Like a Bird Podcast

About Like a Bird Podcast

“One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.” - Paul Valéry One useful idea every Wednesday morning, usually an essay, but sometimes an interview. Most of the ideas will explore how to grow lighter and freer, like a bird, by gently cutting ourselves free. Many will be rooted in secular Buddhism, and everything that interests me: truth, love, books, creative sources, ego, friendship, raising boys, art, hard bop jazz, the mountains, meditation retreats, wealth, narcissism, solitude and addiction. Latest creative projects always at jechadwick.com Please join us, share and of course give feedback. likeabird.substack.com (https://likeabird.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

J E Chadwick

Category

education · religion & spirituality

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

16 Feb 2024

Latest episode

9 Apr 2024

Latest episodes

10 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   9 Apr 2024

   Watching One Day: Six Ways We Misunderstand Love

   All creative projects at jechadwick.com (http://jechadwick.com) — Did you also find yourself unexpectedly Binge-watching Netflix’s One Day, and what did YOU take out of it? — What did it say to you about relationships, and how we often misunderstand love? — What are the foundations of a healthy kind of love? Just when you think you know your own taste in TV shows, a fourteen-episode Netflix Rom-Com pops up and gets deep under your skin. I lost a week binging One Day, the new bittersweet adaptation of David Nicholls’s 2009 bestseller. The film tracks the complicated love between Dexter Mayhew (Leo Woodall) and Emma Morley (Ambika Mod) for two decades. They hook up on the final day at Edinburgh University, July 15th, 1988, and then each episode intriguingly revisits them on that same day a year later. The format is genius. It allows us to see the broad arc of a relationship over decades, especially how power shifts between friendship and love as their fortunes rise and fall. It slowly sucks us in, requiring us to imagine what happens between each July rendezvous. Like a Jane Austen chapter, each episode sets fresh obstacles for their relationship—new partners, weddings, children, addiction, the death of a parent—inviting us to switch our sympathies. Who’s to blame for this fight? Who is holding the relationship back? Are we still rooting for them? Although they botched the final episode (Emma Morley would have hated it; way too sickly sweet), I was hooked until then. Of course, all the British 90’s nostalgia helped: a killer soundtrack, college balls, lad culture, London pubs, and getaways to Greece, Italy, and Paris. But for me, the real hook was its brutal dissection of love and how easily it can be misunderstood. Sexy Dex and Serious Em are unlikely soul mates. They come from entirely different places—social background, race, gender, vocation. He lacks purpose and direction, while she takes life too seriously, and there are few signs of sexual chemistry between them. Em resents the privilege that Dex was born with, and his lack of self-awareness, yet she still sticks with him as he loses a decade to narcissism and addiction. Their path from young love to adult love in the city is messy, even brutal. Yet together, they find an equal footing over the years, and we are reminded that love is a journey, often painful and unpredictable but almost always worth it. One Day’s dialogue is knowing and sharp. “You’ve never seen me before in your life,” Em accuses Dex when they first meet, in a moment that foreshadows all of his narcissistic thoughtlessness. In Episode 3, Dex lies on his back while Em’s head rests on his chest. In this moment he does see her: “You know what I can’t understand? You have all these people telling you all the time how great you are. You know, smart and funny and talented and all that. I mean, endlessly. I’ve been telling you for years. So why don’t you believe it? Why do you think people say that stuff? Do you think it’s all a conspiracy? People secretly ganging up to be nice about you?” Soon, they grow apart. Dex finds the fame and success he lazily pursues as a TV presenter, and his ego takes over. In an excruciating restaurant scene, Dex can’t stop looking over her shoulder for more interesting options, bored by her conversation, and she explodes on him outside in the alley: "You used to make me feel good about myself. But now you make me feel like s**t. Like I’m not cool enough, or interesting enough or ambitious enough." A few years later, life begins to catch up with Dex, triggering a journey of self-awareness: “You know, if you’re 22 and f*****g up, you can say, “It’s okay. I’m only 22. I’m only 25. I’m only 28.” But 32…” As he struggles through his thirties, they grow closer again as his marriage falls apart. When they finally get together, Em jokes “I just thought I’d finally got rid of you,” and Dex tells her what she already knows, “I don’t think you can.” Even after almost twenty years, their love holds a mysterious power over their lives. At this moment, they simply decide to stop resisting it or trying to understand it. If Dex and Em’s lines sound familiar, perhaps it’s because we’ve said variations of them ourselves. If we’ve loved and lost, or left and tried to return, we have likely traveled through these emotions and had these conversations. Perhaps if we’ve never said them, we haven’t loved yet. Six ways we misunderstand love The mysterious and ineffable power of love was captured poignantly eight hundred years ago by the Persian poet Rumi: Out beyond all ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’ don’t make any sense. Dex and Em’s struggle to understand their love makes for compelling drama, but it also asks questions. Why does love so often overwhelm our senses? What can we expect from those who love us? And perhaps most interestingly, how do we misunderstand love? First, what we typically call love is invariably just the start of love. It’s falling ‘in love’. We become experts in how love begins, but we know far less about how to sustain it. The first glance, words, kisses, and intimacy are preserved forever. We then long for the excitement and boundless opportunities of the first year and use them as a sharp stick to beat our relationship with in the fifth year, the tenth, and beyond. Comparing the inevitable joy of fresh intimacy with the equally inevitable challenge of making daily compromises is perhaps the definition of insanity. Second, we say “I love you” when often we mean “I love love.” We crave the feeling of security and excitement when in love. Saying “I love you” is often a means to the end of being in love. At certain and unpredictable points in our lives, we crave reassurance that we are still lovable and that we can still make someone fall in love with us. Of course, we still buy the flowers and say “I love you”, but in truth, we can often still only love love, because we suspect we may never be lovable. Third and related, we confuse loving somebody with needing them to love us. If we truly see what someone needs, and we want to give it to them with no strings attached, that is the love that we should want. But if we only give our love in the expectation of getting the same or more back, it is something else. As Eric Fromm writes, “Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love. Hence, the problem for them is how to be loved and how to be lovable.” When the Italians say “Ti voglio bene,” sometimes abbreviated to TVB, it means “I want your good” or “I want what’s best for you.” TVB implies selfless, unconditional love - the kind of love we should aspire to be capable of. This love is caught sweetly in a few lines about the Sun and the Earth: And still, after all this time, The sun never says to the earth, “You owe Me.” Look what happens with A love like that, It lights the Whole Sky —Author unknown, often misattributed to Hafiz Fourth, love is neither permanent nor stable. This is perhaps the most dangerous misunderstanding to cope with. We can try to lock it up in legal agreements, ceremonies, romantic songs, and social norms, but nothing can stabilize love. The energy between two separate people, whose individual freedoms, wealth, urges, and dreams have been constrained, for better or worse, will always be dynamic. Love is alive, always thriving and dying. The only antidote is for both partners to know this and stay clear-eyed and honest about the fact that they are not the relationship. The relationship is a separate, fragile, living thing. There are always three entities involved - each partner plus the relationship itself. Fifth, nobody can escape the pain of being in love. To love is to risk heartbreak, but it is probably worth it. Nobody can guarantee they won’t hurt or get hurt, and they should be wary of such promises. If our intention is to live a full life and to slowly and patiently attain a deeper wisdom, then we can expect to endure love’s pain along the way. Herman Hesse and Margaret Atwood both wrote about this: “Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.” — Hermann Hesse “Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.” ― Margaret Atwood Sixth, we cannot hope to change somebody in order to love them more. Think about the logic of trying this. You spend a lifetime searching for the right person, the perfect one, and then when you decide you’ve found them, you start trying to improve them. What was the point of searching so hard, if you’re now planning to bend them to your own preferences? It never works anyway. It’s far easier to change yourself than to try to change someone else, and then feel disappointed when they revert to who they are. In all these ways, and many more, love is misunderstood and likely to cause suffering and heartbreak. Perhaps three important principles emerge though: giving, freedom, and impermanence. A love that is rooted in these three soils is worth wanting. Giving is saying, ‘Ti voglio bene,’ or ‘I want your good,’ and truly meaning it. Freedom is cutting someone free unconditionally while continuing to support their dreams. Impermanence is committing fully to a love that is neither stable nor guaranteed. If Dex and Em had rooted their love in giving, freedom, and impermanence, they might have lived happily ever after. But nobody wants to watch fourteen episodes of that TV show. J. E. Chadwick This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit likeabird.substack.com (https://likeabird.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

2. 

