November has been a very strange time for me over the last few years, it wasn’t until just now, that I realized how many major events occurred in the month of November over that last five years. I hope this year, it holds something good.

Maybe this November will simply be the first November in a long while that nothing significant happens– after the last five years, even that would be a welcomed change. Perhaps this is the month where all the lessons I have learned over the last five years helps me set sail on a new adventure. If so, I am looking forward to that… four sheets to the wind!

Last night, I raced out at the last minute to catch the final screening of the movie ‘Once’ at our local art house theater here in Nashville–the Belcourt. Man, some movies are just dripping with inspiration, this movie was the kind of film that causes me to leave the theater with the passion to get out there and tell stories. A short while before the film started, I bumped into my friend Stephen Lamb, who was at the same screening, and he mentioned he planned on going to see Katie Herzig with Steven Delopoulos, Sandra McCracken at the Basement. Several days before, I had placed a mental note in my head that Katie was playing that night, but like most things in my brain, the memory faded long before its usefulness had expired. Taking the reminder as a divine suggestion, I set my mind on enjoying a great evening of music.

Katie was headlining the night and went on sometime around 11PM. About three quarters of the way through her set, she announced that she was going to play her song Fools Gold, a tune from her album that will be featured next week on an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. After the introduction, she explained that she had written the song with two other talented Nashville musicians, Kate York and Jeremy Lister and that Kate had planned to be at the show that night to sing the song with her, but that she stayed at home because of local tornado warnings.

It wasn’t but moments after this announcement that a slamming of a side door at the club announced to those nearby the onset of a storm. Soon, people began to peek outside as torrents of rain sprayed like heavy ocean waves crashing head first into the bow of a ship. Joining the waves were angry swirls of wind that tossed the tops of large trees in circular motions. I’m sure that there were some folks at the show who, after seeing the odd weather, began to think that Kate had made the correct choice by staying home. This notion would have been strengthened if, like me, they had been spying the small television on the opposite side of the club, near the bar, that displayed the scrolling weather alert and had a local weather guy pointing out flashing red areas on the radar heading directly toward Nashville. Some folks bailed from the show and other stepped out on the patio to observe Mother Nature and discuss random stories of tornadoes. I, on the other hand, returned my attention to Katie and enjoyed the rest of her set–after all the club was named The Basement, and isn’t the basement the safest place to be in a tornado?

The storm never produced a tornado in Nashville, and like the Big Bad Wolf at the door a brick constructed domicile, it turned out to be just a whole lot of huffing and puffing. One of those huffs of puffs happened to blow a chair off my front porch into my yard, upset some trash cans and littered the streets with leaves and branches. I returned home to a dog who was a little edgy, but otherwise in good spirits, despite her dislike for strange noises and cracks of thunder. I sat down on the couch and watched a show on the History Channel about some pending planetary doom via stored methane in the oceans and I faded off to sleep in an upright position. Sometime during the night, I awoke with a crick in my neck and shuffled off to bed.

I woke this morning with the expectation of cooler weather–it seems that storms often precede a cold front and I have been eagerly awaiting the final arrival of Fall weather. I popped out of bed fairly early this morning and after checking emails and reading some Myspace messages, clipped my dog to her leash and headed out for our morning ritual. The storm had brought everything I had hoped. The air was fresh and clean and the sun had begun to shine as it climbed higher into the bight blue sky. The air was crisp and cool, just the way I love it.

After walking back into the house, I quickly realized how stale and stuffy it was inside, in comparison with the fresh air outside. That was a situation that needed to be rectified–so, for the first time since I have owned my house, I moved from room to room lifting the blinds, throwing the open the latches and raising the windows. As I type, my house is wide open, the sunlight is pouring in and a fresh cool breeze is displacing the stale air. This is good stuff.

I don’t understand why I don’t do this more often… but I have a clue. As I started the process of opening my windows, I began to feel some anxiety. There is something about opening the blinds and giving the world a view into your life that makes someone, like myself, uneasy. Being open in this way causes me to lose some control. As people walk past my home, they might look in at me sitting on my couch typing on my computer. Even worse, the men working next door might hear me having conversations with my dog, as I expound on the reasons why she should not be barking at the small birds in the bushes or my neighbor Napoleon, across the street, as he heads out for his morning walk in the neighborhood to pick up trash.

