We Climb Together

We Climb Together

On a good day-
On a good wall and a good face.
We feel at home.
We feel in place.
We clear our heads and we slow our pace.

We see our space-
So far outside of the ever-present rat race.
We make our moves-
Some bold and some true.

When we reach the top we look for you.
As we descend it’s hard to comprehend oh what that is we’ve just send.
In the moment nothing else matters-
But that next hold within these mysterious ladders.

After many hours spent with the people we desire-
We climb these walls and touch the skies together.

Late at night by the fire we look up at the stars-
And we wonder what if the whole world really knew what it meant….

To be a climber.

A Garden’s Keeper Lives Life Deeper – Part II

A Gift

Last winter as I imagined my future garden I had 3 underling thoughts in mind for why I wanted to do it.  As I mentioned in the previous post I needed to reconnect myself with some aspect of the natural world in a dedicated and regular way.  I wanted to garden to challenge myself in being able to grow, manage, and take care of other living beings, aka – a whole lot of plants.  Knowing that I would end up with way more vegetables than my family and I could eat I also wanted to build this garden with the idea of being able to give back to my friends with food.  And I wanted to create a garden at the scale I did to test out in real life ideas I had in mind for some agricultural related businesses and plans I currently have in the works.

For more than any other reason the party portion of my gardening experiment was envisioned to function as a gift – to my friends.

Perhaps my feelings of disconnection from the environment were also closely related to my feeling of being somewhat disconnected from any sort of real community.  I have a great family and wonderful friends, but like most Americans how rare is it that we all get together?  And how much more rarer still do we consider ourselves a community and function with each others interests in mind?

Through my business and my personal life I am blessed to have close relationships with many insanely talented creative individuals.  Maybe we all feel this way to a certain degree, but I consider my friends to be the most amazing people in the world.  A part of my personal style has been and likely will always be to have many different types of friends that function in lots of different interpersonal circles.  I love developing friendships with interesting, unique, motivated, talented, and rare individuals – who are often doing their own thing.  And unfortunately doing your own thing often also means doing it alone.

A big underlying motivator for me in doing the work and spending the money required to throw a huge garden party was to bring together people who wouldn’t necessarily already know each other.  I wanted to physically, ‘bring people together’ who I knew would appreciate each others unique talents and possibly form new relationships from this experience together as a unit.

As I have gotten older I have started to feel that the people who you surround yourself with often define who you are and will become as much or more than you do for yourself.  For me, being surrounded by unique, motivated, and creative people has helped me become a better person for myself.  My friends inspire me.  And the best of them are truly there for me as guides, caretakers, kindred-spirits, fellow adventurers, and humble, honest, decent human beings.

In my attempt to reconnect with the natural world I also wanted to reconnect with the best of my own human spirit and find a way to express my deepest gratitude for those people in my own life for whom without their presence I would be a lesser person.

And for that I thank my friends.

This was the invite that was sent out for the party.  I wrote the phrase, “A Garden’s Keeper Lives Life Deeper” to function both as an invite for the party and to be a submitted piece for my good friend Anne Ulku‘s two year long project, Six Word Story Every Day.  The cards were letterpress printed by Kira Bavender’s letterpress company Cherry Pi.

Before the party my dad and I built a 75-foot long table made of old pallets and other recycled wood.  The seats for our table were red buckets that were formerly used to store fast-food cooking oil (I used them to be slightly ironic).  And the tops of the seats were large wooded planks cut from dead trees off of some our family’s hunting land.  My sister decorated the table and other areas of the party like a pro using all recycled or found items.  And even the dishes all came from a thrift store.  I was determined to create a wonderful environment for the party without buying new things and adding any more waste into our already way too wasteful society.  This party was about bringing people together to celebrate each other and eating natural home grown food – not about creating unnecessary waste in our already way to fragile natural world.

This was one of the 64 final pizzas getting loaded up with the good stuff.  For the party my Dad, Step-Mom, Grandma, Grandpa, Sister, Cousins, Nick Patrek, and one of my sisters awesome co-workers – Riley, prepared homemade pizzas with ingredients mostly coming from the garden.  Riley saved the day in a way none of the guests knew and is a Jedi pizza cook in his own right.  My Dad bought a ton of pizza ovens at garage sales all summer to be prepared to cook for all our guests.

Here is some homemade cucumber salad from the garden.

I spent over $300.00 on the finest cheeses I could find from all over the world.  It was wonderful.

I made sure to list everything that was in each pizza so everyone knew all the good stuff we had in there.

We all played a number of different yard games before dinner.  Here’s Anne flashing a smile.  Our group was definitely competitive.  And I lost.

We had to make a special meat pizza for Cloud!

Jack kept his eyes wide-open on this crowd.

Here’s some other produce from the garden.

My sister collected flowers from other people’s gardens the day of the party and arranged them in Bell canning jars.

We used my dad’s collection of vintage minnow buckets as our Champagne buckets.

We also used vintage milk jugs for our water containers.

A few of my friends played some wonderful music after dinner around the fire.

I smoked a Cuban cigar after dinner by the fire to celebrate all the hard work I put into the creation of my garden, preparing the food, and bringing everyone together for the party.  It also marked a completely different personal milestone for me as well, one of those things you keep to yourself, but that means a lot.

Here’s Jack making shadow monsters.

The raspberries in the Champagne all came from our garden as well.

In the end I hope everyone who attended this party had a good time.  I know I did and look forward to our futures together.

All the photos taken in this post and for this party were shot by my friend David Mendolia.

A Garden’s Keeper Lives Life Deeper – Part I

Oh, how far I have traveled only to return to myself.

Last winter I started feeling a somewhat unidentifiable sense that something was wrong.  Or at least that something was missing in my life.  While digging deeper into that sensation of uneasiness I realized that I was feeling very disconnected from the natural world and had been feeling that way for a long time.

