Carpe DM · Doing More
— somewhere in Ecuador —
A five-second moment.
It started with one line from a television I wasn’t watching.
A borrowed apartment in Quito, 2007. Dead Poets Society playing on the TV. I was prepping for an English class I didn’t want to teach. Robin Williams, as Professor Keating, said the line.
Carpe diem. Make your life extraordinary.
Something rearranged. Not “seize the day.” Something quieter.
“Doing More.” That five seconds is why I’m typing this now.
My name is Paul. I founded CarpeDM Adventures in Quito a few months later. A handshake at the Secret Garden Hostel. A spare room. A coffee thermos. Eighteen years on, it’s a network across Ecuador: investments in two Cuyabeno Amazon ecolodges, day tours, Galapagos cruises, climbing partnerships, volunteer placements with the Tsáchila and the Indigenous communities of the Amazon. Travelers from a hundred countries. Things I never planned and could never have planned.
But this site isn’t about the company.
This site is the slower thing underneath it. The questions I started asking when I stopped sprinting long enough to look up. About flow. About attention. About what photography teaches you that talking cannot. About what it means to be present, to lose, to begin again. About the work of being a person, which never really stops.
A year off with my mother in Quito changed me before I knew it had. Personal tragedies sharpened me. COVID nearly broke the company. The kind of failures that don’t make the LinkedIn post but make the man.
The Soul Image Experience is the writing that came out of all of that. Notes to self, mostly. Some photography. Some philosophy. Sometimes just paying attention out loud.
If anything here is useful to you, I’m glad you found it.