Roland Merullo

what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Welcome to the show. Our guest today is Roland Marulo, author of nine novels, including Breakfast with Buddha, Lunch with Buddha, A Little Love Story,

and American Savior. Marulo's nonfiction writing includes Revere Beach Elegy, a memoir that won the two thousand Massachusetts Book Award for Nonfiction. He also wrote the travel book The Italian Summer. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek,

Reader's Digest, and many others. At various points in his life, Roland has worked in a parking garage, worked for the United States Information Agency in the former Soviet Union, served in the Peace Corps in Micronesia, worked as a carpenter, and taught creative writing and literature at the Bennington and Amherst Colleges. Here's the interview. I believe we're all doing the best we can in our lives with the abilities

that we have and the things that we know. But sometimes getting some new methods or getting some accountability and support can really help us and feeding our good wolf and moving our lives forward. If this is something you're interested in learning more about some of the programs that we're offering, send an email to Eric at one you feed dot net. Thanks Hi, Roland, Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining us this evening, and I would like to start rolling by going through the parable

like we always do. There's a grandfather is talking with his grandson and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, grandfather, which one wins?

And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I love the parable and and I have very strong feelings about what it means for me. What it means for me really comes down to our thoughts. And I feel like everybody who's ever lived has good

thoughts and bad thoughts. And the good thoughts are kind, generous, giving, considered of other people, and the bad thoughts are hateful, device of violent, and sometimes those thoughts the negative thoughts can be about ourselves. I think often so many people they are. And the whole struggle of life to me comes down to how you deal with those thoughts you have.

I know I'll speak for myself. I have them, and the trick is to ignore them, not indulge them, just let them pass by and and stove them to use the terms of your parable and see the good thoughts and say, okay, I could be kind to this person, I could be unkind I could do something helpful to the world. That I could do something greedy and destructive, and though that all begins with thoughts. And in the room where I work, which is in my house, which

is a room I built myself. Um. One of the things I keep up on the wall is a Buddhist sutra, and it says, I'll just read the first line or two. All that we are is the result of what we have thought. That is founded on our thoughts. It is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks her acts with an evil thought, pain follows him as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage, and that's the bad wolf. To me, Um, that's those kinds of thoughts. Indulging and feeding them, just it just

changes the direction of a life. I think, well, you just read. When I read it was one of the most striking things to me that I thought I had ever read. I was like, Wow, you sent me several books and I read. I read two of them completely. Um. Breakfast with Buddha and with Buddha, which I liked a great deal, So, um, thank you for sending those over and and really really enjoyable reading. I love when I can be sort of inspired, educated, and entertained all in

one fell swoop, so very nice. Well, thank you, thanks for reading them. So one of the things that goes on in UM breakfast with Buddha and lunch with Buddhas, there's there's a there's a your your protagonist is on sort of a spiritual journey. And one of the things that I think is interesting there. And I've heard you say before, you talk about that the big questions are so big and they can be so serious that humor

helps a lot with those. And I often say that I think humor is a is an underappreciated spiritual virtue. So I'm just interested in humor in your process and in your writing. Well, it took me a while to come to humor. I've always been considered a funny person in person, sometimes in the best sense of the if, sometimes maybe not so good. But um, in my books. It took me probably ten books before I allowed myself to try to be funny. UM in more than you know,

one or two sentences in a novel. And I think the reason I did that was because I turned more directly at that same point to what might be called spiritual material. I really don't like that word. It's it's a little bit divisive. I think um and and my

meaning of it is pretty broad. But when I started to talk about the big questions directly in books, I felt like, given the fact that I'm not ordained, I'm not a monk, I'm not a priest, I don't have a degree in religious studies of philosophy, I wasn't going to write a serious book. And those subjects can really divide people. And and you can sound like you're trying to preach, you can sound uppity and siguria, you can you sound like you're trying to convince people to believe

what you leave. And I am none of those things in person. So I did not want to come off that way in my books. I tried to make them funny and in that way soften undercut the heaviness of the material. Yeah, humor is such an interesting line to walk, and you're right those Well, the first thing I'll say is you didn't come off as preachy or any of those things in the book. Which is what I enjoyed so much. You said that spiritual is a word that you don't like a lot, and I also wrestle with it.