Growing up I was fortunate enough to have extended periods of time to live in and experience nature.  It was a fundamental part of my upbringing and a core part of who I was — and who I am.

After internalizing this realization I decided I needed to do something about it.  Staying in-line with my usual ‘go big or go home’ approach to life, business, and art – I immediately spent hundreds of dollars ordering nearly 200 hundred varieties of heirloom vegetable seeds.  And of course before making my final order I obsessed over thousands of total varieties from many different seed vendors before settling on some of the rarest seeds I could find.

Once my order was complete I announced to my father that, “We were going to make a garden.”  My dad, a retired teacher and former hippie, had managed to maintain a garden to one degree or another most of his adult life, but was somewhat skeptical of the scale of my vision.  However, being retired he submitted to my wishes and we began to work.

After ordering the seeds we created a garden plan.  We mapped out where everything would go in our garden on graph paper and determined which varieties to try narrowing it down to about 60 different types of plants for our final design.  Our design greatly expanded my father’s original garden and would require some other major additions as well, including a large fence to keep the deer out.

With a plan in hand we waited.  In the early spring we tried sprouting indoors all the seeds that needed a head start.  And we failed.  Our first round of seed sprouts didn’t make it due to lack of heat and light.  With our first failure out of the way I bought some grow lights and other gear needed to make sure it didn’t happen again.  The second round was off and running, but we were already behind on our plan.

Besides sprouting seeds we had to prep our soil.  We put up a huge fence and used a tractor to till up the soil.  We also added 6-tons of horse manure and lime to the soil to add nutrients.  The soil looked good.  The fence looked good.  The seedlings were looking good.  And we were back on track with our plan.

We planted in early May.  It was a bit of a late start due in part to the weather.  June was decent and July was extremely hot, humid, and wet.  During July almost all the plants took off growing faster than I ever knew was possible.  I felt like a master gardener on my first try.

Our crop wasn’t perfect though.  The onions and peppers didn’t do very well.  I think this was because it was too wet and too hot early on.  We had some critters get in and do some solid damage — wood chucks, squirrels, and a family of raccoons.  We managed to trap the critters and even figured out a trick to keep them out of the garden by placing a small radio in a bucket.  Keeping the radio tuned to a talk station sounds like people constantly working or a kind of verbal scare crow.  An old indian trick I assume.

I spent many hours weeding, watering, and watching my crops grow.  It really was a wonderful experience.

We had a huge amount of produce and it was equally fun to learn new ways to cook the various plants we grew.  It was also a fun way to spend time with my dad and step mom and I think they were just as impressed with our final results as I was.

Beyond that the process of learning, planning, starting, and growing a garden for the first time satisfied my fundamental need to reconnect to the natural world.

Looking back on my year and thinking about the time I spent in the garden I can honestly say it has to some degree changed me — and for the better.  Through the process of proactively participating in the lifecycle of food I feel as though I have realigned my own life’s rhythms into a more healthy cycle as well.

Growing a garden for the first time was such an important experience for me that it literally changed the direction of my life in more than one way.  So much so, that I will save the rest of this greater story for future posts.

In the meantime here are some photos from my first garden.  Or my successful attempt to reconnect with nature in 2011:

The garden in June.

The garden just starting to really take off in July.

Fresh lettuce.  Even better than I expected.

White Zucchini — grew like a weed!

My Dad’s favorite peas.

Beets — which I learned to love.

Little peppers trying to make it through the heat wave.

Chives have flowers – who knew?

Lady was always by my side making sure I was doing everything right.  She managed to snag a few veggie treats during the season too.

The First Wave Of American Millennials Turn 30 & Why Our Generation Will Never Say Die

“We’re going to do the impossible, we’re going to make it beautiful, and it’s got to stand up.” – Jack Dorsey, Twitter founder – Perhaps a new generational rally cry?

This year I turn 30 and so does the rest of the first wave of generation Y, Millennials, or the Echo Boom depending on which media buzz term you’d like to reference.

Over the years I’ve paid special attention to how my generation is perceived and presented by our collective elder media folk and speculate, as likely any new generation coming of age might think, that we might still be a bit misunderstood. Maybe I can shed some light on our collective mystery to all of you whose generations have come before ours.

The Mysterious Millennials

Although I can’t speak for my entire generation I feel confident I can speak for a whole lot of us. And I am aware of the fact that I speak from a uniquely American point of view knowing our country and culture certainly doesn’t represent the world in it’s entirety.

The Children of Diversity

I’m going to be bold enough to say we’re the first American generation of true tolerance. And we go even beyond tolerance into a realm of celebrating each others unique differences and individualities.

We are the generation that grew up with single parents. Or our parents were divorced. And if our parents weren’t divorced our best friend’s parents were. Our friends were adopted, refugees, immigrants, rich, poor, middle-class, Christian, Muslim, Jewish or more so than ever the religiously unaffiliated. And came in every color, shape, size, and level of nerdy-ness we could imagine. We didn’t mind because Sesame Street, our parents, and the Berenstain Bears taught us that our differences didn’t matter and that we were all the same kids on a playground trying to get picked for the right kickball team. We were the little people passing notes back and forth to each other in class worrying about who had a crush on who while our parents chased each other up the corporate ladder. We learned about the civil rights movement, about women fighting for their right to vote, about decades of wars that didn’t make sense when we already knew our differences couldn’t be something worth fighting over.

Boys & Girls with Too Many Toys & Too Much TV Time

Our generation devoured and still continues to devour media. We beat all our Nintendo games. We watched way too much TV. Sitting for hours on end watching our programs like: ALF, The Cosby Show, Doogie Howser, Double Dare, Family Ties, Growing Pains, Mr. Belvedere, The Muppets, Fraggle Rock, 3-2-1 Contact, Reading Rainbow, Roseanne, Saved By The Bell, This Old House, Wild America, Webster, and of course – The Wonder Years.

