I'm a story teller at heart- film has just turned out to be the storytelling medium that suits me best.
I'm also a songwriter and music aficionado. My favorite genres are rock and roll in all of its forms, old school rap, old school metal, motown, blues, and a bit of country, but my first and greatest musical love will always be folk.
I've always been interested in making a story (film or otherwise) based on that song.
Ethnically I'm whiter than bread. Supposedly there's some Native American mixed in, not sure what tribe. It's more believable if you look at my Dad. For the most part however, my ancestry hails from Scotland and England, as illustrated below.
Here's me, totally and completely right on the Scotch/English border. No photoshop or any such picture editing used. Nope. None.
I'm a Jedi, which is to say that I believe in the force and said beliefs inform my moral conduct. This does not mean that I believe any part of the Star Wars franchise to be fact, only that much truth can be revealed through its fiction. It may seem odd that anyone could find fulfilling, meaningful religious experience from material written by George Lucas, but remember, in creating the force and other aspects of the Star Wars mythos, Lucas was in many ways distilling and hybridizing ideas from mythology and religion the world over. It could be said that just as Carl Jung theorized the collective unconscious and Joseph Campbell the monomyth, Jedism could be considered a sort of monoreligion, with all other religions being different forms that the force has taken in communicating with the life forms that have been molded from it. The concept of the force is similar to Taoism in that it suggest that all life is made of and connected by a universal energy that runs through all things. The force however is thought to be a touch more sentient, as if it has more a will of its own, and is characterized by an inherent universal code of morality. The basic idea is that the force is the energy that makes up the matter that forms and breaks down and reforms over and over into all that is, was, and ever will be in the universe.
Put more simply: "Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter."
This passage from Thich Nhat Hahn represents the idea of the interconnectedness of all things in a more physical sense:
http://moodle.uncsa.edu/mod/resource/view.php?inpopup=true&id=5259
This picture is also a good example of the concept:
The world is all interconnected by the constant flow of matter and energy from one form to the next, but it is made a rich and complete whole by the individuals that make it up, just as the individual is enriched by that which he/she shares with the world around him/her.
