Company Blog

Distillation

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 teaching in a different vessel. Glenn Frey, an accidental mystic, whose Heat Is On described the energy of my essay on time before I’d even written it. Otis Redding, sittin’ on the dock of today — the present moment as a wooden pier where the only thing required is to watch the tide roll away. Each of them, over the years, leaving a trace.

And not only the great teachers. I began recalling smaller things, too. Mountain driving. The highway signs that read Watch for Falling Rocks — where Watch is exactly the right verb, not Look. The in-store wayfinding signage I helped design for grocery companies across the land. All of it — the sacred and the everyday, the Sufi and the signpost — coming back at once.

That is when the word arrived: distillation.

My mind has become distillery-like. The spirits of great thinkers, writers, poets, musicians — past and present — and the spirit of my own life, evaporating from a failing voice and condensing into written passages. Essays. Odes. Reality expressed through the mind and body named DW Green.

The voice that left me out loud is returning to me on the page.