I once made an invitational film whose opening line was “who wouldn’t want to go to the deepest place there is.” It soon became clear that the answer was ‘most everyone’. Of course, because what I’d meant was who wouldn’t want to go to the cause that lies underneath the underneath. No matter what one may find. No matter the personal consequence.
Gabriel is one of those who would, and has. And his work has had me consider the wider definition of a subject I’ve been focused on for decades – connectedness.
He was also the first film subject I’ve ever asked to take their shoes and socks off and bury his feet in the earth. This Soul Biography should make the ‘reason why’ clear.
The origin of humanity is earth based. Ancestrally. The rootedness is what got cut off. But the earth never left us. We left the earth.
There’s a point in the human story where we got traumatized and cut off from this relatedness to the earth. We couldn’t feel it any more.
As we find our way back in to this relatedness we make different choices.
A lot of the patterns of the modern world are results of people not feeling that relatedness and doing other things to try to fill that hollow place.
one same heartbeat