another post from the book....

this is a section I wrote on listening, enjoy!: Listening is fodder My advice to any human being, be they artistic or not, is to listen. Set all the buzzing and linear communication aside for a minute and listen. Turn off the screen and listen. Set aside your business and listen. Listen quietly. Listen intently. Listen to the underlying hum of all creation. The underlying force by which all things are created and through which all things fall off and die. If you live a life of constant noise, you’ll find the sound of silence deafening. Make room for it. It’s calling you into greater existence. It is the sound of the wind moving through the field. The sound of your ancient ancestor’s voices and hands moving in shadows below your feet. The sound of eons of ice and sun and flood and rain over the land. The sound of vapor and molecules coagulating into some primordial stew of your existence. It is a still small voice, yet all the force of nature and the supernatural moving in unison through the recesses of time. It is the sound of your history, your future, and your present. You were born by it, and into it you shall return. Release your fear of the unknown, because the unknown is already here, awaiting your company, sitting quietly, inviting you to “come in, and know me better man!” (Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol). Now that you’ve enlightened yourself, little grass hopper, let sensei help you lift up your eyes and guide you on your journey. Raise your head. Look up and look around. Look upon the waves and crowds of humanity. Listen for the common thread among us all, the hum of life and community we bring to this earth. The good we contain and the corrupt we fall under. Sift through us, one by one, like grains of sand, and listen to our voices cry out for mercy, love, and tenderness. Hear how each of us yearns for purpose and desire. See us as the blades of grass in the field. The sheaves of wheat swaying in the wind. Handle us with care, we are fragile creatures, bending and breaking under your palms. Treat us with the utmost honor, for our lives are short and strenuous. We are caught in some great cosmic battle of our existence. Some of us benefitted from a roll of the dice, some suffer from it, either way, we are all playing the same game, on the same board, with the same resources. All is play, all is folly. Yet the things of reality exist somewhere in our roots, and they coexist with us for all eternity. In the end, it will not matter who won the game, and who lost, but how it was played. Pull yourself away for an instant and see the big picture. The entire game board moving and shuffling. So tiny and small, yet 7 billion strong and growing. We are but a fragment, a tiny sliver of life on a small rock, revolving and rotating around a tiny spec in the universe called the sun, with eons and eons of cold, dark space surrounding us. Remove yourself from the chessboard for a moment and see how the world turns without you. The game continues on, the pieces shuffle back and forth, the dice roll and stay, roll and stay. You are small, insignificant, and that’s ok. Recognizing your insignificance and unimportance is the first step in overcoming your fear of silence. “I went digging, through the mines of my own soul. The wellsprings of my own mind. And in those dark chambers I found coal. That dark soft powdery stone, bound up in the walls, set upon the hallways of my own psyche. But yet farther down and deeper still. I found something of greater pleasure. of greater worth. I found diamond, and yes, I found you.” If you are still unconvinced, let me appeal to your self-interest: Listening will improve your work tenfold. If you lack material, you need to listen, warehouse upon warehouse of good things lie down there, dormant in the people around you. You need to start digging if you want to find it. A few years ago, a mentor of mine approached me with a concern for my listening skills. With words as precise and sharp as a surgeon’s knife, she told me I was not really hearing people and my communication could, at times, be selfish, awkward, and flat. Under her advice and care, I began to work on and sharpen my listening skills. My eyes were opened in a way I had not seen before and I was enlightened into a whole new world. A world where reality exists with or without me and where we all gather at the same table with layers and layers of unspoken history. We are all waiting to unfold and unclasp our true selves, but it takes patience, selflessness, and mercy, slowly walking side by side with us, slowly unwinding the noose around our neck. Like a wild animal trapped in barb wire, a little tenderness and finesse (over brute force) helps us loosen the grip and regain our freedom. My mentor instructed me to listen objectively and empathetically. To listen with purpose and intent. To listen without judgement and to listen before being listened to. Eventually, she encouraged me to become mature enough to solicit advice and critique of my own person. ...her advice has caused the