And for every hour we spent on the TV we put in our time in the movie department too. We watched some good ones like: Back To The Future, Batman, Big, Dead Poets Society, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Field Of Dreams, Flight Of The Navigator, The Karate Kid, License To Drive, The Never Ending Story, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Revenge of the Nerds, Risky Business, Short Circuit, Stand By Me, Top Gun, Weird Science, – and of course the first film I saw in a theater – Superman.

We saw the Space Shuttle Challenger explode on TV. We played flashlight tag, jumped on trampolines wearing Zubaz, and ate pop rocks. We had pink Skip-Its, Barbie Dolls, and G.I. Joes. The boys among us collected thousands of sports cards, which still fill albums that live within boxes deep inside our childhood bedroom closets. Our cats, dogs, gerbils, hamsters, rabbits, parrots, and goldfish were all subject to kiddy torture, dress-ups, and “science experiments.” We all lined city streets for 4th of July parades, fireworks, and ran around state fairs wearing hyper color shirts and pin-rolled up pants. We blared our tape decks rocking out in Starter Jackets and Nike’s while playing in the rain and eating Pizza Hut before TGIF.

The Olympics and Michael Jordan inspired us. We all knew not to take candy from a stranger.  And we also knew we shouldn’t eat apples from strangers on Halloween because they may contain razor blades. Oh, and neon was awesome.

Everyone actually thought America’s Funniest Home Videos were funny. And we still occasionally catch a late night rerun after our now dwindling drunken escapades. College was a long time ago already. After all we’re 30 now and can’t party like we use to.

The Generation of Awareness

During the 1980’s and 1990’s we were kids. We had fun and we had our knocks too, but maybe one of the most important things that defined our collective youth was our awareness.

We knew what was going on. And not just in our own homes, but in our friend’s homes, and we knew what was happening around our country. We knew when there were droughts in farm fields in the South or massive snowstorms on the East Coast, or an earthquake in Candle Stick Park. We knew about Apartheid in South Africa and Dolphins being killed by tuna nets in the Pacific. We knew about global warming in elementary school. And that other kids in 3rd world countries didn’t get to live like we did. We saw the Berlin wall come down and knew what the Exxon Valdez did. And we cared about it. We internalized it and wanted to figure out our own ways to help. We knew that the world’s problems weren’t necessarily our own, but just by knowing about them meant we should at least try in some way to do something about them. We planted trees on Earth Day after pencil fighting sessions during Italian Dunker and tator-tot lunch hours. We drank cartons of chocolate milk that held the faces of missing children. And you all still can’t figure out the disconnect? Knowing too much when you’re too young – that is our collective story.

We Are The Realist-Idealists – The Realist Part

Our generation does not want what yours did. And we’re not even as close to naive as our grandparent’s generation was in believing there is such a thing as the “American Dream.” It’s a beautiful thought, but we already know that striving for a perfect life, in a perfect house, while trying to force your children to be perfect too only causes them to do drugs and listen to absorbent amounts of rock n roll all while believing getting high will somehow make their own problems go away because it’s ‘peace-love, and groovy man.’

We don’t trust big corporations. And the ‘great recession’ hammered the final nail into our parent’s collective career coffins. Turns out that system never really cared about you and we’re smart enough to realize it doesn’t give a shit about us either. It’s sad to see mothers who broke glass ceilings into rooms full of already broken mirrors. It’s kill or be killed in the corporate world and we’ll quit your shit job for a $1,000 raise somewhere else without a 2-week notice (and we’ll take the fucking stapler with us and sell that shit on Ebay). There is no such thing as corporate loyalty anymore and that door swings both ways. Look that up in your urban rap dictionary, #beyatches. All you 40-year-old middle managers need to stop crying about how Millennials don’t care or know about the value of hard work. Most of us don’t try to hide from the truth as much as you do. In the corporate world we’re all whores to overpaid board of directors with golden parachutes so stop acting like you can’t see the elephant in the room. If you always wanted to be an artist you should have went for it instead of taking out your weak level of authority on me. We don’t want the same thing as your generation did for our work-lives and we’re not going to play the same game either. There are some of us who like our corporate jobs, but that’s only because we like our co-workers. Don’t fool yourself into thinking anyone cares about Excel, Powerpoint, or Salesforce.

We definitely don’t trust banks and our governmental leaders publicly piss on each other waiting for their turn to pass the blame for whatever the current political flair up might be so they can stay in office long enough to keep the killer health benefits and the 80-G’s a year to eat in the private dining clubs on the Hill while screwing an intern or the friendly gay down the street. I’m sure in their hearts they care about our country, but not anymore than they care about their own trust funds.

Don’t even get me started on advertising. Nice try, but we’re not in your demographic anymore. Funny is still funny, but I ain’t buying your mini-van because it’s a swagger wagon. All you account planners out there might as well label us as, the “untouchable” generation.

We are realists that can spot a lie a thousand miles away, but we are not jaded even when the lies are only coming from a foot away. We know what’s going on and we’re not happy about it. You didn’t know we were going to end up here either. But, you’re old now and most of you have given up. You’re hoping the stock market doesn’t totally collapse once the world’s oil runs out or your social security check dries up before you’re dead. You worked for something right? We get it. Remember we’re the generation that knows what is really going on. We see what you were trying to do and failed, but we still really appreciate that you read us books at night when we were kids and paid for all our years on sports teams and music lessons.