I'm curious if you could tell me how would you define that word. I guess non material in the sense that you know, I know, speaking for myself, and I think so many of us, we spent so much time worrying about just staying alive and just feeding our pleasure center and eating and keeping the house warm or cool as the case may be, tending to our health, paying our bills. There's nothing, of course, there's nothing at all wrong with any of that, but it tends to keep

us locked in a certain dimension. And I think I think I would say that spiritual is what is outside that. So the other part of being alive, the mystery of being alive, that the what am I doing here part of being alive to me is is where I would where I would put the word spiritual. But the word spiritual for people who are not actively religious, uh, sometimes is a real turn off. Yeah, it can be. I

like that definition a lot. I think the one that my working definition is just pretty much what you said. The it's at least the recognition that there's an internal life to us that is helpful to pay attention to. That's a good way to think of it. I mean, I think a lot and write a lot about the interior, what I call the interial life. And I remember reading Thomas Martin when I was in my twenties and he

used that term the interior life. And it was the first time, either the first time I had read it or the first time I had really thought about it, but it made a huge impression on me, and I remember thinking, Oh, that's what's going that's the word for that, this place where I spent so much of my time. Yeah,

that is a great phrase for it. So one of the things I'm curious about that we explore on this show a lot, and I'd be interested in your thoughts on it is the idea of so we've got we've got thoughts, and we can sort of direct those thoughts one way or the other, and then we have emotions

would sort of tend to come. And I'm always interested in walking that line between not repressing what we feel, not being in denial about what's going on, so feeling our feelings to some degree, but also focusing on positive action and positive thought, and I think that's such a can be such a tight rope to walk. I'd be interested in your thoughts. Yeah, I agree. I mean, you know,

I think I have a weird habit. I drive a lot, and I have a weird habit if I'm on the road late at night, coming home from a reading or something, of turning on the radio and getting these preachers religious talk shows from all across the country, and some of them just sounds so fake to me, so somber and

superior and fake. And I think I think maybe that's because their their emotions that got deadened, you know, I think the I think part of what happens when you get in touch with your thoughts is that you really get in touch with what you feel. It doesn't mean you express everything you feel, you know, I don't think it's um. Anger, for example, is an issue for me, and UM it has always been. I'm not I'm not a miserably angry, violent person, but I can't get really

angry quickly. And my kids have pointed that out to me, and I've worked really hard to stop indulging that. And it begins with the thought. And I've had a meditation practice the thirty is and you know, no enlightenment, no visions of God, but it does. It has really helped me in my ordinary life because it's enabled me to

see things before they grow into emotions. So something will irritate, you know, I'll be in a certain mood and I'll notice the pattern of my thoughts and then if something happens, or if one of my daughters does something that will just that will act as a trigger. But if I have seen the pattern of thought beforehand, then that triggers.

It's either nullified completely or it's really weakened. And um, I don't know exactly where the dividing line is, but my suspicion is that the emotions have deep roots and thought in the patterns of our thought. That's one thing I'm always fascinated about is which which proceeds which right? And I think that I don't think there's an answer. I think it's kind of like the chicken that crossed the road question, um or essentially not the chicken that

cross the road. It's a chicken or chicken or question. But that am I am? I feeling something because the way I think about a certain situation or vice versa and I'm really interested in the way that action, thought, and emotion can all influence each other. It's like there's some there's a relationship between all three, and you can you can move the lever on any one of them and have some ability to affect the other two. You can,

for sure, I guess. I guess the place that I've settled in that question is that the thoughts come first the workings, and sometimes they're so deeply buried, they're so reflexive, they're so habitual, that that we can't see them. I really believe that there's layers upon layers of thought or mental activity that I cannot see. I'm just not in touch with yet. Um, But I do feel like the emotion, the emotion is a tree then the roots that they go deep, deep down into the into the layer of thought.