single most impact in my life. Somehow, for so many years, I had missed it. I had spent countless hours critiquing movies, paintings, politics, theology, music, books, and my work only to leave the canvas of my own person dry and empty. Somehow I had missed the greatest arena of intellect and creativity, my own soul. In that place, I found truth and I found it in abundance, yet much of my existence had been masked in lies and misconceptions before that. Truth and reality are a composite picture, a mosaic of faces, rather than a funneled down single notion. Truth is hands, feet, body, and head all in congruent motion. Truth is a personality, it has a face....you can look into it’s eyes and understand it. “Hey modern man, wake up!”: Communication between two people is not going from point A (diagram needed?)-----------------------------to -------------------------------->point B It is not a one way street of verbal diarrhea. Our ways of understanding each other in our present culture has caused us to suffer greatly. We should limit our one-track, linear conversation, to questions like, “where’s the bathroom?”, or “how do I cook pasta?”. In fact, there are enough search engines on our mobile devices to entertain us for hours with these kinds of quarries. Sure, if someone wants to talk about the weather, that’s fine, we need to ease into it somehow. But by no means have we begun to understand true communication between each other as human beings. We need to begin to ask each other questions, hard questions, questions that make us vulnerable and help us understand the reality we live in. We are out of touch with ourselves. We’ve lost the capacity to know each other individually and uniquely. We don’t need more neighborhood watches or nosey citizens with guns. We don’t need anymore young adult males destroying our lives with assault rifles. We don’t need another broker sliding a shady deal across our table, or men with bombs in their backpacks. We don’t need anymore political gridlock, or gutless rich people. We need no more protests, or propaganda, or running of the bulls through convenience stores on black friday. We need people with honor, and courage to stand up and begin to listen. To knock on their neighbor’s doors, to sit beside their coworkers, to hold their gaze on each other and begin to truly, emphatically listen. But of course, if you only see people as ways of getting things for yourself, then carry on as you were, you’re probably no fun to be around, you’ll find out someday you’re a jerk. Maybe someone with guts and integrity will tell you so. Or maybe the wreckage of your own life will start to smell so badly under the floorboards, even you won’t be able to hide it anymore. True communication is messy. It’s relationship, and there is no predictability involved. In fact, this may be what makes it so appealing. I’ve seen some crazy shit on TV. People climbing deadly cliffs, skydiving off mountaintops, wrestling slimy, teethy creatures, punching each other out, making trick shots off the backboard, breaking violin strings, eating insects...gaining ground and insight and prowess into every aspect of the human body and modern technology. And there we sit, watching, voyeurs with clamoring endorphins and nervous, static adrenaline. But, honestly, I’d rather strap on a squirrel suit and free fall off a mountain precipice than develop deep relationship with someone. It gives me the cold sweats to meet over coffee or a beer, to ask hard questions that lead to hard answers. To open the hood of someone else’s life and mess with the machinery. It’s not easy, it’s not concise, it’s not pretty. Its grey, it’s crude, it’s beautiful....there is no greater rush, no greater high than knowing others and being known by them. If you want to heal from your own wounds, walk out and through the healing of others. You will find your redemption lies in small pieces throughout the souls of all of us. You will see that meandering with me through my life, will bring change and healing in yours. If you want to know yourself as you truly are, walk with me and know me as I truly am. We are not journeying in a straight line, but a wondering path, and there is no predicting where it leads, only that we are walking together, in the now, stopping occasionally to admire the scenery and/or repair the trail. Our path is not straight forward, it is not linear, sometimes it isn’t even clear, it simply is. As long as you and me breath together and have the capacity to communicate, we are in it. We are bound for glory and it’s a big shitty mess of a way. But we are bound by the things that matter: trust, compassion, love, and honesty. Although our path is winding and circular, we are committed to knowing each other in the highest of possibilities, the highest of plains, the highest of potentials: we are bound together in a way which brings clarity and insight into the “why?” of our existence. We are bound for greater things. We are the living imprint, the carbon copy of our great and mighty creator. (diagram to finish.....a bird’s eye view of a labyrinth)