The world is fucked up and life is not fair. It always has been and always will be. But the difference is that this time it might be for real. Our environment is in such a bad place everything could collapse and not just your bank account, but our whole ability as a species to live. I have personally stayed up entire nights thinking about who I’d have to kill just to stay alive in a world that can no longer support most forms of life. That’s heavy shit to deal with when you’re also still (borderline) trying to please your parents, grandparents, girlfriend, boss, and friends, while also still trying to appear to be a somewhat normal functioning member of this ‘great’ nation of ours. And you’ve got 5 blogs and 6 Twitter accounts to update daily with a dog to walk every fucking night too. Oh, and you still need to figure out what non-GMO foods you can eat or decide which one of the 17,000 different kinds of toothpaste to buy. Really? How can there be so many kinds of…. EVERYTHING. How did we get here?

I dare say our American Y-generation has acquired a type of pressure never before experienced in our species. We are no longer just responsible for ourselves, our own families, our own towns, states, or even the whole country. But, we are responsible for the entire global industrial revolution’s fuck-ups, for our already aging parents, and for that tiny space inside all our brains for our now still imaginary children’s children. The greater our privilege was growing up the greater our responsibility is now and as American youth it would be hard to argue we didn’t all grow up privileged in most ways that count. I can’t be the only person of my generation who has actually shed a tear imagining the world my own grandchildren could inherit.

I know you’re thinking, “Dang, these kids are a bummer and cold.” Nope. Not cold or jaded – we’re just real and we know what is going on. Life’s a bitch and we’re not afraid to call it as we see it. Some of us still don’t speak out our truths, but we certainly know and think about them.

We Are The Realist-Idealists – The Idealist Part

Now for the rainbows and kittens. Oh, man, for all the coldness and cynicism you might detect from myself and my fellow echo boomers we’re all still the children of hippies and the grandchildren of the generation of real values. We got heart for miles. I think if we all thought we could make a decent living at it we’d all work for non-profits. Most of my closest friends are already nurses, therapists, teachers, firemen, artists, lawyers (the good kind), organic farmers, or baristas helping drown out our collective sorrows.

You’d be hard pressed to find a single young American person today who doesn’t in some way want to try and help make the world a better place.

Some of us haven’t yet found our own way to make an impact, but we’re trying. And we’re trying to do it at the same time that we’re trying to make a life for ourselves too. Finding the time to volunteer for a good cause or dedicating ones life to a peaceful mission shouldn’t need to feel like such a struggle, but we all know how hard it is out there right now to just get by. Yet, even in the downturn the beat goes on and positivism exudes from my people.

Everywhere I look and turn my fellow youth are making it happen in the most honorable way. We are the generation of genuine idealism. We know we can make a difference because we already are.

We can inspire you to rejoin the cause.

Maybe because our generation grew up with a bit of over-awareness we also gained a little extra wisdom too. When you grow up learning about and understanding pain and suffering in places a million miles from your own playground you know from a very young age how we’re all really connected in the end. There is no such thing as ‘us’ and ‘them’ we’re all just ‘us’. And it’s not even just ‘us’… it’s endangered animals, tropical rain forests, ocean waves, and tiny bits of energy swirling around the universe from atom to atom into infinity. There is awe behind it all and we are moving it forward from within it.

A modern gentleman knows that conversations about money, politics, and religion are all topics best left for private affairs and I know my generation is as much of a mixed bag when it comes to any side of those coins as any other generation before ours. However, the wisdom I’m referring to taps into something that transcends dinner party banter.

Perhaps it is my own uber-idealism at play here but I truly believe the youth of the world today will help get us all back home. And not back to the ‘American Dream’, but just back to the dream of being able to live a happy life while doing right by other people and the Earth along the way. Right now – as in right now – there are young people leading actual revolutions against decades of tierney in countries around the world. The revolution of our American youth might not be as visible, but it is happening.

Young people are moving away from corporate jobs and starting their own small businesses. We are buying less stuff and interested in living more simply. We are paying down our debts. We are learning where our food comes from and what the real cost of industrialized farming is. We are seeing ourselves in relation to our impact on the Earth and where our energy comes from. We ride bikes. We are spending our money more wisely and looking for quality over quantity. We are designing better more eco-friendly products and questioning what services we really need and why. After seeing a lot of our buddies, older brothers, and sisters lose their houses in foreclosure we’re not about to make that same mistake. We’re waiting to get married because we’re the generation of divorce and know what that fallout means.

Everyday some portion of our individual energy goes towards thinking about and actually doing something better. Making things better is a process and takes time. We’re trying to be patient. Even if you can’t see it yet I want you to know that my generation is solving real and serious problems everyday.

Basically, we fucking rule and we’ve got so much soul you’d cry your eyes out if you only knew how much we care. But, hey, we’re not trying to win medals over here, most of us are humble kids even though we post a lot of random self-promoting shit on our Facebook pages. We’ve all got at least one special someone to try and impress, and just because we care doesn’t mean we need to be boring.

Love Life

How could I make broad and general sweeping statements about an entire generation of people without including a cornerstone of human existence? Oh, snap. It’s time for the millennial love tutorial.

Who really knows? Statistically we’re more single players than not. Yeah, we’ve hooked up. Yeah, we’ve been in a love once, twice, third times a charm. We’ve been cheated on. We’ve tried not to cheat. We’re looking for the sparks, the stability, the chaos, and the moments of silence and understanding. We carry all our fears and past experiences with us. We are just as vulnerable as any other person at any other time that has come before us. And we are either looking for, open to, hiding from, scared of, not ready yet, fooling ourselves, too selfish, or just content enough to know what happens next. Life isn’t static and neither are we. Marriage is amazing and awesome, except when it isn’t. Being single is awesome and amazing, except when it isn’t. Our friends and family help guide our thoughts in life and love and our hearts tell the truth if we choose to listen.

Maybe some things are a matter of destiny that someone like me shouldn’t be commenting on; no matter how hard I try I will never fully understand love, because matters of the heart aren’t things that are designed to be understood from a place that can be written.