   2 Apr 2024

   Twelve ways to read books

   Why do so many of us still read? After all, there are now dozens of alternative ways to entertain or improve ourselves. Can a good book still compete with a blockbuster movie or an addictive computer game? Finding the time to sit down to read alone feels harder than ever, and too often we gradually lose our cherished habit. That would be a mistake. In this essay, I’ll argue for more books and share twelve different ways to read them. Some of these may seem obvious, but a few of them might make you feel hungry to devour your next pile of books. I’ve also written a recommended reading list, with over 200 books across twenty genres, each with a ten-word review (https://likeabird.substack.com/p/books-worth-reading). Read with total freedom. There are too few areas of our lives that we genuinely get to control. Most of us wake up earlier than we’d like to, then race to hit deadlines and appointments and make hundreds of daily compromises to keep others happy. Sometimes, we don’t even get to choose the movies or music we need to match our shifting mood. But nobody gets to control what we read. The books we choose and how we decide to read them are an oasis of pure, indulgent freedom. Books uniquely put us in charge, allowing us to slow down and dwell on new truths or to speed past or skip tired ideas. This rare freedom is what we need more of in our lives. Nobody can judge us for keeping five or ten different books on the go at the same time. Like tapas on a Mediterranean break, we can endlessly snack on a diet of fiction and non-fiction—Yeats on the park bench, Amis before dinner, Austen in bed. Libraries are free, and all are now online, so everyone has access to an unlimited stream of fresh books. And if you don’t like your local selection, you can even ask a friend in a fancier zip code to lend you their login details. Life is too short to continue with a dull book. If you find a book opaque or challenging to get through, it’s the author’s fault, not yours, so please move on. If they could think clearly, they would write more clearly, but alarmingly few do. Reading a different chapter of ten books is often more rewarding than reading ten chapters of one book. Modern life rarely offers us pure freedom, so we must indulge in the serendipity of reading books. Richard Powers captured this freedom wistfully in this passage from Bewilderment: “My son loved the library. He loved putting books on hold online and having them waiting, bundled up with his name, when he came for them. He loved the benevolence that the stacks held out, their map of the known world. He loved the all-you-can-eat buffet of borrowing. He loved the lending histories stamped into the front of each book, the record of strangers who checked them out before him. The library was the best dungeon crawl imaginable: free loot for the finding, combined with the joy of leveling up.” Read to be alone. We can only know ourselves once we deliberately carve out space to spend time alone. Books are perhaps the best way to be alone. They provide just enough company to keep the wolf of loneliness from the door yet still demand our active introspection. A good book gently pulls our attention between the characters, the author, and inevitably ourselves at a pace that creates space for self-compassion. Do we sometimes act like this? Are we also, perhaps, too jealous or too forgiving? Possibly. Read on. With a day of solitude and a pile of books, we can enjoy aloneness, the happy cousin of loneliness. In his 1905 essay “On Reading,” Marcel Proust captured it well: “With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: ‘What did they think of us?’—‘Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?’—‘Did they like us?’—nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by someone else.” Read to be intimate. At the same time, our books can help us find intimacy. They open our hearts and make us available again to connect with people we might wish to love. There is perhaps nothing more erotic than to sit and read in silence with someone we desire. Books allow us to intimately experience shared meaning with other readers and invite friends and family into more profound communion. If you’ll permit an irresistible pun, our books bind us. Cormac McCarthy wrote in The Passenger, “Having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.” Sartre once said, “I found the human heart empty and insipid everywhere except in books.” Or even as John Waters rakishly put it, “If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t f**k ‘em.” Books can also have a unique physical intimacy that can last for decades. I have copies on my shelves that I swear still hold the scent of the person who gifted them to me. Impossible. Right? When we discover and finish a remarkable book, we should buy copies for friends who need to read it and let them know we want to discuss it as soon as they finish. Sometimes, as I read, I’m already debating who will require their own copy when I’m done. Read to understand other people. In Walter Isaacson’s insightful biography of Elon Musk, he quotes the billionaire describing a difficult childhood: “I took people literally when they said something…and it was only by reading books that I began to learn that people did not always say what they really meant.” I don’t usually identify with Musk, but when I read this, I couldn’t help wondering whether my own teenage fixation with Jane Austen was rooted in the same need to understand others, especially those new objects of desire, girls. I suspect I was desperately grasping to decode Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet (“There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.”) or Emma Woodhouse (“I always deserve the best treatment because I never put up with any other.”) If I could understand the secrets of these 18th Century heroines’ hearts, I would surely be more successful with 1980’s girl goths. (Dear Reader, it didn’t work.) As an interesting and perhaps telling aside, Austen’s novels were prescribed to shell-shocked WW1 soldiers to help them rehabilitate back into society. Following their trauma, I imagine those young men must have struggled to learn again how to make sense of anything. Most books make us wiser somehow. Paradoxically, non-fiction reveals the most wildly improbable stories, but the most profound human truths are found in the characters of fiction. Johann Hari explored this in “Stolen Focus” his insightful book about distraction, where he shared the outcome of a study of reading habits: “When they got the results, they were clear. The more novels you read, the better you were at reading other people’s emotions. It was a huge effect. This wasn’t just a sign that you were better educated—because reading nonfiction books, by contrast, had no effect on your empathy. I asked Raymond why. Reading, he told me, creates a “unique form of consciousness…. While we’re reading, we’re directing attention outward toward the words on the page and, at the same time, enormous amounts of attention is going inward as we imagine and mentally simulate.”...It’s a way of combining “outwardly directed attention and inwardly directed attention.” When you read fiction in particular, you imagine what it is like to be another person. You find yourself, he says, “trying to understand the different characters, their motivations, their goals, tracking those different things. It’s a form of practice. We’re probably using the same kinds of cognitive processes that we would use to understand our real peers in the real world.” You simulate being another human so well that fiction is a far better virtual reality simulator than the machines currently marketed under that name.” Read old, original texts. Despite our relentless bias towards the new, the latest, the next big thing, we should fight this urge and always return to old, original texts. Books, plays, and poems can survive intact and pure for centuries, communicating ideas over the ages and revealing universal human truths. Open any battered copy of Shakespeare's complete works at a random page, and you will find fresh 400-year-old humor and valuable insights. The playful and erudite essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb is insistent on the importance of older texts. He often invokes The Lindy Effect, which states that the longer a non-perishable item like a book has been around, the longer it's likely to persist into the future: “I follow the Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be around for quite a bit of time, and so forth.” He believes this idea should also guide writers. If you want to write a book that will be read in twenty years, he suggests, then write a book that somebody would have read twenty years ago. Taleb also argues that most new texts, and especially non-fiction, are disposable. No book that can be shortened survives. “To see if a book is real, ask ten people of different backgrounds & professions to summarize it,” he advises. “If the summaries are similar, the book will not survive as it can be shortened to a journal article. The more the summaries diverge, the higher the dimensionality of the book.” I would add that reading old books beats listening to them. Audiobooks and podcasts might distract us from the silence while driving or walking, but they can’t replace the commitment it requires to read the original text. As Naval Ravikant puts it, "Listening to books instead of reading them is like drinking your vegetables instead of eating them." Read books to savor the craft. We should savor many things more often, such as our food, our music, and walks in nature. Stopping to savor is a form of meditation that usually helps to calm and clear the mind. But a book can also be savored when we pause to consider the elements of its craft. What do I mean by craft? We can consider any or all of the writer's decisions as its craft: the language, pace, characters, narrative devices, dialogues, themes, story, plot, and even the typographical layout. As we read, whatever calls out to us or makes our heart skip a beat requests our attention for a reason. There's usually something there when we pause to consider a line or a single word choice, even if only for a moment. There was a reason it called out. When we savor a book, we start to pick up on all these atomic parts. We stop simply enjoying the story, and we begin to ask why. Only books lend themselves to this form of meditation. With a movie, a play, or a piece of music, it’s a moving target unless you deliberately hit pause, so it’s harder to appreciate things deeply in the same way. Books invite us to stop and savor. But don’t take my word for it. Here are the opening paragraphs from Metamorphosis (German: Die Verwandlung), a novella written by Franz Kafka and first published in 1915. It tells the story of salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself inexplicably transformed