Been really into writing this book.  I'm just about 60 pages in now and moving at a more steady pace.

Here is the opening qoute:

• "from the motives of the heart, the world begins."

another book exerpt....

This comes from a section which could be considered more "self-helpy", but an interesting subject nonetheless. It deals with change in all it's forms and progressions. Enjoy. Change fosters introspection, introspection fosters change. A good way of testing the level of change your experiencing is to gauge it’s effect on your comfort level. Typically, your level of comfortability runs congruent with the depth of change: for example, the more uncomfortable the experience, the deeper the change, the more pleasurable the experience, the shallower the change. Our ability to adapt is amazing, but it comes at no small cost. Making choices which lead to deep change mean leaving some integrated parts of us behind, and never turning back. Deep change demands we question everything we hold dear and draft up an account of our past actions and behaviors. It takes a lot of gumballs to lay yourself bare in the face of your past in this way. We are not naturally wired to enjoy submission and vulnerability, and no one gets off by being scrutanized and picked over by the birds. But there is life on the other end of the pain. The faster you realize all is folly, the faster you see the world in pure, genuine form. Genuine joy. Genuine elation. Genuine sorrow. Genuine empathy. Whatever deep change takes, it gives back tenfold. The deeper the change, the greater the self awareness. The greater the self awareness, the greater the ability to change. The greater the ability to change, the greater the personal empowerment. The greater the personal empowerment, the greater the chance of experiencing life in it’s truest form. Your reward , in the end, is honesty. From there, you have nothing to lose, but everything to gain. The more you let go, piece by piece, all you’ve built, all you’ve toiled and struggled over, the more your identity changes. You become secure within yourself and your surroundings, and the little things that somehow always set you off, slowly wash away. You are pulling yourself up by the roots and transplanting your entire person into good soil. If the contents of the soil are rich and pure, so you will be also. Surface level change, on the other hand, requires little effort and is relatively painless. It satisfies our desire to move, to migrate, to avoid being a stationary being, pinned down by the exoskeleton of routine. To keep us occupied and refreshed and spinning in orbit. But the high it gives us can be unsatisfying, leaving us continually running on what psychologists refer to as the “Hedonic treadmill” (originally named so by Brickman and Campbell in their essay entitled, “Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society” ca. 1971). Basically, when surface level change and selfish ambition become the centered focus of an individual’s pleasure, they’re spinning on a continual looping vortex of hedonism, going faster and faster in relation to the amount of things they acquire. Their happiness begins to decrease with each self-pleasing endeavor, and their taste buds become over-saturated. They lose their ability to enjoy the small things in life, and life becomes less and less simple. The more they spin, the more the twisted complexity and chaos strangle them....and the more they seek surface level things to escape their impending suicide. This cycle continues on and on as they ride a never ending loop of perdition right into the sandpit of their own humanity. Again, evolution is, and always will be, your enemy. It will beckon you to the path of least resistance. The easiest and most painless way.....like a spider in a cave, waiting your arrival. Since surface change lends itself to being a pleasurable experience, it can easily become a death trap. The path of life is beckoning you to follow it into deeper ways, but human nature will tell you to stay ashore and kick your mess farther down the road. Deal with it some other time, some other place, but its never going away unless you look it directly in the face and attack it like you own it. Ironically, people who grow accustomed to quick, self centered change, are typically the least adaptable beings on the planet. For them, the concept of change revolves around their schedule, their time, their will. They become the least pliable, least adaptable of all creatures, and money and possessions only heighten the effect. There are advantages to being poor, one being the continual ability to adapt or die, to appreciate what you have for what it is, and to rely on others for help. The richer and more isolated a person becomes, the more they demand life adapts to them and follows their ways. Those people suck, they’re no fun to be with. They are self tortured souls who will carry their misery deep into their own grave. *** After a long, hot day working in a slum on the outskirts of Manilla, Philippines, I turned to say goodbye to one of the ladies whose residence we had been working in. She looked me in the eyes, big wide white toothed grin on her face, and said, “goodbye....God bless you.” So thick was I in the work we were doing, I’d not yet processed my experiences from the day, but in that instant, some thread snapped and everything sank inward. For a brief moment, I stared back, confused and thrown off. Here she stood, three kids to look after, no potable water to drink, no electric, a home filled with the stench of swine, leaning walls, dirt floors and a decrepit tin roof, yet her words were full of life and sincerity. There was such joy in her eyes, how had I not known this joy before? How, despite all my pissing and moaning and thrashing, had I not seen it? Why was it so simple and so elusive to me at the same time? In that moment, I saw clearly through all the white noise and electric static who I really was....I was the poor one of us both. She had nothing to lose and everything to gain, she was rich beyond comprehension, and when she reached out and shook my hand, I felt as though I was touching the hand of God. I could speak nothing in return, only turn away, red faced, head down, weeping quietly as I walked back down through the backstreets and alleyways of that unknown, indiscreet slum, back to my soft bed and warm home miles away across the open ocean..... I think of that woman often. I think of the gift she gave me. How she was the final crack in a glacial shift in my ways of thinking, feeling, and seeing the world. I think of how her blessing broke me and pushed into some dark recesses of my heart and mind. About how kind she was to bend down and share her wealth with this poor, withering soul. Her words moved me, not for the novelty by which she spoke them, I’ve heard “God bless you” a thousand times before and a thousand times since, but for the very weight of character that lay behind them. Life sprang from the well of this woman’s soul, and when she spoke blessing, her words had power. Power to change and be changed. Power to know in a deeper way. Power of vision and purpose. Power pushing through external circumstances and little provision. The power of all eternity and heaven come down to earth, made incarnate in a poor, widowed mother.

