Tag Archives: featured

After the Summit … Heading Back Down

If you’ve ever reached some sort of pinnacle of achievement— something you dreamed about and suddenly it becomes real— there is always the aftermath.

My continued agonizing to sort out what’s next after the release of our film (no small time ago) is actually pretty absurd. Though there’s plenty of room in my day for big new projects, I do have enough work to do, there are dreams in the hopper, and I have a business plan of sorts. But I’m guilty of what filmmaking story consultant Fernanda Rossi called “retro-engineering.”

We achieve something and we look back and we decide what of the acts we did were leading to success. But we don’t know, really, what led to success. We do a ton of things, there are a lot of variables in the universe, and then we nitpick, we choose the ones that we think led to success. – Fernanda Rossi

In the following interview, Fernanda, “The Documentary Doctor” who has consulted on at least two Academy Award® Nominee films, discusses success. First of all, she doesn’t believe in it.

Click below to view this 3-minute video:

Fernanda Rossi, Author, on secrets to success. by maxwellflower
In the video, she says: “I believe in meaningful acts every day. And if they lead to success, whatever success is, great.” What’s your definition of success? And what do you do after you’ve achieved it?

Thanks for reading. Cheers,

Greg

Photo by yours truly atop “Yahoo Point”

Beerfridge Poetry

you sit with friends asking if you still have itAs part of my two-years-long-and-counting spring cleaning exercise, I’m thinning my archives. There’s enough paper to make a papier-mâché blue whale and a shredded sea for it to swim in.

Today, two poems copied down from the fridge at the old condo (in the glory days when my only fridge was also my beer fridge). With luck, my two current batches of homebrew will be ready in just over a month to toast the 10-year anniversary of these bubbly outpourings.

August 15, 2002

I swim atop
a malty sea
me blood like

a flood of heady
bitter lather
hops in me skin
fresh Ale Cascades
over me lips
into me mouth
& I am GOOD

special BREWS
 bottle one dream

put it there
and get gone from here

you sit with friends
asking
if you still
have it

you tell them
I am sipping it!

and drink
of this happy juice
for all of your days

Clearly the Homebrewer’s Association novelty beer-poem magnets came in handy that summer.

Thanks for reading. Cheers,
Greg

Looking Up to Real Stars

I told Maya I was looking forward to skiing so I could slow down a bit. She was understandably befuddled. It would take a few more friends— and then a rich tapestry of stars— to bring me ’round.

On hearing my desire for a little reprieve through high-speed turns down a mountain, a second friend suggested, instead, a slow hike and a soak in the local hot springs. I thought perhaps she didn’t understand how soothing it could be for me to schuss down the snow, but Laura waged a convincing argument about the body dysregulation that all my recent air travel could have caused. Laura’s perspective is rooted in Somatic Experiencing, which essentially respects our innate biological ability to self-regulate— assuming we tune into it. One cool example of SE shows this amazing ability of the body to recover (especially in children), following the ‘quake and tsunami in Japan.

Still I waffled, unsure how to approach this whole slowing-down thing. A third friend— and his seven-year-old daughter— simply showed me how it was done. It was after bedtime, but Sophie stalled her march up the stairs with a question. Instead of herding her onward to keep to the schedule, Matt sat down and engaged her curiosity for many minutes. He never checked his watch. I can only assume that Sophie went to sleep with a head full of new fodder for dreams.

It reminds me of Dr. Jane Goodall’s reflections on how her own mother encouraged a spirit of curiosity and scientific inquisition at the earliest ages:

When I was a little girl of 18 months, she [my mother] came into my room one day and found that I had taken a handful of earthworms to bed with me. She didn’t say, “ugh, throw these dirty things out!” She just said very quietly: “Jane, if you leave them here they’ll die. They need the earth.” — From a Chautauqua Lecture, August, 2000

Yesterday’s schedule got derailed a bit for me and I didn’t get back to my home in the mountains till after dark. It was far too late to ski, but there was time for an easy workout and a soak in the springs. When I finally made it home (at an hour that would have been well after Sophie’s bedtime) I lingered in the driveway long enough to be smothered by the quilt of stars overhead.

My every exhale painted the frigid air around me, but the stars blanketed the whole scene and gave me a sense of warmth. I thought of how we work so hard to stoke our fires, to create our own lights in the sky, too often forgetting the others already up there. Here’s to all the stars in our lives, those who help us slow down and take it all in: the friends, the healers, the heroes … and the kids.

Thanks for reading. Cheers,

Greg

Photo by Patrick Hoesly