I could never think of myself as a self-made man. I’ve learned something important and indispensable from everyone I’ve known, every step of the way. Immediate family, relatives, friends, acquaintances, playmates, school teachers, employers, coworkers — each has contributed something, each has awakened something in me, each has helped show me the way. In this process, I also count forgotten random encounters. I include pets. And I most certainly include our old family farm, and nature in her wild and semi-wild states. In a more cerebral, abstract dimension, the list includes every book and every writer I’ve read. It includes, too, those whose insights are best experienced as they were spoken by Alan Watts, to name one pleasantly conversational example, or by Jiddu Krishnamurti, or Thich Nhat Hanh. I can only guess at what my life would be like had I never listened to them. But of course their message, to use a ready, easy term, has always, and will always, remain available to those who are ready to hear it, and they would be the first to point out that their names in themselves mean nothing special at all. Their teachings are timeless. They are in the wind. Here I will add two more teachers — or is it three? — whose insights strike me as being profound. Sleep, and my own bare feet.
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Categories: Sweet Sleep and Bare Feet
Tags: Alan Watts, Bare Feet, Books, Child and Man, Insights, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Memory, Nature, Our Old Farm, Sleep, Teachers, Thich Nhat Hanh
William Michaelian 
One of your best entries, William. I really found wisdom here. You have been and will continue to be a great teacher, the Bard of the Pacific Northwest. Thank you.
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Thanks, Paul. Your kind words give me joy. And they go both ways.
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Life itself our teacher. Lovely thoughts, William.
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Thanks, Elisabeth. And though you weren’t named, you can be sure those thoughts include you as well. I’m grateful.
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