Much more than your magazine cover tells you to be...

Parkour - the art of movement. Jeet Kun Do - the art of expressing the human body.

In a time when there is so much stimulation with the media and distraction with advertisements telling you what you need, who you are...

I've discovered an approach at life early on: It was up to me to do anything. I was not sheltered from the world and it's joys and horrors. In the beginning this was negative from being exposed to tremendous mental abuse in my early and impressionable teenage years. Hey, it made me who I am today.

My current evolution is taking place through the art of movement, le parkour. I am very new to the actual techniques established as the most effective techniques...however I am not new to conditioning my body. What trully sets parkour apart from every 'sport' out there is it's requirement and at the same time it's purpose: to master yourself, to master your enviroment.

It continuously amazes me how parkour attracts my interest by setting me free to move about spaces as I wish to, to liberate that railing with one official use and create with it a thousand jungle gyms. The grace and elegance you can feel as you flow from one move to the next...like water. It let's me be like water; constantly flowing life over under around or through anything...becoming any confinement by being shapeless and every shape at the same time. One of the only human purposes in life is our capacity to create. Through parkour training my imagination fires and my mind is so much more active in ways I long thought I had forgotten about. To envision yourself doing a difficult move, to see unlimited ways to move over or around obstacles. To imagine, to envision, to reaize that vision. This is Parkour.

I've trained most of my life...at least I've been very active my whole life. Parkour has introduced me to myself. To train properly requires a tremendous amount of thought and awareness, or else you soon realize why you keep getting injured. My routines constantly shift and flow with my new awareness of some obscure stabilizer muscle I never knew I had. Constantly changing my conditioning routines to adapt to knew insights to my body, by a new level of awareness and understanding...I'm so thrilled by these sensations, this understanding of how my body works. To know thyself. This is Parkour.

Fear. Some of us see more of society becoming based on fear. It is everywhere. The grim vision put forth by Aldus Huxley's 'A Brave New World', or Orwell's '1984'. Our wars across the globe, our lack of attention to other crisis centers, that hot body in the magazine, or the kid everyone picks on...fear is a reality in the shaping of our world, and this negative energy is spiraling out of control. It seems to dominate alot of our world in such a sublte way. Goodkind wrote, "Evil thinks not to beguile us by unveiling the terrible truth of it's festering intent, but comes instead disguised in the diaphonous robes of virtue, whispering sweet-sounding lies intended to seduce us into the dark bed of our eternal graves." Everytime I go out to train I shatter the ability of evil to hold sway over me. To precision jump from one spot to another knowing I could be seriously injured, to build up to that move slowly untill I accomplish the feat... I shatter the unrational sence of fear. I shatter the fears I'm conditioned by society to accept as my reality. I am not afraid of the dark, I am not afraid when I have the ability to defend myself or flee when I cannot defend myself. I am not afraid to defend LIFE.

This is perhaps my greatest love of Parkour - to know that I am no longer a captive of unrational Fear. I am not alone. I don't need to spend a dime to be happy. I'm not afraid.

This is parkour.