Six Years of Profound Living Essays, Images, and Poetry

Just like my life and yours, Profound Living is a work-in-progress.

My first essay, Welcome to Profound Living with Michael Kroth  appeared on January 1, 2018. Since then, Profound Living has published 430 posts, which include essays, images, and poetry. We have had delightful, moving, beautiful contributions from artists of the word, like Carol Rogers-Shaw; of the visual, like Marc Christensen, Vincent Fortunato, and Antonia “TJ” Cardella; and of both word and visual, like Kelly Anderson, as well as a number of other wonderful contributors.

In these last years, we have featured Haiku Narratives with Amy (Hoppock), Davin (Carr-Chellman), and Michael (me). These are monthly video discussions about haikus we have written and shared with each other, which involve poetry (the haiku), art (what is called a “haiga”, that is, the haiku presented within a visual image, such as a painting or photo), and narrative (a “haibun”, that is, a narrative description or reflection about or along side the haiku). We have been sharing these haikus, writing about them, recording our discussions, and posting them as a part of Profound Living since, May, 2020. That's 37 of them, I believe, You can catch them all, here.

Two books of essays and images from Profound Living and one book of our Haiku discussions have been published, and a third book of essays and images will be out in early January, 2024.

From the start, the main purpose of Profound Living has been to help each of us to go deeper in our lives, our work, our relationships, and spiritually, in ways that make our lives increasingly meaningful. We live in times which pull us toward the superficial, the quick fix, and the “top ten ways you can…do, well, anything.”  I want to support all those individuals, writers, researchers, coaches, mentors, and leaders who are working toward depth in their own lives, the lives of others, and society.

From the start, the purpose of Profound Living was NOT marketing, NOT trying to monetize anything, NOT pandering to a particular audience or ideology. I’m not against having more readers, I’d like more. I just started posting Profound Living pieces on Medium, so more people can access this work and discuss it if they wish (my Medium account is here.) . I’m not against making money, I just don’t write these in order to sell something, I’ll write to write what I want to write about. We'll publish pieces that delight, move, and engage people towards depth. Not in order to get clicks or "likes."

I’m not against taking a stance, far from it, and the position I take may not neatly fit into any ideology and it may not appeal to anybody. I hope to be more generative in my thinking and more principled. More conservative and more progressive. More individual and more global.

I'm not kidding myself. That's all aspirational.  It's what I'm trying to do.  Sometimes I do a good job, sometimes - probably more often - I err more on the side of bloviating.  But I'm trying, and trying to do better, step by step.

Here's the other main purpose (can there be two main purposes?) of Profound Living: I write for myself.  I write to learn about myself. I write to grapple with what I am thinking and what I am thinking I’m thinking, with what I think I know, with what I know….I think. Sometimes, I write to remember. Often, I remember when I write. I remember what I haven't thought about for years.

Once I plop my butt in the chair, I love to write. Love it. It's flow, baby. Flowin' down the rive-uh. Getting that butt to plop, or more accurately, thump, into that writing-chair is always the challenge.

“There are as many kinds of essays,” E.B. White, one of the great essayists, wrote, “as there are human attitudes or poses, as many essay flavors as there are Howard Johnson ice creams.”¹ As pretty much a self-educated essayist, I take joy in experimenting with a variety of styles, some of which “work,”  some which don’t, and some of which are simply flights of fancy, and fun to write.  My topics - the topics of Profound Living - vary widely, depending on the contributor's interests.  Going deeper, exploring depth is always the main criteria, and though some of the images posted here have been published in other places, all essays must be original work, first published here.  I may repost something, like Judith Valente's very cool take on an earlier blog of mine, but otherwise, the work you'll read here will be original.

I’ll end here with Montaigne. This has been in our “About” section from the start and remains there today²:

I prefer to call Profound Living pieces “essays” rather than blog posts - though it’s probably just an affectation. They are written in the spirit of essayists like E.B. White and, of course, the person responsible for the term “essay”, Michel de Montaigne.

Montaigne famously used the French term essai, which means “trial” to describe his writings. The term “essay” comes from this.

There is one other legacy that Montaigne left behind that resonates with me. In 1576, he had a medal made which said Que scais-je?, which means, “What do I know?”. As translator J. D. Cohen writes in his introduction, “He had come to recognize by experience and reading that the intellect was powerless to discover those truths about which he was most curious…what passed as truth was often a matter of climate and upbringing, of passion and prejudice, depending entirely on the inquirer’s viewpoint” (p. 10).

Just like my life and yours, Profound Living is a work-in-progress. It has been a rewarding six years and we hope to be going strong over the next six, learning how to live and to write about life lived more deeply day-by-day.

Finally, I can never thank enough both David Clemons, who gave me the idea for Profound Living and whose company, Push 360 is the platform for this beautiful site; and Heather Barrett, who has supported Profound Living artistically and technically through David's company, Push 360, from the start.  Heather also designed the covers of our two Profound Living books.  Thank you David - "You da man!", and Heather, so very, very much.

Footnotes

¹ White, E. B. (1977). Essays of E.B. White (1st ed.). Harper & Row. New Paragraph.

² Cohen, J. M. (1959). Introduction. Montaigne Essays (pp. 9-21). Harmondsworth, Middlesex; Baltimore: Penguin Books.

"What Do I Know?"