It seems so much easier to keep the windows and the blinds closed–to keep the world at arms length and to control what others see and hear. Perhaps by hiding from them, I grant myself permission to ignore my problems and indulge my eccentricities. But certainly, it is much better to throw open the windows and displace the stale air. Open windows not only bring the newness in, but can remind you that there is a world out there that isn’t defined by four walls, a world of new experiences that is expansive and yearning to be explored. As I sit here this morning, I can’t help but feel a calling to escape what is familiar and set out on a journey of adventure and discovery, something I can’t have, tethered to this couch, to this computer, to this house–stepping out into a world that is beyond my control, where I am vulnerable and at risk in the hands of uncertainty.

There is something almost Abrahamic about the feeling I have at this moment–called by Jehovah into a life of uncertainly, resting only in one fact, that Jehovah is the I AM. Leaving the comfort of the land of my birth, being called into a new lands full of unknown enemies and unimagined dangers, a place where I cannot rely on myself and cannot control my circumstances. I can’t predict how long this feeling will last or how long it will be before I button myself back into my four walls and breathe stale air again, but for this moment, I stand wide open.

I consider myself fairly astute politically. I have voted since the age of 18 and I have been a part of two political campaigns in my lifetime–but today, politics is just plain crazy. Before I was old enough to vote, back in high school, I considered myself a Democrat. By the time I registered to vote, at the age of 18, I had swung back to my family tradition as a Republican. I think I did that mostly because I consider myself patriotic, and Democrats seemed very unpatriotic to me. There were several years in high school, when I was the only student who was standing for the daily pledge of allegiance. I think it was my sense of patriotism, that caused me, at the age of 18, to join the Army. Only a month after graduation, I shipped off to Fort Sill, Oklahoma to learn how to become a soldier. Much of my sense of patriotism was inspired by Ronald Reagan — yup, I am a Reagan Youth.

It was barely a year after I joined the military, that I was headed to Saudi Arabia for the very beginning of Desert Storm– nine months later, and a firsthand participant in the horrors of war, I returned home a very different person, with some very different takes on politics and government. My time overseas caused me to hate bureaucracy, something I saw our government rife with. When I had finished my enlistment in 1992, I left the Army and returned to civilian life. By 1992, the country had seemingly swung liberal as Clinton had already begun what would become an eight year reign. After witnessing firsthand the impacts of bureaucracy in and on the U.S. military, I had a great deal of distaste for politics in general– but that was before I discovered Rush Limbaugh. Under the tutelage of Limbaugh’s three hour daily show, I began to understand the mechanics of politics and it suddenly became more interesting to me.  Eager to understand politics more thoroughly, I became a Political Science major in college.

In the early to mid 90′s, I was coming on board to conservative politics at a very exciting time, the apex of Newt Gingrich’s ‘Contract With America’ which resulted in the sweeping of both houses of congress and becoming the majority party in the House of Representatives for the first time in over forty years. At the time, there was such hope for change. Finally, a conservative voice in America; certainly, I thought, there will now be sweeping change. What history ended up showing us, was that Republicans are no better at wielding power than were their colleagues on the other side of the aisle. In-party fighting, political corruption and abuse of power seemed to be everywhere. Eventually, Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, lost control of power and retired his seat in congress rather than be demoted and probably fired from leadership. What happened to the promise of change? The changes of the Contract with America seemed somehow a pale glow to

Since the revolution in 1994, the government has become more bloated, intrusive and ineffectual as ever before in our country’s history. After eight years of Clinton politics and nearly as many of Bush warmongering, I think people are tired of business-as-usual politics and really desire some change. I think, for many Americans, that change might be manifested in nominating the first female or black candidate. At this point, some people are so burnt out on government that they just want anything but more Bush and I am with them on that.

Some years back, probably sometime after 9/11 I reconsidered my political position. What do I really believe about the role of Government? What kind of person do I want representing our nation. While the names may have changed over the years, my philosophy hasn’t I want a principled person in the White House, someone who believes something, someone who has something governing them, someone with integrity. I am not an issue-based voter. I don’t care what someone believes about this-or-that so much as I want to know what motivates them. Are they Clintonesque, in that they put there finger in the air before issuing policy decisions or do they stand firmly on some foundational principles. If those principles are solid and reasonable, I might find a reason to support them. It is for these reasons that I have sometimes supported fringe candidates like Perot and Forbes for President. It is also why I campaigned for Dole and initially supported W.

