Periodic Journey Logs Through February 2020
The reason I’ve scripted the story of this journey is to help you see that even in the state of instability of my life’s circumstances, I’ve maintained my persistent intention giving this ideal and faith in us a fighting chance. Through everything I’ve had to recover from time and time again. To pursue what I’m actually saying, I need help creating the way of life that enables us to achieve the pace of study to make this company a reality, to advance this pursuit into it’s next stage. On the street I haven’t been found my way to holding onto my materials to pace while I work, or fulfill a daily routine, or commit to research and classes, or maintain myself in a fully conscious approach of my wellest state. And the way my life seemed through March of 2020, there didn’t appear any really realistic way to postpone creating this company to provide for it alone later down the road, to give the next generation a better foundation without me having grounding community through that journey. I can certainly hold my responsibilities in that grounding community. This is a very real job that I put myself to and a very real commitment for you to take up if you would be such a great person. I’ve been holding to this through a whole lot of waking outside of the comforts of a way. We people have to shift out of our rutz. Let’s remind ourselves that we’re really living for each other and this is our opportunity. If we can create the foundation for our way of life we’ll create new ruts. It’ll be the grooviest. We’ll not have to step out of our way anymore to give life to our activist culture. On Valentines day of 2020 there was a raly in Pritchard Park in Asheville. The speaker shouted out to the crowd, “YOU HAVE TO STEP OUT OF YOUR WAY TO FULLFILL YOUR JOB AS AN ACTIVIST!” but with the depths of what I’m trying to communicate in this book I’d like to turn that statement inside out and say; One doesn’t have to step out of his way to enable community that grounds us to a state in which our way of life aligns with our values. We have to redefine our way of life so THAT community is part of our way.
Telling stories:
When this journey is all over, people will actually want to read and understand what I’ve written in numerous different ways as an attempt to save my own life, because they really feel that this is truly, most deeply, what they want, as we do our very bests to create heaven on earth. It’s entirely possible that we’d have visited Hades and Persephone for a brief appearance at their everlasting party. We might live in tiny-houses or maybe hobbit holes, or wooden doored nooks in the stems of giant flowers; since a little space, closer to the outside world was the first thought for a solution and where the planning began. Where the planning for more courts, and smaller jails, and understandings of human necessities and of our relationship with God Almighty and how it’s always been a piece of our common ideal that sustaining this wealth of life is our responsibility in exchange for this gorgeous earthen home. So the vision for “Tiny-Houses LLC” became a sort of sustainable supply store, and center of collaboration and intent and I realized this was basically Menards or Wallmart under different direction, and I spent a couple years about developing the plan for the business on and off the street, I was calling it the Adorable Life Plan because I wanted to create a specific vibration in my stores. During part of the time of me developing this, I was staying with Ryan in Nashville.
(Nashville)
I decide while staying with him, that I wanted to make a couch surfing journey around the city to get acquainted and make some friends. One person I messaged, had a vibration that I really appreciated, and I messaged her that I could tell she would make a good friend. Immediately our conversation flowed enjoyable about sustainability and intentions. After a couple weeks or so of simply messaging she told me about a gathering event that was to happen outside Lafayette TN with the Medicine Tribe at a sustainable community named The Garden. She said, “That might be a good place for you to find where you’re going next.” I packed my things, everything I wanted to donate to individuals who might benefit from it all, books like “A Hewn Log-House: Complete Guide to Building and restoring”, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, Real Happiness, The Power of Meditation and meditation cushions, “Jangles”, “What To Do With An Idea”, ordered a nice tent, and Ryan chauffeured me to The Garden.
Jesus Bells
I was jangling when I first set foot @ The Garden. As a house warming gift, years before, Lusti had given Autumn a string of beads and brass bells to give to me. The string was green, rope-like, and thick as a shoe-lace. The beads were translucent with bubbly insides of red, blue, clear and green hung with a brass bell at the end of the pattern and that pattern repeating for about three feet of the string. In the years after I moved out of the apartment I had them tied up to the handle, and hanging into the pocket of my passenger car door so that when I would go over a bump or each time the door opened and shut, they would jangle. The sun shown through the beads through a summer and changed them, making them even more beautiful. At this time, they were woven about the ties of my pack so that they jangled when I would walk, or set the pack down.
(The Garden)
Ryan and I looked about this little community of rugged (not insolated) wood paneled shacks. The outdoor kitchen had a dirt floor then, stone stoves and shelves of produce and was crowded with people in dirt bathed overalls, sunhats, and colorful rags. We introduced ourselves to a man, as being there for the gathering, and took advice on how to get started, setting up my tent on some bare ground near the edge of one of the camping portions of the property. When the camp was made, I wished my old bro, farewell.
For days of the gathering, I didn’t make any friends, I didn’t seem to understand how to connect with others. On April 20th (4/20/18) I woke and walked down to the outdoor kitchen for the community coffee and fire cooked breakfast. I conversed with the circle of people around the fire outside the kitchen. I conversed with the people that were circling the fire inside the kitchen and I walked back to my tent to script some notes of my appreciations and how things should be for me. Then I left the land for a run / hike with an unusual goal. As, since I already was not sure how to make friends and now after the morning fires, I was even further feeling into myself, I decided to let go of the people all together. My goal for this day was to make it to the nearest town and back by hiking or hitch hiking, and hang the bells that Autumn and Lusti gave me, up in the town and then make it back by sundown. My understanding was that the nearest town was maybe about 20 miles in that direction. I put the bells in my pocket, zipped my tent closed, turning to set out at a jogging pace into the forest, knee-high-toe-up over sticks and barbed wire, then across the neighboring field and onto the rural highway). It probably took me a half hour (three runs and three walks) to reach the Kentucky boarder some four miles from The Garden. And, by that time, I’d already taken the wrong fork in the road and was not headed to the nearest town. After some three hours or so of hiking my feet unusually hurt so I took a break. I climbed some bluffs onside the highway and sat to rest looking down on the road. I could hear a neighboring farm with at least two men working / shouting to each other. No cars were passing. No cars had been passing. The country-side was quiet. When I was content I climbed down from my perch and decided now is a good time to begin putting my thumb out. I heard a car approaching down the highway, beyond the bluffs and over the next hill, so out goes my thumb and immediately, amazingly, as this first car pulls into sight, this car slows to a stop. “It’s homie from The Garden!” I hear. And they let me in. It’s the filthy, hippy band with the dog named “Angel” and they’re headed to this more distant town where nobody ever goes, where I didn’t mean to be going; because today they’re determined to play frisbee golf! At a seemingly abandoned / overgrown frisbee golf course in this southern Kentucky town, we played a full game with Angel running along and about the wide-spread-tree-speckled, hill-fields around us as we throw. I hang the lil Jesus bells at the park’s pavilion. I could finally FEEL connected. I could finally experience some friendship. I let the bells go, to be blown in the wind and be mine no-more and I made it back to The Garden to gift the band, A Hewn Log House (complete guide to building and restoring), as they were the most active in constructing the community at the time. I was able to help shingle the schoolhouse with tire scraps and the relationships around me began compounding. I began making more friends. That’s when I met Jacob de-Lion, and the next night Frodo, and then the next, Lion and Moon and many who I don’t know where-ever they made it off to. What magical bells I was gifted from Lusti and Autumn to have Jangling on my pack. The Jesus bells I called them because of their colors, and they were hanging on my car door through some of the time I lived At Wesley United Methodist Church. They brought me friendship where I didn’t know how to find it.
