I have found myself more contemplative lately. Adi has been gone nearly three weeks now, up at Sovereignty Ranch in the Hill Country, and the house has grown quiet. Oscar and George, our cats, have taken over her side of the bed, which I choose to read as loyalty rather than opportunity.
It has been that kind of season. The kind that turns you inward whether you planned on it or not. I had a gig in Fort Worth last week, made some aerospace engineers laugh at the Omni, and then was planning to point the car south toward the Gulf until Adi called me. The island would have to wait while I was diverted on a quest.
I decided to write about it. It starts with a yield sign and ends on this bench and somewhere in the middle Adi steps onto a stage and the room is never quite the same again. I hope you will read it.
Kempner Park sits in the heart of Galveston Island, shaded by live oaks that were old before anyone thought to name the place. A bench rests among them, iron and weathered wood, facing outward into the green. The plaque nearby speaks of a Teutonic club, of dancing pavilions and bowling alleys, of a social life that ran from 1876 until the war made being German inconvenient. The oaks predate the plaque and will outlast it. They keep their own record. You sit and the park settles around you the way a room settles after the last guest finally leaves a party, the hosts exhaling, the night a success, the house returning quietly to itself, whole again. The island does the same after the tourists take their noise back to the mainland. It exhales.
The park holds the quiet completely until, like an uninvited guest, an occasional siren pierces the silence from somewhere beyond the tree line. The park does not flinch. It knows what the oaks know. Every emergency has a time stamp. Everything returns to the true source — the light. It falls through the canopy in pieces, slow and unhurried, belonging nowhere in particular, and so do the people here, the ones the rushing world has looked past on its way to somewhere important. The ones who did not survive the sorting, who fell through the cracks the system calls a safety net. They find this bench, these oaks, this light, every morning. The ones who linger know something the rest of us have traded away without noticing, or perhaps were never offered in the first place. You walk through it and the outside world does not disappear exactly. It just stops being relevant for a while. The oaks have seen to that. They have been seeing to it since before the plaque found a home.
I’ve spent most of my life onstage, telling stories for laughs and feeling a room shift in real time. For twenty five years I hosted an improvisational show called Four Day Weekend, and that stage felt like home. In 2020 the world shifted, and so did I. The questions of the world began to matter more to me than comedy, and I turned toward writing about life's greater mysteries, finishing We’ll Always Have Paris and later Quietude, which became a quiet turning point in my life. Exploring The 12 Universal Laws widened the lens even more. Now the island reflections and everyday synchronicities I share carry one intention, which is to help you awaken to your highest potential. I am not here to convince or impress you. I simply hope to brighten your day, invite you to question what you have been told, and remind you of what you already know. Each morning I return to the same ground. I am awake. I am aware. I am able. I remember. Everything I share grows from there.