DW's Blog

Three Voices, One Field

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.

by DW Green — April 8, 2026

“The Scarlet Letter Never Left — It Just Found a Bigger Stage”

“On one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush… It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 1850

— • —

I read The Scarlet Letter in junior high school and didn’t much care for it. Not because it was badly written — it wasn’t. But because something about it made me deeply uncomfortable in a way I couldn’t yet name.

I can name it now. What bothered me was the crowd.

Hester Prynne commits adultery in 17th-century Puritan Boston. Her punishment: stand on the scaffold in public view and wear a red letter A on her chest for the rest of her life. Not prison. Not quiet consequence. Public, permanent, visible shame. The community gathers to watch. To judge. To make her carry their discomfort so they don’t have to.

I was thirteen. I didn’t have the vocabulary for what I was sensing. But the instinct was sound: shaming pe...

by DW Green — April 1, 2026

“An Easter Reflection on Love, Renewal, and the Radical Original.”

I’ll be honest with you. I almost let Easter pass this year without a word.

Not because I don’t believe in what it represents. But because the holiday has accumulated so much — so much argument, so much institution, so much tribal ownership — that sitting down to write about it felt like trying to find the original painting beneath two thousand years of restoration.

And then I remembered: that’s exactly what the man was trying to say.

Strip it down. Get underneath the argument. Find the original thing. Love. Compassion. Peace. Goodwill to all. Not as a theological position. As a way of being in the world, practiced daily, quietly, with an open hand and a soft heart.

That’s the Easter I’m celebrating this Sunday. Not a doctrine. The original radical act.

The Earth Already Knew

Easter doesn’t happen by accident in the spring. The early church anchored the resurrection to the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. That’s not coincidence. That’s ancient wisdom honoring what the earth itself was already saying.

by DW Green — March 25, 2026

“Balance, the Inner Ear, the Spring Equinox, and the Great American Pastimes”

I. The Catch

It happened again recently. A slight misstep, a momentary tipping toward the floor, and then something ancient and involuntary reached up from somewhere below conscious thought and said: not yet. Not down. Stay. The body caught itself before the mind even knew there was a problem.

I am 75 years old. I find this remarkable. Not embarrassing, not alarming — remarkable. Because what caught me was not will, not effort, not the careful deliberateness of a man watching his step. It was something far older and far wiser than any of that. It was the vestibular system — a tiny, fluid-filled architecture deep inside the inner ear — doing what it has been doing, silently and brilliantly, since before I drew my first breath.

So much of what is knowable is not — for whatever reason. We walk through our days largely unaware of the extraordinary intelligence keeping us upright, balanced, oriented in space. The inner ear never announces itself. It never asks for credit. It simply responds — a thousand invisible corrections every moment — so that we can stand tall and move through th...

by DW Green — March 19, 2026

“The infinite doesn’t show up as the infinite. It shows up as THIS.”

The Leather Jacket

You know the feeling of an old, worn, soft leather jacket? The one that doesn’t impress anybody. The one you didn’t buy to make a statement. It’s been through rain and sun and years of just being worn, and somewhere along the way it stopped being a jacket and started being an extension of you.

You don’t put it on to become something. You put it on and feel like what you already are.

That’s thisness.

Not a concept. Not a philosophy. Not something you study or achieve or add to your spiritual resume. Thisness is the most intimate thing there is—so close you keep looking past it, the way you look past your own nose a thousand times a day without noticing it’s always in view.

What Thisness Actually Means

The word comes from the old traditions—haecceity, the philosophers called it. The “this-here-ness” of a thing. Not what makes it similar to other things, but what makes it irreplaceably, unrepeatable itself. Not “tree” in general. This tree. Not “morning” as a category. This morning. Not “life” as ...

by DW Green — March 11, 2026

“Beliefs are yesterday’s conclusions pretending to govern today’s reality.”

YESTERDAY’S CONCLUSIONS

Here’s a strange thing about beliefs: we treat them like they’re alive. We defend them, polish them, build our days around them. But a belief is never born today. Every belief you hold is a conclusion drawn yesterday—maybe last year, maybe forty years ago—dressed up in present tense and acting like it still knows the room.

Think about that. The conviction you carry into this morning was formed in a moment that no longer exists, from evidence that has since shifted, by a version of you that has already changed. And yet it walks in like it owns the place.