I can say this from a completely personal place – my grandparents, both the living and the dead, inspire me in ways I’m not sure I fully understand. Their commitment to each other through 50 years, 60 years, 65 years and on, go beyond my imagination. Living my own life to the age of 65 will be a miracle – having someone else there with me and me with them that long seems as abstract as space travel and being described colors I’ve yet seen. That kind of connection, and maybe even more that kind of commitment, hits me so hard it feels like I’ve gotten the wind knocked out of me.

Yet, despite years of turmoil growing up with divorced parents I know it was all for the best – for all of us. I know my life is better because my parents got divorced and that we lived through that reality together.

In all my relationships and interactions in matters of the heart I carry with me this duality from my lineage.

I also know those moments of the unimaginable joy in being alone – totally un-tethered – completely free in the moment you feel your own heart beat while on a morning run in time with its rhythm looking to the sky knowing with certainty that that moment was created for you. Absolutely nothing can touch a moment of singular clarity. Our souls may dance in time with others, yet they are ours alone.

We are the generation of future hermits and cat ladies. We are the generation of future divorces and long storms before long-term happy endings. We are the generation of the future Happy Days re-runs. We are the generation of the soul-mated and the broken hearted. We harmonize like crickets and fireflies in deep dawn.

My generation, well, lets just say we’re complex – and it’s as simple as that.

Mysterious Millennials now and forever — special people, for a special place and time, with a special kind of love for each other and for you.

This Is Our Time

This year, in my New Year’s letter I wrote:

“For all the world’s daily dangers or despairs and for all our differences and shimmering individualities I take solace in our commonalities and shared aspirations.

All living beings possess a basic shared desire to love and be loved, to be healthy and bring health to others, to be happy and inspire happiness, to feel success over pain and suffering, to conquer fears, and to hopefully pass with wisdom, integrity, and perhaps legacy. We all wish to live well.”

In the end, maybe the only thing you really need to know about our generation is that we’re trying really hard to do the best we can with what we’ve got. We are keeping it real and we will never say die on our collective dream to live well while doing right by ourselves and each other along the way.

Some of my fellow Gen.-Y’ers might disagree with me on my thoughts here, but then again they probably weren’t really into the Goonies that much either – just saying.

(If you like my thoughts here please share them. And if you’d like to share your thoughts with me on what I’ve written feel free to reach out to me via Facebook or Twitter or send me an e-mail at: revolution(at)clarkpatrick.com)

48 Days of Efficiency: The Experiment – Part 3 – Balancing Mindful Content Consumption Vs. Mindful Content Creation

Step Three: Mindful Media Content Consumption

This a biggie.  Like my previously stated semi-commitment to exercising and healthier living I’ve also at various times in my life struggled with my personal levels of ‘content consumption.’

For a short period of time I worked in the US Senate and was a double-Blackberry-25-news-sources-daily-reader kind of person.  Thank GOD twitter wasn’t invented yet.  If keeping up with the news was a kind of booze I would have been dead drunk.  I was consuming news and general media content so intensely I think it actually messed me up, definitely burned me out, and was a big part of the reason why I decided to leave the Hill.  When you work in the Senate you are expected to know just about everything that is going on with everything in the world all the time, which is unrealistic and kind of ridiculous.

At a certain point sometime before college I decided a similar thing about TV.  I still more or less strongly dislike TV.  I don’t own a TV and likely never will.  I decided there was essentially no content on TV worth ‘consuming’ and anything that was I could likely find on-line to watch later when it fit my schedule instead of my schedule needing to fit TV-land.

The choice to not own and rarely watch TV is something I still believe has been a very positive choice for my overall well being, and also for the purposes of this experiment, my overall energy efficiency.

BUT, where I left behind the TV – the internet, blogs, social media sites, feeds, and the like have taken up that void in ‘content consumption’ and likely then some.  The internet has become for me a kind of ‘choose you own adventure TV’.  It’s an endless pit of interesting tunnels or branches in a web.  One you’re caught in the web you can never get out! (insert evil laugh here).  Blast you Al Gore for your evil invention.

However, I rarely feel like my time on-line is wasted because I’m almost always using it to learn something new, interact with new people, or people I already know care about and am interested in their lives or work.  I’ve communicated with some of my creative heros only because of what the net enables.

But, it’s very much a double-edged sword.  No matter what I may be learning or doing that I feel adds value to my life while consuming media on-line it automatically takes away from my ability for ‘mindful content creation’.  In other words – No matter how great all the shit I’m taking in is… it takes time and energy away from my own work.  And for a person whose entire livelihood is dependant on their own ‘content creation,’ this can be a very damaging thing.

In starting out this new year I’ve put a lot of effort into being much more aware and mindful of how I spend my time in the, ‘content consumption’ department.  Becoming a more efficient person requires a lot  of attention to where your mental energy is being used.

What You See Depends On What You See: Perspective from a Bonsai Tree

This blog is about challenging conventional thinking in/on photography and life by trying to highlight new paradigms from which to see the world.  – Mind over camera.  Think:

Today I had a sudden and slightly intense flashback.  While eating my lunch I remembered a conversation I overheard while looking at a Bonsai Tree exhibit in 2007 at the amazing local Como Park Conservatory.  A young couple was discussing the merits/values of bonsai trees.

The young women wasn’t very interested in or impressed with the bonsai trees on display and was making a case for why they were not interesting, beautiful, worth taking care of, or even worth looking at.  While the young man was trying to argue ineffectively with his mate that there was something more to bonsai trees than what she was seeing.  In the end, neither one of them would make very good lawyers, but her argument was something along the lines of, “There are more important things to do than take care of tiny trees, and they don’t even look that cool because they don’t have flowers….. and flowers grow fast and are easier to grow.”  While his argument was something along the lines of, “Yeah, but they’re really old and being old is important…”  Even though he couldn’t really explain why.

It wasn’t an earth shattering discussion, just one of those things you overhear and chuckle at while visiting a public space.