Vacation time!

Just dropped the wife and kids off at the airport for their annual trip to Missouri.  My wife and baby are staying for a week and my son and older daughter, a month.... 

Dads vacation is the chance to stay at home for some pure unadulterated creative work time!  Here is a list of some creative goals I have while they are gone:

1. Finish the book I'm writing ( I'm almost 50 pages in, and I'd like it to be around 100 total)

2. Finish the screen landscapes I've  been working on. 4 or 5 more to go!

3.  Change the brakes in my car.  Always wanted to, just never had the time or patience.

Im writing a book...

...always wanted to, but finally getting around to it. It sounds so pretentious saying, "I'm writing a book.", but oh well. Im excited about it, it's basically a user's guide to being creative, the idea being that there are some basic universal concepts to the process of creativity, and if we dig hard enough into our creative person we will find a lot of relatable stuff in there to help increase our work flow and quality of work. Here is a portion, "You see, these pages are you because they were written by you. Back when there was nothing, we were all the same thing, and the universe exploded within itself sending millions of particles of the same matter/substance into space.....and everything came from one place and became its own entity...and it was good. I am woven with the same fabric as you, and that in its own way helps me understand you and humanity on more universal terms. You and I are more alike than we might have imagined, yet you are nothing like me. Such is the paradox called “being human”. It is this precise humanness that binds us and distinguishes us at the same time. In fact, this truth becomes more self evident the deeper I begin to dig into my own psyche and human behavior, revealing more and more of myself and at the same time, hitting the bedrock of what it is to be human. In other words, the more I understand me, the more I understand you. Being “human” is a very complex and simple thing, really, and while all of us do many things in many ways, the basics of human ingenuity and creativity are almost entirely universal. Just as every car fits a different shape and purpose, they all have the same basic functions that cause them to accelerate and brake. No matter if its a Ford or a Volvo, you still find the same combustible gears and gadgets under the hood. Every car needs a power source to move, every car needs brakes to stop, every car needs mirrors to see it surroundings, and so on and so on. So just imagine these pages to be the extended version of a drivers manual of your own creative psyche, and even though it may have been written by some depressed 35 year old guy somewhere, in some obscure corner of the earth, it still relates to you in the sense that you are human and that guy is human and in some distance of time and space, as he opened up the hood of his own creative psyche, he saw your face staring back at him.....as he suffered, you suffer, as he strove, you strive, as he rejoiced and revelated, so did you and will you through your interwoven human experience together."