This isn’t a criticism of beliefs. I’ve held plenty. Some of them carried me when I needed carrying. But there comes a point—maybe it’s at seventy-five, maybe it’s at twenty-five if you’re paying attention— when you notice the weight. The beliefs that once felt like wings start to feel like walls.

Not because they were wrong. Because they were finished. And you kept wearing them.

THE COSTUME OF IDENTITY

Here’s why beliefs stick long past th...

by DW Green — March 4, 2026

“What if knowing isn’t something you DO — but something you ARE?”

THE EMAIL

I was writing to a client last week. Good person. Good relationship. We’d just finished a piece of work together and I wanted to close the loop. Say something. Acknowledge them.

And I paused. Fingers on the keyboard. Because I couldn’t decide between two words.

Appreciation. Or gratitude.

I chose appreciation. It was the right word for the moment. Specific. Professional. A thank you for something they did, something concrete. I appreciate your partnership on this project. Clean. Clear. Done.

But the pause stayed with me. Because somewhere in that pause was a question I hadn’t asked in seventy-five years: What’s the difference?

THE SHIFT

I’ve noticed something in the way people talk now. “I appreciate you.” It’s everywhere. End of a meeting. End of a call. End of a text. It’s become a kind of verbal handshake. Warm. Sincere enough. But general. Almost automatic.

Growing up, appreciation had edges. It was pointed. You appreciated something specific. A favor. A gesture. A meal someone cooked....

by DW Green — February 25, 2026

“Emotional stability isn’t a “nice to have.” It’s foundational.”

We talk about skills, accuracy, punctuality, following instructions. These are the visible things—the behaviors we can measure and manage.

But beneath every behavior is a person.

And beneath every person is their emotional foundation.

WHAT IS EMOTIONAL STABILITY?

Emotional stability is the capacity to:

• Stay grounded when life gets turbulent

• Separate personal struggles from professional responsibilities

• Receive feedback without collapsing or resisting

• Respect authority even when it’s uncomfortable

• Show up—mentally and emotionally—not just physically

It’s not about being emotionless. It’s about being REGULATED.

Able to feel what you feel without letting it run the show.

WHEN THE FOUNDATION CRACKS

Life happens to everyone:

• Relationship troubles

• Family stress

• Financial pressure

�...

by DW Green — February 18, 2026

“…letting go. Not a doing. An undoing…”

“It is resistance that keeps the feeling going.” — David R. Hawkins

THE GRIP

We think letting go is about the thing we’re holding.

It isn’t.

Letting go is about the holding. The grip itself. The white-knuckled, unconscious, so-habitual-you-don’t-even-notice-it-anymore clench of the hand around something that was never meant to be held that tightly.

A feeling arises. Fear. Anger. Grief. Shame. And before the feeling has even finished arriving, we’ve already done five things to it: resisted it, judged it, feared it, moralized about it, and tried to fix it. Five reactions, and the feeling hasn’t even had time to breathe.

That’s not experiencing a feeling. That’s mugging it in the hallway.

Hawkins saw this with extraordinary clarity. The first step, he said, is simply to allow yourself to have the feeling without resisting it, venting it, fearing it, condemning it, or moralizing about it. Drop the judgment. See that it is just a feeling. Be with it. Surrender all efforts to modify it in any way.

Just a feeling. Two words that change ev...

by DW Green — February 11, 2026

“Everything IS what it IS, and what it IS, is its Meaning.”

THE GLASS CASE

There’s a way we treat sacred things. We place them behind glass. We lower our voices around them. We approach with reverence, with caution, with the quiet dread of someone holding a priceless vase—terrified of the sound it might make if it slips.

We do this with religious relics. With ancient texts. With grandmother’s china.

And somewhere along the way, we started doing it with life itself.

We decided that if life is sacred—and it is—then it must be fragile. That if something is holy, it must be handled with fear. That the proper posture before the divine is one of paralysis: don’t touch. Don’t break it. Don’t get too close.

But what if the sacred isn’t fragile at all? What if it’s the opposite? What if life is so holy, so resilient, so infinitely generous that it wants to be touched, tasted, felt, heard, seen, and known?

What if the greatest disrespect we can show the sacred is to leave it under glass?