That's I mean, I'm not saying I know, that's just that's just what I believe at this point. Yeah, I've been thinking about that idea of everything being conditioned, the idea that whatever thought or whatever is happening to me right now is the result of so many different conditions that happened, and so many habitual reactions, and and just

starting too and I agree with you. I think that the benefit of meditation for me is that I can at least start to question some of those and maybe think, huh, maybe that's not reality. Maybe that's just my perception of it based on exactly, like you said, all these things that I can't even begin to fathom exactly. And I feel like, you know, people throw the word enlightenment around and they talk about Buddha and Jesus and Muhammed and

and so on and so forth. My suspicion is that they they were in touch with their thoughts at a much deeper level than I am. And I feel like if I just looked back ten years in my own life, I feel like now I'm much more in touch has gone down to a to what I think of as a lower level or more hidden level of my thoughts

and brought them into the light. And I feel like that process just goes on and on and on and on, and eventually you get someplace that's extremely special and different and I'm not even close to but I really do believe that that's the point of being alive, that the things that happened to us make us aware of thoughts at different I feel sometimes I liken it to a big dictionary, you know, the old fashioned webs the dictionary, and you turn a page and you learn something else

about yourself while you see something else. But there's another five thousand pages that you can spend. It certainly seems that way. At least. I don't feel like I'm anywhere near uh in norder. I think I ever will be continuing to uncover those those deeper levels, which is which is fun. Yeah, most of the time, I feel like, you know, people say the universe is expanding, I feel like you never catch up to God. You know, you go or the divine intelligence is what the Buddhists call

it instead of using the word God. But you know you you get clearer and clearer and deeper and maybe better and kind of what you just keep going and going. It never ends you just as an unlimited amount of

space for you to improve into. One of the things that you said when you were you were referencing Breakfast with Buddha and Lunch with Buddha was that you were trying to counter what you called an excessively materialistic view that we hold in Western society, and you were talking about it not in the way we normally think about it, like I want to accumulate a lot of things, but about a view that really, um really that if I can't see it, feel it, touch it, it doesn't exist view.

Can you expound on that a little bit? Yeah, I think for me that's been the contribution of Eastern mysticism, Eastern religions, Eastern writing is that. And I'm speaking in gross general generalizations here. But if you take Tibet for one example, um, or you could take Native Americans for another example, those are coaches that we would say are undeveloped, to use the word that's not politically correct, um. They

don't have the roads that we have. In the case of American Indians, they didn't have the roads, They didn't have the kinds of sophisticated medical procedures that we have. They certainly didn't don't have the kind of weapons that we have, other architecture that we have, but they had something else going on that we really don't pay attention to. And that's the non material I think that's where I use that word that they they went to places in

the interior world that we don't even know exists. We don't you know, we don't as a culture, as a society, don't give much credit to We don't really even think it matters. You know, people talk about meditation as naval gazing. You know that's that's a really revealing comment because it completely diminishes it. Or you're just wasting time, you know,

looking into yourself. That's the Western mentality. And I have this idea, which I'm writing about a little bit now, that maybe someday those two, those two philosophies will come together, those two ways of life. So instead of you know, the the Europeans crushing the Native Americans um or the Chinese crushing the Tibetans, maybe we could say, okay, look, we know how to replace the hip. We know how

to develop these very sophisticated medications to fight disease. We know how to build, you know, hundred story buildings and fly planes around the world. But you know how to do this thing that we don't. And maybe we could learn from you and you could learn from us. That's my very idealistic dream for the future. Do you think we're moving in that direction? Some days? I do. I mean I don't think. I'm not sure that progress exists

in the human realm. I wish, I wish I believe that, but it just seems to me that for for every new disease we can conquer, we have a new kind of weapon. You know this. There was war and torture two thousand years ago, and there's war and torture now. I mean, I would like to think it's getting better, but I really what I really think is that individual spirits move through that. In other words, we go from a cruder place to a finer place as individual souls,

and eventually we go on to someplace else. Um. But but the earth itself, I'm not sure that that dimension of life really really gets better. To use a to use a judgmental term, I just don't see it. Do you see it? Yeah? I do. I think my general feeling is that, yes, I agree that I think there's I think we're human and so some degree the human condition is going to exist, and all those bad things

that you mentioned will exist. But it feels to me like even if you just look at, you know, being here in this country, the thing the progression we've had as far as you know, civil rights or or gay rights, or it's the sort of when torture happens now, it seems like it's the sort of thing that that most people call out as a concern globally worldwide, and I don't.

