From LW Ghost Regarding the TPP Conference

We've been gathering with content creators and business friends preparing for even more content and opportunities. I wanted to share with you a beautiful message prepared by LW Ghost (I hope he doesn't mind). I only share it because perhaps it will speak to you in your current travels and situations -- and give you the courage to find beautiful conversations once more!

I would also like to thank Lew from the bottom of my heart in front of all of you. He brought me a crew jacket from a television production he worked on. I have a friend and former colleague who I see once or twice a year. She is married to a highly successful man... but he also privately has struggled in the past with doubting himself despite his tremendous achievements. Part of that self-doubt comes from his not having a father in the home growing up. He always longed for a dad to encourage him, but no father ever arrived. But the television show that Lew worked on had a father in it and my friend's husband watched that show to see how a father would act. He's raised two beautiful teenage girls who are just lovely people and he's remained faithful to his wife. And some small part of that came as he modeled what fatherhood looked like in his young days from that TV dad.

Before I put this crew jacket into display in the studio, I'll be taking it to their house and letting them know that Lew says the man who played that role was just as charming off-screen as on. And I think it will mean much to my friends. Thank you, Lew.

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It is just shy of 7am. Yesterday those of us who've gathered at the "undisclosed location" spent an amazing afternoon and evening doing something special: Having fun and food and conversation with a bunch of people that many of us have only known briefly but all of us have become friends with, sharing, even with our individuality and, let's admit it, personal quirks, a pretty basic core view of right and wrong, good and evil, and the very best of our common culture and being willing to fight for it and remind others of it no matter the slings, arrows, witches, whines, and even attacks of those with a vested interest in destroying it for their own twisted goals.

But for a few treasureable hours, we didn't really think too hard about the world's "bads" as we luxuriated in the "goods," we didn't pay attention to grim headlines and world events and stupid statements and follies of our self-anointed enemies. Oh, sure, some "shop" came up and will as we continue for the next couple of days before branching back out to our own homes and regions near and far. That's inevitable and okay, too.

But my point is this: Speaking as somebody who has become less in-person social over the years due to distances, time, and in my case literally outliving a lot of those who were so dear, and as one of all of us who do so many "transactions" of not just business and intellectual exchange and social contact via the modern technical marvels that permit, encourage, and enable such long-distance interaction (and with nothing against them at all, really, since for those of you who met my wonderful wife might know we literally met via our typing fingertips online before ever finding each other in person and forever,) there IS SOMETHING IMPORTANT about just being in the same room, sitting across the same bountiful table, enjoying the sounds and sights of our families and kids having fun, and just plain BEING together in person, in the moment, and caught up happily in our friendships to the semi-exclusion of the rest of the universe's temptations, thoughts, problems, malign showerers, legalist bully wannabees, and the trials and tensions that, while they make us stronger in the long run, distract us from this basic, important and oh-so-human need for in-person relaxing interaction that is known, for lack of a better term, as... True Friendship.

Those who are here...thank you! Those who couldn't make it...do so next time! And just know as I got up and watched the dawn's early light break here at the desk from which I mostly connect with you and our audiences and, inevitably, reconnect for a bit with the big, bad world out there and its tensions, miseries, and malice and ignorance that are, of course, what this "internet" thing is a part of as well...all I could think of was how wonderful it was to be with y'all and how eager my wife and I feel our soul's delight at the prospect that in a couple of hours we'll do more and merrier (even if at least my old bones are saying "You haven't done this much lately and we're kinda dinged up from lack of regular workouts of this kind and hey, will you stop typing and take some aspirin, please?") we'll do it all again, and more, and just as wonderfully.

As I hope you discover when you get further down whatever roads life takes you along, when you get to this point in life, even having lived a full and wonderful one as I've been blessed to do, and even with both spiritual and semi-scientific physical reasons to think there are still about 20 more years left in this phase of it on Earth, that the last and most unexpected thing that will happen is that after having fewer and fewer dear friends as time and distance and mortality take them away, SUDDENLY and "Like a bolt out of the blue, fate steps in and sees you through" to a whole bunch of wonderful new ones and, as that song continues, dreams you didn't even know you still HAD "do come true!"

______

And because I know Lew reads the Patreon... we're all hoping (and praying) for more than those twenty. It's a very nice thing to say that we have new friendships just getting started. Perhaps that's one way to find morning again, no matter the stage in life we might be.

It is, indeed, a beautiful sunrise. Again and again.

Your pal,
Pro