into a huge insect. It’s perhaps my favorite opening passage in all literature, and I invite you to savor the writing craft and pause to spend time with anything that jumps out at you: As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly stay in place and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes. What has happened to me? he thought. It was no dream. His room, a regular human bedroom, only rather too small, lay quiet within its four familiar walls. Above the table on which a collection of cloth samples was unpacked and spread out—Samsa was a traveling salesman—hung the picture which he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and put into a pretty gilt frame. It showed a lady, with a fur hat on and a fur stole, sitting upright and holding out to the spectator a huge fur muff into which the whole of her forearm had vanished! Gregor’s eyes turned next to the window, and the overcast sky—one could hear raindrops beating on the window gutter—made him quite melancholy. What about sleeping a little longer and forgetting all this nonsense, he thought, but it could not be done, for he was accustomed to sleep on his right side and in his present condition he could not turn himself over. However violently he forced himself toward his right side he always rolled onto his back again. He tried it at least a hundred times, shutting his eyes to keep from seeing his struggling legs, and only desisted when he began to feel in his side a faint dull ache he had never felt before. Read to become slightly less dull. I’ve always felt that the worst insult is to call someone dull, and I’d feel gutted if somebody labeled me unoriginal. But after living alone in a cave for 11 years, that’s precisely how the British Buddhist nun Tenzin Palmo has described the human mind: “The mind rarely thinks up something fresh and new and exciting. Mostly it is just the same stale material, repeated again and again. The same old grievances and memories—both happy and sad—opinions, ideas, plans, fantasies, and fears. If we start to observe our mind, we see how unoriginal it usually is. Our ordinary conceptual mind is not really very bright.” After 11 years of solitude, arguably, she can see things as they really are, so I’m willing to accept that most of us are rather dull. To be clear, I’m not claiming that reading more books will instantly make us fascinating, and I certainly know people who read all the best books and took out all the worst messages. But if you become a discerning reader and take the time to reflect and savor the craft, especially if you take notes and review them along the way, you should at least become less dull. Curiously, the books we read will still change us even though we forget most of what we have read. A good book is also a good conversation, even with a stranger. I used to find it difficult to converse with two types of strangers: the very young and the very old. Now, I simply ask them what they’re reading. It works well with five-year-olds and eighty-five-year-olds. And if they tell you they don’t read books, you likely just saved yourself a dull five minutes either way. Read to get healthy. Kafka once compared books to narcotics, but all the evidence suggests they are more like tonics. Across various studies, researchers have linked books to putting our brains into a pleasurable, meditative state. Regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than non-readers. Book therapy is not a new idea. The Ancient Greeks called their library in Thebes, a ‘healing place for the soul’, and Sigmund Freud experimented with using literature as part of his psychoanalysis sessions in the nineteenth century. It’s even got a name, bibliotherapy, dating back to a 1916 article in The Atlantic Monthly, “A Literary Clinic.” Bibliotherapists can refer to a light-hearted almanac of literary cures, written in the style of a medical dictionary full of lively recommendations. It’s called “The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You” (https://a.co/d/7blUc0J) by Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin: Structured like a reference book, readers simply look up their ailment, be it agoraphobia, boredom, or a midlife crisis, and are given a novel to read as the antidote. Bibliotherapy does not discriminate between pains of the body and pains of the head (or heart). Aware that you’ve been cowardly? Pick up To Kill a Mockingbird for an injection of courage. Experiencing a sudden, acute fear of death? Read One Hundred Years of Solitude for some perspective on the larger cycle of life. Reread great books. D. H. Lawrence once wrote, “It is far, far better to read one book six times, at intervals, than to read six several books,” but I always suspected he was exaggerating. Not all books are worth rereading, but a great book deserves at least three revisits over a lifetime. Perhaps as we get older, we become more efficient at forgetting, so I might return to a few of my favorite short novels six times before I die. In the case of Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” Waugh’s “A Handful of Dust’ and Roth’s “The Plot Against America”, I hope so. I revisited each of them last year, each for the third time, and I was struck by how different the rereading experience is from reading a book for the first time. I think I preferred it. The first time we read a book, we’re a little nervous. Like a first kiss, it feels exciting but awkward. Are we right for each other? Where will this go? What are we getting into? Rereading a well-loved book is very different. We already know we are in love, so we can relax. We half-remember the plot, but there are still delightful surprises. We can stop more often to savor the details, and especially now that we understand the whole book, we can appreciate the craft and bread-crumbs the author laid for us but were missed the first time. Read to develop a profound, original idea of your own. Getting to a profound and unique idea takes work. There are many intelligent thinkers, and now anyone with a keyboard or a camera and an idea can publish. The world of ideas is flat and daunting. But if you read books, you have a strong advantage. For a start, most people are too lazy to find and read the right books. Yet the complex ideas you need to build on to get to an original idea of your own are all in those books. Remember, good books can contain highly sophisticated ideas, as Michael Chabon has observed: A book is a map; the territory it charts may be “the world,” or other books, or the mind of the cartographer. A great book maps all three territories at once, or rather persuades us that they—world, literature, and a single human imagination—are coextensive. – Foreword to Trickster Makes the World, by Lewis Hyde Books are the most effective medium for communicating complex ideas. Books require their authors to work hard to distill their ideas clearly, even if only a few people ever read them. All it takes is to find and absorb a handful of the right books around a common theme and then to synthesize and extend them into something different and better, and you can get to a fresh idea. Find several books that tackle the same important theme from very different angles, then write down your own new beliefs. You will need a robust system for note-taking to build deep and original ideas. Unless you combine reading with a simple habit of rereading your highlights and notes, almost everything will be lost, like sand flowing through open fingers. There are plenty of apps out there to help; I recommend Readwise (https://readwise.io/i/d90) to capture and then revisit your books and articles daily, to harness the power of spaced repetition and active recall. (https://blog.readwise.io/hack-your-brain-with-spaced-repetition-and-active-recall/) Read to travel (light). Books and travel often satisfy similar emotional needs; they release and temporarily transport us to more inspiring places. Our romantic minds often link a favorite book to the warm beach or rattling train where we first sat down and opened its cover. When we revisit its pages, the sounds, smells, and stirring emotions all instantly return. Sadly, when we get busy with work or parenting, we can’t read as often as we would like to, and our favorite pastime gets postponed to holiday reading. We store our books in a pile for the next trip. Ironically, this almost becomes the main reason to travel: to sit on the beach and read books. Yet often, by the time we’ve navigated flights, car rentals, and hotels, we’re too tired to get through half of them. If we’re honest, we might have enjoyed our break more sitting with a bottle in our favorite chair with someone we love, all our devices switched off, and rereading our favorite books. In fact, with the right books, we often don’t need to go far to experience many of the benefits of travel. When we travel physically, we only see tiny fragments of the world. So we can choose to either experience these fragments of the world for ourselves, or we can enjoy even more of them through the eyes and words of the best travel writers. I’ve traveled both ways extensively, and there are fewer differences than you might imagine. Many decades later, the memories I still hold from reading Bruce Chatwin’s ‘Songlines’ and ‘In Patagonia,’ or devouring Pico Iyer’s ‘Falling off the Map’ or ‘Video Nights in Kathmandu’ are as strong as my own travel memories from the same period. Read to stay humble. In Alan Bennett’s bittersweet play (and hilarious movie) The History Boys, Hector the teacher tries his best to express part of the magic of reading to the teenage boys: “The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out and taken yours.” I feel for Hector. As a father of four boys who were once avid readers and have lost the habit for now, I wish I knew how to convince them not to turn their backs on a habit that will always provide solace. I still hope they’ll return to become readers again as adults. This humbling reading experience - as if a hand has come out and taken yours - is essential to becoming an adult. It’s the moment when we understand that we are not so special and that our pain or sadness is not so unique either, and certainly not worth losing sleep over. A good book reflects our mortality. It gently teases us about our pretensions and reminds us how little time we might have. All these feelings and ideas existed before us and will continue long after us, so perhaps the best we can ever make of it all is to sink into a very comfortable chair and get lost in a fresh pile of colorful hardbacks. J. E. Chadwick Looking for recommendations? I’ve also written a recommended reading list, with over 200 books across twenty genres, each with a ten-word review (https://likeabird.substack.com/p/books-worth-reading). This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit likeabird.substack.com (https://likeabird.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

