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There are few people who can change the world through a seemingly simple act. Their talents go beyond the isolated existence the rest of us live in. They create a new world for us. They transport us into a demention of our own emotional body we can only temporarily visit. And forever we will continually be inspired by their work.
This is the type of person my brother is and after nearly five months of traveling around the world he is returning home to finish working on the project world citizen.
I knew from day one I had the ability to make this project work…I also knew without my brother, this project would end up another boring travel film. It has been his personality that defines the movie and it will be his artistic genius that makes it.
Every time we filmed I was in awe of his ability to capture a moment on camera. He is truly a film maker and everything he touches turns beautiful.
Stay tuned as the editing process moves forward.
I invite all of you to click on the ‘trailer’ link in the navigation bar to view a short teaser created by a close friend Mitchell Rossit-Lavigne.
It was still dark out, and 8 other people around me slept soundly. I laid awake on the bottom bunk, staring blankly into the nothingness.
My alarm was set to wake me in 3 minutes…I had been up for hours.
It was the last 3 minutes before I took a cab away forever, and it felt like the last 3 minutes of my life.
The building was an old victorian mansion adjecent to Presidents home in old town, Panama City, also know as Casco Viejo. As I stepped out of bed the floor boards creaked. I wondered if everyone knew I was leaving. I wondered if they knew why I was leaving and what my brother and I had been through.
My bag was already packed.
There was only one thing left to do, and it made my throat swell up like in the moment before we cry.
I woke brother sleeping in bed above mine. He knew what I was doing.
In a week he would go to live in England to work, not ready to leave his greatest adventure. He was what I was only two year ago…on his own now, in the world.
I stuck out my hand and his hand grasped mine. He looked me in the eyes, through the early morning gray and said, ” This is not over…we will go on”
I felt the creak of every step down the stairs like a shooting pain through my heart. My backpack weighed heavier on my shoulders than it ever had. It was worse than a break up.
My thoughts were of everything my brother and I had been through. No one would know…but for the rest of our lives we would have these memories to share with each other. And every experience was better because I shared it with him.
For many many days, it was ignorant, but it was complete wonderment that I found the inspiration to write about experience.
The business like process of making a movie isn’t that of wandering through a timeless and ageless desert. But it is a honest process…and really, what else do we have?
Everyday, the ambitiously inspired and cautiously reserved engage in this, honest process we call life. They send me emails or share with me over coffee the dreams they dare to dream about the experiences they want to have. They are me, and I am them…and together we are the world.
All that we can do now, is figure out just how, to make this honest process something of a life experience.
Something we will tell our children about, and write about, and sing about, and know forever that we chose to live that process.
Today I am not in the Jungle…and as I stare up at the virgin marry there is no AK-47 pressed against the side of my head…but today I am alive. Today I have friends. Today I have everything that I could have. And if I never make it to tomorrow…all I can hope is that I lived my today. Here, there, anywhere, and everywhere.
My biggest struggle was not learning to be some sort of eclectic citizen of the world, it was learning to live here. It was learning to actually find peace in my day to day existence, and not to be living in the fantasy of my next adventure. My adventure was now, no matter how mundane or insane it was. I am here.
And this project will continue on.
My heart felt weaker than it ever had. It weighed so heavy in my chest, holding my head up to look anyone in the eye took motivation. Thinking about the project felt like trying to breath when the wind has been knocked out of you.
That feeling resided deep in me for weeks and I avoided anyone and everyone I could. It was not that I ever thought I was invisible…I just thought I had to be for everybody to believe in what I was doing…that or, “I told you he wouldn’t last”.
Maybe all of it and none of it is true.
I didn’t need to dwell on it, I just needed to experience it. I needed to feel the pain so I could always remember what this felt like. And I always needed to remember, because if I forgot…then I’d forgot where I’d come from.
And this was so much more to me than the geographical distance between Mexico and Singapore.
Three months ago I walked along a beach road in Mahahual, Mexico. A Hurricane had passed through just months before, leaving the paradise a near waste land of destroyed dreams. I knew I would have to survive my own Hurricane before this was done.
