: Bedouin Dream. Wow. Avram Fefer on the big sax with bassist Eric Revis, Marc Ribot on guitar and Chad Taylor drums. From the album Juba Lee recorded in 2022. Dig it. Jazz. It’s been around since the end of the 19th century rising up out of the Blues and the Spirituals of the deep South, the African dance rhythms, the call and response traditions. Whe...

So it’s like all this geo-political strife in the world. Russia vs. Ukraine. Russia vs. Nato. Hey Nato is an alliance formed for collective security. Why doesn’t everybody just join Nato? Why is it somebody vs. somebody all the time? We’re all somebody. Just make the group bigger. Russia and Chiba and North Korea. We could call it All Nations Oh. AlNato. Anyways that’s my thought upon waking up th...

Annie Dillard is a Pulitzer Prize winning author. Among her triumphs are Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood and The Writing Life . I have all three in a compiled volume. “For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. If you were a Zulu warrior banging on your shield with your spear for a couple of hours along with a hu...

The singer is Odetta , AKA the voice of the Civil Rights Movement. She’s been singing folk songs and popular ballads since way back in the sixties and even before that. She was a mentor to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and Janis Joplin and a favorite of Martin Luther King Jr. The song takes me back to the Sunday School days of my youth when we used to sing it sitting in a circle in our little chairs. It...

At 7:15 AM on November 1, 1952 the United States conducted the very first full blown test of a hydrogen bomb on the tiny island of Elugelab in the South Pacific atoll of Enewetak. Elugelab was vaporized leaving a crater 6,000 feet wide and 160 feet deep. The fireball that rose up after the detonation was 4 miles wide and the mushroom cloud (which was all that was left of Elugelab) rose 27 miles in...

I’m imagining that I just arrived here. I just dropped into this body, into this world. I have no personal history. Nothing came before. The only orientation is my breath, coming and going. An inhalation. Followed by an exhalation. It’s sweet. It’s comforting, which I’m mostly in need of. Comfort and annihilation. Some kind of restart because I know there is no do over. If I could just focus on ea...

It’s probably a little too early to worry about this but the sun is going to burn out one day and turn into a red giant and devour Earth and all the inner planets and that will be that. Toast. Dust to dust. All that humanity has been and all that humanity has accomplished will be lost and forgotten. Who won the 1936 World Series for example (the Yankees over the Giants 4 games to 2) and all the re...

I first discovered Bluey in a New York Times article entitled ‘ A Children’s Show About Everything, Especially Music ’. Hmmm, that’s interesting, I thought, sounds kinda like the rohn report so I decided to report on it. laughter The first thing I have to report about Bluey is the great interaction between the kids and the parents. It’s amazing. Maybe not too realistic but refreshing. They’re alwa...

* Imagine what it’s like to not be alive. Pretty hard, right, since you wouldn’t have a brain. But imagine not not being alive, I mean that’s when you have a brain and a body and you live on a planet with other people and millions of species all connected in a biosphere. * Now imagine you were not alive but you had a brain and you were trying to imagine what it’s like to be alive. It would be unim...

I’m sitting at the Royal Blue Grocery in downtown San Antonio trying to write something. I don’t believe in writer’s block, that usually means I’m just not ready to write yet, but I need to write something for the newsletter. That’s why I’m scribbling in my notebook, trying to generate some momentum, see if I can come up with something. Nope, nothing yet. Maybe If I could just can’t see it. There’...

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....