DW's Blog

Friendship

by DW Green — June 17, 2026

“A Walking Stick Report.”

The Thank-You

It began, as these things do now, with something small. A thank-you — a letter to Stan Frizzell, the neighbor of my boyhood and, though it took us the better part of a lifetime to find each other, one of the truest friends I have ever had. Thank you for the blessing of your friendship, I wrote him. And as I set that last word down, it came apart in my hands.

I had unpacked others this year. Interabiding split clean down the middle into inter and abiding, and the seam was the sermon ...

by DW Green — June 10, 2026

“Inter means between. Among. Mutually. Abide means to dwell, to stay, to remain. Put them back together and the word is not a piece of jargon. It is a definition wearing a disguise. To inter-abide is to dwell-between — to have your being in the space that joins you to another, not in the lonely fortress of yourself.”

“On the Words Whose Meaning Lives in the Between”.

It began with an injury and a slip of the hand, which is to say it began the way most true things do — sideways, unplanned, through the crack rather than the front door.

This morning I dropped a gate fob into that thin, merciless slot between the car seat and the console, and in fishing it back out I peeled a strip of skin off my right hand. The writing hand. It bled out of all proportion to the wound, the way hands do. And then, because the work does not wait for the body, I sat down to write anyway — and somewhere in the typing, my nicked hand let a word come apart that I had always seen whole.

Interabiding.

It split under my fingers into two pieces. Inter. Abiding. And in the space where it broke open, the whole teaching was standing there, waiting — as if it had been h...

by DW Green — June 3, 2026

“A Boy, His Grandfather, and the Heroes Who Paid for the Show”

There was a Saturday afternoon, somewhere in the late 1950s, when the most important room in the world was Grandpa Green’s living room and the most important square in the world was the one inside it on the television set. The console TV hummed for a minute before the picture came in. Grandpa in his chair. Me on the floor, or on the couch beside him, depending on the day. A bowl of something to share. The announcer cranking the drama up to eleven before the bell had even rung. And then — the ring. Four corners. Four turnbuckles. Three ropes stretched between them. A square of canvas inside a square of ropes, suspended above a wooden frame, lit so brightly you could see the sweat already gathering on the wrestlers’ shoulders. The matches began. So did the lifelong education I didn’t know I was getting.

The Roster

Some names live in a different room of memory than ordinary names. They’re not stored. They’re kept.Dick the Bruiser. Voice like a gravel truck. Crewcut. Built like the steel mills of Gary, Indiana, where he probably should have stayed if anyone had given him the choice. The kind of heel who’d come up on you slow and then explode.Cowboy Bo...

by DW Green — May 29, 2026

“A Late Recognition of an Early Companion”

I came of age in the era of soul music.

Otis Redding. Aretha Franklin. Marvin Gaye. Sam Cooke. Sam and Dave. The Temptations. Al Green. Stevie. The Stax records and the Motown records and the long, slow burn of a saxophone holding a single note longer than seemed possible. The word soul was on every record sleeve, every marquee, every radio introduction. Soul Train. Soul Brother Number One. Soul Man.

I must confess: I was clueless as to what it meant.

I felt it. Of course I felt it. You couldn’t be a young person in those years and not feel it. Something
happened in your chest when Otis sat down on that dock. Something happened in the room when Aretha demanded R-E-S-P-E-C-T. The music did something the music wasn’t strictly about. It carried more than its lyrics. It delivered more than its melody. There was a freight inside the sound that the sound itself could not quite explain.

But if you had asked me, at seventeen, what is soul? — I could not have told you. I had a definition-shaped
hole where the word should have lived. I knew it when I heard it. I could not name what I was hearing.
It has taken the better part ...

by DW Green — May 21, 2026

“On expectations, two beautiful towns, and a brother who keeps teaching me.”“On expectations, two beautiful towns, and a brother who keeps teaching me.”

My older brother Mike was an art professor for most of his career. He has the eye and the temperament that goes with it — he sees things other people walk past, and when something captures him, he talks about it the way a poet talks about light. For years, the thing that captured him was Bend, Oregon.

To hear Mike tell it, Bend was paradise. The mountains. The light. The river running through town. The art scene, the food, the air, the people. I lost count of the times he described it over a long dinner or a quiet phone call. By the time I finally visited Bend myself, many years later, I had built an entire city in my head.

And then I got there.

Bend is, in fact, a beautiful town. Genuinely lovely. The mountains are real. The river is real. The people were kind. Everything Mike had said was, in the strictest sense, true.

And I was disappointed.

Not because Bend had failed. Bend hadn’t done anything. The problem was the version of Bend I had constructed in my imagination over years of Mike’s loving des...

by DW Green — May 13, 2026

“Three rooms. One is invisible. That’s the one that matters.”

