fellow questers…

i delivered an outdoor ‘wild self’ keynote to students at lowell high school in san francisco… the students were great…

i shared the ideas i love most… the wild self… inner realms of creative spirit… with promising students…

lowell high school is not only the oldest high school in the western united states… it is also consistently ranked as one of the top 50 high schools in america and has a distinguished alumni…

when i was a teenager… if somebody asked me to speak publicly… my body would freeze and perspire…

‘what will she think?’… ‘what will he think?’… ‘what if i say something stupid?’ would run through my head…

hearing ‘gino… it is your turn to speak’ felt like being asked to dig my grave… i tried to prevent my death by re-positioning myself to the back of classrooms so i couldn’t be seen but that rarely worked… seems like the more you hide the more transparent you are…

when i learned in college i would have to take an introductory to public speaking class… i waited until my last semester to enroll in the class… hoping it would be dropped as a requirement before i graduated… didn’t happen…

so there i was sitting in the back of public speaking class…. learning the basics… solid attention getter… clean thesis… three main points… summarizing statement… you know the form…

i found the form comforting… just plug in content and lo! you got yourself a speech… ‘i can do that’ i thought…

my first assignment… a ‘how to’ speech… i think i made lemonade… was a sweaty encounter…

however… each assignment brought me more and more confidence… so much so… i received a B- …

as years passed… i found myself speaking more and more… the more i spoke … the more i liked it… something resonated… couldn’t conceptualize it though…

while at purdue university… doing my doctorate in philosophy of communication… i taught introductory and advanced public speaking classes…

periodically students would do everything asked… in terms of form… everything on my evaluation sheet would be checked off… clear thesis… clear points… concluding thoughts… just to name a few… yet they didn’t inspire the audience…

witnessing speeches that institutionally succeeded yet spiritually failed made me think… the exterior world offers us formal patterns that if we follow… we will be socially accepted and enjoy a comfortable life… yet overlooked is how form alone will not inspire us nor our audiences…

what the exterior world.. outside world… world of maya… doesn’t tell you… is the ‘wild self’ exists beyond form…

when we cross the threshold of form… we walk into the wilderness of ‘wild self’… content blends into form… mediums bow to interior explorations…

so my dear questing community… once you furnish form and live in it…  find fire within… flaming formal patterns to spring inspiration…

alive,

gino

below are clips from gino’s ‘wild self’ keynote at lowell high school in san francisco…