I guess I wasn't around two thousand years ago, but life just seemed like, it seems to me like that was those things were a lot more common and accepted. But I'm also aware that I may have rose colored glasses on in that one, but that tends to be how I feel. But maybe it's maybe I'm feeling that as a result of, like you said, my own spirit moving in a certain direction. I don't know. I mean, I think one of the great one of the things I love about theo Zen Monks is when they asked,

you know what happens after you die? They say, I don't know. That's the perfect answer to me, you know, because Billy, we don't know. And I think I think we have to have a philosophy that we live by. I think everybody has a religion. Everybody if you define religion as a as a as a philosophy about life, why we here, what we should do, what happens to us?

And it's helpful for me. I have my own belief system, which is a hybrid system but um, I think it helps us to live, That helps us not to be completely paralyzed by the mystery and the and the impossible puzzle of being alive. But at the end of that, I have my model. I have my I think the world works this way. But at the end of ends, as the Russians say in the final analysis, I say, I don't know. I'm with you on that. I think that sometimes seems like the only reasonable answer to me, Like,

who knows. It's interesting to think about, but it's fascinating topic. But I don't I don't feel like some of those questions. Certainly, I don't feel like I'll ever know. So you talked a little bit about meditation that you've had a had a daily meditation practice for a long time, and you talked a little bit about the benefits. Could you maybe share a little bit about what that meditation practice is, maybe more like the method that you use. I'm just

it's a topic I'm interested in. I know our listeners are interested in. Also, sure. Yeah, I should preface it by saying I was raised a devout Catholic and for the last thirty or forty years have been really reading across the religious spectrum. It's a real hobby. It's a passion for me and not just a religious spectrum. I read a lot of psychology also. But so my own

practice is a is a very strange hybrid. I think because I sit in a chair and comfortably, and sometimes I keep my eyes open, sometimes I close them and I say a Hail Mary um, and I say an our Father slowly, and then I do this, really, what's really a Buddhist meditation? Some uh Sometimes from the Hail Mary and our Father, I do tungling, which is a Tibetan meditation. It's called the prayer of giving and taking. So if you're thinking, so, let's say it's it's a

birthday of someone I love or care about it. Let's say a friend of mine's wife has cancer. Let's say it's the day on which my father died, or my grandfather or grandmother died. I'll think of that person and I'll breathe in and take all the negativity, take their pain, distress, discompasite here, whatever dimension of life they might be living a dead I'll take that upon myself. On the inbreath and on the outbreath, I will be out to them, love, happiness, peace, contentment, safety,

and so on. And you can do it for yourself. I mean, if I'm having a particularly bad morning for whatever reason, sometimes I'll do that for myself. Or if I know that, you know, I have to go through something difficult that day, so I'll do that for a little while, no set time, and then I'll do really what's closest to a joke chin, which is another Tibetan Buddhist meditation, which is like then it's um. There's no

mental gymnastics involved. You just sit quietly and pay attention to your thoughts and you try to have one thing that you come back to. So that thing, that anchor can be your breath, it can be your entire body. It can be a word like a mantra. It can be an image, it can be a thought of that particular person you're praying for him that day. But it's not rigorous in that sense. You don't force yourself to come back and say a mantra every thirty seconds or something.

You don't count your breath. You just pay attention to your mind and your mind will wander, it'll it'll latch onto you know, I have to pay the electric bill. Why Did I forget to pay the electric bill? G Do I have enough stamps? The snow on the road? Can I drive down to the post office? And so on and so forth. And then at some point you catch yourself and you say, oh, wait a second, let

me come back to my breath. And that's it. I just do that, and I set a time or usually thirty minutes, sometimes forty five minutes once in a while during an hour, um, and I'll just do that endlessly, and at the end, I'll say in Olmney Buddhist prayer and you know, open my eyes. I'll stand up, stretch a little bit, and go about my business. And I missed some days, but i'd say not say I averagely six five or six days a week for the last

twenty five years. Yeah, that's a great it's a great practice. I've been meditating on and off for a long time, but it's really been the last year and a half or so that I got really committed to the very daily practice. And for me, it's been good to just sort of be like every day without exception that that helps me stay on target a little bit better. It's so healing to me. I really feel it saved my life.

