Category: Idea Sharing Adventure Blog Posts
“No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.” —John Wheeler, physicist Alison and I have been married for thirty-two years. During that time, we have had four dogs, all yellow Labs. Bowdoin, Tampa, Tucker, and Scout are their names. Only the last of which is still with us today. Most dogs…
READ ARTICLEFlashback #1: Our daughter Abby is five years old, and blindfolded. In the middle of the screened-in porch hangs a piñata. It’s a colorful donkey twirling gently in the breeze. In her hands Abby holds a yellow Wiffle bat commandeered from the garage. Abby swings and misses, yet all the other children cheer, confident in…
READ ARTICLE“If one person in your family commits a crime, the entire family must be purged.” “When you have food in your stomach you can think about the meaning of life, but when you are starving, all you can think about is hunger.” “I never saw a map of the world. As an Asian I didn’t…
READ ARTICLE“If you want to be a champion you’ve got to feel like one, you’ve got to look like one, you’ve got to act like one.” —Red Auerbach John Kohtala was the best jump shooter I ever met. If he could get his right elbow above your left defensive hand, he was going to shoot, and it…
READ ARTICLE“It takes a lot of different flowers to make a bouquet.” —Ancient Islamic proverb I can still picture the world from my dad’s shoulders. I’m two and a half years old and he has an ankle in each hand. My head is above his and I feel as if I’m on top of the world…
READ ARTICLE“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” —Joseph Campbell It would be impossible to acknowledge the oneness that defines our universe and then go back to work as a supervisor, executive, or team leader and manage “employees” the old-fashioned way—barking out instructions with a heavy hand. Workers historically have been commodities….
READ ARTICLEGo ahead and hate your neighbor Go ahead and cheat a friend Do it in the name of heaven You can justify it in the end. —One Tin Soldier Why has acknowledging our universal connectivity and oneness been downplayed for so long? The answer has two parts. First, only recently has scientific understanding advanced far…
READ ARTICLE“The earth and myself are of one mind.” —Chief Joseph “Hey, Dad, what’s wrong?” one of our daughters asks. Whenever I’m asked that question, I’m a tad disappointed (in myself), and yet fascinated by the intuition of the person who has spotted what I was trying to conceal. We’re together as a family, so I’m…
READ ARTICLE“It is hard to follow one great vision in this world of darkness and of many changing shadows. Among them men get lost.” —Black Elk In my last post I wrote about what the sandpiper knows, the tiny bird that moves predictably with the unpredictable. No two waves are ever the same, yet the sandpiper…
READ ARTICLE“We Indians think of the Earth and the whole universe as a never-ending circle, and in this circle, man is just another animal. The buffalo and the coyote are our brothers, the birds, our cousins. Even the tiniest ant, even a louse, even the smallest flower you can find, they are all relatives.” —Jenny Leading…
READ ARTICLE“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” —John Muir The most transformative concept I’ve learned from my time at Pine Ridge is “Mitakuye Oyasin.” Each person translates this phrase in their own way, but the essence is always the same: We are all…
READ ARTICLE“Nobody is superior, nobody is inferior, but nobody is equal either. People are simply unique, incomparable. You are you. I am I.” —Osho If we don’t share our stories they die with us, Verola Spider said to me one afternoon as we sat together on the porch at the Singing Horse Trading Post on the Pine Ridge Indian…
READ ARTICLE“Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.” —Jack Swigert It was April 13, 1970, and the crew of Apollo 13 was in trouble. “This is Houston. Say again, please.” An explosion in one of the oxygen tanks had crippled the spacecraft in mid-flight. “Houston, we’ve had a problem. We’ve had a Main B bus…
READ ARTICLE“You are only ever one decision away from a totally different life.” —Mark Batterson Forty-seven weeks ago I published the first post of this yearlong series on the power and potential of heightened self-awareness resulting in respect for all voices, beginning with one’s own. Next week I will publish the last post of this…
READ ARTICLE“If an apology is followed by an excuse or a reason, it means one is going to commit the same mistake again they just apologized for.” —Amit Kalantri The morning light summons silence and awe as I enter Wind Cave National Park. As I drive, I marvel at the natural beauty that surrounds me. In…
READ ARTICLEThis blog post is a reprint from an article Kevin recently wrote for The Maine Monitor, published October 24, 2021 ______ There’s a lot to learn from babies, one step at a time The CEO of Hancock Lumber notes that infants learn to walk with minimal training or coaching. Leaders can structure their organizations with…
READ ARTICLE“All this time I was finding myself and I didn’t know I was lost.” —Avicii, “Wake Me Up” How do you find and stay on your path? This is the question often pondered by self-actualizers for which I have acquired five personal tenets: You finding your path may have very little in common with me…
READ ARTICLE“Everyone is beautiful.” — Ariana Grande Jenny Edwards cleans and cares for the Hancock Lumber home office in Casco at night, after finishing her day job. I work an odd collection of hours, which brings me into the office at night once or twice a week. This is how Jenny and I met and then…
READ ARTICLE“No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.” —Buddha I was driving through Rapid City, South Dakota, when I saw him. Cresting the rolling hill in front of me appeared an all-white Ford pickup truck with a giant cross towering over the cab. Streamers…
READ ARTICLE“Anyone writing a creative work knows that you open, you yield yourself, and the book talks to you and builds itself. To a certain extent, you become the carrier of something that has been given to you from what we call the Muses—or, in biblical language, ‘God.’ This is not fancy, it is fact. Since…
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