Years ago I lived on a boat and I had not undertaken any large creative projects that were anything that I would consider overly challenging. I had yet to embark on a long boat journey and I had jumped around in my life with very few direct goals. Following a somewhat intuitive nature I had found many adventures that brought great lessons in life but none of them I could say were 100% my own since I was heavily influenced by the opinions and drives of the relationships that meant the most to me at the time.

It was at this time that I found myself sitting at the end of the wooden dock that my little sailboat home was tied onto along with a handful of other boats. I was looking into a thickening fog that had surrounded me, the boats, the dock, and the eerily flat water that I knew expanded far beyond what the thick brume allowed me to see. I was sitting cross-legged, my cell phone held partially away from my face so that I could still hear my sister’s voice but would not be bothered by the heat of the phone against my ear. The fog became so thick that for a moment it seemed that nothing else existed, just me, sitting in a cloud, its moisture dampening my skin. My sister’s voice, the splintering texture of the wooden dock upon which I sat, and the occasional splash of the jumping mullet nearby were my only reminders that there was a world beyond this engulfing thickening cloud of air.

My sister and I were talking about creativity, mostly about writing but somehow we had transitioned onto the subject of scripts and screenwriting. I don’t remember the details of the conversation but I do remember speaking out into the fog the words,

“Why don’t we make it ourselves?”,  in reference to the subject of writing a script for a film.

The words had come out haphazardly, without thought, and the response, at least at first, was silence. I seem to remember a mullet jumping right out in front of me, splashing loudly in the water, as the words traveled out and disappeared into a long pause.

My sister was living in her own world, far from the boat that rocked me to sleep, upon a sheep ranch in the desert high plains of Southern Colorado. There she worked and raised her family. Our worlds were very different but upon reflection, looking at it from my point of view today, they were similar in that they were worlds we both were immersed and participating in but had not fully chosen consciously for ourselves. I do not mean to imply that we had not made choices to be in the lives we were living but only that we had not made those choices based off of our own personal dreams. We had, in essence, supported the dreams of those around us to such a degree that we had somewhat forgotten our own.

There are moments in life that feel like you might be shifting the trajectory of your fate, or perhaps realigning yourself with it, and those moments stick with you in your memory, holding profound meaning for you for years to come. Stating, “Why don’t we make it ourselves?” into the mist before me felt like some strange incantation, as if I had asked the primordial creative forces of the world to allow me, us, for the first time, to take on a quest that was our own. That incantation ultimately started my sister and I down the path of filmmaking.

Don’t get me wrong. There were a lot of other decisions that were made that kept us on that path. We did not know how to make films when those words were uttered. We had both been creative, my sister was a writer and I was an artist but we had not even dabbled in film. Yet, it still seems to me that it was that conversation that ultimately launched what turned into over a decade of change for both Darci and I. On that day we saw a path that we both wanted to take and we began to move down it, a path that changed us profoundly internally even as we just tried to simply piece together the physical mechanics of storytelling and filmmaking. It is a path that we are actually still traveling on and learning from today.

We finished the final details on our first independent feature film this year. It is a funny film, one that I am proud of. However, I do not think it is our final one. It may be only the beginning chapter of our filmmaking/storytelling lives. It’s hard to say how far the paths we create will lead us when our first steps are words recited into the endless fog.

Peace,

Terri