Years ago I sat through an Amba Gale leadership workshop, and somewhere in the middle of it she said a sentence that has stayed with me ever since.

“You know what you know. You know what you don’t know. But you don’t know what you don’t know.”

Then she walked to the easel and drew a large circle. She split it in half with a horizontal line. Then she split the upper half in two with a vertical line. The upper-left quarter, she said, is what you know. The upper-right quarter is what you know you don’t know. And the entire bottom half — fully half of the circle — is what you don’t know you don’t know.

Half. Drawn larger than the two knowing rooms combined. I have never forgotten the picture.

I remember writing the sentence down and then sitting with it for a long time, because at first it sounded like a tongue-twister, and then it sounded like a riddle, and then — slowly — it sounded like the truest thing I had heard in a long time.

There are three rooms in the house of what we know.

The first room is the lit one. What I know. Everything I can name, recite, dem...

by DW Green — May 6, 2026

“The answer IS obvious. That is the whole problem.”

The things some people manage to be experts in: fantasy sports, celebrity trivia, derivatives and commodities markets, thirteenth-century hygiene habits of the clergy.

We can get very good at what we are paid to do, or adept at a hobby we wish we could be paid to do. Yet our own lives, habits, and tendencies remain a stranger to us. We know the rosters. We do not know the roster of our own attention.

At the end of your time on this planet, what expertise will be more valuable — your understanding of matters of living and dying, or your knowledge of the ‘87 Bears? Which will help your children more — your insight into happiness and meaning, or that you followed breaking political news every day for thirty years?

I asked these questions in 2024 with a slight edge in my voice. I want to ask them again now without it. And I want to admit something I did not see clearly the first time: the questions themselves are too clean. They sound like the answer is obvious and the only mystery is why we keep choosing wrong.

The answer IS obvious. That is the whole problem.

The bigger picture is not hidden becau...

by Logan Kost — April 30, 2026

“Brands are lived, not explained.”

Last February I had a stroke. One of its effects was losing my voice. I’ve seen a host of specialists, but so far no clear answers — though my voice is slowly returning.

Shortly after the stroke, my nephew gave me a beautiful leather-bound journal. I began writing in it, titling the journal The Pathless Path: Notes IN Being. What started as a quiet practice became something I couldn’t stop. Non-stop writing. Non-stop reading. Non-stop remembering. It was as if losing my spoken voice opened something else entirely — a written voice I didn’t know was waiting.

The writing has ranged widely. A recent essay reimagined Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter — I called it The New A. Another explored the Spring Equinox through the lens of Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel, a book I loved in college. The stroke didn’t slow the writing. If anything, it unleashed it.

I’ve had a lifelong fascination with spirituality, Eastern philosophy, and — pun very much intended — NOW — non-duality. Eckhart Tolle. Richard Rudd. Alan Watts. Wayne Dyer. The poets — Rumi, T.S. Eliot. Contemplatives like Richard Rohr. And the musicians, too — the ones who carried the...

by DW Green — April 24, 2026

“The writer is not the writing. The writer is the still.”

When we develop Brand Foundations for clients, we begin with what we call the Soul of the Brand — the meaning of the business. Over the years, we’ve had some apprehension about the word soul. It sounds devotional in a room built for deliverables. So for a while we softened it. Essence. Core. DNA. Each is true enough. None is honest enough.

Because here is what we have learned, client by client: every business already has a soul. It was there before the logo, before the strategy deck, before the first hire. The work is not to install one. The work is to recognize the one already present — and to stop smudging the glass with everything the business thinks it is supposed to be.

Sesiels Iowa Meats knew this without being told. Generations of families tasting the difference before anyone explained it. The snap of the casing. The seasoning that tasted like somebody’s grandfather stood over it. No campaign could have manufactured that. It had been lived, one sausage at a time, for decades. Our job wasn’t to give Sesiels a soul. Our job was to help Sesiels see the one it already had — and then to live from that place, on purpose, every day.

by DW Green — April 16, 2026

“A Walking Stick Report.”

Rumi wrote about it. “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

I first encountered those words years ago and something in me went quiet. Not the quiet of emptiness — the quiet of recognition. As if something I had always known had finally been handed back to me in language.

The meaning only expands with contemplation. That’s how you know you’re standing near the truth. It doesn’t shrink under examination. It opens.

Viktor Frankl wrote this: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

A neurologist. A Holocaust survivor. A man who had every reason to collapse the space between what happened to him and how he responded — and instead chose to live inside that pause, to tend it, to call it sacred.

That space Frankl describes — that breath, that pause, that moment of pure potential before the reaction fires — that is Rumi’s field.

Same place. Different door.

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