So yeah...its pretty obvious that I've been introspective the last few weeks....its evident by the stuff I've been writing both on my blog as well as the music I've been writing....I guess we all have those times when we think and think about everything......you think about your life, about the things you've lived, the things you've done and the things you've seen....
Without sounding like I'm bragging, I've been blessed with the opportunity to see some pretty amazing things....and had the misfortune of ending up on the wrong end of life just as many times.... I've flown in a helicopter over the slums of Rio de Janeiro, I've walked with a $65,000 camera through the most crime infested and gang riddled streets of Mathare Valley in Kenya, I've stood on the border between Mongolia and the Siberian desert watching the sun beating down on me at 11pm....I've stood at the base of the Acropolis in Athens, Greece....I've felt the brush of alligators on my bare legs in the swamp of the Everglades.....I've sat and chatted with Palestinian gunmen who begged me to film them and let them tell their side of the story of the Israeli Palestinian conflict... I've swam in the Indian Ocean waters of Mombasa....I've been inside an actual chamber of Parliament in London literally in the shadow of Big Ben....I've rolled tape in the middle of a riot in Chiapas, Mexico....and speaking of riots, I watched Woodstock 99 go up in flames quite literally in front of me....walked the dusty streets that my grandfather walked on in San Javier, Bolivia....I've been in the control and command room of a fully operational Navy Destroyer and once walked into Donald Rumsfeld's office in the heart of the Pentagon.
I've driven miles from here to the moon and back....I know backroads and shortcuts in at least 5 states...I've driven through the rockies, through the backroads of Nicaragua, the streets of Honduras, the curves of the Smoky mountains and the blue Ridge parkway....Blizzards in Pensylvania...taken a Greyhound with my best friend from Philly to Miami and learned the meaning of frustration through it....i've witnessed the oceans of bicycles in China, and sipped the worlds most awful coffee in Manila....
So so so much more...overflown the lines of Nazca... watched hysterical mothers looking for their missing children after the earthquake in Pisco, Peru....smelled the stench of the mass graves in Haiti....overflown the carnage left behind by hurricane Katrina all over the gulfcoast....I've been hit with bottles in east Jerusalem, punched in Miami, Mexico, Charlotte, etc.... shot at in Beit Jala, arrested in Bethlehem, detained in France.....and had a 30lb buzzard fly through the car window and land on my lap in Recife, Brazil.
I've lived a life that's full.....said Elvis Presley....I've traveled each and every highway...and the one thing I've always walked away thinking was....."I feel like a Forest Gump class idiot ...." and "Boy have I got a story to tell...."....every time that I think that I've seen it all I realize that I so have not......I realize that once God knows what the future holds....there have been a few times that I have found myself negotiating with God....."Get me out of this and I'll.......(Fill in the empty promise).......
A little tidbit of idiosyncrasy about me is that I ALWAYS have had music with me wherever I go....be it a walkman back in the day, a portable CD player or an ipod ....and the one common song every single time was this one with these lyrics.....it made that midnight sun in Mongolia all that much more of an introspective experience....I never felt so far from home like I did that sunlit night. I hope you like it and I hope you'll answer my question at the end :)
So what about you? what's your craziest experience where you thought you'd be lucky to be alive the next morning....?? (all I ask is that you keep it PG-13 at worst) lol :)
I had a moth fly into my ear at a Christian Music Festival once.....
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