@ this gathering, Lion and Moon shared with me their plans to begin a circus troop for the promotion of their sustainable intentions. The troop was named Circus of Purpose. I hadn’t read the book yet, but I’d retrieved “The Healing of America” from a street library box a week or so earlier on a night when Ryan and I went to see some of his friends perform with their bands at 5spot and I broke off as soon as we got there to sink into my own thoughts by taking a walk around the neighborhood. When I got around to reading the book, some months later, I was beyond inspired to generate the “Social Movement” that Marianne Williamson defines as being necessary to bring our society back to our, necessary for living together, and for sustaining our joy of life, spiritual focuses. I began applying all my knowledge of what needed to happen in the world, like meditation in schools, feeding movements, and funding my store, to building my own vision for Moon’s mission, in a project description of the Circus Of Purpose. Using my church’s basement to fulfill the growing vision of my Adorable Life Company and this movement towards sustainable circus’s (Who I didn’t even know how to get back in touch with, but had some weird sort of faith that I would see again.), while I participated as much as I could with Kevin Nelson’s campaign for state rep in District 60 of Missouri (JC). It was now Summer of 2018. The phone banks and campaign ended and I was sitting on the wall of the parking garage, in the dark of the nights alley behind Bones night club, where are party was waiting for the election results, when I saw my aquaintence (who cared so very much about the importance of what WE SPECIFICLY were standing for, and getting Kevin elected) briskly exited the bar, slamming his fist into a neighboring piece of building, bowing his head in maddened (probably not evident) tears for just a moment before dragging the wind with him down the Alley, followed closely by Vicky, running after him and asking him if he wanted to find a place to sit and talk and chill for the night. I thought to myself, “I guess we lost.”
In September I followed Angie’s advice to get in touch with her friend Susan who was remodeling a house and organizing art and music collaborations for the purpose of stimulating a greater art culture in Jefferson City because she believed that if there was a thriving artist community, the rest of the community would benefit. Her goal was to found a program through which youthful creatives could apprentice creative trades while remodeling old houses in the city, using their creative skills to beautify the places, and also regularly have sorts of Vender Market’s of creatives to promote the culture. I imagine her vision was something like Nashville Night Market in West Nashville and would’ve been badass if it succeeded. (Nashville night market is held once a month in a grand 40 foot tall warehouse covered nearly totally with all peoples graffiti. When I visited, there were great bins of graffiti-paint in chain-link cages out in the open center, between which; as the evening grew dark, girls danced with fire while music played. Creative vendors aligned the walls and customers spaciously nosed about the tables and comunity. Abby Smal who recommended me to go, told me the entry fee was $10.00 but it would be worth it. I brought the money, but it was free. 😉 )
The Art House in JC in the Summer of 2018, though. …I spread out my brainstorming across Susan’s attic, interviewed her to comprehend what I could of her vision, and scripted her a brief project description to help her communicate her perspective wholly, but after a few weeks she put my belongings on the street in a night because she felt threatened by my “Suggesting” that she had done something in the home that I was asking to talk about.
(Indianna)
It was about this time that I got back in touch with Lion and Moon when I found Moon’s you-tube channel where she’d posted song videos of her playing acoustic guitar and singing in places like fields and forests, at festivals, and in front of city fountains or dirty curbs. I followed the channel and commented extensively on the video’s, quoting her from the day she told me about her project. She replied, “Is this Drew?” The next day I was able to send her everything I’d put together for her project and she said the next step was definitely to work together in person and that there would be another gathering in October, this time at Sage Valley outside Worthington Indiana. I packed my things and headed to the gathering, getting there weeks early, not realizing this community was a very young pilot project and nobody was living there other than the family that owned the land. I spent the weeks seeking peace by running the hills of county roads and exploring the nearby town. If you’ve never been there, half the community is Amish and the forest has never been logged so it’s all so clean and healthy and old. The rest of the town who isn’t Amish has this cute way of driving golf carts instead of cars. From the weeks I was alone exploring Worthington, I met a number of the villagers. When I finally got up to go to church in the morning at Folsom Methodist Church there, I found that all the people I’d met around the town were in the congregation. I was overwhelmed by the crowd so I stepped out during the sermon. Jay stepped out to ask if I was okay. We had a great talk and he offered to let me do laundry and shower at his place. Jay introduced me to his wife after church. We had lunch at grandmas with the rest of their family and after I rode with grandma across town on a golf cart to fill jugs of water. They were so kind and wanted to help me so much giving foam to sleep on in my tent at Sage Valley and all manor of other things to improve my life out there including potential work with Jo Fleetwood who was putting together a heating an air conditioning crew. They were super interested in the sustainable community project and offered the materials of three buildings on their property to help build the community. If we could remove the entirety of all three buildings we could have all the materials, really nice good conditioned lumber for free! I shook out an Indiana persimmon tree and learned how to make Mimi’s Persimmon pudding which I shared with the tribe at the gathering. I wish I could have known them a longer time and that the rest of the tribe would have valued the offer for the buildings, but sometime during the gathering with rain drops on stocking caps and bare wet feet by campfires, beneath acoustic guitar music somebody dropped acid and the whole world aligned and connected and shook and ran me off I couldn’t hold onto Worthington. I was actually terrified to at the time, so in terror of a background experience in the town, with horribly broken heart to know I couldn’t hold onto the love that I found their or so much as clean up the mess of that love, I accepted a passenger side ride, in the last car out of Sage Valley, out of Indiana.
