Footage That Should Not Exist
There is a truth behind my writing that covers more than one subject. Sometimes it leans into martial arts or the forge or life on the road or whatever spiritual language people use to make sense of things. Some folks call it theology, philosophy, religion or psychology. Others call it intuition, conscience or culture. To me they are different vantage points of the same mountain. Different lenses pointed at the same questions. What is a good life? What is the truth? How do we carry responsibility without breaking? So when I write it is not from authority or education or as a polished professional. It is from lived experience shaped by martial arts, scripture, stoicism, silence, the forge and the field. If there is a purpose to any of this it is to try and put words around the things that already exist in us before the words arrive.
Every now and then a dream hands you something that feels more like a warning than a metaphor. I woke up from one of those dreams the other night. Two scenes. One from way back and one from somewhere out on the edge of my future. Both trying to tell me the same thing in different words.
In the first scene I was back in my home place in Ireland or at least something that felt like it. I had an old phone in my hand and it was full of videos that should not exist. One was me proposing to my first wife. Another was a black Mercedes S600 idling in a car park. The strange part is I never filmed either of those things. This footage does not exist in real life. So there I am watching old footage from a life that was never saved to begin with. A past version of me that was never archived properly. A younger man with ambition and innocence and a fire in his gut who never thought he needed documentation because he thought the future would do the remembering for him.
Then the dream jumped.
Now I am on a stretch of coastal land which I have been returning to my whole life. Cabins by the sea, remote and wild. Belonging to a man named Dan who I met as a teenager when I was still figuring out how to move through the world. I have always called that place my second home even though no one ever gave me a key. It is the sort of place that brands you and then leaves you to make sense of the mark in your own time.
In the dream Dan is older. Not the strong barefoot man from my memory carrying firewood and fighting the Atlantic wind. His right hand is still strong and his grip is still there but his left hand is weak and his fingertips go black if he squeezes too long. I do not say anything because you do not strip dignity away from a man who built his own life on the edges of the map. But he sees me noticing and calls himself a fool for aging out there with no contingencies. No one to take the land. No one to carry the place forward. No plan except survival and stubbornness. And there I am helping him walk from point A to B while he talks about time running thin and how the wild is not made for old bones without help.
That was the whole dream. One scene of footage that never got saved and one scene of legacy that never got passed. And somewhere between waking and getting out of bed I realized both scenes were saying the same thing. If you do not record who you were and you do not prepare who comes after then everything dies with you. That hit harder than I expected.
Because I have lived through parts of my life that never made it onto film or paper. Whole chapters of ascent and collapse and rebuilding that exist only inside my head. If I died tomorrow half of it would vanish and the other half would be argued about by people who were never there.
And I have also known men like Dan who built entire worlds out of grit and intuition but never handed the keys to anyone before their grip failed. Their stories die in remote cabins. Their land ends up in government folders. Their life's work gets summarized by people who never saw the smoke rise from their chimney.
Dreams like that are reminders in plain language. It is not enough to live a hard life or a meaningful one or a wild one. You have to transfer it. You have to document the early chapters so they do not become lost footage. You have to build systems and teachings so the mission does not die when your knees do. You have to prepare successors not just apprentices, not just friends but actual carriers of the fire. Otherwise your life becomes a story that cannot be told and a land that cannot be maintained and a legacy that evaporates the second you stop walking.
Forge and Farrier is my attempt at not letting that happen. It is me archiving the past that never got recorded and building the structure that Dan never built so if I make it to his age I am not out there on a walking cane and with black fingertips calling myself a fool for running out of time.
Some men leave legends, some men leave property, some men leave scars. I want to leave a lineage. So that the footage exists and the land has a steward and the work outlives my bones. That was the lesson from the dream. Not mystical, not poetic just responsibility, quiet and heavy, the kind you either take up or watch die in someone else's hands.
