the rohn report

The spirit of writing hasn’t come upon me lately, no more than the rain has visited this parched terrain. The urgency to explain or declaim is missing somehow, instead I’m watching TV football and gazing out the south facing windows at the sun filled front yard. There are deep slanting shadows attached to the trees even while their leaves shine brightly. I know soon they will grow dim. Soon it wil...

I’m sitting here with two books of poetry open - ‘ failure ’ by Philip Schultz and ‘ Walking to Martha’s Vineyard ’ by Franz Wright. Two white boys alright. Just finished ‘ A War with Grandpa ’, a young (very young) adult novel by Robert Kimmel Smith. Why he needs 3 names I don’t know. Maybe because there are so many Robert Smiths? Anyways, this is for my 1st grade mentoring. On the Kindle app on...

Mercury is the first planet from the sun. A little too warm for most people - average temperatures are around 330 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s like an oven. You could bake a cake in there. Earth is the third rock from the sun, so to say, having a solid core like the other inner planets. It’s comfortable, so comfortable that life was established here billions of years ago and continues to proliferate...

. . . although sometimes I feel kind of stuck. I’ve created a biosphere and a ranchito and feel responsible for the animals and plants that live here. The dragonflies darting around above the hydrilla in the old cement swimming pool (now a fish pond) and the bats that fly thru the air in the evening skimming the water, the orange and white gold fish who now are as large as small carp which I guess...

When I woke up this morning, White Tail, the yellow cat with the white tail, was on the night stand monitoring my movements, calibrating. Is he going to get up and feed us now? Dawn had not yet arrived, we were still in the realm of darkness but I could see his shape and infer his presence. He had spent the night somewhere on my bed, curled in among the sheets. When I sat up, he purred. When I pic...

Summer has dropped like a heavy beam into my front yard. It’s palpable. Hot and dry. The earth is sun baked, cracks appear. The sunflowers that grew like a forest 6 or 8 feet high now bow their heads and mourn. Their roots are shrunken and shriveled in the dirt. The microbes are screaming. I can hear them almost. Everyone is miserable which is why I’m watering the yard this morning before the sun...

1.I met a girl in the cafe reading a book. I think it was Merit, the cafe, yeah next to the bike shop. No, that’s right it was in Charis Park. She was there with her friend under the tree. Her friend was also doing something creative, oh yeah she was painting on a framed canvas. I couldn’t see what it was. Anyways I went over to where they were and said “Excuse me do you mind if I ask you what you...

cute baby with catshad to cut it offrejoin my body andmy breath surroundedby a worldlooks calm and serenebut i know beyond theblue is crazy outer spaceendless airless darkness unlessyou’re near a star or have aflashlight we are protected fromthis awesome terror by our gentle light blue sky with a few clouds floating thruwhat can be more peacefulheaven above and earthbelow and never the twainshall...

Ten years ago I made a solemn pledge to write a book, publish it and introduce it to the world. The pledge really was to myself, something I had to do to regain my own sanity or more accurately my own inner peace. I don’t think I was insane. That was the one clear thing in my mind. Otherwise I was pretty much wounded and in need of healing. Writing my book was the healing. It took me six years to...

you can trip digital switches far away on some server connected to your phone by wifi / fiber optics / satellite communications / it comes out of the sky like rain / we can ‘halloo’ from the other side of the world and say ‘have a nice day’ as if they were sitting right next to us at the cafe we can peer into the mystery of ancient archaeology and read the current news on our card shaped handheld...

From what I heard the old ancient Hebrew priests considered the name of God too holy to speak or more accurately it was unspeakable. The human tongue could not utter it. But how do you talk about something without giving it a name? The old Hebrew priests were into talking about it. So they came up with Yahweh, spelled with no consonants just YHWH. The secret name of God spelled out in a unpronounc...

What is it about politics that brings out the least cooperative, most combative part of us? We divide up into clans with our own colors, our own logos our own slogans. And then we argue and fight and strategize how to attack and defeat the other party/person whoever they may be. We could discuss the issues and find solutions in a cooperative, constructive way with benefits obvious for everyone. Th...

