Some of My Best Moments:

Standing on the rim of Bryce Canyon Utah, just before dawn. Twilight has begun to obscure the millions of stars, and the bowl of monoliths that lie below my feet before me begins to glow an erie orange light. The coyotes who kept me awake all night by howling at the full moon are not at all intimidated by my presence. I was the outcast in their world. I take a photo and remember...

Grocery shopping in a crowded Trader Joe's on the way home from the gym on a warm summer day, I was feeling pretty good about myself. I felt pumped up and had a tank top on and as I was trying to squeeze through an isle by a shopping cart a little boy all of about 5 years old said to me, "You have really big muscles." I was instantly feeling like a super-hero. I humbly said, "Do you want to have big muscles when you grow up?" - He said "No." I chuckled and limped away, a shell of my former bravado.

Standing on the roof of the bridge of a 1500 passenger cruise ship at 3:30AM watching whales spout off the starboard side. The ribbons of clouds decorate the passing mountains as we enter the mouth of Glacier Bay National Park. The sun is just beginning to rise behind the mountains and in the distance, glaciers reach between 14000 foot peaks to bless the water's edge. The combination of strangely colored twilight, ice, cloud-ribbons, water, mountains, all combine to make me imagine that I am traveling on some foreign world - perhaps one of the moons of Jupiter - and a world in which Man is irrelevant.

I finally had written and produced some large film-score cues, like you would hear in the movie "Star Wars" or "Indiana Jones" and felt like I had yet mastered another major feet in my path as a musician and composer. Then I sat down one night with the score to "The Planets" by Holst. This peace which was written about a century ago, is the most plagiarized orchestral work by major composers of action film scores ever. In the first few minutes of listening and really seeing the mastery of this peace, I realized that I still hadn't even learned to crawl compared to this long dead composer's brilliance in music.
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Often, my ambition and sense of self-importance drive me and demand that I try to reach the highest levels of human achievement. Like almost all humans I think I must be "special." We think our problems. our accomplishments, our dreams, are unique. I can become stressed-out and out of balance because of the need to live up to my own over inflated expectations.

These moments of genuine humility which come from nature, or from the mouth of babes, or from that light-bulb turning on from some other realization, can be remarkably liberating. So long as there is no malice sensed from the situation, the realization that we are pretty insignificant can release us from the sense of needing to self-evaluate. Because Man is supposedly the only creature who has a true concept of self, we are probably the only creatures who may forget our place in the grand scheme of things no less, nor more important than that rock over there... or that one star up there... or that little bird there.....