Before all that storm of heartbreak, Moon and her circus troop arrived some week or so before the rest of the tribe. We had meetings about the project, listened in on the live chat of the greater “Conscious Carnivals” movement’s planning talk and decided that the difference in what we wanted from the project was too different, as they wanted to remain a small troop and unofficial in the system and I was trying to create a paradigm shift in society, which if done via the Circus of Purpose wouldn’t be a small unofficial thing. After about a month in Indiana, in the last car to leave Sage Valley with my new friend Micheal, who I’d just met after everyone else was gone from the gathering and who would prove to be really important over the next year of my life. For some three days after we were the only two people left in the valley, I cooked us meals over the sacred fire. I cooked pumpkin seeds in a clay oven that took practically all day to get going as it was simply a pit with one opening in the front and the fire had to get really hot to not go out as it was pushed back, singing a new song….
“We gather together to build communities.
We gather together to share our ideas.
We gather together with so much reason to share.
We gather together like it’s just you and me here.”
and so on…
The opportunity to see The Garden again; and at The Garden talk further with The People’s Project, who lived out of a homily remodeled traveling school bus, who I’d met at this gathering and been passionately inspired by’s stories of the pipeline protest in Standing Rock and was STOKED to understand more ofs’ mission and plans and the possibility of maybe making it back to Missouri for my court date in November and maybe get to see Asheville, where I’d heard so much about was enough potential for saving grace. As we packed our belongings into Micheals’ car the wind picked up with strength that took great big limps off the old trees around the valley and we got on the highway in the evening with me sitting cross legged in Micheals’ passengers seat since his car was packed so full like perfectly arranged Tetris blocks and it stormed.
(Back to Nashville and Jefferson City)
We bounced back through The Garden to talk to the Peoples Project and then I clinked like a black sheep, back to Nashville just before Halloween. Bloooey, who drove me, dove through dumpsters in Inglewood / Madison with me. I didn’t really want to let myself into Ryans place until he got back to town, although; I could have. He was away on work. When Ryan returned, we had fun for a couple of days and I discovered he had work in Kansas City the next week.
Ryan’s an electrician who earned his two year at Linn Tech and now (in October of 2018), as Frodo put it when he glimpsed a pay stub during a tour of the house the previous spring, “Make’s bank” working for a company that pays him to fly all over the country and sometimes abroad to fix whatever is needing to work at their factories. Even though he was out of town the previous spring when I’d first met Moon and Lion and Frodo and we’d passed back through the city with the two dirty kids Rachel and Christian, he supported hosting them as well as the Brizilian Craft Beer Brewers that needed a place for the four days of the Craft Beer Brewing Conference, who found us through couchsurfing.org. Ryan supported that and he couldn’t even be there…. Since I had an upcoming court in JC and he had to work in Kansas City I accepted a ride to Jefferson City on the way. His company paid for the trip. The Legal system didn’t do me justice in any sense that I could stay in Missouri for under the circumstances of my life, so I set my sights on Asheville, NC where I’d heard “The whole city doesn’t subscribe to major corporations. Instead they go local.” Which sounded like part of Marianne Williamson’s social movement of returning the “American Ideal” to the public perception and also seemed like it might be a good place to find people for the core group to enable my Adorable Life company, which Ryan had named “Materials Farm”. Calum! Was there too! My acquaintance who had befriend some of the fellows I grew up with out in Boulder and Moved back to Columbia Missouri with them some years earlier. Though, once in Asheville, I found peace and maybe got a little stuck to the support system on the street like someone else’s work / home ruts and never in that first year really made it to see Calum.
By the end of the month of November 2018, I had arrived in Asheville, North Carolina.
(First Appearance in Asheville)
While I was in Asheville my documents relative to Materials Farm began zapping me and so I had to get rid of them all and back off, the pursuit; but this was good. I then invested myself fully in where I was, being transient and part of an (at the time) very family like homeless community. Written in black marker on a pillar of the day shelter AHOPE’s porch, was the question, “A hope for what?” and I thought, “A hope for the foundation of a life.” And I reflected on my experiences with living arrangements and why they didn’t work out, of hypothetically what might work, and what all I was missing in being homeless, all together why things were as they were and I decided to give the thoughts for free to AHOPE. Like “this is what’s going on! We should do this!”, focused primarily on our relationships and why, I thought, I wasn’t in a trully supportive working / home life. So I developed the project descriptions for “Ahope for the Foundation of a life Movement” and for an “Awakening Mind’s Store” to help the people retrieve their focuses back to the focuses they would define for themselves, to see the whole picture of their lives, and to have the resources to achieve their ideals of life together. I too began applying myself my Radical School Approach again “The Whole Picture Work Space” has been my approach for a long time, though I didn’t always regard it as a thing, I just put notes and perspectives all over the place.
There were a few breaks in my stay in Asheville. I couch surfed to Sapphire, NC where I wrote “Creating Heaven” a review of our circumstance and what we should be doing, which when I journeyed to Austin TX to get a feel for the city that I had spent a year in at 19 years old to see if it was different to me now. (There was sort of an attitude like “Who do you think YOU are?” when I returned.). On my greyhound bus travelling into Austin, I was sitting beside one of the neighbors of the End of The Line tiny-house community for homeless and disabled people (the biggest in America) which amounted to me visiting the community to share my writings about homeless circumstance at ideals with the rich guy who had the place made. I gave the papers to one of the secretaries and she said she’d share them with the man. On my way home I passed through Nashville briefly to escape the instability of my life, and see the broader perspective as a vacation can help with, became “Revised” and the collective motions that I was carrying were printed at my friend’s and placed on his coffee table while he was (again) out of state, to be shared with his new lady friend who was pursuing her doctorates in sociology at Vanderbilt and specifically interested in studying the homeless in Nashville. I also made a journey to Knoxville to meet somebody who I thought may be interested in helping develop the employee education of my company as he said his area of study was in maintaining clarity. That turned out to be sort of shallow judgement and didn’t lead to anything. He left me a review on Couchsurfing.
Drew booked a stay with me in early December for three nights. Here is the summary of what I got about him:
PROS
Drew wrote me a detailed, well thought out message and clearly read my profile. When he showed up, he talked about forming a store that sells eco friendly products, living a positive lifestyle, and he is overall a very friendly guy. He greets people with hugs. He is clearly a well intentioned, warm and kind soul.
