Father's Day was yesterday, but I thought it might be time to give a mention to my dad, who has been mentioned here briefly but never with any detail.
Dad used to be a lawyer. He wanted to go into music and writing out of college, but that wasn't going to pay the bills, so he went to law school instead. Some thirty years later, he got a shock from the maker on a ski slope, when he fell from a poma lift and shattered his pelvis.
That was in 2006. Since, his life -- and ours -- have never been the same. He decided he was done stifling a boundlessly creative soul, and hasn't stopped creating since. At the beginning, it was a multimedia show that he and I were partners in crime on, but it spiraled from there to screenplays, more shows, books, seminars.
None of his productions have come to fruition yet, but to say it was just the products that matter would be a great oversight. Not content to purely change careers in his mid-fifties, Dad embarked on a life-changing quest to find a whole new way of living -- a full-accountability, fully alive, fully aware kind of life. It was a journey so transforming that the whole family was touched by it, and are all on our own journeys in the same vein. Of self-discovery, forgiveness, lack of judgment.
Throughout the process -- well, you couldn't expect it to be easy, and it wasn't. There were many times when the normal person might have quit and gone back to the hated status quo, begged the universe's pardon for disturbing it, and forgotten how to dream.
Not Dad. He kept going, kept creating, no matter what happened. He is without a doubt the most courageous man I have ever met, and I'm constantly inspired by him -- and challenged to be a better person. I think, even if he wasn't my dad, we'd be friends.
I encourage you to check out his website, which just launched a couple weeks back: www.kevin-rhodes.com.
Happy Father's Day, Dad! Love you dearly.
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