For whatever reason I ended up at home,I don’t know and maybe never will, BUT, I will make the most of it. I was working within 72 hours of been home, and as I put the pieces of the project back together I will be trying to raise the funds to get back down Santiago…and begin exactly where I left off.
And as the forever believer George, of Mahahual, with his bare and weathered hands, puts his Beach Hotel back together, stick by stick: So I will begin putting the (over) 600mins of footage we have already shot together and planning my journey back into ‘The World’.
There is a long road ahead and I have no idea what to expect…and that, well, that makes it all the better.
Stay tuned
When we try to hard to understand why something happens, we can loose sight on making it right. Sometimes the world moves us to places we never expected to be. And sometimes the place you never expected to be was home.
and then…
It is when we are faced with a challenge that we find out whether we truly believe in what we say – or we just preach it in blind ignorance.
Such was my fate as my plane landed at YVR some 8 months too early – some 20 countries shy – and to top it all off…alone.
…
I sat cross legged, flipping through my journal, while eating a Spanish Omllette in the Panama City Airport, trying to remember what had just happened. I wasn’t even sure if it had…and as the last remains of the Spanish Culture faded away around me I wasn’t even sure what was happening this moment.
…
I used to lay in bed late at night, listening to music and imagining what this journey would be like…I never imagined a moment like this.
Business people, some families, a few other backpackers, and this lonesome film maker marched solemnly onto the plane. My head was low and I had to watch my feet board the aircraft to really believe it was happening.
It had.
I was flying home. Cheated multiple times, robbed, and with a camera that barely lived to tell the tale of its tragic fall some fifteen feet down onto the desert ground. It was a remarkably unfortunate ten-days that led me here…
Stay Tuned.
Where is all the Mess?
As I walked a familiar street, people mowing their lawns, children playing in the yard…I didn’t remember how to look at it. Flying home over Dallas I saw the checkered board of society mapped out below me in perfect form. So much organization.
I couldn’t remember the last time I saw such a systematic structure of society. In Central and South America, everything is a mess. The jungle is a grand entanglement of flora and fauna so dense its passage is nearly impossible – the city scape’s don’t prove any better, with shanty homes and shops put up in every corner.
It is not that I enjoy the structure and of such a world as that…but when it is like that, you can see the mess that is the world, that is society. You can see the struggle.
Here amongst the organization we hide the mess of the modern world…we hide our struggles behind the perfect lawn. And now when I look at it…I don’t know what’s real and what is simply proper.
I am lost here.
Understanding the nature of motivation is quite a complicated thing. In fact, it is next to impossible to predict unless you know every single defining moment leading up to the action itself. On most occasions the only person who has that information is yourself – that’s why people may think your ‘crazy’ but to yourself the actions are completely justified.Such was the motivation of Project World Citizen’s departure date.We sat there amongst our own ambitions trying to understand the purpose of our motivation. A motivation that was becoming twisted by people who had no idea how to understand the nature of our journey.We sat there until we realized what needed to be done.In doing, we must believe that we are doing something the exemplifies the desire to become something of it. When you try and become something of something before that something has even been done you are setting yourself up for failure.Without the journey – your goal is meaningless.I was forgetting the journey and becoming consumed with the outcome of the project. Project World Citizen was about raw, unique experience. If I didn’t stop stroking the corporate machine I was about to begin a project that had already lost its soul.So on two short days notice we left.