My only other experience with a bonsai tree was in high school when my best friend got one as a present for a birthday or Christmas one year.  We were both huge martial arts fans.  Both the films and in real life via a few years of kicking each other in the head at a Tae Kwon Do studio.  We got very good at kicking each others asses and I still maintain I’ve seen more martial arts movies than anyone I’ve ever met.  But, I digress….  My friend was fairly serious about taking care of his bonsai, which if I remember correctly was already nine-years-old when he acquired it.  The little tree required water daily in the form of mist from a spray bottle and was very temperature sensitive, which is kind of hard to control in Minnesota where you could experience an outdoor temperature swing of 50 degrees or more in a single day.  But, even in our punk high-school karate-kid phase my best bro managed to keep his bonsai alive and well for over 3 years.

But, at somewhere around age 11 my friends’ tree died.  And it didn’t die of a crazy natural disaster or from a flock of killer locus.  My friend basically just stopped caring about it… or watering it… and well, it died.  Looking back now, I couldn’t tell you exactly when that was and it wasn’t a big deal at the time to either of us.  There was no sleep lost over the dead 11-year-old bonsai tree.

That being said, somehow today while in mid-bit of a turkey sandwich I felt sort of sad about its demise.  I contemplated the ideals below the surface of the bonsai tree raising experience.

Perhaps what the young man was trying to explain to his young girlfriend at the conservatory in 2007 was that bonsai trees are important not just because of what they look like in their physical form, but also in part for what they represent on a deeper level.

Patience

In order to keep a bonsai tree alive you need a lot of patience.  Many of these tiny trees require a lot of work to keep alive and healthy.  They don’t care what you have going on in your own life they only require you take the time to take care of theirs.  And they don’t grow very fast or get very big.  If you expect to see any progress in their lives you’ll have to look at them for an extremely long time.  They don’t care if you have a fast paced life and they certainly don’t tweet.  They just live.  And chill…. for as long as you take care of them.  In fact, they’ll easily out live you.  It’s funny to think a tiny tree could live 3 or 4 times as long as you could.  Bonsai trees are a physical representation that other beings and even ideas take time to grow.  And require a huge amount of patience to make sure they keep on living.

Dedication

Taking care of a bonsai tree requires dedication.  Even looking at one you don’t own presents this to you in its form.  Each tree is carefully monitored, protected, watered, trimmed, misted, and transported.  It lives as long as someone is there to be its guardian.  It could be a life long commitment to take care of a single plant.  In the society we live in now there is almost no such thing as a life long commitment.  Less than half of modern marriages make it past a few years.  It’s amazing how much a tiny tree can symbolize the  idea or ideals of making a commitment to something outside of yourself for the long haul.

Fragility

It seems that bonsai trees are also an amazing symbol for the fragility of life.  Not just their own lives, but all life.  When you look at one you get an immediate sense of how easy it would be to throw it on the ground and after a few swift kicks kill it within a matter of minutes even if it had already been living for a hundred years or more.  It’s kind of amazing to think that these trees, like us, would certainly die without water any longer than a week.  Their weakness is a reflection of our own.   It’s interesting because I think when we’re healthy adults we rarely think about the extended periods of times in our own lives that we would perish without the care of others.  The very young and the very old require the care of other humans to live.  Those of us beyond or before these points in our own lives rarely think about the fact we would most certainly be dead without someone else’s care.

Beauty

Trees are amazingly beautiful things.  Stoic, silent, and humble living creatures.  Their beauty goes beyond their physical form in that they are a reverse reflection of our own human lungs.  They actually look like lungs and take the exact substance we release in our own process of exhaling and return to us the oxygen we require to live.  Trees are our twin caregivers.  The balance between our species is nearly unmatched.  This kind of beauty goes beyond any aesthetic explanation.

Dream of Trees

A handful of years ago I had a strange reoccurring dream involving trees.  I thought it would be interesting to look-up what it meant if you had a dream involving a bonsai tree in a dream dictionary.  It said this:

“Dreaming of a bonsai tree indicates the limitations of your own conscious mind. You need to consider what your instincts are telling you.”

Maybe these tiny old trees are trying to tell us something after all?

My Wish for You in the New Year

At the start of this year I fully updated my address book for the first time since 2002.  I threw away about 1,000 business cards I’ve collected since that time.  Deleted many interesting former contacts and persons met along the way.  And cherished the friends who have been with me so far through the long haul. I wrote a happy New Year letter to my friends.  And for those of you who didn’t get a copy in the mail this is for you as well:

My Dear Friend,

As the ball dropped upon another new year Robert Burns 1788 poem Auld Lang Syne rang its yearly query, “Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?”

Posing a rhetorical question the song asks us whether the time is right for old times to be forgotten as well as presenting us with a gentle reminder to remember our long-standing friendships.

As we begin a new year in the new decade I would like to thank you for your time, energy, and influence in my life this past year.  However great or small our interactions may have been I appreciate you and our time together.  I will file our experiences together into the beautiful wooden box that has now become our collective old times of 2010.

Regardless of your thoughts on, or memories of, the year gone by we can all celebrate together in shared hopefulness for a joyful new year.  Each new year brings with it an opportunity to refresh our values, goals, wants, needs, and dreams.  A new year brings the possibility for a new perspective on the life we have lived and the life we are working towards.

For all the world’s daily dangers or despairs and for all our differences and shimmering individualities I take solace in our commonalities and shared aspirations.

All living beings possess a basic shared desire to love and be loved, to be healthy and bring health to others, to be happy and inspire happiness, to feel success over pain and suffering, to conquer fears, and to hopefully pass with wisdom, integrity, and perhaps legacy.  We all wish to live well.

As I look forward into what my new year may bring I intentionally look through rose-colored glasses with romantic eyes and wish for nothing but the best in a cornucopia of wonderment and possibilities.