One thing I have learned about my philosophy, is that the principles that someone stands on need to be looked at carefully. While W. is a very principled person, he seems to follow principle over reason. Our quagmire in Iraq is mostly due to his pig-headed principles. At some point you have to be able to look at something objectively and leave room to change your mind– not because it is politically expedient, but because it is the right thing to do. W. should have realized that invading Iraq was the wrong thing to do, and instead of “staying the course,” he should have been working on a plan to extricate America from Iraq. Yes, we would have to deal with the fall-out, but I think having a divided Iraq and causing civil wars will eventually play it self out, it would also force the rest of the world to be involved. But that doesn’t protect of energy interest in the region does it? Should have thought about that before invading shouldn’t you have?

Anyway, that is not my point. Sometime before the last election I began to realign myself politically. I found that I am rather a purist when it comes to government and that I believe in less government and greater personal freedom. Eventually, I found that my personal beliefs aligned much more closely with the Libertarian movement and not the neoconservative Republican one. While my card still says Republican, I am still a Libertarian at heart… and the last six years of voting history supports that. But, while I consider myself a Libertarian philosophically, I really have a problem with the party… mostly because it is filled with pot-heads and conspiracy theorists that serve to erode the credibility of the party. For this reason, I don’t think that the Party will ever field a reasonable presidential candidate.

So, I tell you all of that, so I can say this: the 2008 presidential race is a mess. I don’t think I have ever been so tossed about by candidates. I think that my mind is in the same place as most Americans when it comes to what I want in a presidential candidate and a government in general… CHANGE. I want someone who is going to change things, to work on righting the wrongs and making our government more fiscally responsible. I want someone who is going to keep our noses out of other countries businesses and halt our attempts at nation-building. I want someone who will work across the aisle to do what is best for our country and not what is politically expedient. I thought I had that candidate of John McCain.

Being a former Arizonan, I am aware of McCain’s cowboy mentality. He seems to be a man determined to do what is right, not what is political. He bucks the system and works bipartisanly to pass bills that help America. I think he understands the need for a strong and well-equipped military, but would not be the kind of leader that wields military power recklessly. As soon as McCain announced, I joined his campaign. What followed was a big disappointment. Instead of emails that detailed issues and solutions, I started receiving regular pep-rally emails that simply begged for money. I wanted substance and all I got was politics. I fear now that McCain is going the way of Bob Dole– over handled and way too “on message” to be to separate himself from the host of other Republicans doing the same thing.

Disconcerted with the direction of the McCain campaign, I sought out to search for someone who was really looking at radical changes to government. As I dove into the major candidates, I found very little in fresh new ideas for change and that bothered me. I then stumbled on Newt Gingrich’s blog and started reading about his ideas in Transformational Government. His ideas peeked my interest and I checked to see if he had any aspirations at a bid for 2008. It seems that he was carefully considering it, but was waiting until after Labor Day to decide. Ultimately, he said it would depend heavily on whether of not Fred Thomson threw his hat into the ring– which he has.

At some point in the middle of this, I was talking to my brother and he asked me if I had heard about this guy who really seemed to have some grassroots support. He couldn’t remember his name… Ron something or something Ron… a guy with two first names. A quick search on the Internet introduced me to Ron Paul, a congressman from Texas, doctor by trade and former Libertarian presidential candidate (1988). I read his profile on Wikipedia and said hmmm. Then I promptly forgot about him and went back to reading Newt’s book ‘The Art of Transformation’ and sending email questions to John McCain. Becoming quickly dissatisfied with McCain, I was also looking at Fred Thompson.

Everything changed for me two weeks ago when I stumbled on the documentary ‘America: Freedom to Fascism,’ which made me start thinking fundamentally about our government and it’s intrusion into our lives. I had never given the Federal Reserve or its control over our economy any thought. This thought caused me to dig a little deeper and do some more research. This research lead me directly into the Ron Paul camp. I spent quite a few hours watching Ron Paul coverage at FreeMe.tv and my mind is spinning, there are tons of reasons why I am ready to jump feet first into the Ron Paul campaign, but there are many reservations.