I got this title from fellow Substack writer, James Roberts. He writes a newsletter called Into the Deep Woods and when I saw it it was like, heck yeah, I want to write about that too. So I started right up. He’s posting from the Cambrian Mountains of Wales with its lovely dells and streams and oak forests, I’m posting from the outskirts of downtown San Antonio in what used to be a forest but is n...

It’s summer and the heat is back. The sun rolls up the overcast morning sky like a rug and by noon it’s blazing away undeterred, unfettered, indefatigable and any other descriptive word you might find that mean yikes watch out, it’s the sun blasting away in the sky with unregulated intensity. We live on the edge of the desert, well we used to live on the edge of the desert, I think we live in the...

I have a biosphere in my backyard. It’s like a miniature nature preserve, like a natural paradise. I’m proud of it. It gives me comfort and solace. The fish pond with the overhanging Willow and the deep green of the Groovy Nook with its small ponds back in the corner and the Hackberries and the big Pecan and the brown cedar fence surrounding it all are the main elements. And the Bog Filter. The Bo...

I had a chance to host Mimi on Warm Showers recently. It was a revelatory experience and so much fun. She’s on a mission. How do we heal the violence in our world? How do we heal the violence and fear inside ourselves? Well here’s Mimi’s way. Click on the play button above. These are the shoes she was wearing when she arrived in my driveway after walking from Phoenix. I thought they were a true wo...

Where did you and me and the entirety of everything come from? God made it is an easy out but doesn’t really explain anything. Where did God come from? Well, God is an eternal infinite being that was never created. Just believe. We’re not really getting anywhere. According to the ‘scientists’, those consigned with the duties of figuring everything out in a rational knowable way, it all came from a...

My half dead Pecan tree has come back to life. The Hollys and the Hackberries have bloomed forth their full leaves waving in the breeze. The Spanish Oaks, oh my, and their serrated twig tips full of greenness. A leaf is a twig tip as a nut is a tiny tree. Brain shaped pecans for example. The BB sized Sugar Hackberry seeds that the Squirrels love and drop all over the ground after devouring their f...

“‘Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die,’” Teddy said suddenly. “‘Along this road goes no one, this autumn eve.’” “What was that?” Nicholson asked, smiling. “Say that again.” “Those are two Japanese poems. They’re not full of a lot of emotional stuff,” Teddy said. He sat forward abruptly, tilted his head to the right, and gave his right ear a light clap with his hand. “...

“A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke.” wrote Vincent in a letter to his brother Theo. Then I will stop, Vincent, and warm myself at your fire. I know you had great struggles and turmoils and equally great transformations and victories. I know that you came into your highest powers while the depression and madness worked o...

Well this is a break through. Not only am I riffing on Donald Trump, something I vowed never to do but I’m doing it in my own rhythm. No more Thursday morning deadlines, every rohn report being published precisely at 7 AM on the morning of . . . (you may or may not have noticed). Just a simple catch and release. Who knows when the fish will bite, it’s still early or it’s too late, they bite when t...

I’ve got ants in my kitchen. I don’t kill them, I watch them. They come out of the electrical outlet next to the refrigerator and begin their foraging, forming trails of small black bodies, scouting out the premises to see what’s to eat. If they don’t find anything on the butcher block table they trek over to the sink and see if I left the honey out. If there’s nothing there, I guess, I dunno, may...

This post first appeared in August of 2020, just before the presidential election. It was my first post on Substack. There have been 267 posts since then, on everything from nuclear war to wildflowers, from supernovae to the murals that decorate my city and I’m feeling an urge to return to the place of my origin, revisit the garden of intention and the spirit of that very first post. It was called...

I was thinking that maybe the rohn report should be more journalistic. It is a report after all. Write about current events in contemporary society, real things. So with that in mind I searched around for something more real, journalistic, and came up with ‘some trees I have known’. There’s something. I know alot of trees. Trees in various neighborhoods and various guises that stick in my mind. Tr...

We don’t talk about it much as if it were a mysterious disease or a taboo, maybe a little weird. I asked my cat about it the other day. I thought she might know something but she just looked at me as if to say what a stupid question . I realized that I was on my own. elated | əˈlādəd | adjective: ecstatically happy, exhilarated, delighted, overjoyed, joyous, gleeful, excited, animated, jubilant, b...