With these thoughts in mind wherever you are right now raise-up a hand with me and throw out your best air high-five, because however lofty my dreams and aspirations may be they are shared and reflected within you.  And I happen to already know this year is going to rock!

Lets get busy living like we mean it.  All of my best and most humble energy for this new year.  Cheers!

In Truth & Sincerity,

Clark & Lady

5 Keys of a Human Portrait & 4 Corners to the Human Soul

Since committing myself to a lifetime of image creation I have come to realize a few things that define me as such.

Perhaps my greatest interest and fascination in life is that of other people – I am perpetually curious of the complexity of my fellow mankind.  Out of this curiosity comes the desire to know deeply most everyone I meet and to document their being.  And to document them in their own honesty – to grab an element of their being that can only be seen in the millisecond of a captured image and not just in any millisecond, but a moment of pure truth.  A moment that shows with absolute definitive clarity – here stands this person, they are real, they are worthwhile, they are beautiful, and this is their truth.  This photograph represents everything that they are right here – right now.

As I’ve continued to grow within my art and my career I’ve come to realize a process that guides my ability to capture what I believe are truly honest human photographic portraits.  Here is my guide:

1.) Recognizing Universal Human Beauty.

This is Hannah.

When I took this photo Hannah was not allowing me to simply take a photo of her.  She was taking one of me as well.  She was meeting with me mind to mind.  She was not afraid, nor happy, or sad, but calm and calculated, she was examining what I was doing and understood it.  We never spoke a word to each other.  But, we communicated.  And for a moment I heard with clarity what she said.  “Here I am.  You can take my photo, but I’ve already taken yours.”  Hannah could see in me what I was looking for in her.

Recognizing Universal Human Beauty - is the first thing you need to be able to do in order to capture an authentic photographic portraiture.  The hardest part of this is recognizing that beauty is first and foremost an internal feature not an external one.  Because of this you have to be searching for beauty beyond the obvious.  Not everyone acts, appears, projects, understands, or knows beauty.  But, everyone contains it somewhere within themsevles.  And in order to capture it you need to see it.

2.) Seeing What One Cannot See In Themselves.

This is Lily.

Lily is like watching a waterfall.  She is in constant movement.  She is loud, and bold, fast, and wild.  Her energy is powerful.  She could knock you down and pick you up before you even knew what hit you.  Her energy flows up and down and swirls around, she’ll laugh a moment, cry the next, splash the shore and flow right past you.

Lily is just beginning to understand who she is.  She recognizes parts of her power, but she doesn’t know what it means yet.  I’ve seen Lily cry so hard and for so long that she fell asleep with tears running down her face.  When asked why she was crying she said, “I don’t know.  I just have to.”  Oh, Lily I understand.

Seeing What One Cannot See In Themselves - is a complex but equally necessary task in being able to create an honest portrait.  From time to time you might think perhaps your friends, your spouse, your children, or even a stranger know you even better than you do… and you think that because in some ways – they do.  We are all such unique beings that in our own uniqueness we can’t fully see ourselves for who we really are.  We can’t see our own totality outside of ourselves.  But, it is there, and there are things about us that others can see of which we cannot.  These are special things.  Little pleasures or pains we give to those who can see them.

3.) Reaching for the Core.

This is Kate.

Kate and I met for the first time on this day.  And I dug deep.  I was reaching for her core.  I asked her perhaps a hundred questions.  I joked, I pried, I teased, I made faces and jumped around, I stood on chairs and laid on the floor.  I moved her around, dressed her up, and dressed her down.  We ate junk food – catfish and fried chicken.  And I got what I wanted – I could see her.  I found her truth.  I got my pictures, but there was no camera – just an artist seeing his subject.

Digging deep into someones core is a dangerous thing because in order to get there you’ve got to open up your own core.  Capturing someone’s essence means giving them a piece of yours.  That’s the deal – it’s an unspoken agreement and a fair trade.

I captured Kate’s core on that day and later she captured mine.  This portrait is a record of an agreement to trade essences.

Reaching for the Core - is an intentional effort to find out exactly who you’re interacting with.  When you’re taking someone’s portrait you need to know who they are in order to represent them to the world through your images.  If you can’t find out who the person is that you’re making a photograph of then your image won’t be fair or accurate to them, or you, or anyone who sees it later.  As an artist you don’t need to present your subjects in obvious ways, but you should seek to represent them in honest ways.  This is the underling ideal of the portraiture.

4.) Matching Energy.

This is Cory.

Cory is an environmentalist, an artist, and a sage.  She is definitely a person who understands energy.  When you look at this photo you can tell what type of energy Cory is projecting out to us.  Cory called me out with her eyes just a split second before she called me out in words.  I don’t remember exactly what she said seconds after I captured that look, but it had to be something along the lines of, “You’re full of shit.”  And, her smile says, “But, I already knew that…”  And whatever I said to prompt her look I knew was full of shit too.  In an instant Cory’s expression is both a question and an answer.  We were on the same page.  Two friends goofing around with our two dogs in a park on a calm winter day.

Matching Energy – is a crucial tool in the photographic tool box.  But, it is a tool that cannot be bought at your local camera store or on-line retailer.  Matching energy means – meeting people where they are.  Every single human on earth is a living breathing thing full of their own energy.  If people were colors there would be six billion colors on earth because we all have our own unique energy.  Our energy flows in us, through us, and all around us.  And it’s ever changing.  As a photographer if you want to capture someone’s essence then you better get right up next to it, feel it, and flow along side of it.  It’s like a dance.  If you can move with someone then you can know them.

5.) Live in the Moment.

This is Toy.

