I continue to be grateful for the time I've had in the 2021 to focus on this project and my personal practice. Despite have very little professional work, I was able to get by financially and continue refining this project have  more clarity. I was made my goal of being about to interview 12-15 people per year and visit a few new cities that I hadn't been to before.  In particular, I go the chance to make my way to Crestone, a epicenter of Buddhist retreat centers of a town of 500 residents. Although I only spent a few days there, I positive I will be back for one of Tysokyi Rinpoche's week long teachings. 

I heard from various sources that Crestone CO was the seat of many buddhist retreat centers for a very small town and I had thought it was because of some government policy that encourage this type of concentration. As it turns out, there was a land grant by one of the 16th Karmapa's student that promoted the development all these centers. Since I spent most of the time interviewing people of the project, I didn't get to check out the town as much but in general, it's fairly undeveloped as a town so I am not quite so sure that I would want to move there anytime soon! I found this write up from a travel writer about Crestone that gives more history about the town.

The good folks over at The Tattooed Buddha did an interview on the project. I did a media outreach earlier in the year and they were the only ones that responded so back to drawing board. My main intention on doing the media outreach was to help get more subjects for the project and my current outreach process has definitely been challenging.

Originally I was going to put together a just photo slideshow of all the beautiful places I got to check out on my journey. However, I only recently decided to engaged more on the video editing side of this project and I used this project as way to learn the basics of video editing. Just as I had always anticipated, video editing takes a considerable much more time than photo editing but frankly, I have been enjoying […]

Despite all the external and internal challenges presented by the pandemic on a personal front, it was a productive time for moving this project forward. Because my main source of income was severely impacted, I had much time on my hand to learn video editing and go through all the footage. Originally, I was working with another video editor but being a self funded project, I had to take over the responsibility of ‘processing’ the hours of […]