3. 

   27 Mar 2024

   Does your inner voice have a volume dial?

   “All men need enough solitude in their lives to enable the deep inner voice of their own true self to be heard at least occasionally. When that inner voice is not heard, when he cannot attain the spiritual peace which comes from being perfectly at one with his true self, his life is always miserable and exhausting” —Thomas Merton A man walks into a monastery. He takes a vow of silence and commits to speaking only two words every seven years. After seven years, the monks summon him and ask him to speak. "Hard bed," he says. They nod and dismiss him. Seven years later they summon him again. "Bad food," he whispers. The monks all nod and wave him out. Seven more years pass, and they bring him back. "I quit," he declares. This time the abbot can’t control himself. "Oh, big surprise!” he says, "You've done nothing but complain since you got here." The longest stretches of silence I ever experienced were ten-day Vipassana retreats. For the first few days, you feel disoriented by the lack of human communication. Nobody is talking to you, nor are you talking to others, which means you are no longer spending energy trying to interpret or perform all those endless stories. At first, you miss the human reinforcement that you do, in fact, exist, but after a week or so you will likely start to enjoy this new, quiet freedom. Then, you start noticing a new, quieter soundtrack. There’s no TV, music, arguments, podcasts, gossip, ringtones, or keyboard tapping. In their place, there’s a new background hum of birds, insects, wind, streams, leaves, and the gentle shuffle of fellow meditators as they struggle with their positions. It’s delicious. It was always there, but you never heard it before, and now it feels like someone turned off the other soundtrack and turned the volume on this one up. Finally, on top of this soundtrack, there’s a new noise to get used to: your inner voice. It was also always there, of course, chattering away with itself in the background, but you have become an expert at drowning it out with playlists, screen time, and Netflix episodes. Now, you have no defense. You are forced to listen to it for around sixteen hours a day, but hopefully, with the gentle guidance you are given each day, you are also learning how to observe it rather than identify with it. We start asking ourselves a new set of questions about this inner voice. What will we learn from it about ourselves? Will we be able to cope with listening to it, all on our own? And how come we took so many decades to sit down and listen to it finally? What were we afraid of? And then, for me at least, we start asking this weird new question: Does my inner voice have a volume dial? And if so, what default is it set to? Before you read on, please try to answer yes or no. So, it turns out it does—or at least mine does. I didn’t know this until I noticed that my inner voice was practically shouting at me, and I could barely hear the delicious background noise of the meadow outside the room. For the first time in my life, I wondered idly whether I had a volume dial. I tried to change my inner voice to a whisper instead of full volume, a “3” instead of a “9.” Unbelievably, it worked immediately, and for the rest of the retreat, I was able to observe my thoughts in a softer whisper that was far more enjoyable to listen to. It was quite a revelation. I always knew that I had the power to move to a quieter place and meditate, but I didn’t know I also had volume control for my inner voice. It made me feel even more in control of my mind than before. I would have never known this if I hadn’t stepped out of daily life to change my soundtrack. It was another reminder that we can change the volume in our lives to make ourselves feel lighter. Why don’t we do this more often? Tenzin Palmo, the remarkable British Buddhist nun who lived for eleven years on her own in a cave in India, believes we are afraid: “We are afraid of silence—outer silence, inner silence. When there’s no noise going on outside we talk to ourselves—opinions and ideas and judgments and rehashes of what happened yesterday or during our childhood; what he said to me; what I said to him. Our fantasies, our day-dreams, our hopes, our worries, our fears. There is no silence. Our noisy outer world is but a reflection of the noise inside: our incessant need to be occupied, to be doing something.” – Tenzin Palmo, Into the Heart of Life Starting to listen to your own voice again feels both delicious and deeply human. You feel you were born to listen attentively to yourself, but somehow, you forgot how to do it and then surrounded yourself with unnecessary noise. Biologically, this makes sense because we are human apes, just a few hundred generations from a society where the ability to listen to the signals and chatter of the jungle or the savannah would determine whether we would eat or get eaten. In fact, especially in America, even a few generations ago, people lived right on the frontier between the city and the unknown, between the noise we created and the noise from which we came. It was important to pay close attention to threats from the wilderness. I often feel this urge to go outdoors and be a listening animal. In nature, even silence seems loud; the quieter you are, the more you can hear. One reason our family decided to move to Utah was to spend months of the year in the mountains because the easiest place to find total silence is on a mountain alone while it is still snowing. I first experienced it while trekking in Nepal, and I have sought it out ever since. Whether you walk out in the backcountry or up a chairlift on a quiet day, the silence is uniquely deafening. Peter Matthiesen, the enigmatic writer, zen teacher, and onetime CIA agent, captured it beautifully in The Snow Leopard: Snow mountains, more than sea or sky, serve as a mirror to one’s own true being, utterly still, utterly clear, a void, an Emptiness without life or sound that carries in Itself all life, all sound. If you don’t have a mountain to hand, an interesting way to explore the experience of sitting silently together might be to attend a Quaker meeting, which take place all over the world. Formally the Religious Society of Friends, the Quakers or ‘Friends’ date back to the English Protestant movements of the 1650s, and offer a very personal and quiet form of worship. Here’s how they describe their meetings, which are open to all and often held at local meetinghouses on Sunday mornings: A Quaker meeting is a simple gathering. Because Friends believe that Spirit may reveal itself to anyone, we don’t have priests dispensing grace to a congregation of followers; instead, everyone arrives at the meetinghouse as equals, and seating is usually arranged so everyone faces each other in a square or a circle. Then, in what’s known as an unprogrammed meeting—because anyone could be the instrument through which God (or Spirit, if you prefer) chooses to give a message—everyone sits in silence, usually for an hour, and waits to see if a message comes. For a more active, transformational experience, many people travel to France and Spain to walk the Camino Way in silence. Pilgrims travel from all corners of the world to silently walk the Way of Saint James, known in Spanish as the Camino de Santiago, the almost 500-mile path from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in France to Santiago de Compostela near the western coast of Spain. Apparently, the early pilgrims deliberately traveled slowly, forgoing the use of river barges or horses in favor of their own feet. A pilgrimage from northern Europe to the remains of St James in Santiago could take eight months, with travelers leaving in the spring and returning in the winter. It’s now at the very top of my bucket list, and when I walk the Camino Way, I plan to carry the poetry of David Whyte, either in my backpack or my head, and especially this verse: FOR THE ROAD TO SANTIAGO For the road to Santiago, don’t make new declarations about what to bring and what to leave behind. Bring what you have. You were always going that way anyway, you were always going there all along. —David Whyte Controlling our inner volume dial also often helps us with creativity. When we sit alone to create something - perhaps to paint or to write - we need to hear ourselves clearly, and silence creates an empty space that must be filled. As Aristotle understood, nature abhors a vacuum. Marcel Proust, who gave us ‘A la recherche du temps perdu,’ perhaps the most intimate (and longest!) portrait of an inner voice in all of literature, apparently lined his walls with sound-absorbing cork, closed the drapes, and wore earplugs. He knew that great work comes from great silence. In all these ways, then, we can choose to turn down the volume and listen. We can switch off our devices, walk silently, find snow, pray, or meditate. When we take the time to find our own volume dial and then learn to turn it right down, we regain some control over our thoughts and give ourselves the chance to hear again and perhaps, from this quieter place, even to create again. J. E. Chadwick If you enjoyed this essay, please share your own thoughts or experiences: — Have you ever tried to take back control of the volume in your life? — Do you think your inner voice has a volume dial? Have you ever tried to adjust it? — Would you like to find new, quieter spaces, and what would you use them for? What would you create? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit likeabird.substack.com (https://likeabird.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

4. 

