the rohn report

Enjoy the audio version or After writing about refugees in my last post I got a comment from Mary Ann pointing out that not only are people refugees but animals are refugees too. Pushed out of their natural living areas by humans, AKA ‘development’, they have to adapt or perish. My veterinarian once told me that when he was a kid there were deer roaming about in the wild savannah on the other side...

I’m thinking about refugees. Four million of them from Ukraine alone in the current war, another 26 million worldwide who have sought shelter from the storm. Half of them are children. They have left their homes, their communities, their culture, their land where they lived for generations, probably, and made their way carrying a few belongings in a suitcase, clutching their children at their side...

And if it all goes up in a flash of smoke and lighting so be it, my arugula and I will be vaporized in the same mushroom cloud and our atoms will settle down somewhere else on this earth to reseed and rebuild some kind of a garden somewhere. Premier kale, lacinato kale, dwarf blue kale, champion collards, rocket arugula, bibb lettuce, spinach - I’ve got them all started in little containers filled...

Isn’t that the name of a movie? It also could be the title of the current scene playing here on planet earth as we spin around and around, slowly orbiting a medium sized star 93 million miles away known as the Sun. I just thought we should put this in context. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has wounded the whole world. It has left a gash in our collective sense of well being. It has shaken our co...

As of today, Thursday March 10, 2022, the Russian army has invaded Ukraine and occupied a significant amount of their territory. The huge military force that they assembled outside the Ukrainian border is now pretty much inside it. Close to Kyiv, the capitol and the cultural heart of the nation, a 40 mile long convoy of tanks, armored personnel carriers, missile launchers and heavy artillery waits...

So, there was a girl and a boy. Their names were Adam and Eve. They fell in love and got into a relationship. They wanted to have kids and start a new world. Of course they didn’t know what they were doing and ran into a lot of problems because it was their first time. Having a family and starting a new world and all. They tried to discipline their kids but they were wild. One wanted to start a na...

One hundred and twelve years ago the Bolshevik Revolution brought about the demise of the Russian Czar, Nicholas II, and the rise of the beleaguered working class. Communism, led by Comrade Lenin, took over and they (the workers) were all singing the national anthem together, “Arise, workers of the world, all the world’s starving and enslaved!” A mere 20 years later Joseph Stalin had taken over an...

So I’m supposed to select 6 poems for Mega Corazon in April, one for kids, plus one by a poet I admire, that’s seven poems, and perform them in the Urban 15 studios. Wow. I’m editing my book manuscript with an editor, well a friend, well she’s pretty smart. I may release it online one day if we can figure it out. Forget the publishers, I could never figure them out. My literary career is zooming....

I believe in San Antonio, that this place has an ancient and enchanted history. People have lived here for hundreds of generations, that’s for sure, thousands of years. They hunted and gathered and told their stories and sang their songs and danced their dances and lived their lives without really changing all that much and without destroying the environment they lived in. Something we could learn...

Tee tah, my lovely and groovy cat loved sleeping outside all night, even when it was cold. Now she’s gone, carried off by a coyote. Me and Kybo are left. We’re sad. Kybo meditates all day. I can only manage spurts. Move on. My life is winding down. It doesn’t last forever. I know that intellectually but that’s not the same as feeling it wind down. Like you get your spring wound up when you’re born...

A Prem Rawat quote came across my screen recently. It went something like this: ‘Gratitude is the wind that fills your sails so you can sail across this ocean’. The best I can remember. We all are sailing across this ocean, in a sense. We may be bestilled, we may be on the rocks, we may be in stormy weather or we may be sailing free and clear with a pleasant wind in our direction. I’ve experienced...

On the morning of Dec. 25, 2021, just a few weeks ago, an Ariane rocket blasted off from it’s launching pad at the European spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana . It was carrying the most powerful space observatory ever built - the James Webb Space Telescope and was headed for a location a million miles away where the gravitational fields of the earth and the sun commingle to produce conditions just...

I suspect, but cannot prove, that the real virus affecting us is not Covid 19 but something like the winter of our discontent, some kind of dis-ease of the mind, a misplaced longing perhaps. Something is stuck in our brain. People are unhappy and yet we’re living in one of the most successful countries in the history of the world. We have conveniences that are so convenient that we only need to to...

“They keep changing the date. It used to be 2021. Now it’s 2022. I wish they would just find a number and stick to it.” “Like what number would you like?” replied Jay. “It just doesn’t matter to me, just quit changing the number. 43, 32, 1 billion 987 million 324 thousand 602 would be fine.” Paul lowered his hands from where he had been gesticulating in the air and took a slug of his Barley Brew....

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...