Origins
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Background
Starting more than three decades ago, I've been privileged to interview countless individuals who have shared their personal stories with me. The invisible threads that connect us have always been fascinating to me.
My collection of stories began in Glastonbury, England, in March 1992 while developing a documentary. This journey was preceded by a transformative visit to Edinburgh, Scotland, a place that immediately felt like home, a few months earlier.
When I stood on the platform at the train station the previous November, waiting for the train back down south into England, I had the strongest sense that I was heading in the wrong direction.
Something inside me stirred to life.
Upon returning to Los Angeles that December, I soon realized that if I stayed I would fall back to sleep. And the thought terrified me. I was finally awake and I wasn’t going to go back.
Though uncertain what awaited me there, I felt strongly pulled toward the unknown.
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Collector of Stories
I booked my ticket to London before I knew what I’d be doing over there, and before I could talk myself out of going. It was after an auspicious meeting with a woman at a Dire Straits concert that I decided to bring a video camera and use it as a vehicle to create a documentary from conversations with the people I'd meet on my travels.
Beginning in Glastonbury, my journey unfolded organically with each encounter leading to the next. I traveled the UK by rail, eventually finding my way to the Findhorn Foundation in northern Scotland, where I would stay for the rest of the year.
I became a collector of stories. These weren't formal interviews but intimate conversations where new friends shared their experiences, many for the first time. I wasn't interviewing them; I was witnessing them. By speaking with someone genuinely curious about them, they revealed themselves not only to me, but to themselves.
I watched many of these people transform before my eyes, and something changed in me, as well. It told me I was on the right path. I still wasn’t clear where I was going, but as long as I was willing to move forward one step at a time with intention, I was fairly certain I would be led by some benevolent force.
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Conclusion
I had started what came to feel like a never-ending journey to complete the film I called Messengers, as in we are all messengers to one another and the outpicturing of our inner archetypes.
I wanted my audience to get the sense that they were being spoken to directly by these people and that each of them had a specific message for them, which would, of course, change from person to person and with each successive viewing.
I fell in love with the concept and came to believe I was doing something "important" that would shift people's consciousness. I had no idea when I started that it would take more than four years to finish. But I wasn't going to stop until it was done, and it carried me back and forth between the UK and the US several times, raising the cash to complete it while I learned how to make a film.
I hadn't realized at the time that I was struggling with ADHD, executive dysfunction, working memory deficit and time blindness, all things that had worked against me throughout my life. I had managed to slide by without noticing previously. I knew there was something wrong but any attempts I’d made earlier in my life to get help was met with dismissiveness. I had never been so committed to anything before. I was on a mission now.
I completed the film with as much innate skill as I had, but the truth is I was running mostly on faith and fumes, and while the film has quite a few gems in it that make it worth your time, I've never been completely satisfied with the way it turned out.
I'm now offering it as a viewing experience for visitors to my website. The best way to watch it is as an oracle. Come to it with a question about some issue you're wrestling with; one of these messengers will address it.
“What service is, is not finding what needs to be done. Service is finding what fills you up; finding what you would do whether anybody paid you to do it or not. Finding what your heart tells you to do and doing that a hundred percent. No vacations. You don’t need vacations when you’re doing what totally fills you up and turns you on and gives you joy.”
“It’s very difficult for people, to shake them out of their complacency and their material preoccupations. And I think what does that for most people these days is illness. I think it’s the moment when people are sick, whether it’s mentally, emotionally or physically, when they’re at a crossroads, they’re open. It’s like, “Wait a minute. It isn’t working. What I’ve been doing isn’t working. Maybe I should look at some alternatives. Maybe I should take a fresh look at what I’m about. What am I here for? What’s this all about? What’s going on?”
“For thousands of years we have become progressively alienated from the earth and our body. And that means, in psychological terms, we have repressed our primitive, natural self. So that when the first settlers came to America, went to Africa and so on, all they could see were primitive savages. What they were seeing was that part of civilization that had been put down and repressed. And the violent, predatory, destructive part of western man is very easy to see if we look at his history. We are so busy glorifying ourselves that we don’t want to own this rather dark shadow. Unfortunately, therefore we have accumulated many, many generations of repression of this violent and brutal shadow which we choose to project on simpler, less materialistic or technological peoples, the indigenous peoples.”
“It’s simpler to change the universe as long as we don’t separate from the oneness. This is a oneness. We’re all in it together. We are parts of one another. We are parts of a oneness. And if we can get back to remembering this and acting in this as a oneness and to remember that we carry messages to one another and the bad guys are the ones that we are requiring to play very ugly roles for us which are no fun at all. And let’s stop requiring people to do that for us. Really see what parts of you create the bad guys and change them and then you won’t require any bad guys anymore. You won’t have to have those kind of role players. Because all it is is role playing. And who wants to be the bad guy?”
“Service and love are the only two things that actually, right now, have any valid meaning, certainly in my life. It’s about acceptance of service for other people. Service and love and compassion. And maybe that is why we’re having to go through such turmoil before we wake up. We are having to be taken to the edge, to the very edge, of the abyss. To bring the human collective to its knees to begin to ask, for God’s sake what?”
“Be forgiving. Let go of yesterday. These are the things that you do to cooperate with your vision. If we can do that everything else will take care of itself. Your decisions will be made for you. The doors will be opened for you. Because guess what? You’ll be ready to go through those doors.”
“Don’t be afraid. I want to say it to me first... and then to say it to everybody... we need to fall in love with ourselves which means we need to be kind to ourselves, we need to believe in ourselves, we need to honor ourselves. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to do. But I think that’s our task as a planet... to see that we’re not “other”. When we fall in love with ourselves we know we’re everybody else.”
“I don’t think it’s ever going to be where religion gets organized again the way it has been in the past. We’re each going to have our own path and then we’ll share it with each other and say, “Guess what I found on my path today? I got this gem. What did you find on yours?” The discovery and the kind of sharing we can do with each other… because I can’t take your trip and you can’t take mine. But, boy, we can share some of the gems we find on each of our trips and some things you’re going to discover are things that are going to help me on mine, and vice versa”