   20 Mar 2024

   An Interview With Gorbachev, And Why I Hate Parties

   I once got the opportunity to meet and interview one of my all-time heroes, Mikhail Gorbachev. It was around 1993, a few years after he’d received the Nobel Peace Prize, and I was still an undergraduate at Oxford, trying to prove myself as a journalist on the student paper. One evening, the press release came through on the fax machine - Gorbachev was coming to speak in Oxford next week - and I knew this was my big chance for a serious interview. I’d just recently worked out that getting interviews in Oxford was easier than I’d imagined, and I was already pestering every poor A to C-list celebrity who was unfortunate enough to visit the city. I just called their PR team and asked to meet them, and they inexplicably said yes and proposed a time to meet in the Randolph lobby. In fact, I was on a bit of a roll. A chubby George Best dressed in an improbably pink shell suit. A very witty and kind Eddie Izzard. The dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah, over tea and biscuits served by his mum at his home in East Ham. And even Bob Hawke, the former Australian prime minister and Rhodes scholar, famously held the world record in the 1950’s for drinking a yard of ale (11 seconds). Gorbachev, I felt, would cement my reputation as a serious interviewer. I just needed to call up the number on the fax sheet in my hand before anyone else got the same idea, and ask politely. Gorby would be all mine. As I called the number, I didn’t recognize the name or organization on the fax - Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, of the Oxford University L'Chaim Society. This was still five years before Google was founded, so I was not aware that Boteach, named subsequently by the Washington Post as the most famous rabbi in America, had been sent from America and funded as an emissary to Oxford to raise the profile of the Chabad Jewish community, and had founded the L’Chaim Society in 1989. I didn’t know any of this, and in those days if you didn’t know something, you just dialed and blagged it: “Hi, is this Rabbi Shmuley Boteach? This is James Chadwick, from the Oxford Student. I understand the L’Chaim Society is bringing Gorbachev to speak next week. I’d love to interview him.” Long silence. “Hello?” Another long silence. “Tell me, Mr Chadwick, why should we let you interview one of the greatest political figures of the twentieth century? What are your motivations for this interview? What relevant experience or geopolitical insight do you bring that qualifies you for this honor?” I explained about Eddie Izzard and George Best, wisely omitting the part about the pink shell suit. “Mr Chadwick, I do not know these people. Do you even know what the L’Chaim Society is, and what we stand for? Do you know what is happening in Israel? Have you done any research into us, Mr Chadwick?” Another long silence, this time mine. “Look, why don’t you come over, and we will discuss this further? Come to my house this evening, we are having a little party. It’s very informal. You can meet some of our student community and we can see where it goes. See you at 7.” The call ended, and my bowels churned a little. F**k. This was a big problem. I desperately wanted to meet Gorby, and my future career might depend on it, but there was now a monstrous obstacle I would need to tackle first. My deepest, darkest nemesis. A party. I’ve always hated parties. I think I’m generally a sociable and chatty person in regular life, but for whatever reason parties freak me out. All my physical and mental faculties turn to undependable blancmange between the moment I step into a party and stumble out. Usually, I RSVP yes and then never get off my own sofa and am a no-show. Still, on the disastrous occasions that I turn up, I typically seek out the dullest and most isolated person in the room and then monopolize them until even they find an excuse to leave early. I’m like a colon cleanse for party hosts. But this was for Gorby. Tonight, I needed to step up and bring my A-game. So a few hours later I was cycling through the cold, dark rain towards the Rabbi’s house, dangerously hungry and thirsty for Dutch Courage. I chained my bike in the rain and knocked on the door, and it was opened by a towering, elegant American girl in a black cocktail dress and pearls. Presumably, they were her informal pearls. “Come in, you’re a little late; we’re just getting started,” she said. My only waterproof jacket was a giant Russian army surplus coat, which she reluctantly took and hung on a tiny hanger, before leading me into the living room. Things had started badly and then got precipitously worse. When it comes to parties, for me, size does matter. As Jordan said in The Great Gatsby, “I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties, there isn’t any privacy.” I stepped into a living room with a dozen preppy and intense kids, trained in the dark arts of professional mingling, and there was nowhere to hide for the next hour. It felt like being locked in the green room before the National Debate Club or Spelling Bee televised finals. One by one, they rotated in to start a conversation with me, quickly established my profound ignorance of Middle Eastern politics, and then rotated out effortlessly. They just kept coming. I was like a new lamp-post, that every dog in the park had to piss on just a little. Fortunately, there was alcohol, and someone kindly filled our wine glasses. Or at least, someone kept filling up my glass. The first rule of being a British student is never to refuse free alcohol, but these American kids clearly hadn’t got the memo. More fool them. After an hour as a lamp-post, we all moved into the dining room for a sit-down Shabbat dinner, and I was seated opposite the Rabbi. Now, the second rule of being a British student is to consume as much free food as possible when presented with the opportunity, and I took this rule very seriously. I surveyed the feast of generous portions and set about gorging myself efficiently and comprehensively. Conveniently, I had also been seated in front of the only alcohol on the table, a full bottle of cheap vodka, so I naturally began to apply the first rule once more. Winter was coming and I needed to store more calories. I decided to focus on the food and drink tasks first, and then move on to buttering up the Rabbi. This party was all right. I was doing well. I was even, dare I admit it, enjoying myself. And then the speeches started. Now, I wasn’t expecting this. The Rabbi said a few words about the significance of Shabbat, and possibly spoke some Hebrew, and then nominated one of the preppiest kids to ‘say a few words’. Then this kid just stood up, thanked Rabbi Boteach, launched into one of the most beautiful, sincere, witty, profound meditations on the meaning of love, raised a glass to propose a loud ‘L’Chaim’ toast, and then sat down. What just happened? How did he just do that off the cuff, I wondered, as I gave myself an extra little ‘L’Chaim’ with the cheap vodka. Can all American kids do this? Very impressive. Next, he called up the statuesque girl in the pearls. OK, we’re doing this again. She was even better! She totally nailed her meandering meditation on peace. Incredible. “L’Chaim!” Then, again and again, moving around the table, all these kids totally killed their speeches. I still remember they had this great technique where they started with a sweet and touching observation. “You know, Rabbi, the other day I was walking to my lecture, and I noticed two butterflies, dancing in the rose bush, as colorful and happy as I’ve ever seen.” Then they’d somehow connect it all up to peace in the Middle East, and we’d all shout, “L’Chaim!” God this was fun. “James, why don’t you share some words?” That’s funny, I thought, one of them is also called James. This should be a good one. I looked around. Why was everyone looking at me? Why was the Rabbi smiling at me? Oh god. Looking back now, thirty years later, I still can’t believe I hadn’t worked out that my turn was coming. I mean, I knew I was being checked out for the Gorbachev interview. Almost everyone else had spoken. I ate my share of their food and drink at their table. Ok, I had drunk considerably more than my share of the wine and vodka, and I suspect that did play a factor in what happened next. I remember rising to my feet and looking everyone earnestly in the eyes, long before I had worked out what to say. In fact, I’m not sure I ever consciously worked out what I was planning to say. Unlike the American kids, I had no experience of talking in public. I had never been invited randomly to stand up and start riffing on butterflies and my dreams for a better world. At school in England, we essentially sat alphabetically and wrote essays for twelve years, between rolling about in the mud, singing hymns, and exploding test tubes. At no point were we encouraged to speak, let alone stand up and string them together into sentences. All I could think of was what my Dad had once told me about public speaking: Start with a good joke. Tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em. Tell ‘em. Then tell ‘em what you told ‘em. Sit down. And so that’s what I did. “Thank you, Rabbi Boteach. Friends, I am going to tell you a joke. How do we know that Jesus Christ was Jewish?” Anybody? Nobody? “Because he lived at home till he was thirty, his mom thought he was the son of god, and he thought his mom was a virgin. That is the joke I have told you. Thank you.” I sat down uneasily. Now, in the movies, this is the part where there’s a long silence, and then suddenly everyone breaks out into uproarious laughter. Or the Rabbi starts with a giggle, then a chuckle, and then it kind of ripples out from there, ending in uproarious laughter. And perhaps they would all start chanting “Gorby! Gorby! Gorby!”. But that didn’t happen. Only the long silence bit happened. I don’t recall much after that. After the speeches finished, I tried to catch the Rabbi’s eye, but he didn’t seem in a buttering mood. I like to think I thanked everyone and made a polite excuse to leave, but it’s equally likely that I grabbed the vodka and my Russian trench coat and cycled off into the wobbly darkness, my face burning red from the shame and alcohol. I may also have been hit by a large, wet bush traveling in the other direction, judging by the condition of my wheel spokes the following day. Despite my hangover, I woke up early and called to follow up. An assistant regretfully informed me that Gorbachev would only have time for ‘Tier 1’ interviews. I crawled back into bed to wallow in vodka-soaked shame and self-pity. F**k. No Gorby. No career. No future. All hopes were dashed by my old nemesis. F*****g parties. I eventually got over the hangover, but I never interviewed Gorbachev. Shmuley Boteach grew the L’Chaim Society into a vibrant and controversial debating and public speaking club with over 5,000 non-Jewish members until it closed in 2001. He became close friends with Michael Jackson, and excerpts from his best-seller Kosher Sex were serialized in Playboy. He’s written over 30 books and is still on TV in America. A lot. Decades later, I still mistrust parties. I can see how they once served a purpose before dating apps and Netflix, but now I feel it’s often something we still do without knowing why we still do it. But at least I don’t fear them anymore. Admittedly, I rarely get invites these days, but if I did, I would feel better prepared to survive them, for a few reasons. First, I genuinely don’t care what anyone thinks of me anymore, which helps. I’m not selling myself or my services anymore, and I’m not searching for my perfect life partner, so it’s very easy to meet and quickly connect with others. Second, I’ve discovered that almost everyone else hates parties as much as I do, so I have no excuse to feel different or special. The world seems to be broadly made up of two types of people. Introverts, who just hate parties outright. And extroverts, who appear to thrive off other people's energy, especially when networking at parties, but then love to tell you that even though they regularly dance on bar tops wearing feather bowers, deep down they are introverts. They would prefer to be home curled up on the sofa in their pajamas. In short, I’m clearly not alone. Finally, over the years I have diligently collected all kinds of eclectic and entertaining advice about how to make the most of parties. I’ll probably never use most of these myself, but I feel better knowing about them, and I offer them up here for you to experiment with at your next party. Enjoy! — Find someone you don’t know very well, start a conversation with them, and then deliberately lean in close and whisper “I just want you to know that I personally don’t have a problem with you being here…” — Instead of bringing the best-looking but most affordable wine you think you can get away with, just bring ice to house parties. There’s never enough. — If someone starts telling you a story you’ve heard before, you have two options. Option one, you must immediately interrupt with an over the top reaction and cut it off at the pass with “Oh yes, that was totally (insert adjective) I couldn’t believe it when you told me.” Option two, if you don’t act immediately, you must hear it fully and react throughout all over again, as expected by the teller. — Never congratulate a pregnant woman unless you can literally see the baby’s head emerging. Not worth the risk. — If someone asks you, “So where are you from?” or much worse, “Where are you really from?”, don’t waste your time getting angry about it, just say to them “You go first” and keep probing until it’s clearly established that we’re all really from somewhere else. — If you are wittier than you are handsome, avoid loud parties — Overall, don’t be too snobbish about ‘hating small talk’. Big people can enjoy small talk together. Small talk exists for a reason: it helps us first establish what type of person we’re dealing with, and what kinds of subjects we might want to avoid. As Arthur Schopenhauer observed, we should always remember, when meeting new people, that they might only be a few steps away from wanting to grab a weapon and end their own lives. Small talk allows us to feel our way into the real conversation we might both enjoy having. Also, as Alain de Botton has noted, hatred of small talk overlooks that it isn’t ever the subject matter per se that determines the profundity of a conversation. “There are ways of talking about death that are trivial and ways of addressing the weather that feel significant.” — Finally, as Rachel Sugar sharply reminds us, we should never tell strangers at parties who we think they look like. “In the vast majority of circumstances, it is unacceptable to issue a verdict on the totality of someone else’s appearance. You cannot walk up to a stranger at a party and declare, “Wow, great waist-to-hip ratio, but you sure do have a noticeably large forehead!” Yet that is exactly what “You know who you look like?” is, except in code.” — Instead of asking people what they do, or where they are from, ask them if they are happy. If they’re dull, they’ll quickly excuse themselves. J. E. Chadwick This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit likeabird.substack.com (https://likeabird.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

5. 