CONS
Unfortunately, this was the deal breaker for me. He randomly takes off, paces around and seems to have a very difficult time articulating even basic thoughts. He was acting extremely strange when he was here. He also told me about his mental disorder, his run ins with the law, and even mentioned a “warrant”. Both me and my roommate were extremely uncomfortable when he was here.
He is a nice guy, and I wish him the best. But we were way too uncomfortable to let him stay for the 3 nights he booked, so I told him to leave after spending his first night here.
Back in AVL
For a short while I began contemplating the thought of a small market beginning for my Awakening Minds Store as “Carolina Cushions Company” of locally grown and made meditation cushions, but then, right then, the whole city and my life underwent an extreme experience sort of gave me a different perspective of what had to happen.
What it waaaas.
This was about the time Marianne Williamson announced that she was running for president. I went ahead and sidewalk chalked the walls and walks of The River Arts District on an evening stroll, “Marianne Williamson for President (2020)” one night. Then for another, I was with a small huddled group of Asheville’s resident homeless, putting together a small market starting point for my big dreams on the 7th and 8th floor stairwell landings of the parking garage next to the bus station, downtown. January of 2019 had the most hand freezing mornings, in which I would walk to the day shelter at 8a.m. and have coffee with the other vagrants.
***
Through the night, papers were spread across the concrete floor organized in rows according to the pieces of the plan, the market analysis, the financial estimate, the vision defined, relationships… The whole thought. An anonymous man who told me his name was Pacman ,(who I’d just met), was reading the pieces and sharing his thoughts as we paced about and I wrote at a music stand in a notebook continuing the planning. Carolina Cushions Company was going to be us (The Homeless community of Asheville)! Locally grown, locally crafted meditation cushions to start providing the resources for the people to reach their best potentials (at the homeless day-shelter) this was going to solve everything. After all, it wasn’t only the weakest members of our society that were missing resources for seeing clearly what would be necessary for them to achieve their collective bests and the weakest members, themselves, had a unique opportunity: the ability to step back from the way of the world and define for themselves what they ultimately wanted for their lives.
On the 8th floor of the stairwell, with his back to the glass, behind the trash from the camera, a heroine needle was in a mans arm. On the landing between the floors, someone else was laying to sleep in a bundle of blankets. She called to the man upstairs, cheerfully. “Hey love, what are you doing?”… He responded something in a quiet, smiling, holler….
With the plan still sprawled across the 7th floor, before the elevators; I sat looking at the whole picture of the plan while Pacman began telling me stories, drawing some design in paint-marker on the concrete floor while he talked. The night trailed off and my acquaintance and I learned about the lives that each other had known. Eventually I collected all my papers from the concrete, put my stack of folders, neatly in my hiking pack and stepped down a few flights of stairs to sleep on a different landing where I thought I wouldn’t be discovered by the morning Guard and could slip out with the sunrise.
The next day @ hay-wood church where the City’s “Welcome Table” was serving a free Sunday Lunch for the whole city, I was somewhere amongst the crowd of transients talking in smaller groups outside the Sanctuary doors. The Pacman-stranger was wearing sunglasses as he approached. I waved to him and he stopped just moment in hello to say something of that he’d see me down in the fellowship hall where all the people “Would be bumping into eachother.” I remember thinking, “What a peculiar way of looking at things.” But before the day was done, the whole church looked like a Dr. Suess book. People were bumping into eachother. LSD was flowing through the crowd and the acid didn’t stop dropping for a month.
@ First I was like “Okay, this is what’s happening. GOOOOooooood! I’ll re-arrange my plans. I should definitely do what’s necessary to simply enjoy this experience.” But after 10 days with the street community still at it and deep outlining shadows and this juice of life still in everything, I was beginning to want my balances back and my thoughts were not the best in that moment at reasoning how to do that so one drink one night carried over into the next day and ultimately, I ended up at an art supply store in a part of town I’d never walked to; where I purchased spray-paint drunkenly. This is the sort of thing that can accidentally happen if your friends and you used to jump out of someone’s second story bedroom window to watch the quiet streets of your hometown as an adolescent, at sleepovers. In the afternoon I found myself with some strangers at a skatepark and the paint laying on the grass. Under the influence of the Waaaaaaaaaaave I had forgotten how to stop drinking and so it just kept going I was I buying it for the strangers. Hah! One of the strangers asked about the paint and with my welcoming sureness he proceeded to paint the wall of the skatepark in broad daylight with cars driving by and parents with their kids at the skatepark. I joined him, calling angels with the paint, in some sort of uplifted and drunken faith. The police arrived awhile later. I took ownership for the cans on the grass, but denied knowing anything about the paint on the wall. Just imagine me, my face half covered by long wavy hair but a red nose peaking through the locks as shaking my head side to side to the officer, maybe even with a painted face or wearing striped women’s dress pants rolled up at the ankle cuffs and strange, almost neon curly strings tied about in some belt fashion OR SUSPENDERS! ….But for sure a red nose peaking through my knappy-golden-poodle-fro, smh to the officer..
“Mr. Angstead, you’re telling me you don’t know who wrote “Conscious Clowns” in paint on the wall right here? (whatever was actually on the wall is history)
The paint is yours though.. ?”
“Nope, haven’t heard nothing about a circus….”
I was cuffed, and taken to Buncombe County Jail.
That stranger, Pacman, was in the Jail Annex with me. “Good to see you man, what did you do to get in here?” He told me some outrageous story about stealing a (few) cars and going for a joy ride and painting a sidewalk like he’d done that night two weeks earlier, and some other stuff. I told him. “That’s insane, dude.” I don’t believe his story was true.
I was released two days later with the help of a public defender, immediately going over to Asheville’s “Beloved” Collective with all my notes about “Justice” to talk with someone who was there about this Wave that was really happening and totally out of our control and resulted in people making some mistakes that they wouldn’t normally make and how this is an instance when the circumstance of a mistake should really be taken into account which would look something MUCH different than a judge sifting people like “Next. Next. Next. Next.” Over the next month my public defender, had me sort of hopeful but not being able to escape all the city’s LSD and the risk that maybe I was going to have the so passionate time of my life take away from me was a lot to handle. I left town on a flight to Tampa, where my sister lived. She was about to have a child and I was terribly heartbroken about how my family never knew me. I thought. “I can be this badass person that I am here, on the street in Tampa, if I can manage a little success, then maybe she’ll actually get to know me. I’ll just focus on me.”
