March 2005 Thoughts
Here it is, finally, the thoroughly self-serving evanmpeterson.com. The journey that brought this web site to be here started with realizing that I could do more of the work I enjoy if I promote it. The difficulty was that meant promoting me. Folks who know me know well that I am rarely without something to say, but speaking about me in third person - selling Evan - was uncomfortable. I went about getting my web address and started to build a clunky little site.

One day while I was playing around clumsily with html, an old friend I hadn't spoken to in about 20 years sent me an email. She still lives in California, where I grew up, and we met in high school. Turns out she now has a successful business in graphic design, including web site design, and so I had to ask. All she could do was say no. This site's design is thanks to the talents of Laura Quick, who you can find on the internet at www.qdesigninc.com.

I wanted this site to be visually interesting, so I collected some photos that my wife had taken and sent them to Laura, who added some of her own. The tree you see in the background of the home page is a maple in my back yard. The photo of moss on the same page is from Garden Island, an uninhabited island in Lake Michigan where my family spent a day hiking, swimming, and being eaten by mosquitoes last summer. The uniting of those two places, purely my web designer's choice, is meaningful to me.

I hoped to include as part of this site's design some quotes that relate to the professional services I provide. A good friend of mine in Massachusetts, the late Whit Garberson, loaned me a book by William Gibson and in it I found a brief quote that fit perfectly with my work as a therapist. I thought about what constituted fair use, which is taking someone else's work and quoting it without paying them or getting permission, and decided to take the high road and ask. All the authors could do was say no. I am grateful to John Lawton at Mr. Gibson's publisher, Penguin Group, who granted gracious permission for the use of William Gibson's words.

Someone whose work I have admired for some time, Coleman Barks, has created beautiful translations of Sufi poetry. I found a quote in his translations of Rumi, a fellow whose permission was irrelevant given that he died over 700 years ago, that fit perfectly with my work as an Expert Witness. So I found Mr. Barks on the internet, at www.colemanbarks.com, and asked him. All he could do was say no. Not only is this quote used with Coleman's gracious permission, turns out he's a genuinely nice guy and in the process of asking I made a new internet friend. Coleman went to UC Berkeley, my father's alma mater, across the bay from where Laura grew up.

Whit turned me on to a web site, www.plumvillage.org, where I found quotes from Thich Nhat Hanh that I also wanted to use here. This was a tougher nut to crack. Master Hanh is a busy fellow, I thought, as my email to his Zen Buddhist community in France went unanswered. The Zen thing to do would be to wait and I did. It was subsequently pointed out to me that while Master Hanh is fluent in at least English, French, and Vietnamese, the staff at Plum Village might not be. There are certain times we ask ourselves questions we already know the answer to, like, "How stupid could I be?" to which the answer is always, "This stupid." So I poked around the Plum Village site again and found Master Hanh's publisher, Parallax Press, and asked them. All they could do was say no. The quotes from Thich Nhat Hanh are used here with the gracious permission of Parallax Press arranged for me by Sarah Rich, whose fax number is also in Berkeley, across the bay from where Laura grew up.

Laura found me, suddenly and unexpectedly, and designed this thing. Whit, an old internet buddy, fellow social worker and occasional trouble maker, turned me on to Gibson's book and Master Hanh's web site. Sarah, working in the town where my father and Coleman went to school, facilitated the use of Master Hanh's wisdom. John gave me the OK to quote Gibson. Coleman gave me his translation of Rumi.

So, to Thich Nhat Hanh, Coleman Barks, William Gibson, John Lawton, Sarah Rich, Whit Garberson, and Laura Quick, your gifts are greatly appreciated. Not everyone says yes to me just because I want something, nor should they for disaster would surely follow, but these folks did and their kindness is nothing short of stunning. The process of everything falling into place and all these people and their gifts intersecting here to create this web site has been amazing and humbling. Folks who know me will no doubt tell you that being humbled is an experience I can always use a little more of.

I will return here, irregularly, to post new thoughts, for whatever they're worth, including an occasional sentence that ends with a preposition. I suppose I must be ready, because this web site has appeared. I don't deserve it, but as George Burns said once, I have arthritis, too, and I don't deserve that either.

BACK TO THE TO THE TOP
MOST POPULAR THOUGHTS
EVAN'S FAVORITE THOUGHTS