   12 Mar 2024

   Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy

   For more creative projects, check out jechadwick.com (http://www.jechadwick.com) I spent Saturday afternoon exploring a 60,000-square-foot L.A. warehouse trying to make sense of Luna Luna, perhaps the greatest art story ever told. It spans six decades and features Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein, Salvador Dalí, David Hockney, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Miles Davis, Philip Glass, and a $100m investment led by the Canadian rapper, Drake. The story begins in cold-war Vienna and Hamburg against a backdrop of post-war Holocaust trauma. If it were a painting, it would feature dark, European surrealist roots, neon-colored graffiti of New York’s pop-art explosion, and a long sandy exile in the Texas desert in 44 metal container boxes. It reminds us that art does not need to be confined to individual frames on well-lit gallery walls in capital cities, or the dark vaults of billionaires. Art also lives. Outside the constraints of the boxes created by their industry, artists can collaborate playfully and create physical spaces for crowds to enjoy together for reasons other than money. It leaves us wanting more. Luna Luna is a forgotten fantasy, and perhaps the greatest story that art has ever told, which I will explore here in three action-filled acts. Act I, Hamburg 1987: “The most dizzying, dazzling art show on Earth” Over a seven-week run in Hamburg in the summer of 1987, almost 300,000 visitors came to enjoy a colorful, surreal amusement park built by the eccentric Austrian maverick André Heller and 32 of the world’s most talented artists. The mostly German families rode in a large, white Ferris wheel designed by Jean-Michel Basquiat, rotating to Miles Davis’s haunting track ‘Tutu.’ They explored the mirrored Dalídom of Salvador Dalí and wandered through a glass maze designed by Roy Lichtenstein, to a soundtrack composed by Philip Glass. They could step inside David Hockney’s ‘Enchanted Tree’ structure, or whizz around on Keith Haring’s painted carousel or Kenny Scharf’s chair swing ride. It was a big hit. At the time, Life magazine called it “The most dizzying, dazzling art show on Earth”, and arguably that still stands, if only because it somehow fused pop art and surrealism with abstraction, art brut, Dada, nouveau realism, and Viennese Actionism. Heller managed to unite established post-war artists like Dali, Hockney, and Lichtenstein, with emerging stars like Haring, Basquiat, and Scharf. Even Andy Warhol, who didn’t participate and died a few months before the show, was memorialized with a booth where visitors could get their 15-minutes-of-fame snaps with cut-outs of Einstein and Marilyn Monroe. It was joyful. From the 30-minute documentary video shown on Saturday, we get a feel for the true magic of the 1987 live carnival. Kids squeal with delight and roam wild, as couples cuddle affectionately and enjoy a mock wedding at Heller’s surreal wedding chapel, surrounded by jugglers, magicians, stilt-walkers, and costumed performers. To remind us that this is 1980’s Europe (and definitely not 2024 California) we can watch the stunned and sniggering audience of Manfred Deix’s ‘Palace of the Winds’, a live performance of amplified bare-cheeked farting, accompanied by a concert violinist. (Apparently, there was a tradition of public ‘flatulists’ in Europe earlier in the century.) And then it ended. After one summer of fun, Luna Luna was packed up into containers, ready to be shipped to the next destination.  As they meticulously packed and labeled everything for the next event, nobody dreamed it would be forgotten for almost forty years. But who was Heller, how did he come up with such a colossal idea, and how did he pull it off? Franz André Heller was born in 1947 in Vienna into a wealthy Jewish family of sweets manufacturers, Gustav & Wilhelm Heller. In 1964 he began a prolific and eclectic creative career as a German-language artist, author, poet, singer, songwriter, and actor. Sixty years on, he’s still going. The idea for Luna Luna was inspired by his childhood memories of the Prater amusement park in Vienna, and a strong desire to bring the progressive, avant-garde art he was so passionate about into the lives of everyday people who wouldn’t normally visit galleries and museums. In short, he wanted to bring artists together, and then bring their art to the masses. But it took him a decade to pull it off. His first meeting with an artist was in Paris in 1976 with Sonia Delaunay, the Ukrainian-born artist who co-founded the Simultané movement and designed the Luna Luna entrance archway, finished posthumously in 1979. Heller persisted with his vision. After turning down funding from McDonald’s, in 1985, he closed a grant for $350,000 from a German magazine and started traveling to visit the world’s most talented artists. With a budget of only $10,000 each, he had to inspire them into acceptance. In his own words, this was the pitch: "Listen, you are constantly getting the greatest commissions. Everyone wants your paintings or sculptures, but I am inviting you to take a trip back to your own childhood. You can design your very own amusement park, just as you think would be right today, and really, without exception, everyone answered by saying, sure, that's a nice, pleasant challenge." Eventually, the ball got rolling and the artists themselves started making introductions. Warhol apparently sent Heller to meet Basquiat, Lichtenstein introduced Hockney, and Haring brought him to meet Kenny Scharf. Haring and Scharf relocated to Austria to build their attractions by hand, and the scale of their output is remarkable: apart from the hand-painted carousel I counted eight enormous bus-sized original Haring banners. In the documentary we see Kenny Scharf building six large goofy sculptures and hand-painting over 100 colorful panels for his chair swing. Most of the American artists, however, worked remotely with Heller’s team, who provided the resources they needed. For instance, Basquiat’s Ferris wheel, and the Dalídom were built by Viennese opera and theater workers from vintage carnival attractions. It was the only time Basquiat ever allowed one of his works to be painted remotely, and the 1933 white wooden wheel is covered with dozens of his slogans and sketches, topped with a giant monkey’s butt at the rear! Recently, Basquiat’s sisters have shared that their brother loved visiting Coney Island as a kid, and we feel he would have approved. On Saturday I wasn’t aware how old the original attractions were, and I couldn’t understand why the attendant warned me that it was ‘probably over a hundred years old’ when I stepped nervously into Lichtenstein’s glass and mirror maze. I had never walked into a piece of pop art history before, and it gave me goosebumps to know that it had a pre-war history all of its own. Act II, Texas: Forty years in the desert After such a successful debut in Hamburg, Heller understandably thought he had options. Initially, it looked like Vienna's city council would buy the park for permanent display, but this fell through. At one point, it was rumored to be heading to the Netherlands, and a US tour was being explored. A wider European tour also went nowhere, and the storage fees started to mount up, sending Heller into debt. He ran out of runway. Finally, he agreed to sell Luna Luna for around $6 million to a Delaware-based philanthropic group, the Stephen and Mary Birch Foundation. They intended to recreate it in San Diego’s Balboa Park (still a great location!) and an LA Times article in 1991 suggested it was a done deal: “What seemed impossible has become all but definite: A local arts venture has won the enthusiastic support of both arts professionals and city officials.” But again, the relaunch fell through due to a dispute about charging commission, and various rights concerns, and the ownership went into decades of litigation. As the legal issues dragged on, the 44 containers were shipped to rural Texas where they sat baking by the side of a road, accompanied by rattlesnakes, armadillos, and scorpions. Meanwhile, the art world moved on and forgot all about Luna Luna. Perhaps because it took place in Germany and before the internet and smartphones, it didn’t take long for the memories to disappear. In fact, I personally spent time in a commune in Hamburg just a couple of years afterward, and nobody ever mentioned it. Why was Luna Luna so easily forgotten? Of course, great art often goes missing and has to be rediscovered, but this was so unique and contemporary, and on such a large, public scale, that the collective amnesia feels strange. Perhaps because it deliberately sought to disrupt the art industry’s collective control of value and meaning through its arteries of auctions, museums, and galleries? Was Heller’s ambition a threat to the establishment: to bring the artists together, and then art to the masses? Meanwhile in England in 2015 Banksy, another artist operating outside the establishment, managed to pull off a darker sort of bizarro Luna Luna “bemusement park”, called Dismaland. Banksy managed to persuade 58 artists to contribute, including Jenny Holzer, Damien Hirst, Jeff Gillette, and Jimmy Cauty, and described it as a "family theme park unsuitable for children." Over a five-week run, it attracted a respectable 150,000 visitors, but the visitors weren’t able to interact with the art and it didn’t delight the critics. (Arguably Weston-super-Mare, the seaside town he chose for his dystopian vision, already does a good job at evoking the apocalypse even without the input of 58 visiting artists.) During these years, there were plenty of potential wealthy suitors for Luna Luna, but few were comfortable committing without a full inspection. The sellers insisted that the 44 containers must be purchased as-is, sight unseen, which understandably put buyers