Rascal, entertainer, and personal hero Alan Watts. His laughter sounds like music to me.
It's no secret how much I love the written and spoken work of Alan Watts. Watts was a priest who studied eastern spirituality and philosophy and became a sort of "spiritual entertainer."
Watts made it very clear he was no guru, he did not have all the answers for you. Rather, he had a different way of seeing what it meant to be alive, a way you too might try to see. The ideas he talked about were a mix of Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and a distinctly modern sensibility.
His ideas, combined with the work of some others (Pema Chodron, Brené Brown, Dan Millman, Wayne Dyer, and Viktor Frankl) have changed and informed my whole life.
My friend Manuel sent me a link to a 3,800 word article by Tim Lott about Watts, his life, and his work, Off-Beat Zen.
I'm very grateful for it. It taught me some things about Watts that I didn't know, and expresses in a marvelously pithy way some of the very complex, powerful, transformative ideas I learned from his work and which are a part of my daily practice.