I really do certainly saved. My sanity helps me and my work helps me tremendously as a as a father, and um, it's just the most wonderful thing. I can't I'm so so happy that I that just came into my life, and I don't think I'd ever let it go. So you describe in the past having wrestled with depression, and I think I've heard you say that you think that meditation has really mostly helped you overcome that as am I am I recalling that correctly, Yes you are.

So what about meditation do you think worked on your depression or what was going on in your depression that allowed it to be helped by meditation? To take that either way, I guess I was. You know, It's it's funny when I look back into high school and college and the years just after college, I really was almost bipolar. I mean I had I had my best friend that's had in my life since died had terrible bipolar disease.

So I'm not I wasn't at that level, I don't think, but really, you know, i'd be up, up, up and happy and outgoing like a politician on the stump for two or three days and then I just sink down into the most the dark ist, dreariest negative place where I didn't want to see people, nothing good was ever going to happen. And you know, it wasn't like I was tormented by that every day, but it was definitely there. And um in in my twenties and thirties, I started

to keep notes about I called it hell notes. When I when I was in a really bad depression, I would force myself to get out my notebook and write a paragraph about why I felt that way, where I thought it it began. And what happened with the meditation and those that note taking, that journaling was that I began to to see the depression much much earlier than I was able to see it much before, long before it took over my my mental state. I could see

the beginnings of it. I could see a certain pattern of thoughts, and I could say to myself, Okay, look that's happened, that's beginning to happen. That's just the thought. It's not reality, and that's purely and simply came for meditation. And once I got to that point, the you know, I still have little ups and downs, but it's nothing compared to what it used to be. I mean, really nothing, And I credit that completely to meditation, and that's been

so healing for me. And I mean and my late friend I began to teach in meditation and he immediately were very quickly was able to reduce his um he's taking with him, which is a typical drug for bipolar illness. So I think, you know, I don't know that it would work for everyone, but I know that it worked for me, and I really depression is not even an issue in my life anymore at all. That's great news

for you, certainly, that that that work. I've found that meditation has been helpful, but I don't know, And again maybe I just haven't been doing it long enough consistently enough that it's been sort of that level of transformative for me. Yet. I think I'm probably twice as old as you are. I don't know. I don't know about that, but you might have a few years out of that. You know, if you've been meditating regularly for thirty years, you've certainly got you got a lot of hours long

that I don't yet for sure. You write a lot, and you describe your writing as a vehicle of hope. What does that mean to you? And how do you make that happen? And why is that important to you? I guess I know I've heard you talk about positive thinking, and I feel the same way that you do about positive thinking. I don't I don't completely buy the idea that if I if I think every day that I'm

going to hit the lottery, I will hit the lottery. Um. But at the same time, to go back to what we were talking about earlier, that you know, the good wolf and the bad wolf, you can you can seed certain kinds of ideas that are more positive than others, and you can, Um. I think we're kind of digital. I guess binary that that at every moment of life,

we could go this way or that way. You know, we could we could embrace this kind of thought of that we could make this decision or not this that decision. You know, if if I'm an addict at any given moment, I can say I can choose to to pick up the bottle I'm not, I can choose to pick up the cigarette or not. I can choose to do drugs I'm not, or whatever the addiction might be. And then once you make that choice. Then then there's a there's another binary choice in another minute. You know, I can

choose to yell at my wife or not. I can choose to laugh at something that bothers me or not. And once you make that choice in a good direction, I think it leads you to I don't want to sound pollyanna Ish because I'm really not that way, but I think it does lead you to a more hopeful place in life. And I think that's where I go with my writing. I have written some books that are

really dark. I mean, The tox Funny Girl is a It's about a badly abused girl in New Hampshire, and I have some violence, especially in its well in certain books are not in Breakfast with Boodh and Lunch with Booda. But it's not that I denied the darkness in the world at all. But I really I have hope. I try, I try to I try to go toward the good. I tried to see the generosity and people. I was brought up by some really extraordinary people in my My

