Wednesday, January 31, 2018

A FREE MAN



Last week I took my daily planner and journal and wrote across in a sharpie marker, "A Free Man". 


Why did I do that and what does it mean?  

Simple that is how I feel, I feel I am newly a free man.  I no longer do I have the walls, structure, and confinement of the corporate 9-5 that I had clung to for so long.  But at the same time, I no longer have he walls, structure, and confinement of the corporate 9-5! 

This whole thing has me going in top to bottom emotional waves.  Waves that sweep between the excitement of the freedom I now have to create my life as I dream it to be and the fear of the responsibility that goes with it.  

My mind now is on those inspirational talks that end in, "write your own destiny" and "define your life".  

The truth of this statement is in that writing your life's story means holding onto a moving target reminding yourself constantly of what you want (not what you don't want).  

For me the want is to build a small social agency with 5 - 10 employees that manage social media accounts for businesses throughout the US.  The reality is I have to go out there and recruit those clients and prove to them I have a capable team to do this so they believe.  

Going from here to there, well I think it's just baby steps and time.



As the highs and lows go, it seems like fear likes to creep in at night while I am getting tired and slowing down from the day.  It did tonight while I was on Daddy duty.  Fortunately my friend Reggie (Rex) sent me the picture and quote above.  

Sometimes we need to be reminded more than once, enter that cave!




Thanks for reading.

Saturday, January 27, 2018

PEOPLE YOU NEED


3:30 AM Woke up full of fear.  


How did I know it was fear?  

My mind starting saying the 'I don't wants'.  

"I don't want to loose my home"!  "I don't want to run out of money"!  "I don't want to work so much I have no time with my family"!

Wrote this out when I woke up:


You name it my mind was thinking it and I needed to slow it down quick.  How and who do I talk to?  No one, because anyone you want to talk to at this hour is probably asleep and your wife is going to be scared if you fill her head with all this fear.  I need to breath.  I need to get out of the fear space and start talking about what I do want.  So I got up about 30-minutes later and started to work.  I generated more items on my to-do list the most important of which was the formation of what I want out of this.  I called them, The Articles of Formation for Endless Media (my company).  The first of which was our mission statement:



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The mission behind Endless is simple.  It’s a place where people give a shit about each other, about the client, and about the work.  We give a shit (period).  We prioritize the human experience and connection, and we work hard to make it look good.  Then we commune together.  Anything else isn’t Endless.

After this and a series of goals and objectives, I started to settle down by thinking about what I DO WANT versus what I don't want.  That comes from a place of love and the things that I love.  That is where the true power of life lies.

All this got me thinking it's important in life to do things that help you realize the people you need in life.  See this whole thing has got me looking at people different.  People I need, people that support me, people that are out here with me are a little more rare, but so VALUABLE.  

My wife, my family, friends from high school, friends from growing up.  People you would never expect to be key people show up to support.  During the change I put out a shout and here are some of the text messages I got back:


This one came with an AWESOME one liner that really got me going about the cave we fear.




This one was from my childhood buddy who I have known for nearly 40 years.  He hit it on the head.




 Same friend and what I love most here is what he says if I am broke.  



Nothing better than a friend that will take care of you am I right!!

God bless I hope you got something from this free form put it on paper scrap book.

More to come!






Thursday, January 25, 2018

THE MIND OF A SLAVE OR THE MIND OF A FREE MAN


I woke up this morning so scared of the freedom in front of me.  So afraid of the walls that I am about to depart.  See if you don't know I have decided to leave the comfort and consistency of a corporate job to start my own production company and lately I have been having some serious highs and lows.  So I decided to start to write about it in this blog and this is entry number one.  To keep in efficient and timely I am not going to do a ton of proofing and oversight.  I am just going to put it down and post it, so you'll please excuse the typos and errors along the way.

So I was scared, laying awake at 4:00am, and I honestly couldn't sleep but I didn't want to get up and face the world but I did and I am proud of myself.  I woke up, went swimming and in the process found some great inspiration in part from this AMAZING video compilation on Jim Carry which gets better as you watch it.

My favorite line from it, "For years I spent time wanting to do something bigger than myself, until someone much wiser than me said there's nothing bigger than yourself".

So the title, The Mind of a Slave or The Mind of a Free Man - it comes from the book The Richest Man in Babylon.  And so I ask you and myself, do you have a mind of a slave or a mind of a free man.  And for me the answer today is I have the mind of a free man.  And honestly all that freedom scares me.  So it's baby steps going forward.  Little goals.  Things I can do and understand, because the outcome is out of my hands.

The video below it gets better as you watch it, trust me.

zzzz

Thursday, January 18, 2018

Italy, Marco Priori (Natural Survival) and the Sweat Lodge


With Marco Priori in Leonessa, Italy

On a recent trip to Umbria, Italy I had the chance to visit my friend Marco Priori who is heading up the Natural Survival movement in Italy.  He and I had decided to experiment with the concept of building a homemade sweat lodge and meditating for an afternoon like traditional Native Americans before plunging into the depths of a near by fresh water spring to lock in the experience.  What came of this was truly enlightening and life changing at some level.

*Stick around I have an awesome video on the experience (if you skip there you'll need the password: Italy).

Now if you know me, you know I love Italy.  I lived there for 3-years back in 2010.  I even married my lovely Italian wife just to have an excuse to go back year after year (not really, but really) and this year we made it back.  Oh man, how excited was I to see Italy again!

It was an amazing experience filled with lots of food and time with family & friends.  Hours sitting around grand tables filled with wine, cheese, and all the blessings of Italian dining while talking endlessly.

Why don't we do that here in America?  Seriously it is so awesome, why!?

