I grew up a long way away from the American West... with only a tiny glimpse into that lifestyle through a rodeo that would come through my tiny Michigan town. From as long as I can remember, that rodeo was my July Christmas present, leaving me with an insatiable desire to be on the back of a horse. At the age of 12, my dad (a car salesman and knowing nothing about horses) traded in a quarter horse from someone who owed him money and helped me convert our backyard shed into a barn. The horse was green, and so we negotiated a rocky relationship with my 90lb body for a few years before having to sell him to a woman who wanted to barrel race him. Before he was sold I have a life-embedded memory, where my horse let me climb onto his back in the shed while he ate. For a moment we found peace with one another and I fell asleep, my arms around his neck, for a few minutes of sublime glory.

I got scholarships to study film in LA and then lived most of my adult life in cities, a long shot from what I imagined my life to be, my arms around the neck of a horse. I read Wendell Berry constantly, but was living in the concrete boneyard of the industrial revolution (North Philadelphia) when I saw the Filson collaboration with Ranchlands. I watched it over and over, like discovering a lost home video. I remember going into the Filson store in NYC and feeling that all the folks who worked there, like me, were caged. We longed to live in a different place, but were trapped by our lifestyles, habits, or maybe just the way life unfolded. So the best we could figure out to do is put on an expensive jacket, like a Halloween costume, that might act like a band-aid to keep us somewhat connected to a lifestyle we wish we could actually live in our minds. I have both a sadness but also a grace for myself during that season of my life.

Some years later, I moved to Colorado and immediately tracked down Ranchlands with a desire to make a pilgrimage of sorts. It's hard to know what to wear when us outsiders go to visit. Be cool, but not try-hard. Do I wear shit kickers or my normal Nikes. My wife needed our SUV that day so I was stuck driving her white VW Jetta station wagon (not cool) which then would need an alignment after the washboarded out road. I wasn't met by cowboys who were too intimidatingly stoic, shaking my soft ass keyboard hands. But instead I was welcomed by folks who invited me to their family dinner, and were inquisitive into my own story. 

When Duke / Tess / Maddie asked me to help put together their Collective film, it felt like a very sacred task (for a commercial filmmaker). I'll be forever grateful to them for letting me be a part of the Ranchlands Collective. It's a gift that, in its own way, helps me keep slowly notching my life closer and closer to a true alignment towards what I believe to be true, and what I've always known as a vocational magnet since my childhood. As a filmmaker and a wanna-be-rancher, my head is always on the swivel for how I can be a real, professional filmmaker—telling big stories. But also, live a life that is in close connection to the wild world around me. I hope they are not mutually exclusive. Watching a life like Wendell Berry's, and similarly, a lot of the folks at Ranchlands, who combine their love of writing and art with a love of livestock and conservation, gives me hope that the abundance might be real.