Hanging On

“Wow, you lead such an adventurous life!” A friend exclaimed on the phone to me yesterday.

“Yes, I can hardly call it dull but it’s not easy, in fact I find it really challenging but I’m doing it. I’m pushing myself to make my dreams happen, that's a real blessing, the belief I can make it.” I replied.

“Yes you're lucky.” Sarah said.

I’ve been back from the States a week now. The sun has been pleasantly on show and spring is in the air, flowers are in bloom, blossom outside my window still wrapped in buds, waiting. Perhaps like me.

It’s been eleven years since I started this epic journey of filmmaking and pilgrimage. I’ve met people who I would never normally get to meet and seen natural beauty that’s borderline otherworldly. These are the external bonuses along the way, for I find that the experience of filmmaking and pilgrimage is really an internal journey.

Pilgrimage is like yoga, it cultivates an inner light to impermanence and everything, good, bad, and plain right disastrous is all the making of the divine. A pilgrimage teaches the art of surrender, not in a feeble way of giving up but surrendering to beauty, bending to the rhythm of life. I find these are like the master keys that help me along the filmmakers’ path.

I think most people would have given up by now but every day I count my blessings and rise to work. I consider myself an expert dealing with disappointment and rejection and can pick myself up to start searching for new possibilities, almost at the same time as feeling lost without hope. I’ve learnt to bounce back and to bite. I choose to see that my experiences are helping me face success and despair with equal measure and to value integrity and money with the same. I feel I have a PhD doctorate in experience.

We live in a world of instant satisfaction and work hard for these short-term pleasures that give us a sense of security. If we don’t like it, we just get rid of it and move on. We value worldly success over integration of body, mind and spirit and search for all the earth’s riches, without seeking the real riches of wisdom created from experience. I struggle against this mentality too and the social values and expectations of what I ‘should be’ doing with my life. However, as old structures crumble and the social paradigm shifts, I see the benefit of what I am doing. Vitality of life is too vital to lose, the message I communicate through my films is an ancient one.

Naturally I'm working toward an outcome and the desire of a commission, recognition and a willing audience but I also know there is no destination. Time is the moment and I'm doing what I'm doing for the love, unconditionally without expectations. I’m following a calling, beyond the reasons of intellect, and feel compelled to complete, as though it wasn’t the outcome I needed or wanted at all but the skill that embraces the hardships along the way and I realise too I am already living my dreams, even if they hang on prayers and good karma, sewn from eons ago and little else. It's all what we have, any case.