Profound Living - One Year Anniversary

The first Profound Living essay was posted just less than a year ago, on January 1st, 2018. It has been a joy to curate this process over the last few months, working with other insightful and talented writers and artists, and I am looking forward to 2019. We are hoping to collect the work of 2018 into a small book and of course we will continue posting essays and photographs. At some point, we will add original, unpublished poetry to the mix.

In my second essay, Ovaries, Oysters, and Toads , I laid out why a blog, answering “I knew I would write a blog the day I realized my Facebook shares about horse ovaries, rocky mountain oysters, and guys who irritate witches and consequently get turned into toads were getting lots more traction from friends than my pontifications about climate disaster, political disaster, religious disaster, or just disaster disaster.”

As it turns out, very little has been written here about disasters, and much has been offered in the form or words or images about what my collaborator and friend Davin Carr-Chellman calls “human flourishing” . Too, and an important part of human flourishing, we have seen much imagery showing the beauty of our world and beyond which we could perhaps call "natural flourishing".

As I wrote in that second essay,

I’m interested in exploring how we can live our lives with more meaning, more depth, and more joy. We live in a world that feels like it is being experienced increasingly on the surface. We skim for news on the internet, accept what one pundit or another declares to be true, rush from one meeting to being a cabbie for the kids and then jump back online to check out what is happening with the Kardashians (or name your favorite reality show). We might have booked a flight or booked out of the office or listened to the Book of Secrets, but the last book we read was in college.

We are busy, busy, in a tizzy, tizzy.

The focus of these essays will be profound living and we will explore what that means and how to move in that direction. For the moment, it just means deepening. Deepening all aspects of our lives, over time.

How about living a life more caring than carry out, more bottomless than bottomless fries, and more unbeatable than an unbeatable Black Friday sale price? We’ll travel this path toget her.

That purpose has not changed. The journey toward profound living has no end. As I wrote in my fourth essay , “Who knows where this profound living idea might lead. It's a lifetime pass. An open ticket. Destination(s) unknown.”

Let’s hop back on the train, float the river, pad down the path. Sit and saturate in the wonder of being alive.