When a Project Takes on a Life of its Own - Mind, Body, & Soul Part 1

When a project takes on a life of its own, you know you are on the right path. We had an ambitious goal to begin with. Our project, to film our thru-hike on the 3,100-mile-long Continental Divide Trail and interview people across the country about the effects of nature on well-being as humans. It was already going to be the biggest documentary project we have worked on. Now, over two years into it and another to go at least, it has taken over our lives. In hindsight, that’s exactly what was supposed to happen. 

The Team Forms

We’ll start at the beginning. Alex moved to Montana in 2019, soon after that, he started dating a girl, Amy Robin. Their love for cameras and the outdoors, especially the mountains, united them. They both believed that spending time in nature was crucial for their own well-being. After Alex told Amy about his thru-hikes that he had done, what they had done for his mental health and overall well-being, she was very interested. Amy had lived a rough life and by the time she was in her mid-twenties, she had experienced more hardship than many people experience in a lifetime. A weaker person may have not survived what she had been through, at the very least be as successful. She carried a lot of the trauma from those years around with her and she believed that a long period of time in nature was just what she needed to process and release a lot of that trauma. She asked Alex if he wanted to do a thru-hike with her and make a movie about mental health. To her surprise, Alex said yes. Alex knew it would be challenging, but being the optimist that he is, he chose to focus on the possibilities rather than the consequences of taking on such a huge task.

Right around this time Amy introduced Alex to sweat lodge ceremonies. These are very similar to the traditional sweat lodges that the Native Americans used thousands of years ago. They represent the womb of the earth, and a person is symbolically reborn when they come out of the lodge. The ceremony consists of four rounds of singing and drumming in pitch-black darkness. It’s very hot in there and you are drenched in sweat in a matter of minutes. Prayers are said by all participants in-between rounds and the experience is a very powerful one to say the least. Amy is more in tune with the spiritual world than Alex, but he has always been curious and open-minded about things of that nature. It’s no coincidence that this sweat lodge came into Alex’s life at this time. The man and woman who run the lodge have since become their spiritual advisors and they have served an extremely important role in helping them interpret what happened over the next year.