I didn’t like Tampa, though and she was about to have a child, and we had never really known each other; so she didn’t want anything to do with me. I had enough money to get me only as far up the coast as Tallahassee. The Tallahassee shelter was a sad experience, but a rainbow man approached me as soon as I was off my bus and then I saw him some days later and eventually he asked if I wanted to fly a sign and so we made plans for that, and managed a new way of life that supported me only a little cold curled up on sidewalks at night, for the rest of the month of March.
I was sort of paying attention to Marianne Williamson. She had been speaking in L.A.
I knew, the only way we could actually ever make anything happen is to be present in person and put in the work to create that foundation of us. And this was what I was writing about… This is what I was putting together on the 7th floor of the Stairwell by the bus station and in and out of the homeless support network writing about my life experience about concepts of life-approach and needing a foundation for achieving. This is what she WANTED, what she called “A deeper conversation” about social reform topics and “Creative Approach”. So I bought a ticket out to L.A. and Hiked up into Korea Town past the church where she’d been speaking and out to Hollywood where I ultimately got stuck, but reached out as well as I could to her campaign, like “Hey I’m a writer and I’ve a similar story to Marianne’s and I’ve got the radical perspective that you’re asking for and the answers to the peoples questions. Hey! Hello?” *echo echo
Oh, but woah! Let’s go back. During the week that all that was just beginning to happen, maybe a day or so after the church experience…
Youth Transitional Housing (Let’s breath and slow back down.)
During the week that, that all began, in late January of 2018, there was a lady interviewing people under 24 on the streets of AVL and I inspired her with my perspectives. She invited me to help her paint bedrooms in a house she was rehabilitating where I answered questions for her considering a project that she was planning for the space that was a lot like “For the Foundation of a Life Movement.”
From this relationship, I realized that I was selling myself short. I’ve experienced a lot of ways of living with other people and have a lot to say on the matter so I began with a new viewpoint, (thinking of marketing myself as a consultant and what other skills that I value in me). I called the marketing of me, “Rascal Company”: named after my badass, turkey slaughtering, black cat from childhood.
(Order)
After “Rascal Company” in March of 2019. With concept stores I began seeking funding in a variety of ways. Having evaded AVL. I wandered somewhat confused through Florida and then in response to the request for creative approaches to social reform and a deeper discussion from Marianne Williamson for America 2020, I went out to where she appeared to have much activity, Los Angeles. (What can a man do?) There I actively contacted everyone nearby in her campaign network to meet up with me and consider my plan. I went down the list of citizens in the states who answered her campaigns question of “What political topic would you like to know more about?”. Then, according to my studied understanding of her perspective from reading two of her books, I answered the people’s questions; something I noticed, the costumer service on her campaign not doing. All the campaign was really doing for itself was internet social networking and the social medias including the campaign network had ,by April of 2019; reached a state of what I would consider being an illness (the general background thought of promoting oneself, the habitual process after years of doing that, and the continuing of trying to use something like “facebook” or another social media to hold together your relationships after they have evidently been destructive and moved your relationships in the opposite direction times before. 2018 was when it began, but in 2019 it got really bad that facebook began zapping their clients who were upset with their own usage of facebook TO GET THE PEOPLE TO LET GO! It wasn’t until January of 2020 that I finally deleted all my followers and all who I was following / all my friends from my facebook to maybe, possibly not ever go back.) So now, I’ve completely separated myself from social meadias and out of love, I encourage my people to do the same, but this approach to stimulating social movement, was failing for the campaign and I was there in person like an example that could only fail. After a month of Los Angeles, sitting still on the filthy streets with bleeding feet I left the city in a state of determination through fear, carrying my belongings….. And, ultimately, that’s where may’s review begins. ❤
(The Progression)
Tiny-houses
— Nashville —
Adorable Life Plan
Materials Farm
Circus of Purpose
— Jeff City, MO —
@ church (It’s About You! Kevin Nelson’s Campeign), (Word to God’s People)
Art House in JC
(I stayed with Gayle some weeks after this.)
— Indiana —
Peoples Project
— JC —
— AVL —
For the Foundation of a Life Movement
Creating Heaven
Awakening Minds Stores
— Latte and some vacant 8story stairwell // pace-able, windless office space —
Rascal Company
Out of Reach Ideal
— Back in Indiana —
Concept Stores
— (2020) —
Activism Culture Housing
And Foundations for Stimulating Activist Culture
May (2019)
Time of Healing:
Through all of this time of healing, my primary focus has been of finding things to work on or help with and applying myself to the chosen task consciously; as the seeming brokenness was a struggle for initiative, but from the conscious effort I have continually improved. The first two weeks of the month passed @ a weekly pace, trying to free from the freeze. Traveling back east took a week, then I spent about a week in confusion in Johnson City TN; sleeping, purifying myself, amazed and thankful for that Marijuana. I was expelling Los Angeles coffee rocks from my system so awesomely, couldn’t stray far from the porta-potty for a couple of days, comprehending what-all had happened and what was, slowly renewing my understandings of my ground.
I hadn’t kept up on my people’s lives during April: I was struggling so much. I had left the city in a fear and wearing filthy shower clogs, carrying my belongings with recovering feet. I’d vaguely comprehended that there was a medicine tribe gathering, but hadn’t really had the ability to try to make the event. My friend of some half year in Asheville, Micheal, though; had. He was headed north from AVL to make the Indiana gathering. It was certainly time for healing and I really wanted to see our tribes people again despite my state, as much as I wanted to cry very much the same as a child finding God at church camp about the state of everything in my life and of “What can we actually do for God’s workmanship, for sustainability, for our society, as people in the current times and WE ARE the people who are attempting to carry out God’s work even if not all the people of our tribe see it that way.” So on that note, Micheal swept me up and carried me north with him.
The Gathering passed like a dream. I devoted half of my first days to running through the mustard colored off year crop fields on the cleanest roads of the never been logged and extremely healthy, old forested hills of rural Indiana where at least half the people are of an Amish group (a beautiful balance for my soul after the filthy and cage-like streets of Los Angeles). Running lifted my spirits again, started up all my functioning’s of being a person and saved me from the tired, and distant state I had fallen to.
The first two days, after returning from my walk / run, I just listened.
The next two I began talking again.
