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...

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.

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.