C’est la vie!  Such is life.  Toy was a person who understood the importance of living in the moment and blowing a kiss to the wind.  The day I took this photo she told me about her childhood, about her family, and she shared with me all kinds of lessons she’d learned along the way.  Her stories were wonderful and her energy was amazing.  We had fun together.  We were playing.  She said, “Whatever is going on in your life there is always a way to make it fun.  And you need to… life would be too hard if you couldn’t find a way to have a good laugh.”  I spent 4 hours with Toy on that day and we were both 100% completely and totally present to those moments.

Live in the Moment - photography is nothing more and nothing less than a moment.  If you’re not present – you can’t see it for what it is – a moment.  An incredible moment.

A very good friend once told me that there are 4 Corners in the human soul.

In the first corner are all the things that you know about yourself and so does everyone else.

In the second corner are the things that you know about yourself, but no one else knows.

In the third corner are the things that friends and family know about you, but you don’t know about yourself.

And in the forth corner are all the things that you don’t know about yourself and neither does anyone else.

As a portrait photographer I see it as my mission to look for answers in every corner of the soul.  And what I find there becomes my art.

Visualizing Change Through Interactive Photography: Transforming Identities, Transforming Research

While researching material for this blog on a broad range of topics, (but with the clear focus of how to present thinking about photography and imagery in new ways) I came across a wonderful piece in the: Hmong Studies Journal, Volume One Number One, Fall 1996 Titled: Visualizing Change Through Interactive Photography: Transforming Identities, Transforming Research written by cultural anthropologist Sharon Bays.

When Sharon wrote this piece she was an anthropologist “gathering hard data from adults” living in Visalia an agricultural town in California’s San Joaquin Valley.  As she describes in her paper she was taking a fairly traditional approach to working with and studying this specific group of people.  But, via some prompting of two Hmong children to show them how “to make pictures” she realized by teaching them the physical mechanisms of how “to make pictures” with a camera and allowing them to use her camera to express themselves and explore their own identities this would give her further access and understanding into the culture she was studying while “gathering hard data from adults.”

Giving two children access to cameras to explore their own identities gave her an entirely new way to explore their cultural identities both through them and in an interactive way with them.  She states:

“It was these very fresh, intimate and compelling images, both the color and the black and white, shot mainly when I was not right there, that convinced me that their photographs reflected their culture and community in a way that mine could not.”

Further stating:

“For Jamie and Pang our project came to be about their struggle as emerging artists that reflected their own unique young Hmong perspectives, which often clashed with those of their elders. Our ongoing dialogues became the grounds on which they tested their ideas about language, love and sex, and, for 15 year old Pang, the courage to redefine “traditional” concepts of marriage. They both tried on aspects of their culture to check the fit, rejecting some parts while embracing others. And they both endured considerable criticism from some members of their community for hanging out so much at my place.”

You ask – Ok, interesting story, but so what?  What’s your point?

Photography is often thought about in the following ways or layers:

1.) First, people think about photography in terms of it’s tools.  Or the camera.

2.) Secondly, photography is thought about in terms of it’s products. The photos.

3.) But, there are other levels.  Like thinking about photography in terms of the process of creating the images and even deeper in terms of relationships that develop in the process of creating images.  Thinking about photography in this way could mean that neither the tools nor the products are as important as the process or the interaction.  And I would argue that this is more often the case than not.

Using our example above Sharon later explains:

“It was also the work with the children that pointed to the inherent difficulties of turning such comfortable ethnographic traditions on their heads. Once relations had changed and barriers broke down, I entered into a deeply personal realm of interaction that no anthropological text even hinted at how I might proceed.”

Why is this important?  Whether you’re a professional photographer, or an editor, or a creative at an ad agency, or any person concerned with the output of images for your job – you have to remember that things change in the process of creating images, relationships change, the meaning behind the images change, even the purpose and function of the images can change.  Very often image creators and image consumers don’t recognize the importance of the creation process in terms of the meaning or value of a given image or set of images.

I encourage you all in the future to think deeper about the imagery you create and consume.  Ask yourself not what camera was used to create a given image, or even for what purpose, but try asking yourself – what happened during the process of creating this image?  You might start to see all imagery in an entirely new way.

48 Days of Efficiency: The Experiment – Part 2

The Process

Step Two: Refocusing & Planning

During my process of slowing down and re-centering I’ve also been thinking about how to move forward in all aspects of my life.  Including how to move forward with my business, my health, all the way down to where I live and why.  In doing so I have created a plan.  An action plan.

However, for now the specifics of this plan aren’t as important as the process.  And the process of carrying out my plan has to do with its structure and execution.  Essentially I’m creating a set of rules for myself to create a space and time from with to work or carry out my plan within.

A Structure from with to Execute a Plan

Here is the structure for my plan of moving towards becoming more energy efficient in my life and my business:

1.)   For the first time in well over 10 years I am going to get up at the exact same time every single day for 48 days in a row.

2.)   For the first time in my entire life – I am going to go to bed at the exact same time every single night for the next 48 days in a row.

3.)   I am going to eat breakfast and dinner at the exact same time for the next 48 days in a row.

The underling idea or goal behind doing these first 3 steps is to create a rigid frame to work within, or in other words – I have the exact same amount of time everyday to use my energy.  No more staying up all night to work on something only to sleep half of the next day away.  And no more not eating anything for breakfast because I had a bunch of morning meetings and didn’t get up early enough to eat. etc. etc.

I am not a morning person. And I never have been.  Mornings are my Jedi kryptonite.  However, for the purposes of this experiment in efficiency I am going to set a reasonably early (for me) time to wake up each morning.

Over the last few weeks I have read a number of different thoughts on how getting up early lends itself to being generally more productive.  And I have generally stated throughout my life that I am way more productive at night.  But, I am willing to see if there is some magical thing I have been missing all these years and to test this theory out for myself.

I recently read two blog posts by Leo Babauta titled: How I Became an Early Riser & My Morning Routine.  Both of these posts made a lot of sense to me and are a part of my new ‘structure’ from which I will be executing my new plan towards efficiency in my life and business.