I was born in Lincoln, Nebraska. A land of corn fields, prairies, and cowboys. The kind of place where you can imagine covered wagons and steam locomotives and thousands of bison roaming the plains not so long ago.
I remember in elementary school we would have assemblies where we would all gather to sit on the shiny wooden gymnasium floor and listen to a Sioux storyteller tell us the tale of how coyote used his wits to trick a giant monster and save the world.
There were tornado drills and we would play Oregon Trail in the computer lab.
I remember going to the library and checking out a dozen books at once and spending my time lost in their fantastical worlds.
I remember listening to stories on cassette tape to fall asleep at night. Fables, King Arthur, The Three Musketeers, Robin Hood, Arabian Nights, Hank the Cowdog.
I remember early computer games. There was that one computer in the corner of the classroom that had games on floppy disks. The screen had two colors – dark green and light green – and simple letters, numbers, shapes, and stick figures would move across the screen. A couple years later graphics had improved and there was Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, Treasure Mountain, Pajama Sam, and Spelunx. I remember writing and illustrating little fanfiction books about the Zoombinis during my classes.
There are other games that I have been trying to find for many years but the memories are too vague, like a dream that fades when you try too hard to remember. Camel eating a mushroom 90s computer game or Chihuahua folds twenty dollar bill in half to trick taco truck 90s computer game doesn’t yield any helpful answers on google.
As I grew older we moved to Pennsylvania – more east coast, more puritanical and germanic. I delved into epic fantasy and sci fi. Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time, the C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy. I played Pokémon, Final Fantasy, Zelda, and later World of Warcraft. I watched Adult Swim and Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo and later Quentin Tarantino and Kurosawa and David Lynch movies.
There was something about these worlds that felt more real than reality. Driving around, passing strip malls and big box stores, having a vague sense of the impending reality of working 9-5 and paying taxes, a vague sense of the dread of late stage capitalism – why couldn’t I have been born into a different world? One where I could be a cyborg samurai, or a space cowboy, or a wizard?
I tried to capture these feelings through writing, drawing, painting, and clay sculptures. In Nebraska I had spent many hours creating narratives with legos and action figures in my room and outside in the grass and dirt and vines with the bugs and flowers. In Pennsylvania I would listen to the Star Wars soundtrack and read novel after novel. I would walk in the woods behind our house and collect unusual sticks and assign them magical properties, and find special artifacts – stones and feathers and animal bones. And then I would go to school and learn algebra and physics and play in the marching band.
When I was a teenager I visited my aunt and uncle in San Francisco, and in an incredible opportunity that in retrospect is actually insane, I got to visit the headquarters of Pixar. My aunt and uncle had a family friend who worked there, and we were able to tour the building, walking by the giant statues of Pixar characters and walls of storyboards, and then we attend an employee screening of Spirited Away in the Pixar auditorium… AND A Q&A WITH HAYAO MIYAZAKI!
It’s one of those memories that doesn’t even seem real. Even now I am questioning whether it really happened or not. I knew that I wanted to be a part of this magical world – I wanted to work somewhere like Pixar. I wanted to create something of my own… but how?
I realize now that there was a disconnect between the feeling and the expression. I resonated so deeply with creative worlds, but I lived so deeply in these worlds that I was often disconnected from my own lived experience in my own physical reality. The art that I did create always felt like an imitation of something else. I was sporadic and undisciplined with my art and struggled to find any cohesive vision.
My high school had a class called “Cinema Arts”, where we had access to MiniDV Handycams and computers with video editing software. I chose to sign up, and when I began making videos I was able to go deeper artistically than I ever had before. It was one of my first experiences with tapping into the unconscious mind in a creative capacity. I would collect these dreamlike ideas of scenes and write them down and then me and my friends would try to recreate them on camera. There was something about attempting to capture the unpredictable nature of reality on camera that allowed me to bypass a lot of the blocks I felt in other mediums.
I became known at school as the film guy, and when it came time to apply for college I decided to go to film school and become a Director. I applied to NYU with my collection of strange short films and got in.
I won’t go into the full details of my college experience here, but for the purposes of this piece just know that it was an amazing time of growth, as well as a period of doubt and disillusionment.
I began to see the business side of the film industry and how it seemed to bleed into every aspect of the creative process. I quickly realized that my surreal dreamlike story concepts would likely never fly in a pitch meeting. I began to worry what I would do to make money. I spent less time writing and dreaming and more time learning technical skills that I knew would make me employable. Cinematography, camera operating, lighting, and editing.
They were all interesting enough, and got me close to the action, but they took me farther and farther from my creative essence.
I remember one summer I was back in Pennsylvania, working at The Nittany Lion Inn, a banquet restaurant where I worked as a cook during college breaks. I was on a breakfast buffet shift with another cook, and I was pulling sheet tray after sheet tray of bacon out of the ovens while he scrambled gallons and gallons of eggs. At one point he looked at me and said, “You’ll never be a famous director, you know.” There was bitterness on his face and pain in his eyes.
I was stubborn and defiant, but a part of me agreed with him. I knew deep inside that I wasn’t doing the things that a director would do. I wasn’t writing, I wasn’t listening to my creative vision, and I wasn’t taking tangible steps to make the dream a reality. It was this feeling that pushed me further and further into the technical side of film.
