Back in 1991, right around the right time I began the intentional explorations of my own emotions, Sam Keen published a book called Fire in the Belly. I read it shortly after it came out, and all these years later, I’m still benefiting from what I learned. Three decades down the road, I’ve gone on to […]
“What do you do when your world starts to fall apart?” author Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing wonders in The Mushroom at the End of the World. Her answer: “I go for a walk, and if I’m really lucky, I find mushrooms.” When Brené Brown asked British actress Sarah Niles, “You, Sarah, are called to be really brave, […]
Many people, wanting to live their lives in more interesting ways, will decide to take the occasional cooking lesson A well-connected friend asked me the other day to let her know what she should tell politicians of both parties that small-business people would like to have right now. Since I struggle to find the words […]
Many people, wanting to live their lives in more interesting ways, will decide to take the occasional cooking lesson here and there, all the while continuing to do whatever it is they do for a “living.” I went in the other direction. I started cooking for a living, and in the process, ended up with […]
There is nothing I can think of in the early years of my existence back in suburban Chicago that would have led me, or anyone else for that matter, to believe that the story of my life would later be transformed by a deep connection to food and cooking. We ate supper together more often […]
Forty years ago this week, on the 13th of September, 1971, a ninety-one-year-old woman died quietly in Genoa. She had moved there near the end of WWII to live with her son’s family, while continuing to do the anarchist writing and publishing work that had helped her make her way in the world throughout her […]
In the strange corners of my mind, sometimes I start to imagine conversations between people who I know full well never met one another. Silly as they may seem, these imaginary “chats” are flights of historically mixed-up fantasy that help me get my mind around what shifts might have happened along the course of human […]
In prior installments in The Guide to Open Book Management posts, you learned what Open Book Management is, The Case for Open Book Management, whether Open Book is right for your business, the 3 Key Components of Open Book Management, and 5 Decisions to consider as you go Open Book. In this installment, the assumption […]
If we look for patterns in the past, interesting and unexpected things will appear. Sometimes, what we find makes us smile (I’ve been studying the history of “the frozen water trade” that was one of the country’s most important industries 120 years ago). Other times it can cause consternation (like the discomfiting realization that we […]
Fourteen years before we opened the Deli in 1982, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton went out west to travel. In 2019, writer and permaculturist Fred Bahnson published a thoughtful piece about that trip, entitled “On the Road with Thomas Merton.” Aside from the fact that I have long admired and sought to learn from Father […]
On his new album All Round the Light Said, Irish singer songwriter Joshua Burnside sings about “A Man of High Renown.” Who we hold in high renown, who we learn from, who we admire, and who we aspire to emulate has a huge influence on how we live our lives. What follows is, I hope, a […]
The other morning, I got an email from a Zingerman’s alum. Although it’s been many years since she worked with us, she still lives here in town and has long had her own successful career in business. She wrote that last week she’d had a particularly stressful medical appointment for which she’d had to fast. […]
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