Mark Brown’s Blog

“You don’t pick your totem animal. Your totem animal chooses you.” Raven sunrise at the Trona Pinnacles • Photo by MMB This quote, which I heard recently on a podcast, shed some light on a seminal event in my young life. When I was a child, my family was at an outdoor...

“If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.”  I often heard this call to action from Scoop Nisker coming out of my radio, at the end of his progressive news reports and alerts on San Francisco’s KSAN and KFOG radio stations. He was an author,...

“We hid most of the wine in the back of the cave and made a false rock wall so that the Nazi’s wouldn’t find it and steal it.” Rene Loyau was an old French wine maker in the Loire Valley village of  Vouvray and was spinning tales for us young Stanford students...

“Her name is Empress Kitty Robin!” I was living in a suburban ranch house in Palo Alto my junior year at Stanford with my friends Brad, Rob, Jenny, Julie and my partner Rachel. The house was on Wilton Avenue in south Palo Alto and we called it “The Wilton...

“ Missed you at church on Sunday. My cows got into the corn. It might rain. “ For the first several summers that we lived in rural Heath, Massachusets there were two general stores, one in Heath Center next to the church and town hall and the other in North Heath two...

“I like the idea of Cowboy poetry, but I don’t need to hear any more of it.” I was at a music festival in the Sierra Mountains and had just been told that there was a late afternoon performance event called  “Cowboy Poetry,” happening, appropriately enough, at the...

“ You climb up to the top of the tree and while you’re up there I’ll chop the tree down. ” When I was 11 years old I spent the summer in rural Massachusetts, wandering around the fields and woods with my best pal, Stevie Wolf.  We had no phones of screens to...

“ Let’s climb that mountain and take a Wind Bath when we get to the top.“ We were resting in a meadow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains when my friend Brad introduced me to the concept of wind baths. He had heard that Chairman Mao took wind baths on mountaintops in China...

We were laying in bed in a remote corner of Iceland inside of a tiny cabin, trying to get some sleep after a long day of travel when we began to hear voices outside of our lodge, which was on the edge of an uneven, rocky lava field. It seemed like a very unlikely...

“I’m going to make the greatest sacrifice that a guitar player could ever make!” Jimi Hendrix said this on mic, moments before playing “Wild Thing”, setting his guitar on fire, smashing it and throwing it into the audience at the Monterrey Pops Festival in June, 1967....