Welcome to Profound Living with Michael Kroth

I’m teaching myself Italian, so I will add benvenuto alla vita profonda to this welcome. And why not bienvenido, bienvenue, and howdy as well? I grew up in Kansas, where I took some French in high school and Spanish in college, and spent summers on my grandparent’s farm just outside the little town of Winfield so a variety of caio’s – hellos – and welcomes seem appropriate here.

Like my knowledge of these languages, my understanding of profound living extends just barely beyond howdy. Yet the opportunity to learn about la vita profonda, the profound life, extends far beyond. That is the challenge and the prospect.

I decided to create this site, with the special help and encouragement of my buddy (and co-author) David Clemons, and my son Shane, because I felt an urge to write about this topic, which has been on my mind over the last four years. (For more about why this format, take a look at my piece Ovaries, Oysters, and Toads.)

I started this journey a few years ago. It is both a personal journey and a professional inquiry. It began with an interest in irreverence, added reverence (after working in Italy for three months), and evolved into a desire to experience and to understand profound living and learning.

Just within the last year, my colleague at the University of Idaho, Dr. Davin Carr-Chellman, and I have begun to explore this topic from a scholarly perspective. Davin has agreed to write about our research and also his own perspectives here from time to time. More about our research, with updates, and about Davin, a profound and fun fella to work with, as we go along.

In the meantime, the writings and videos you will see here come from my own experiences, perspectives, and reflections. I’ll bring in other sources – poetry, research, deeper-thinkers-than-I, authors, bloggers, heck, maybe comedians - as well.

I’m not sure how this will all evolve. I am both reverent and irreverent. Sometimes I think I’m deeper than I am, which is the pretentious me, and sometimes I’m just off-the-wall and playing with ideas. Once in a while I might have something worth tucking away for further rumination. I imagine you’ll get all of that and a lot more as I learn how to write for this medium.

As we go along I hope to engage people in causerie, these informal articles and also chats, about this topic. I just learned that word, causerie, a few weeks ago and am enamored by it. It sounds like fun and meaningful discussion. I know, as an adult educator, that much if not most of the learning comes not from the facilitator (in this case, me) but from all of the knowledge and perspectives and experiences from the folks wanting to learn. I am not sure the vehicle for this “chat” yet but we will find engaging ways to kick things around constructively.

Thank you again for taking a look here and we’ll see how it goes.