There must always be balance. We all understand the natural characteristics of such a phenomenon and respect it in quiet ignorance – most of the time. It’s when we are tipped that we become louder in our questioning of that which defines the rules of life.For most, balance becomes the saving and humbling force of reality we come to appreciate and expect. When we are down, generally there is an experience that brings us back up, or inversely, when we are too high, one that brings us back to Earth. I am no longer interested in such an expectation of experience. How do we balance the good with more good?I don’t want to be ironical or hypocritical or anything absurd; but, my struggle becomes not an expression of doing what I do not know how to do, but actually, acting on the instincts that have been taught to me over and over.When we can choose to listen and live within ourselves we begin kill off the very choices and emotions we engage in – that hold us back.With Project World Citizen, myself, my brother, and my best friend believe in an ideal. That ideal is our dream and that dream is our reality. Over the course of 45,000kms we will see that dream tried and tested until it becomes not something to defend or protect – but such that it lives on through our very actions no matter what happens.I have been afraid of failure my whole life – and it is not through my accomplishments that I have learned what it is going to take to walk out my front door and end up in Singapore without using any planes. It is through my failure.- – Give me a penny, I’ll be fine, because with the amount of pennies that have been taken from me, I learned just how to take one as far as it can go – –
On Thursday December 6th, O’niel , Dustin, and I set up a booth at the Best of the Banff Mountain Film Festival. Next year, ‘Best of Banff’ will see the official Project World Citizen teaser and in 2010 Banff will be featuring our movie. So be ready.
A special thanks to Rodger Friesen for making this possible.
” I thought you, your friend, and your brother’s forthcoming adventure would be a fascinating combination…I will pray for god to grant you health and safety.”Certain people possess a quality of presence. A silent worrier whose wisdom and worth is shared with those only – who accidentally stumble into the worrier’s path. Often little is said – but that is enough.I will refer to this person only as R.W. E – and we thank-you for your kinds words and well wishes.Condolences to your tragic loss – you are in our thoughts.
” Do not go where the path may lead; Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Holding an assault rifle, a 12 year old child becomes the voice a of a law most of us know nothing about – in a world I cannot imagine.Today, I met a man named Kjll Jacobson whose contribution to Project World Citizen may be more generous than any to date. The price of life is expensive – in any country – and Kjll promises to front the cash to keep ours alive.” Don’t get me wrong” Says Kjll, ” I love what your doing, but going to countries like that you will find yourself rotting away and hungry in some cell waiting for your parents to gather $50,000.00 and bail you out.”I don’t want to carry-on in a winded rant about such a philosophy; yet, my mind is left wondering such – late into this night.Is there a reality to this world I refuse to face. Most well-versed – well-aged people will probably agree with a certain Hobbes:”No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” But I am far too young, pretty, and naive to understand such a world as that. It is only in my ignorance that I can really see the world I am about to see – if I entered any country, seemingly, and knowingly, I fear my perspective would be turned into an hour that has 60 minutes – and I would know far to much about something I knew nothing about. It is only when my eyes have seen nothing that I can open them to see everything. My belief in people is only good – so Mr. Jacobson you can keep your money.
I came across one of my journal entries from 6 weeks ago – it’s amazing how much has changed.”The Anticipation was not almost too much – it was too much. Maybe it felt like what a stockbroker feels or a lawyer. There were no assurances. There was all these things and we still had nothing.”
At first I wasn’t sure what inspired it – maybe I believed it was one defining moment – but quickly I realized such a phenomenon was not possible. A desire to do is never quite as instantaneous as it may feel – it slowly builds and burns within us until our most human elements cannot keep it at bay any longer.I was sitting on the ledge of the 13th floor hotel suite looking out to the Mexican Peninsula when I realized I had to set out on another adventure.That was 3 months ago…For the 5th time in two weeks my brother, my best friend and myself sat in our dungeon workshop until the wee hours of the morning creating and formulating and finally starting to see the realization of Project World Citizen.It started as an idea to travel the world and film it- that became a website, a blog and probably one of the most interesting interview series the world will ever see.
“Happiness is best when shared with others” – there’s a quote that goes something like that. I cannot say for sure I knew it would be my brother and my best friend that I would be traveling the world with, but I can say that I could have dreamed of nothing better.We’re still 2.5 months away from leaving for Mexico City, but the Journey for us three has already begun…I heard a quote the other day I quite liked:Emerson Said ” Most men live lives of quiet desperation ” – that might be true but it is not true for us.
We recently interviewed Chuck Webb of Fraser Financial Group to hear stories of travel and to ask him what it might mean to be a World Citizen.Our sincere appreciation goes to Chuck and the Fraser Financial Group for sharing your time and memories.
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