father and mother both came from huge families. I have like forty first cousins and something. Many of those people were almost unbelievably warm and generous. I mean, and they had lives that were difficult, but that planted some seed of possibility in me. That made me think, you know, I don't have to be crabby, I don't have to be frazzled, you know what the difficulties I face in life. And I've had a lot of difficulties. I've had a tremendous amount of physical pain, but I still find I

still somehow reach for the good or the hopeful. And I think they think a lot of that is in my books. Yeah. You you say somewhere that some people indulge their pain and pass it on, some fight it to a draw, and some people transcend. My goal reflected in many of my characters is to transcend. And I really, I really liked that. When I read that, that really

hit me. It's um And in that same book, to Talk to the Girl, this the girl is tremendously abused, weirdly, terribly abused as a child, and with the help of a couple of real angels in her life, she she

gets out of that situation. And then it becomes years later apparent and she knows that some of that scouring still is still in her and she feels the tendency to pass that onto her children in certain ways, you know, to get angry, to yelled to her, and that she feels like that's her work in life, is not to

pass that on. And I feel that way too. You know, whatever hardships I had as a kid, in addition to the great stuff I had, I feel like, you know, the purpose of my life is to dilute that, to weed that out, to not pass that on to people. And it's not easy, you know, I struggle with it. I mean it's you know, if I have something pain someday, I have a backstasm or whatever, I'm worried about something, and you know, you go into the post office, it's hard to say, hey, how are you doing, good morning.

You know, if somebody cut you off in traffic, it's hard not to give them a finger and lean on the on And I don't always succeed, but I try. Yeah. I like that, that idea of not passing on our pain, stopping the I've heard it referred to us, or at least in a familial sense, stopping the cycle or breaking the cycle. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean I think it's some amazing figure like half more of the people in prison

used as children. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah. So another thing that I've heard you refer to is the Biblical idea of false gods. That's something that's something that you It isn't a concept that helps you think about things. Can you explain what you mean by that? Yeah? Um, again, I think it's it's me taking my Catholic upbringing and reinterpreting it a little bit. And one good thing. One of the good things about that upbringing was that I listen to stories from the Bible every Sunday, and I

think that was a wonderful education. And I'm familiar with that idea of you know, having false gods. I shall not have false gods and so on, and I think there's a lot of different kinds of false gods that we can have. You know, money is clearly one, physical appearance is clearly one. Power is clearly one. The intellect is a subtle, sneaky one. I used to teach in college. I haven't done that in years, but um, and many

of my friends are academics. But I did notice, um that sometimes there would be people in the academic world who are really really intelligent people but they make what I would call a false god of their intelligence, and that becomes the most important thing. That's what they look for in other people. Are you intelligent like I am? And that's that's a false god? You know, I don't. I think it's good to be intelligent. You know. I

want my kids to be educated. I have a great education myself, but I don't put it in first place, and UM, and I don't put money in first place, and I don't put you know, status in first place, or at least I try not to put those things there. I try to see the whole human being. And I guess that's what that's what the false god idea means to me. Yeah, I like that idea. I'm a fan of UM Stephen Covey's work, and he has an idea

of what do we hold as our center? And some people are money centered, some people are spouse nerds, some people are family centered. But that all those UM can have, Not that there's anything wrong with any of those things being important, but if they become your center or in your you know, in the terminology Reaeson, here your your god, that your life gets out of balance, and that that a center that's based on on principles. Is a center that holds a lot more will will hold a lot

more strongly. Yeah, that absolutely makes sense to me. And you can see it. I mean you can see you know, you see people who have hun billion dollars trying to influence law, make is to pass a bill or to build a project that makes them richer. I mean, what's that all about? You know? That's just a kind of absolute craziness to me. Yeah, there's a lot of that craziness. And it just seems to at least that that idea of the inequality wealth wise just keeps getting worse and

worse and worse. It's sort of becoming almost um comic if it weren't so tragic. Yeah. I think that's our number one problem, and it breads so many other problems. I agree. Have you been working on Dinner with the Buddha? Is that? Is that something we're going to see anytime soon? Done? It's coming out June two. That is great news is out from Algonquan June sewond Lunch with Buddha just today