(left: out for a night in Frascati just outside of Roma with Giorgio Priori.  right: preparing the table for our New Years dinner party).

 


This was a great highlight, Christmas dinner!  It lasted for 5-hours, had some 7-courses, and ended with this lovely sunset over olive tree covered hills.  Not everyday you do that in the day-to-day.

Christmas dinner in the San Polo (near Tivoli)
I also made homemade Lemoncello with Nonna Anna who gave me her Sicilian recipe!  It was made with amalfi lemons, so AWESOME.  They're big like grape fruit and smell so good.  Mmmmm.

Come visit me and I'll get you a sample!



From there we progressed north some 2-hours out of Rome to Umbria to a large farm near the town of Prodo.  This is the view from the farm house looking down on the castle in the center of Prodo.

Side note: One family owns the castle and the entire farm land that you can see in front of it...OMG!



There we spent the following 5-days enjoying both the nature that surrounded us and the amazing medieval villages of Orvieto, Todi, and my personal favorite Civita di Bagnoregio.  It was classic Italian tourism at it's best.  David got to explore with his cousin Lolo, he loved being with Lolo so much!

(David and his cousin Lolo (Lorenco) from the tower over looking Orvieto)

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Civita di Bagnoregio (below) was something rare to behold and truly baffled my ability to comprehend such a way of life.  The infrastructure of trade and transportation during that period that was required to supply food and water to an isolated city of this size truly inspired my imagination.

What were these people doing up here?  I could only imagine the life.

btw: That bridge obviously was not there when the town was established some 1000 years ago.   Strangely the ground beneath it is sinking.  In just the past 100 years that has dropped some 30 or more feet down.  They now predict the town has only a short time before it too will disappear. Glad we got to see if before then.



While the experience of more traditional tourism in Italy was enriching and fun for the family and myself.  A big highlight for me were my experiences with Marco and going out into nature.

(Marco sitting at our table where we drank and ate till our hearts were content before our 6-hour hike - oh man that's some good food)




Our adventures started with a trip north to Leonessa, where after a full afternoon of eating pasta and drinking wine we decided to hike the 5-mile and 2000 feet hike up to the Chiesa de San Giuseppe (here is a good description and visuals of the hike up past the 5 monestaries called, Colle le Croce).  As we hiked up we observed the nature that surrounded us, we studied the tracks of animals and humans that had passed before us, and we watched as day would turn to night over the ancient village of Leonessa below.

This place was frequented by the Romans...Romans!  How cool is that!?



Once we reached the snow covered top.  We drank wine, lite torches, and hiked back down.  It was amazing.

(left: entrance to Chiesa de San Giuseppe, the reflection of red is the torch lite to illuminate the cross overlooking the town below.  It's a tradition and the whole reason we hiked up here.  I didn't take that photo of the cross.  I don't know why.  It was cold and we were rushing down the hill.  I just missed it.  I'm sorry.  right: the touches as we started our trek down the mountain to the lights of Leonessa below)

 

Update: Marco sent me some additional photos and I do have a photo of the cross illuminated and some additional of the hike down.


We further enjoyed a winter wonderland on our way down!



Before leaving the area Marco and I drove over and hiked in through the snow to their old home in Capo d' Acqua.  It was a bitter sweet experience as the place was still quiet and special, but now a little more empty with the absence of Marco and Alice.  They were forced to leave after the earth quakes of 2017 that left their 200 year old home (here to the right in the photo) uninhabitable.  I felt a sense of sadness as we visited the old water spring where we once cleaned and took a bath.  The whole place felt more like a ghost town now than the warm welcoming little village Marco and Alice had made it into (see my previous post from my 2014 visit here on the story of their life before the earth quake).





On our second to last day together we experienced one of the most unique things I had personally done in near a decade, the sweat lodge.  We started our by hiking some two miles down into a deep mountain entrenched valley where a crystal clear natural spring ran through the heart of it all.  Our goal was to create a place to meditate to focus on our goals, our lives, and what we wanted for our futures.  We would then plunge ourselves into a small pool of ice cold spring water that was located just outside our canopy.  Neither of us had any clue what we were about to experience.

(left: the frame of our structure for the steam lodge. right: the fire and completed lodge shortly before we entered)


 

Over the next 5-hours we would collect wood, build a fire by hand (no spark, no fuel), create a canopy from our surroundings and a green tarp we had hiked in, and heat rocks till they glowed a bright luminescent red.   Then we rolled the rocks into a pit we created, entered inside, and started splashing water over them.  Instantly the space was blinded in steam.  The smell of the roasting rocks covered with the fresh spring water left an aroma of earth that filled our lungs.  It was truly a rare and a delightfully unexpected after affect that we didn't expect.

Then we started a passage through the 3 parts of meditation, which happened naturally; first came reflection on the internal (self), next reflection on those you are experiencing it with (others), and finally reflection on the environment and things that are treating you to this experience (nature).  It was truly enlightening.  When I entered the water after I was so relaxed and present that I settled into a calming breath and literally had an out of body experience.  After a few seconds fully immersed, I neither felt the sensation of cold nor the feeling of my physical body around me.  I was transcending the physical at my best estimation and felt as warm as if I were in a hot tub.  It was inexplicable.

**must see video below of the experience (password: Italy)

In the end we cleaned up and headed home relishing the experience.  A little over a week later, I was on a 12-hour+ trip back to home in the US and back to my reality.  Now returning to the routine, I think back to all that we did and that moment in the spring water.  It's got me asking a lot of questions about life and how we're living it.  It's got me wanting to live out those promises I made to myself in that sweat lodge.  The whole thing has got me, it's got me good.

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