“You either walk inside your story and own it or you stand outside your story and hustle for your worthiness.”–Brene Brown I’ll never forget the day I stood in the archives at the Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University when an historian friend of mine showed me the bill of sale from the […]
It was a night when sleep eluded me, when the continental divide between my deepest life questions and the trivial worries of the day narrowed into a sliver of fear. So I was already awake when I heard a loud thud from inside my apartment. I reached for the nearest weapon, a baseball-sized river rock that decorates my […]
I’ve performed the hokey pokey in about half a dozen countries, with Mongolian guides in the Gobi desert and indigenous people in the high Andean mountains. While the locals don’t know the words, there seems to be a universal language in the connections we make when we “shake it all about.” Recently, the hokey pokey […]
Because it’s related to the topic of my book and my work with Wake Forest University, I’ve been reading a lot about meaningful work lately. And in Bali, I met examples of it everywhere—people who have what they call “taksu.” Taksu can be interpreted on the surface as “talent” or “passion,” but its meaning goes […]
Ever since I became aware of the Hindu deities, I’ve had a bit of an elephant-god crush on Ganesh. I like that he is the remover of obstacles—he’s the go-to guy when you’re stuck in a situation that you don’t think you can move out of. About five years ago, I was in Tallahassee for […]
I’ve been traveling with Cross Cultural Journeys for over 15 years now. It started with a life-changing walk across the Sahara Desert, and continued on with Tibet, Mongolia, Botswana and Cuba. CCJ is owned by my friend Carole Angermeir, who has been dreaming up inspirational trips for 23 years. These trips aren’t typical tours to […]
Like me, Zanzan has spent his career in the hospitality industry. As manager of ARMA in Ubud, Bali for eight years, he ran one of the most beautiful and successful hotels in the city. He met Desmond Tutu and other luminaries when he helped my friend Carole Angermeir plan a major conference in 2006. By […]
While I was staying in a village home stay in rural Bali, my hosts owned about a dozen chickens and a pig. I walked through their modest family compound several times a day, and each time I stopped to talk to the pig. He (or she—I didn’t check) always seemed happy to see me, wagging […]
On a recent job interview with a Wake Forest alumna, the interviewer looked at her resume and asked, “What is it they do to you at Wake Forest? There’s something special that happens there.” I’ve spent the last seven months researching what I’ve come to call the “Wake Forest Mystique”— trying to nail down just […]