For the rest of the month I rapidly progressed at a steady pace of about two days per experience. Regaining comprehension and the ability to apply myself to work and find work to achieve. Like Pedro the good snake, one of the tribes people’s pet; I shed all that didn’t serve me and anything that was really out of my control including my nappy nearly dreaded hair, what a lovely process to feeling fresh and free, occasional copings, and seeming opportunities that were wrong paths which I shouldn’t define here; all the while doing what I could to maintain my routines and apply myself to what work I could find or think of that needed to be done where-ever I was. The month drew to a close @ a tiny house festival in Nashville which is a fun story in itself, where I was primarily focused on my own objectives and reviewing the turning point of the month and what the best directions for pursuing my goals in this month of June will be. The conclusion is to continue seeking a way of saving back some money while putting myself to bringing about a product of the projects I’ll define below. I’ve stopped by my home town in Missouri, though I don’t have a place to stay, if all I can do is share a moment with a few of my people while I’m here, then that was something I was able to do and like the medicine tribes twice yearly gatherings and the instances of me returning to my church through different stages of my life have proven in the past, the distance and then the reconnecting are so important and through it all, where am I in my thoughts without any of my people. So I do believe these visits to all my people are worth the time, no-matter how brief or where I find home for the most times in between. ❤
Projects:
The projects I’ll be diving into as soon as I get back are:
(1) Another small market starting point approach for “Concept Stores” that looks like a course outline of “God’s work / mental health approach / a very real, revised, grounded account of the humble perspective I’ve acquired” to be shared with both kids and adults.
Alongside completing my own studies according to the first semester of our radical school approach to founding a company on spiritual principle. The thought is to approach developing a series of classes to be pitched as a different approach for kids and adults’s individual studies, through the class developing their own “Whole Picture” work-space and in collective thought our first “Concept Stores” (with easier access to the necessary materials for achieving our most optimal potential as a whole) The only requirements would be the pedant knowledge of it all, though within that is the way to each implementing the whole life for themselves. Once planned entirely I’ve considered a few people to pitch the class to and if you’ve anyone who you think might be interested in paying me for this review of acquired perspective then please invite me to share the course syllabus with them. I’ll hopefully be developing the class in one of my favorite space to work (my church’s basement) where anyone will be welcome to come find me, to talk, to help, to join me in my daily routines such as, research, meditation, and walking / running. I’m hoping to have the whole first semester completed by the end of the summer as when I was living there last year, there was a very active and passionate youth group that I’m hoping is still together and the experience of the past year has brought me to a greater peace so I think maybe now I might be able to be engaged with the community and what we’re doing as a people. I’m inspired by the medicine tribes complete family dynamic and the truth of this May’s gathering, how the reconnecting of our relationships throughout time is so important to our certainty in each-other and the healings of our beings and is how we see truly, realistically, what we as people in this life can do and how we in current times can still know each other, despite the distance we couldn’t for-see.
(2) In addition to the first semester study and class development, I’ll be attempting to bring together the movement’s underground news paper which was and idea that maybe first came about during the May Gathering (though evidently another person has been campaigning for it for a long time so we’re going to make that happen)….. The idea came about during the gathering from an older gentleman who shared with me his story of graduating high school during the draft of the Vietnam War, though at the time of the media spilling the truth regarding what the war was about and inspiring him and his friends to refuse and evade the draft and convert their highschool news paper into and Underground News paper covering their movements. A vague tale, but the idea seems appropriate for our people and our times given the importance of discussing taboos in a safer manor and the inability of any of our current forms of communication to enable a clarity of the whole picture of US; so we may develop quicker ways to achieving success and also financial freedom which God deserves. This way people will receive a deeper understanding of our movements progressing over time.
Example articles to be researched and written are:
-What stores dumpsters in what cities are good bets for feeding our movements?! YEAH!
-How do the collective focus of individual cities compare across the country? I’ve made this observation myself, but a man who goes by the name of Dandelion was evidently discussing this as well further knowledge and our tribe as a whole can witness this sort of reality given our way of regular migration. His statement was something of how Fort Worth TX and Asheville NC share much of the same statistics such as population size and ethnicity, but have completely different approaches to resolving homelessness from looking at things in a different way. This should be something that anyone anywhere would read and agree with and might just be best to give the one good example to illustrate how different one place CAN be from another in the collective mindset. Though I think the east to west coast should be re-considered according to the cities thoughts of what direction is the world headed. Over here, I’m creating Heaven.
-Hypothetical creative ideas, ex. during the quiet days of recovery at the start of the May gathering I imagined what elegant impression Sage Valley could generate if we we’re to build a granite floored and tall glass windowed ballroom where the stage is, someone could wash and pat dry all the hippies feets at the door, given the energy gatherings have poured into the valley and the efforts of what it is for our spiritual maintenance and for understanding our ability as little do good people to live totally sustainable off grid, I really couldn’t imagine a better place in God’s house to host weddings and if we planned the whole business around it, we could maybe find an investor to make the architecture we envision, a reality. I recognize that this likely won’t happen at sage valley and maybe it’s too far out, but an issue of our underground paper specifically covering peoples creative envisioning, might be a really fun thing to read and imagine with. Is anyone else thinking like me?
-regular reviews and prospective directions of businesses of our tribe including artists, musicians, merchants, activist groups our children’s books, the off grid communities themselves, Concept Stores (I’ve thought to break this down into separate issues such as (arts, creative hypotheticals, a regionally relevant issue would enable our reporters to get the most out of one trip)
-Promotions of other movements we support
(3) Childrens books are always an ongoing project and with the volunteer efforts of local artists we may be able to produce one or more in my home town this summer.
All of this requires I find some reliable security and way of maintaining myself in a daily progress for the next months so if you can help me in anyway, please reach out! ❤
Thank you:
In conclusion to this brief summery, I want to thank all the off grid community and all the people who show at the gatherings, those who’ve driven me across the country and those who are living together and soldiering this movement. Thank you for keeping the dream alive. If you would like more information on any one part of May’s Journey like how our van was detained by police, but then a gorgeous school bus that’d be remodeled into a living space was gifted to us and so we made it to the tiny house festival in that, how an abusive household brought forth the truth of “What I know about shit” or more information on our projects ahead, please ask. If you have your own project that you see as being apart of this workmanship please send me a reply with the word “Underground” and your businesses name in the title. If you know anyone who would like to help me with putting things together, travel and write for our movement (living accordingly), volunteer to help determine financing for the paper or help develop the course outline for this class with me, provide pace-able working space, classroom or office materials, or study, run or meditate with me regularly, please get in touch and tell me how you’d like to help make this life the best it can be for me and for all our people.
This is life. We’re doing what everybody wants us to do. Have faith in that and we’re going to be a spiritual renaissance that brings forth a sustainable future for our people.