The first major issue, is that no one over the age of 25 seems to know who Ron Paul is. His movement is significantly Internet based and encompasses not only children below the voting age, but people from other countries. I watched a funny Ron Paul supporter video that ended with the declaration that they supported Ron Paul and they weren’t even American–how crazy is that? Sadly, it isn’t the candidate that I have problems with, it is his supporters. The majority of his public supporters are “issue-based voters”… something I really detest.

I am not an issue supporter. I will not vote for a candidate because of a position on any specific issue, something that I am afraid that Paul will get labeled with. People will frame him as an extremist candidate who wants to overturn Roe vs. Wade and eliminate the Federal Reserve, IRS, Board of Education and pull us out of the control of the UN. These are things that are part of his expressed desire, but there is a reason for it, that go far beyond the issues themselves. Ron Paul is a strict constitutionalist, and all of his ideas stem from the overreach of government beyond their constitutional limits. I am definitely in line with his ideas, but I think that the grassroots nature of his campaign prevents his image from being managed. I think there is almost no way to prevent him from being portrayed as a cracked pot.

Ron Paul is for overturning Roe vs. Wade, something that can be twisted and turned to opponents favor, but while he advocates the overturn, he doesn’t stand for the elimination of abortion, he believes that is a State’s right to decide if it supports or not… what he is against is the Federal support of abortions. As a man who personally delivered over 4,000 babies, he is an advocate for the unborn. I am all for a federal repeal of Roe vs. Wade as long as people have the right to decide for themselves by influencing their state governments to reflect the will of the people or that of Sate law. Decoupling us from the federal teat and allowing us to govern ourselves more locally.

It is so easy for us to simply go for what is popular or trendy, I think that the democrats will probably choose their candidate based on what is trendy… probably going for Hillary of Barack because of their gender or skin color. What candidate is a candidate of change? Everyone is talking about change, but who actually has radical ideas that will move our country forward, improve our liberties and allow us the greatest opportunity for personal advancement. Many of the democratic candidates have ideas about reform that require more government. Health care and retirement… increasing the entitlements of our country and leading us into deeper and deeper debt.

If you have no idea who Ron Paul is, I encourage you to Google him and research his ideas for yourself. I think he is the most reasonable and practical candidate out there. Sure there are plenty of good men and women out there who are seeking to lead our country, but how deep are their fundamentals? How much new government would their policies create? How much do you know about these people really? It is way to easy to rest on celebrity, to go for a candidate that makes us feel good about ourselves, but will choices based on that rationality move us forward? I can’t say I have come to a conclusion yet, the good thing is that I have some time to research the issues more. My question to you is, is your candidate causing you to explore issues, or does their rhetoric simply lull you to sleep, convincing you that everything will be OK when they get to office. I personally lean toward the candidates that cause me to ask the most serious questions and lead me to understand the depth of my ignorance.

It was recently, in a conversation with my brother, that my ears laid hold of something profound. We were knee deep in a conversation about living life when he mentioned a friend and something that he found incredibly frustrating about him. The conversation had steered curiously to the way the some people live, or rather, don’t live life. In the midst of his descriptions of his friends activities and inactivities he uttered a phrase that landed smack dab in the middle of my psyche like a pallet of bricks. “He lives his life in his mind; he doesn’t actually do anything, he just sits around thinking about doing things.” His statement crashed heavily, as the pallet of bricks broke the bands that held their form and spilled out awkwardly in a pile. “Ouch!,” I thought, “This is going to take some time to clean up.

Over the few weeks since that conversation I have returned to my pile of bricks and attempted to sort them out. Having crashed so heavily, it was clear to me that my brother’s statement resonated in a very personal way with me; I found myself clearly reflected in his observation of a friend. A great deal of my time is spent thinking about life, and very little time actually living it in any real substantive way; this was flushed out a further this week when my brother directly challenged my manor of living. During our six and a half hour drive from Nashville to Dothan, AL to surprise our mom for her birthday, Matthew turned to me and said, “you think that you are a filmmaker, but you are really just some guy sitting alone on your couch in your living room, surfing on your computer and watching TV.” My psyche flinched, awaiting the crash of whatever heavy object this realization was determined to embody.