came out in audio format. And just about two weeks ago there was some film, pretty serious film interest in breakfast and maybe breakfast and lunch that would be great. Yeah, the book has been good. Breakfast, I mean came out of nowhere from me and Um and it's been a wonderful thing for us. It's sold a lot of copies, and it's kept me in business as a writer. And I've gotten the most beautiful ratifying notes and emails from

people about it. It's really interesting that so in the book you create a The story is about a UM family man. He's he's pretty much part of the normal world. I'll put that in quotes, and and ends up going on a road trip with a spiritual guru of sorts, and it sort of unveils that his his spiritual unfolding as well as a good road trip and a lot of other things. What I find interesting is the character that you've created there is a spiritual guru, is very

interesting character. Have you ever thought of dressing up and playing him on TV? No? But I have. I've gone on especially before we had children. We were married eighteen years before we had children, and those years I I went on a bunch of retreats um somewhere Catholic, Protestant, non denominational, some of Buddhist, UH and I was really

lucky on a couple of them. I went through the Providence and Center for a three day retreat many years ago, and I just happened to be there when son Son was there, who was the Creans and Master who had these centers all over the world. And Um, I also want on to retreat in France with Soviet m Pichet and those two men, along with the Dalai Lama. What so many things about them impressed me, but one thing that really impressed me was that they had a tremendous

sense of h learning. Sum Sun Nim was a very funny guy, very happy. Um Soga Reprochet can be very funny. The Dalai Lama is famous for laughing at stuff and making jokes and goofing around. And for a guy who grew up Catholic, where you know, the popes of my youth were not exactly comedians. And the priest that we I did have one really funny priest when I was a kid, but everything was so serious and so somber,

and that was so refreshing to me. UM to see that they could be goofy, that they could laugh at themselves and laugh at life. And I, I really I really wanted to put that in the book. So Riprochetus, the character you referred to in the Buddha books, I think it's a funny, goofy guy. M Yeah. Back to that idea of humor being an underappreciated virtue, or levity being an underappreciated virtue. You know. I wonder sometimes, you know, Jesus and Buddha, you just don't see any humor there.

And I wonder if that was edited out. I hope so, you know, I like to think that they were they could laugh sometimes and you don't see that. And I wonder if the people who came after them, who had control over what was written down in both cases, I wonder if they changed it to say, you know, to try to be to sound more grown up and more serious, but it just doesn't work as well for me. Maybe we could work on writing Jesus's joke book. Maybe you know, I'd actually did write a book. I did, which is

a crazy thing to do. I wrote this book called American Favia was published about six or seven years ago, and the idea is that Jesus comes to Earth and runs for president of the United States, and so I ended up kissing off people politically and religiously, and um, I had a good time and I it was like the Jesus of my imagination, you know. And he was funny and a little bit goofy and totally unpredictable and

also loving and kind and deep and miraculous. But you know, it was a little bit of a risky thing to do. But that too, is being option for film, so maybe someday, you know, I'll have to check that one out when I get time. We are kind of at the end of our time. Could you just maybe spend a minute and tell folks where they can find out more about you. All have links on the show notes to all of it, but if you maybe just want to spend a minute with that, sure. The best places my website, which is

just my name Roland Marulo dot com. I had Facebook pages and so on. I don't do a lot of tweeting, although I do have an account, but if you go to the website, there's information on all my books and um my appearances and also um a friend of mine who has published my backlist and launce Your Buddha has put together a monthly newsletter that he's built up to over a thousand people, and it has a serialized novel

in it. It has giveaways, it has lists of my appearances, and I always write a to a three page greeting on difference like a minis like an essay on different subjects every month. So that's also you can sign up for that through the website. Great, and like I said, I'll have links to that on our show notes. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. I'm really glad that Matthew made the introduction. I really enjoyed reading both your books and look forward to reading some more

in the future and staying in touch. Well, thank you, I really really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks very much for having me on. Oh you're welcome. We'll talk again soon. Alright, alright, take care by bye. As a reminder, if you're interested in doing some one on one work with me, send an email to Eric at one you feed dot net. Thanks. You can learn more about this podcast and Roland Marulo at one you feed dot net slash Roland