Time has revealed the importance of reconnecting throughout time and after distance to accurately understand our state. It’s so important and I was so healed by this past month and all the waking to coffee with my people and I needed that healing like I’ve probably never needed it before. But I almost feel more solid now after than I was through so much of the past years journey. We’ll see how realistic these next motions are in time as with all the one’s before. Respect and love to all who can read this,
your friend,
Drew
(February 2020 Reflection)
(1) I wanted to save back money.
(2) There was the medicine Tribe Times, news source.
(3) The Course on perspective to get people on my page of the whole societal reform.
(4) I wanted to maintain routine and the radical school approach.
(1) Missing foundation and steady waves of other’s drug use on the streets has held me in a lesser state to this day and really shifting my mind in the direction of committing to some way of saving back money seems like a concept in my peripheral that I’m never really fully comprehending enough to commit to. And even if I really comprehended it, is there even a way to make enough to not be isolating myself away from my people and still be moving in the direction I want to, without anyone helping me? I know I’m not the only one perceiving a necessity of us making our shift happen like this, because I still haven’t met with the people I’ve talked to about getting together to establish creative ways of making the collective effort happen, and I do believe they sincerely want to.
(2) If we weren’t organized like a herd of cats who consider separate cities home, we could possibly write opinions in the Mountain Xpress to shape a really big conversation.
(3) I’m really glad that I did complete this course outline in a power-point and a brainstorming outline to help people with the first step in our reform of Defining their ideals in a way that shapes the working and living environment during the month of June. I’ll include the pieces in the 3rd portion of this book.
(4) Again the missing foundation, and resources for comfortably applying myself to my time has brutally impeded me.
(2019) MAY STORIES:
(Story Piece) (What We Know About What)
I spent April of 2019 in Los Angeles. The sidewalks were a little cleaner in Hollywood and the city appeared to be a lost battle for personal freedom in how I got stuck in Hollywood, how my coffee habit led to bleeding feet and frozen days, and I couldn’t fly a sign for more than two dollars in a day which wasn’t enough to save my life. When my social security came in at the next month and I was finally able to leave, I was struggling with comprehension of what people were saying to me and with applying myself to normally simple tasks. Things as simple as washing dishes or shoveling dirt into a wheel barrow. Twas the May Gathering of the Medicine Tribe in rural Indiana and I flowed gracefully as the tribe has away of aligning when they gather. At the gathering, with intentional application though and a constant conscious effort alongside a loving community that valued the opportunity to share a moment with me regardless of my state, I was able to rapidly recover potentially to an even more conscientious state than I’d been in before April.
During this time of healing in Indiana, I followed what appeared to be an opportunity, to live in a trailer on a farm and earn $100.00 a week, working for the farmer. The farmer was a real kind, Godly man. The other two people there were his lady friend and her mentally retarded brother who had, had a traumatic accident that had left him that way and was struggling to improve his state. Due to this, the government was paying the family to take care of him. Given my own recent experience, I greatly registered with this and enthusiastically supported the prospect that he could totally recover.
In the trailer where I was staying, I found an unopened $50.00 DVD of Daniel and Tana Amen called something like “15 Ways to Improve Your Brain Health.” The lady told me it was for her brother to help him with his brain. Probably the second day that I was there, was a Sunday. I ripped the thin plastic seal from the DVD and put the DVD in, over our morning coffee. Everyone sat down to watch the DVD for her brother’s brain health, with me.
I’m fascinated with this sort of thing, so I was excited to watch this video for me! I’d previously spent hours studying Daniel Amen’s perspective on my own, according to all the free material that I could find online, so I had a good foundation for comprehending what-all he discussed and I wanted to know what was different about what he discussed on this $50.00 course. I took notes. I broke the whole perspective down into a plan for the whole family. During the DVD’s playing, the lady fell asleep in her recliner, spilling milk and something sugary across her lap and onto the floor (nobody was allowed to save the thing because reportedly that had been tried and would anger her), the farmer watched intently, fascinated through the whole video and, inspired at one point; shared a magic trick. The brother sat awake through the movie but wasn’t especially interested and seemed really, somewhat apposed to the whole event in a sort of rejection. When the Sunday, video course was done, I put my notebook away and went outside to evaluate some work I had to do the next day. Though it was a day of rest, I was obsessed with the importance of applying myself to something for my recovery. Joy that I could feel such a way when all I ever am is a chemical balance. (Jail could potentially kill this necessary drive in men as could the instabilities of transiency through trials of the world.) That Sunday morning, I had ritual and community. I opened a DVD and brought some people together for a purpose, I learned something, and then I got stoked to work on something new because I was able to feel excited and enjoy my day.
Later that day or some other while I was there, the farmer and I went into town. From questions about what-all he’d done in life, as a brother would, he shared a story with me. He said he’d worked on a big farm for years. “Once” he said, “a man below me, actually tried to take my job, there.”
I hate this sort of thing. “Oh, really?” I said.
“Yeah. This is what I did. I told him, “You can have my job. I’ve already talked to our supervisor and it’s all yours if you can answer me one question.” The man responded “Okay” So I said, “There are two parts……..” “Cows, deer, horses, they all eat pretty much the same thing, right?” The man nodded. “So why do cows, deer, and horses all have different looking poop? Ones a pie, the other’s little pellets, and the others a turd.” The man didn’t know the answer. Then I asked him “Why do you think you deserve my job if you can’t tell me about shit?”
I laughed. We went and got haircuts and new socks and then headed back to the farm.
In the trailer I was staying in, I made a copy of the Daniel and Tana Amen Video’s Review / plan for the whole family to put on their refrigerator. The perspective was divided into a “To get list”, “Practices”, “Rule’s / perspective to live by”, and “The effect we want”, a breakdown more relevant to their day to day and easier to comprehend than the entire course itself.
Over the course of the week or so that I was there I found that the farmers lady friend yelled a lot. She was verbally abusive to her struggling brother, to the farmer, to the farm animals, and to me; which generated a sort of inescapable anxiety, probably compounded by her smoking cigarettes in the house. And to push the extreme, the final night before I packed my belongings and began walking down the rural highway to get back to somewhere I could feel safe, she fogged the bathroom that served as a hall between her brothers bedroom and the kitchen, with spider and insect killer, that I could still smell in the kitchen the next morning. In the evening I could hear her seemingly un-ending bullyish yelling at the family’s goats across the hill in my trailer. I certainly saw her hit one from the other side of a wooden fence, for no reason other than this was part how she felt good treating them (I think this was some sort of coping mechanism for her and she thought it was a coooool relationship) I couldn’t feel at peace at all in that household because of the lady’s constant.