off. Apparently, one buyer was permitted a limited inspection in 2018 and opened the door to find water sloshing around. In 2018 a niche art and design review website “Minnie Muse” profiled Luna Luna (https://www.minniemuse.com/articles/musings/luna-luna) artfully with delightful photographs, and this caught the attention of Michael Goldberg, a creative director in the US, who saw the potential for resurrection and brought it to the attention of Drake’s DreamCrew. Apparently, everyone instantly fell in love with the idea, and things started to move quickly with Heller and his team. A deal was made. Nobody knows exactly how much they paid or how the deal was structured, but it’s rumored that the overall investment in relaunching the carnival is over $100 million—the price, say, of a single Picasso or Klimt in 2023. One extra kink in the story involves Heller himself. In 2017 the eccentric Austrian became involved with the sale of an unusual Basquiat piece, which went on offer for $3 million. According to Austrian news magazine Falter, Heller glued sketches by Basquiat to strips of wood, applied red paint, and hammered nails and pieces of a black broom handle. Then a genuine portrait by Basquiat, acquired by Heller in 1990, was placed in the frame. “In retrospect, the whole thing is, firstly, a childish prank. Secondly, it is naturally showing off. And thirdly, it is a stupid mixture of fiction and truth…Just a private fairy tale,” Heller told Falter. He could almost have been describing Luna Luna itself, in all the right ways! Heller has refuted any allegations of forgery and has since bought the frame back, but the incident clearly damaged his credibility, and he is no longer actively involved with the project he gave birth to. He continues to cheer from the sidelines though, and appears ecstatic about its resurrection. Act III, Los Angeles: Excavation & Resurrection In January 2022 the carnival finally left Texas for its new home Los Angeles, in 44 containers, two wagons, and seven crates. It was time for the hard work of excavation and a set of tough decisions to ensure a successful resurrection. In many ways, Southern California is the ideal next destination. First, La La Land is where the biggest and boldest stories are told and distributed around the world. Second, ever since Disney opened the first modern amusement park in Anaheim in 1955, it has also become the spiritual home of the carnival. And third, those containers were originally shipped to San Diego back in 1990, and now finally they (almost) reached their destination. Clearly, Drake’s DreamCrew management team, together with Live Nation, was also a great fit for the next chapter. Drake is invested in getting it right: “It’s such a unique and special way to experience art. This is a big idea and opportunity that centers around what we love most: bringing people together.” If you know how to pull off the technical and artistic production challenges of a multi-city concert tour, presumably reconstructing a carnival feels manageable. (It probably also helped that in 1987 each attraction was lovingly packed and labeled by meticulous Germans and Austrians!) Another lucky break was the archive of Sabina Sarnitz, the Austrian underground photographer who captured Luna Luna’s development in more than ten thousand photographs across multiple cities in 1986-7. With her Nikon and Sinar cameras, she often used long exposures and supplemental spotlights to profile the crowds at the fairgrounds and the work of artists, technicians, artisans, architects, and studio teams. Sarnitz captured everything. Together with a detailed event book published by Heller, the photos not only helped the crew reconstruct the attractions faithfully, but they also now feature as fascinating mood boards as part of the new exhibition itself. The new owners set about opening the containers, rebuilding the attractions in a 60,000-square-foot Boyle Heights warehouse, and sprinted fast to reopen the carnival. They launched in December 2023, just in time for Christmas, and opened to positive reviews and busy crowds. The tickets cost $38 on weekdays and $48 on weekends, and there’s also a $85 VIP “Moon Pass,” which gives visitors the opportunity to interact with various attractions. The carousels and Ferris wheels of Luna Luna are finally turning again, at least until ‘Spring’ at this location. But did they get it right? With all the trade-offs between ‘art’ and ‘amusement,’ cost and safety, physical works, and multimedia storytelling, have they been faithful to the original intentions? And ultimately after almost forty years in the metaphorical and literal desert, what does it all mean? I think they pulled it off masterfully. It was certainly the most memorable art experience of my life, even inching past a glorious Hockney immersive 2023 retrospective in London. There were so many ways they could have gone off-piste, but they managed to tell this remarkable story, with a perfect balance of colorful joy and challenging ideas. A few highlights for me (explore more at the impressive website) (https://lunaluna.com/learn/artists-and-attractions/) * Stepping into the first enormous room, and being hit by the vibrant neon colors of the revolving Kenny Scharf chair swing and the Keith Haring carousel * Squirming at the videos of bare butt-cheeks farting a waltz, outside the graphically-painted facade of Manfred Deix’s ‘Palace of the Winds’. * Discovering the full industrial scale of the eight, bus-sized joyful Haring tarps, each uniquely hand-painted * Navigating Lichtenstein’s Luna Luna Pavilion hundred-year-old glass/mirror maze * Following the curated timeline wall installation, which weaves European history with major art movements and the artists’ own lives * Lying on bean bags watching a 30-minute documentary (Favorite moment: when David Hockney sees what other artists are doing and admits that his installation might be a ‘bit boring’ in comparison) * Seeing inside two example containers, half-full of carnival treasures, including a ‘meta’ film showing the original unboxing moment * Participating in a costumed mock wedding ceremony in Heller’s cosmic chapel, complete with a live audience, polaroid still photo, and marriage certificate * The gift shop, enticingly, has original ‘archival’ items from the containers for sale, including large posters (starting $225) and 40-year-old t-shirts (starting $250). Normally I hate gift shops, but even I was tempted to own a piece of this history. How could it be an even better experience? Perhaps they might dial up the live fairground entertainers, to recreate the vibe of the original event. Perhaps find a way to make just one of the moving attractions available to sit on, for the same reason. But why? This is now art, not an amusement park. It’s now art because of its story and the collective cultural importance of its creators. We don’t need to sit on art to enjoy and learn from it. If Luna Luna had been all joy, it would have been less meaningful. There are darker and more challenging moments too, more true to the reality of a divided, cold-war Germany in 1987, still a few years before the Berlin Wall came down. Many of the artists were Jewish, including Heller, and if you scratch the surface of the more avant-garde European art movements, you feel the brutality of a haunting recent past might be revealed. We see it in Daniel Spoerri‘s Crap Chancellery, a spoof replica of Albert Speer’s designs for Adolf Hitler’s Reich Chancellery, an architectural symbol of Nazi grandeur and power. Spoerri’s own father was murdered by Nazis in World War II. The columns are topped with piles of excrement, and apparently, the interior of the original doubled as both an actual bathroom and a gallery of grotesque sculpture. Perhaps most darkly, the documentary features the Mechanical Theater of robots and mannequins built by British-Swiss artist Jim Whiting. Constructed from found objects and discarded junk, the torso-less dancing trousers and thrusting human-machine figures—at a bar or suspended above a car crash–create ghoulish scenes of alienation. The mannequins (thank god) are no longer connected to their electronic motors and now sit lifeless and menacing. One is labeled ‘Man watching porno.’ I don’t know what the plan is for them, I don’t particularly want to know, and I’m in no hurry for them to resurrect this attraction. Epilogue: The Greatest Story We may believe we go out to appreciate art because we find it beautiful, inspirational, or awe-inspiring. But the market often suggests otherwise. The value of art appears to increase in proportion to the power of the story behind it. The most valuable works from artists like da Vinci, Picasso, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Basquiat all carry a strong story, and without a narrative, we struggle to connect with art in a meaningful way. Story is meaning. So does Luna Luna tell a compelling story? In the marketplace of ideas, is it strong enough to stand the test of time, and overcome our tendency to move on and forget? After all, it’s happened once already. I believe it does tell a story, and even more so now, because those forty years in the desert have strengthened it. It was a compelling story in 1987, but each of the talented artists was still emerging then. While those 44 containers baked in the Texas sun, each of them became more iconic and famous as individuals, but together, they became irresistible. And now, after a few false starts, they have experienced the strongest story of them all, the ever-powerful arc of struggle, death, and finally resurrection. The door to the tomb has been rolled away. It’s a story that might just last two thousand years. J. E. Chadwick For more creative projects, check out jechadwick.com (http://www.jechadwick.com) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit likeabird.substack.com (https://likeabird.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