However, despite my expectation of some kind of weighty crash, this statement seems to have taken a different form–no longer something chaotic and obstructive, this realization seems to have taken the form of a spade, or possibly a plow head. I think that this has become a true epiphany and could possibly be resulting in a paradigm shift. For years I have bemoaned my state of existence, blaming it on other people or some sort of cosmic joke. Lately, I have been undergoing some major personal evaluations which have resulted in a series of life changing realizations and it is entirely possible that this one will join those ranks.

I never seemed to put together such a simple thought. For many years, I have sat around expecting things to happen in my life and it seems that nothing ever seems to happen; however, this is not entirely true. Things happen all the time, but rarely do those things live up to my imagination of them. Perhaps, this is one of the reasons that I have been so bad a having a relationship with someone… too much thinking. In nothing is my pattern of “too much thinking, not enough doing” more obvious that with filmmaking. I know a lot about filmmaking, I have loads of gear and have read plenty of books. I’ve studied it and spent countless hours thinking about it. However, thinking about things like that rarely result in anything. The most vivacious people are those who are out there doing stuff, not those inside thinking about doing stuff.

I have been looking at my recent past under this new lens and finding some really destructive patterns. I don’t think this is any more evident that in a recent interaction with my relatively new friend Kim. It is odd that our initial connection happened because she had read some of my blogs and thought that we were so incredible similar. In retrospect, that thought seems so incredibly odd since, in many ways, we are polar opposites in terms of our personality. Regardless of personality, we do share a bunch of things in common, one of which is filmmaking.

Kim and I have had many conversations about my desire to become a filmmaker, and it was almost two weeks ago that I was set up for one of my clearest examples of how I practice that art of “thinking, rather than doing.” In light of our many conversations about making films and telling stories, and fresh off our participating in Nashville’s 48 Hour Film Project (www.48.tv), Kim posed an opportunity to shoot a small documentary about an interesting local character that she knew. Over the duration of our conversation, I spent the whole time talking around the project. I explained all the things that we needed to and should do, I passed off the initial work and directed her to find a way to get the project rolling without me. At the moment, I thought I was being pragmatic, but in hindsight I realize that I was possibly blowing off a project because it didn’t fit my minds model of a documentary I would do.

No wonder it seems that things don’t seem to happen in my life; because when things do happen, I am quick to dismiss them if they don’t meet up to the standard that I have formulated in my imagination. The funny thing is, that I know that I am creatively at the best when I am working in collaboration with someone and an opportunity to do that was in my face and I baulked. While Kim is a dreamer, she is also a doer… I, on the other hand, am just purely a dreamer. How is it that I, with the desire and capability to become a filmmaker, seem to find my way out of work? It seems so simple, so I can’t help but wonder where I got this self-defeating mentality? Some period of life must have instilled me with it, but at the moment, I haven’t discovered it.

The more I think about this… thing, the more I see how pervasive it is in my so-called life. Way too many areas of my life are infected with it. I fail to build relationships because of it, and I am pretty sure that I can’t seem to find a direction in life because of it. I think that spade of this new epiphany has broken the dry and impacted soil in my mind and seems to be tilling up a whole bunch of things that I have been completely ignorant of. I certainly don’t want my legacy to be that of someone who never lived up to their potential or left behind a life unlived. I deeply desire to awaken to the light of a day when I spend less time thinking about things and more time actually doing them.

I have always prided myself on the products of my mind, but it is becoming more and more clear that I spend way too much time there. I believe I really do live some sort of imaginary life in my head–a life where I am much more exciting that I presently am, at least in practice. So, this week I got of my ass and got out there. I finished a few projects and joined a film crew for the last five days of their shoot. I need to change the way in which I think about things and begin to spend more time doing things. I am not quite sure I know how to do that yet, but one thing that I am sure of is that I no longer want to live the most colorful parts of my life in my mind. In essence, that IS filmmaking, taking the figments of someone’s imagination and making them visible to others. If I hope to do that with someone else’s imagination someday, why can’t I do it with my own imagination now–only for real?