I still considered myself a writer, but I hadn’t written any feature length screenplays. I had tried, but they had all felt like copies of other films, and I would get stuck. I was just another suburban USA white guy, what did I have to say that hadn’t already been said many many times already?
Back in NYC I doubled down and worked on student and indie film sets every weekend. I also started working as a live event camera operator my senior year. I got know Geoffrey Erb, one of the NYU Cinematography teachers and the former Director of Photography of Law and Order. He told me that he would connect me with some of his contacts in the production world after I graduated.
And then I graduated, and when I reached out to him I didn’t hear back. I learned a few months later that he had passed away. He had a neurodegenerative condition and had been in a power wheelchair when I had known him, and his condition had worsened. I was shocked and sad to hear the news, but selfishly I also felt the loss of an opportunity. Another door had closed.
I doubled down again and started taking whatever gigs I could find. I would often do lighting or camerawork for the rate of $100 for a 12 hour day. The film world, and especially indie productions, is notorious for cheap pizza catering, and I spent many days fueled by pepperoni – or worse, plain – slices, carrying heavy steel light stands and cases of camera gear up and down NYC walk up apartment stairs. Dirty, greasy, dehydrated, and drinking my fourth cup of boxed Dunkin Donuts coffee.
I would still daydream about my own stories. I would see the directors and writers who were brave enough to claim it for themselves and wonder where I had gone wrong. But no, in my mind it was too late – I had chosen my fate and now I had to walk this path. I took on the identity of the failed writer, the guy who had to toil away because “nothing in life is easy” and I felt resentful about it.
With each gig I sold another piece of my soul for $100 and a slice (or several) of pepperoni pizza.
I bought my own camera and I shot Bat Mitzvahs, I shot videos for small businesses, I shot videos for a lawyer who worked out of a WeWork office with a poster of John Wick on the wall and who at one point threatened to sue me. I would shoot concerts and wish I was the one playing onstage instead of standing in the dark, wearing all black, invisible.
I did all of this and more for many years, and I know now that this is what was meant to happen. The storyteller within me hadn’t died, it was germinating. It had needed time to gather nutrients and prepare itself to grow. All the traveling around New York City and across the country, going to places and meeting people that I never would have otherwise – it forced me to expand my inner and outer world. To slowly cultivate an ecosystem that was completely unique to me and yet was informed by a richness of different perspectives and experiences.
After freelancing for 7 years, I worked for 7 more years in-house at large consulting companies doing corporate video, and while it became clearer and clearer that soon I would need to make a big change, these experiences pushed me to more new places and added even more nuance to my ecosystem. I traveled even more and saw all the weird behind the scenes shit that goes on with corporate executives, corporate culture, and corporate expense accounts.
All the while, that deep creative essence seeped out in different ways. In Dungeons and Dragons games with my friends. In a comedic recipe email newsletter that I sent out for awhile. In random deep dives into hobbies and subcultures.
And then one day I decided to write a novel. It was time. I reconnected with that long lost feeling of going deep into my unconscious and letting ideas appear to me. But this time it was informed by everything I had accumulated – the inner architecture I had built. Early each morning I would sit at my laptop before work and let the writing flow out. Page after page, chapter after chapter, until I had done it. I had written a book.
My unconscious had awoken, and it was finally ready to be my collaborator. Not just on a whim, sporadically – but consistently and powerfully.
Slowly things came more and more into alignment. I was meant to write like this. I was meant to live like this. I was meant to do this exploration with others. I was meant to facilitate this kind of work, tapping into metaphor, myth, fable, symbol, dream – and do it in a way that changes lives for the better. I saw the new path.
For whatever reason, everything that happened leading up to this had to happen for me to find my way. I had to hack through the underbrush in the valley to find the hidden path to the mountaintop. For me to be able to write confidently and decisively and post it online. For me to be able to get up in front of a crowd and tell a story that only I could tell. For me to leave the corporate world and build a business doing this work.
I was reading about Celtic shamans recently, and there is a recurring legend that many shamans experience a period of 7 years of darkness before becoming a shaman – a mysterious illness, being bedridden, or a deep melancholy – an initiation period before awakening to their powers.
I’m not saying that I’m a shaman, but I thought it was interesting that I spent 7 years doing freelance video work and then 7 years in corporate video work becoming more and more miserable before awakening to what now feels like my true aligned purpose. Just like a seed that has to germinate underground until the right conditions arise for it to sprout and fulfill its destiny.
If you saw some of yourself in my story, remember that there are seasons to this shit. You may still be in the germination phase. In sustainable farming practices, there are entire seasons where a “cover crop” is planted – not so that it can be harvested, but purely so it can cover the field, protect the soil from erosion, and then die and replenish the soil for future seasons. Your current stage of life might be a cover crop, with the purpose of returning nutrients to the soil for whatever amazing things will grow next.
So do not fret, oh little seed,
For in the darkness you cannot see,
Yet you can feel the rain soaking into the soil,
You can feel the temperature growing warmer,
And soon your husk will split open,
Your roots will spread, your stem will grow upwards,
And I wonder what you will become,
When you spread your leaves in the summer sun.