Another Year...

So, my 47th birthday is around the corner, and I have been haunted by my ghosts lately.

I have lived in so many places and made so many amazing acquaintances that I am beginning to lose track of them all. I don't want to lose track of all of the people who have shaped me to become the man I am.

Life is sloppy, clumsy and messy, but it is also beautiful, vibrant, and full of meaning. I have been so fortunate to have lived on my own terms. We are nothing without those who have embraced us, loved and hated us. We are nothing without the lessons gleaned from pain and happiness.

Lately, I am inundated by noise and distractions and I have been desperate to have some time to collect my thoughts and slow this ride down, but time doesn't slow down, and so we must learn to appreciate every second while it lasts.

It is interesting to me how the goals I had as a young man weren't goals I failed at reaching, but rather, along the way I changed and what was important to me changed.

When we are young, and facing the end of our childhood and the beginning of adulthood, we see the world in neat little packages. A trail of milestones of achievement that lay in front of us like mirages. As we actually live life, we learn that relationships don't last because we change, and the people we attached ourselves to change, and losing people from your life doesn't have to be sad but rather another chapter of life.

I have loved some exceptional people, and have enjoyed returned love. I have failed in love, and succeeded in love.

The most important thing is that I grew as a person and matured. I learned to live for quality over quantity and to abandon material things in favor of richer life experiences.

I have suffered fools, critics and haters, and they too brought focus to my life, and made my art more dear to me.

The art I create in these last few years has been almost solely out of my love for one woman, my wife Liz La Point. Sparks of lust turn into adoration and deep love, to an intwined life, and then family.

I turned 4o years old in Las Vegas and realized I was not living true to myself and started to reflect on what was missing from the life I was living. I started feeling like I was living in the shadow of someone else's dreams and it made me feel empty. The people I was surrounded by were someone else's friends and not the friends I would have made when I actually knew myself. I got lost.

Around the time I was making some profound realizations about who I was becoming, I met Liz La Point and a mutual passion for work and art exploded and everything became clear.

I wish happiness to all of the people I have known and I am so glad to have lived through some very difficult moments, and to have reached this point in my life where I feel so fortunate to have my own family, a wife who understands me, and more opportunity to create and explore than I have ever known.

Every year my wife asks me what I want for my birthday, and every year I look into her eyes and tell her that I have everything I have ever wanted already.

Life is very, very good.