This page is some background for those of you who don't know me.  For those of you who think you know me, this might help you understand me.... or convince you that you might not know me as well as you thought.

  I was born on an Air Force base in Ohio and spent the first few years of my life there.  As you may have guessed, I don't have a lot of memories from those years.  I'm not sure that any of us do, just a few clouded images, colored with feelings floating around in my head.  Warm loving arms, carefree unprovoked laughter, and the smells of a mother's hair brushing my face as she bent over me to coo and admire.  I have the vaguest recollection of the experiences of that newborn life, the love that I felt from and towards everything I encountered.  It is a feeling that flutters through my memories every now and then, like a brightly colored butterfly that my chubby little hands were to clumsy to catch.

It is a feeling that I search for, that unconditional love and care that a child has for everything that it encounters.  I want to grasp that elusive butterfly and hold it to my heart until it is part of me once again.  This love does not come from the outside, of this I am certain, it is locked away inside each and every one of us.  This thought has been nudged and elbowed into the recesses of our mind by thoughts of fear.... the base reactions that we perceive as our 'survival mechanisms'.

  I once read that a newborn has only two fears, a fear of loud noises and a fear of falling. I have watched children since that day and decided that this is truth.  We are taught every other fear that we have and it's these fears that keep us from realizing our potential.  My life has been overshadowed with fears, they have allowed me many reasons not to be the person that I long to be.

  I have had the same troubled childhood that so many of us seem to wear like a badge. Actually, it's more of a shield as I think of it now.  Whenever I felt inadequate or needed an excuse for my behavior, I took out the shield of childhood trauma to protect me from those mean people who might look down at me.... who might reject me.  I had a great shield, forged of the strongest circumstance.  Two divorces, estranged father, mother murdered when I was 15, mental and physical abuse.  I gotta' tell you that sucker would repel any consequence that might be tied to my actions, at least in my mind.

  The one thing about these shields that we don't realize, they weigh a ton!  If you let them, they will drag you down and hold you back from ever achieving greatness.  The longer you carry this shield, the more attached you become.  Eventually we put it on, like a badge or take it out as a conversation piece.  It wasn't until I started using it as a crutch that I realized I had molded my life around these circumstances.  I was allowing things that had happened half my life ago to affect decisions that I made everyday.

  I guess this was the point that I woke up, rattled my head and started to shake out all those fears that I had allowed to become the framework of my life.  I remembered that all those fears were learned, or created, and decided to start re-learning how to live.  Instead of reacting from a set of seemingly instinctual fears I am starting to respond as the person that I want to be in every situation.

  Some of my friends (you know who you are) don't think that it is possible to live their lives without fear.  They think that these fears are necessary or too ingrained in their lives to overcome.  Well... I'm not afraid of falling and loud noised don't seem to bother me anymore.  I know that if I can overcome these two instinctual fears, I can overcome any learned reaction that I may have developed over my lifetime.

  I have left my entire life behind; friends, family, businesses and just about anything else that I thought was "me", to explore myself.  I want to find all those hidden fears and vanquish them forever from my mind, because I have found that they are all in my mind.

  I encourage all of you to follow your dreams and live the grandest vision of the greatest version of yourself you have ever imagined.

Larry