i have awesome friends :: part 1

**note to those reading through email subscription: you have to click to the online post to view videos (and each one is worth the few minutes to view, I promise ♥) **

I just love my friends.

Through the years I've found myself saying over and over how blessed I am to have such a great community of friends surrounding my life...and how so many of them are super creative. Seriously, we sit around all the time and wonder how we got to know such a large cluster of imaginative people, working on amazing projects around the world, and who are lovers of humanity (and how they all ended up being here in St. Augustine for at least a period of time).

You know how "they" say that there is about 6 degrees of separation from you and anyone else in the world...well, with our friends being spread out so much, and involved in so many projects, I really think I'm probably at least down to 4 degrees solely on that account.

I've never really bragged about most of them before, mainly because the nature of my blog was more focused, but now I think it's a good time to talk about inspirations in all forms...a lot of which, for me, come from my friends.

The first, which I have written about before a few times, is ROSA LOVES, the non-profit Chris helped to start along with our good friend and designer, Mike Fretto. Changing lives of individuals around the world through something as simple as t-shirts. There's a lot of exciting things going on already this year...a story just wrapped up (sponsoring 30 children in a new Child Development Center in Bangladesh) and a couple more are in the works. The local recycled bicycle project, Simple Machine is going strong, and a new friendship was formed with another world-changing & people-loving company, Growers Alliance Coffee, which I interviewed last month.

CLICK HERE to sign up for the ROSA LOVES Newsletter :: and take a look at a new short video for the Simple Machine story put together by another friend, Eric Hires:

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So yeah, Eric, the guy that did that last video...he's pretty much a nomad. We have quite a few nomad friends...ones that if we haven't seen or heard from them in a couple of weeks, it probably means they are working on a boat in Alaska, hitchhiking cross country, taken a seasonal job with Oxfam, working for a couple months at a villa in Italy, or shacked up in Indo somewhere for a while. But they always come back...just not for too long. My friend, Diana, is another free spirit, always somewhere new, working on a new project, running out of money, and never seeming to care. I just love that! They all add to our ever-growing international address book...as last year, we had friends doing things in Cambodia, Vietnam, Italy, Ireland, Spain, Vanua (still not 100% sure where that is :)), France, and all around the US. All my nomad friends are very inspirational to me: either making me feel more grounded if I'm feeling too up in the air, or challenging me to go with the flow when I'm planning things too much.

When Eric's not out running red lights on his single-speed, he's making some videos. Here's a visual of one of his recent nomadic adventures sailing from the Outer Banks to Puerto Rico this past December:

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The next is my good (and very tall) friend Russell Brownley, who travels around the world filming awesome documentaries with his company WUSS PRODUCTIONS. He has a great heart for people, and most of his projects focus on humanitarian efforts around the globe. I'm always amazed at each piece he releases. He was in Bangladesh with me last fall, and is working on putting together a film about the project going on there. I included the teaser in my posts about that trip.

Check out the montage of his recent projects to see what he's been up to:

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I couldn't mention Russell, without mentioning one of the big projects he was involved in, a civil rights film created by another friend, Jeremy Dean: DARE NOT WALK ALONE. Winner of numerous prestigious film festival awards, Dare Not Walk Alone explores the importance of our city of St. Augustine during the civil rights movement in the 60s, including a journey through Dr. King's impact on our small town (which most people never even hear about). Their site does a better job at explaing:

Hailed as "a triumph of outrage and empathy," and described as a "powerful slice of roiling American history" by the Los Angeles Times, Dare Not Walk Alone tells "the greatest civil rights story never told." Set to a soundtrack that flows from gospel to hip-hop, the film places the heroic struggle for civil rights in the context of current conditions in a place where those struggles were fought, a place that epitomizes what Barack Obama has called "the gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time."

This amazing film was just released on DVD, and you can order it on Amazon!

Watch the trailer for the film, and look for screenings around your area...or organize one yourself!


I probably should stop there before 'part 1' gets too long. But, seriously, lookout for the next post...lots more creativity to come!