For the first time in his 43-fight, seven-year-long fighting career, UFC-veteran Matt Horwich will fight in Texas this Friday when he takes on Danillo Villefort at Shark Fights 14 in Amarillo.
When asked what comes to mind when he thinks of Texas, Horwich immediately speaks of deserts, forests, beaches and gila monsters.
Along with being self-aware, humans can often be quite self-centered and quick to forget about the interconnectedness of all life forms, including gila monsters.
Fighters tend to represent themselves on social networks with a self-portrait: shirtless, stone-faced, hands held up in a fighting pose. Horwich's Facebook profile picture features him shirtless, grinning, hands holding the flippers of Aurora the bottle-nosed dolphin, whom he met at a Sea Life franchise in Mexico.
"I'm a big fan of nature in general and God's creativity," Horwich professed to Examiner.com. "Hopefully once I can make it to the Rain Forests and swim with the river dolphins."
Horwich admires the dolphins' intelligence, their ability to learn a vast vocabulary of human language. He said that he has no problem with dolphins in captivity, but would like to see them released into the wild for study more often, to at least get a taste of their natural habitat.
Just as Horwich is interested in the freedom of the loquacious, playful and dangerous dolphin, the 32-year old seems to enjoy the idea of passing freely from one world to another, having spent time living in the densely-forested Oregon training with Team Quest as well as the ultra-urban Hollywood district of Los Angeles, where he lives now as he trains with Eddie Bravo's 10th Planet Jiu Jitsu and Legends MMA.
"I like nature and the country a lot, but Hollywood's my favorite city because there's so much creative energy and opportunity and a lot of people doing what they like doing in life and seeing other people do well and be successful," Horwich said. "It's got a really artistic, creative vibe about it versus othercities that are more of a drinking-and-casino vibe."
As an enthusiast of playing classical guitar and writing songs and poetry, Horwich is a rampantly creative person and he is taking full advantage of living in Hollywood. He has appeared in National Geographic's Explorer: Born to Rage featuring Henry Rollins, as an extra on the drama-series NCIS, and stated that he plans to pick up more acting and stunt-work in between fights.
"Storytelling's played such a big part in how we've evolved moralistically as a society," Horwich said. "Since the old days, people have related to the hero in a story and learned empathy and morals."
Recently, the trailer was released for "Once I was a Champion," a documentary about the life story of Amarillo-native Evan Tanner, Horwich's former training partner. Tanner isn't necessarily a hero, but he was a lot of things, not the least of which a beloved companion. "[Evan Tanner and I] were good friends," Horwich said. "We hung out a lot even after he left Team Quest. We are a lot alike. We're both free-spirited and free-thinkers."
As for the mystery of Tanner's death during a solo camping trip deep into the California desert, Horwich believes he has some insight into the matter.
"I think that's kind of how Evan Tanner wanted to go out," Horwich said. "There's a good chance [that Tanner wanted to die in the desert]. That's the big mystery of it. Why he would go out into the desert with a limited amount of fuel for his motorcycle and go wandering out so far where there's not gonna be anyone out there?"
Meanwhile, Horwich has plans for a long journey, swimming through the waters of creation, flowing. "It's all interconnected," Horwich said. "The synchronicity of our universe. Whether it's flowing one submission to the next, or guard pass, or takedown to the next in stand-up, or one chord or note to the next in music, fluently, or one subatomic particle to the next in string theory in quantum physics. The whole of the universe is implicate like is shown in the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. You can't measure a particles position and momentum simultaneously because they have no actual localization and they're all connected by a vast sea of energy or empty space, of potentiality. So, we're all one in the universe, like Jesus says, 'Us and each other and the Father.'
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