6. 

   6 Mar 2024

   Oscars special: Perfect Days by Wim Wenders

   Subscribe to the weekly podcast here More creative projects at jechadwick.com Wim Wenders's latest movie is unlikely to win an Oscar on Sunday, yet I suspect Perfect Days will be watched and contemplated for many years to come. It’s a simple story told quietly, creating a space for everyone to find their own meaning. For me, it revealed an unexpected and comforting truth about growing old. The action, or perhaps more accurately, the non-action, takes place over a week or two in the life of Hirayama, a sixty-something toilet cleaner in an outer district of Tokyo. He wakes early alone each day on the floor of his narrow, spartan room and rolls up his futon The camera rarely leaves him as we follow his daily routine - brush teeth, canned coffee, drive van, clean toilets fastidiously, lunch in the park, communal bath, street cafe for dinner, read under a lamp, and sleep. There is little dialogue and less storyline, and each day he repeats his Groundhog Day routine, scrubbing toilet bowls meticulously until they gleam. In less expert hands, this could have been a soul-destroying film to endure, yet Wenders infuses every crack of Hirayama’s routine with humor, beauty, and joy, to create a truly life-affirming experience. I watched Perfect Days last night in the theater. Before the film started, Wenders and his lead actor Koji Yakusho, who won best actor at Cannes for his performance, gave a short introduction to thank the audience. The men stood quietly side by side, smiling warmly with their eyes. Wenders explained how the movie was inspired by ‘komorebi’ ( the original title for the film) which literally means “sunlight leaking through trees” but also suggests a much larger philosophy. Komorebi reflects the very unique, almost romantic love of the Japanese for nature, but also the importance of pausing often to notice and appreciate the tiny moments of beauty all around us. It’s another example of a Japanese word we need in our own language - like ikigai (life value) and irusu (pretending not to be home when somebody rings your doorbell). Hirayama not only understands Komorebi, but he effortlessly expresses it through his every gesture and impish smile. At lunchtime, he sits in the park and takes photographs with an old camera of the dappled sunlight leaking through the leaves above from the same tree. Every week he develops the 35mm film and keeps only the best photographs of his tree in a memory box. He saves tiny saplings from the parks and brings them home to nurture lovingly. Even at night, his black-and-white dreams feature shimmering branches and leaves. There’s a delightful Wenders visual moment in the middle of the movie that is easy to miss. The cleaner is busy inside a cubicle polishing a toilet when he hears voices outside. He pauses and looks up to watch the blurry-colored figures of the passers-by, reflected on the toilet's ceiling. If you look for it, sunlight is always leaking through trees. Komorebi is not only about nature though. Hirayama unconsciously carves out a distinctly analog path within an overwhelmingly digital city. In addition to his 35mm film prints, he devours paperback books at home and in restaurants, and above all he cherishes his collection of 1970s cassette tapes, which he inserts every time he drives his van. The cassettes provide a loving and classically Wenders soundtrack: Van Morrison, Otis Redding, Jagger, Simone and of course Lou Reed’s eponymous ‘Perfect Day’. Hirayama lives a simple and modest life, but he is not alone, and he finds many small ways to enjoy human connection. He is firm but kind to his young and unhinged co-worker, whose girlfriend becomes infatuated with the beauty of the older man’s cassettes. He harbors a secret love for the proprietor of his favorite restaurant and plays tic-tac-toe with a stranger he never meets, hiding a sheet of paper daily in one of the toilets he cleans. When his teenage niece turns up unannounced for a few days, he quietly gives her the calm love she needs. She can’t understand why her uncle lives so modestly, disconnected from her wealthy mother, and she impatiently wants to know what ‘her world’ is. He gently offers wisdom, “Next time is next time. Now is now,” which she finds reassuring. This line, and all of his gentle kindness, we begin to understand, suggests the true meaning of Komorebi. In a sense, this “now is now” philosophy was also infused into how the film was made. There was no time for rehearsals, and the whole shoot took only 17 days. Yakusho had no idea that his role would be mostly silent until the script arrived. The lack of dialogue puts much more weight on the intimacy of the actors’ expressions and movements. The film has an interesting backstory. During the pandemic, Wenders was upset about the break-down of the ‘sense of common good’ in Germany, and hearing this, Koji Yanai, billionaire scion of the Japanese clothing giant Uniqlo, reached out. Yanai had launched The Tokyo Toilets, a public-private renovation initiative in Shibuya, to push the design limits for public toilets. The 17 toilets feature designs by celebrated Japanese architects, including Toyo Ito and Tadao Ando. Yanai was angling for a short documentary, but Wenders was so inspired by the designs, including a breathtaking set of three transparent cubicles that turn opaque when the user locks the door, but also by this very Japanese commitment to public responsibility, he wanted to make a feature-length film. Is it a realistic portrait of working-class life? Perhaps not. The toilets Hirayama must clean are far less stomach-churning than the average Japanese toilet, and nothing compared to those a British or American worker might have to endure. Wenders admits: “I did idealize Japan a little bit in this movie and in this character…I’m not sure if a man like this really exists – but I think he should…Just as I needed angels to show Berlin [in Wings of Desire], I needed a caretaker for these toilets.” As with my other two favorite Wenders movies - Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas - the director provides long stretches of silent beauty for us to reflect on our own daily lives. Because we spend so much time in Hirayma’s shoes, the movie becomes a Rorschach test; we all take out something slightly different, depending on how we feel about experiencing his life. For me, Perfect Days asks a big and important question. It’s related to Komorebi, and the importance of noticing the everyday beauty in things, but it also goes further. The question I kept asking myself on the drive home was this: “Could I be happy living Hirayama’s life, and if so, what are the implications of this for how I live my life today?” I should declare that I’m 52 years old and increasingly curious about growing old gracefully. It doesn’t scare me; in fact, it excites me. Just as there’s an art to being young, and also to succeeding in mid-life, there must certainly be better ways to glide into old age. Here in Hirayama is a man who appears to be doing it well, or at least happily, and with very modest means or expectations. So to be even more precise, the critical question the film asks each of us, is how will we cope if we end up poor and alone in our old age? This isn’t an academic question; it could happen to all of us. Hirayama has very little money, few possessions, no partner or children, and has to wake up early to clean public toilets. By most measures of society, he is failing. And yet he appears to be growing old happily and gracefully. He seems at least as happy as most sixty-somethings we know. Why is this such a critical question to ask ourselves, early and often? Because if we believe we will be ‘happy enough’ in old age, even if we end up single, poor, and taking pride in a simple job, then this is very useful to know as early as possible. This knowledge might give us great consolation today, and reduce our fear of an uncertain future. It should help us to fully enjoy the present, knowing that even a ‘bad’ future scenario might actually be rather enjoyable. We might watch and rewatch this meditation on Komorebi for the same reason we return to Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. They remind us that our greatest freedom is the freedom to choose our attitude. As Frankl writes, “The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living.” The art of living has always fascinated me, and in 2020 I attempted to share my own personal take on it, in a short novel titled Path: A Story of Love, A Guide to Life. My idea was to craft a boy-meets-girl love story that my own children might pick up and read for fun, but to root the story quite explicitly in a guide to life, which they might turn to, should they ever start looking for something. The book was illustrated beautifully by my eldest son Lawrence, a professional artist. I mention it because, in so many uncanny ways, Hirayama perfectly expresses the guide to life embedded in the book: Take a path and walk it with a good mind and good choices. Path all rests on a foundation of three minds: The Grateful Mind (“Savor it all, every day, and always feel lucky”), The Compassionate Mind (“We must care and do more if possible, and it’s always possible”), and The Observing Mind (“Neither chase nor avoid things but accept them and be there in the middle”). Grateful, Compassionate, Observing. Hirayama has learned the art of balancing all three, with grace and humor. Perfect Days never suggests that all our days will be perfect. No amount of possessions or financial security can ever guarantee this. There are no perfect days. Hirayama’s face beautifully communicates this in the very final scene of the film, as Nina Simone’s ‘Feeling Good’ plays on his cassette player. Every day will bring joy, sadness, strength, laughter, loneliness, and love; all we can do is make the most of today. Next time is next time. Now is now. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit likeabird.substack.com (https://likeabird.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

7. 

   28 Feb 2024

   The Truth Really Can Set You Free

   "There is a bidirectional relationship between truth and freedom, such that the truth will set you free, and only in being free can one aspire to uncover the truth." —Gad Saad — Have you ever been set free by the truth? How did it feel? — Has your relationship with the truth changed over time as you’ve gotten older? — Is there someone you love who would benefit from embracing the truth? In this week’s episode, we’re going to explore THE POWER OF THE TRUTH TO SET US FREE,  in order to become a little lighter, like a bird. Latest creative projects can be found at jechadwick.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit likeabird.substack.com (https://likeabird.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

8. 

   21 Feb 2024

   The Worst Shortcut to Happiness

   “If you come to fame not understanding who you are, it will define who you are.” —Oprah Winfrey — Have you ever wanted to become famous, and why? How has this changed over time? — Do you know anybody who made big sacrifices in pursuit of fame? — Do you feel that society’s obsession with celebrity is stronger now than before? Why and how? In this week’s episode, we’re going to explore FAME and CELEBRITY, and how we might let go of our attachments, in order to become a little lighter, like a bird. Latest creative projects at jechadwick.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit likeabird.substack.com (https://likeabird.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

9. 

   16 Feb 2024

   How to Survive a Narcissist (Especially if it’s You)

   Latest creative projects at jechadwick.com One useful idea a week. Usually an essay, but sometimes perhaps a video, a podcast interview, or a list. Most of the ideas will explore how to grow lighter and freer, like a bird, by gently cutting ourselves free. Many will be rooted in secular Buddhism. I will write about what interests me: truth, love, books, creative sources, ego, friendship, raising boys, art, hard bop jazz, the mountains, meditation retreats, wealth, narcissism, solitude and addiction. I will try my best to keep things light, simple, and even fun, and not take myself too seriously. Forgive me when I fail, and please let me know! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit likeabird.substack.com (https://likeabird.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

10. 

    16 Feb 2024

    How To Fire and Rehire Your Mind

    Latest creative projects at jechadwick.com One useful idea a week. Usually an essay, but sometimes perhaps a video, a podcast interview, or a list. Most of the ideas will explore how to grow lighter and freer, like a bird, by gently cutting ourselves free. Many will be rooted in secular Buddhism. I will write about what interests me: truth, love, books, creative sources, ego, friendship, raising boys, art, hard bop jazz, the mountains, meditation retreats, wealth, narcissism, solitude and addiction. I will try my best to keep things light, simple, and even fun, and not take myself too seriously. Forgive me when I fail, and please let me know! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit likeabird.substack.com (https://likeabird.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Contact Like a Bird Podcast

Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.