I posted the Tana and Daniel Amen video review to the refrigerator. And though I’m not sure that she wanted her punching bag to recover, I realized a truth in this paper that I was pinning to their refrigerator; about the whole experience and the story the farmer had shared with me. This review was an outline of what the family knew about “Shit” or “What” of managing the recovery of their weakest member. The lady had bought the DVD for her challenged brother, expecting him to comprehend it himself, though he was moving very slow and could barely walk (fell often). “It’s for him.” The DVD had gone unopened until I opened it and put it in the DVD player. Even after watching it. She had FALLEN ASLEEP, not interested in the least. None had really set an example of acting on a desire to improve, to change something in their life, to apply this knowledge for the sake of healing her brother; or better, improving their own state of well being, to lead by example. The lady was confident that the information was irrelevant to her. Upon leaving the household, I was still the only one who knew what was preached on that DVD. The prospect of being saved or of learning something that could save her brother wasn’t even enough to stimulate interest.
This less than reasonable state of accepting things in our time as being fine enough to not even approach improvement, or maybe the way of the times is heavy or hardened and something has changed our ability to take action like we once did. So much of that experience, beyond any reasonable list; wasn’t fine and was really horrid. Could this state of acceptances be from a lack of being challenged? (in this instance there should have been plenty of reason to scream at one’s self “ORGANIZE”): A challenge shouldn’t be necessary to seek a greater sustainability of the whole. This is a moral. The perfection of our relationships and reaching the ultimate potential of our whole, the value of everything to the greater good; should be the foundation of every direction we take in life. If there is something evidently wrong in the processes of our whole we should take immediate action to correct it. Maintaining our ability to each individually, within our interdependence, to have the right effect is essential to this. We want to be able to produce the right emotion in each instance of our lives, to mindfully approach our paths. Are we balanced yet between mind and body? From what chakra are we thinking? Maybe we need balance out of our heads, to think more from our bodies, to breath and allow us to feel our world. The lady didn’t have any real comprehension of what the problem was with her brother. She should have opened that DVD and watched it immediately if she thought there was any value to it at all, to do something else is evidence of her personal “Mental Illness”.
We’ve been living in this age of acceptances. Like Peter Thiel states, “Our parents weren’t wrong to believe the future would be better, they were wrong to expect it to be automatic.” We’ve taken for granted things like empathy requiring at some point a first desire to understand, or to see the whole of us as being imperfect and so more worthy of investigation as to where the broken relationships that are making that so are found. At the beginning of May I couldn’t comprehend conversations or apply myself to achieving simple tasks, due to what-all experiences my journey had handed me. What I know from experience is that if I’d have gone to my mother for help, instead of seeking understanding and having faith that this was only temporary, she would without investment; in a moment of surrender to ( her own) hollow words of diagnosis’s, and to faith a system that she doesn’t understand: have sent me to a locked institution where I’d have had drugs forced on me without, even there, the ability to run, when in reality what I needed then and had needed all my life, and by the grace of God, at this time, had; was a loving community and the ritual of pushing myself to the curb with running shoes on, and at the end of May I was well on my way to being a functional member of society again. The state I’d arrived back east in (after the expectations of individuals generated by moral-less southern California and a terrified, hero cultured political campaign) was lacking one of the basic needs of safety, and of achieving my best which is rather amounted to after having met the psychological necessities of a support system or my own place of importance and has to do with my day to day pace and ability for moral abidance but is so primarily dependent on my connection to my community, which is why our tribe gathers twice a year for a time of healing and why that really is worth the reservation to understand what we need to succeed, what we can or can’t achieve as we are, and what time we’ve been lost in. In a sense, we have to return to our breathing, our thinking’s clarity to be humble and respect as our bests of all we can do, while we continue to make the gatherings and strive for righteous successes. I went regardless of the state I was in and the love of my people was what enabled me to feel free and go for a run and was the medicine I needed. I wasn’t the only angel-child there in a quiet state. The activists from the People’s Project bus were seemingly in a more pensive state than the previous October. They would sit in long meditations by the sacred fire and talk in very quiet voices, moving slowly, like a person who’s been shook and regaining control of their spirits. There was a feeling of uncertainty about the potential intensity of our circumstance, like we’d survived a series of bombings and were glad to be together but not sure what the future would bring as we all carried on with our pursuits somewhat automatically. But at this time I recovered, and for awhile before the world shook me again I balanced Maslow’s Heirarchy to the best of my ability and I was healthy in my feet, my mind, and my spirits.
The accepted states of being, are too common in our day. Our justice system simply is injust. “Justice” should be defined as the best potential of our whole, but the “Justice system” is a system of torture, a backwards direction. Our mental health approach is destructive and rash, and doesn’t yet account for lifestyle, environment, and ability for or opportunity for connection to ones community. Our more common expectations for a path in life are founded on something other than our real human necessities and the “Greater good”, of “Justice” the “Ultimate Potential of our Whole”, or a maintenance of our effect, our spirit, all that we amount to in this life. The expectation has been that individuals will each provide for themselves, limiting our potential. To begin seeing our world through a lens that isn’t buried from birth by a foundation pointing in an unsustainable direction, we have to reconsider our expectations and design things more worthily of what we want. A perspective clicked with me during a weekly guided meditation @ my local Dharma. The teacher regarded my breath like an old friend who was to bring a “clarity of thought” to my life, and in that day, I was riddled with an echo that had amounted for some time through rough times, simply from the process of living. I hadn’t been in a meditation routine for many months and I’d been through a lot. I understood clearly what he meant. That friend, my breath, was a difficult to recognize friend in a foreign place. Though, my friend, once I recognized him, once I could latch on to the comprehension of my breath, I could return to my clarity. That breath, my friend, breathing in, breathing out, was symbolic of the only thing in this life that is certainly true and real, as like my body sweats I have emotional connotations to things in my life including my own purpose, insecurity of my effect, my belongings, the strangers I encounter (sometimes worse if I especially like you), the echo of my thoughts and traumatic experiences which I certainly didn’t create but have known to haunt me as I struggle time and time again to rebuild the structure of my days. My friend, the breath, thought; is pure and irrelevant to all of this. He was there before that and is going to still be there when all of that unwanted spam ceases to exist and in my meditation it did. I let all of the spam go with the epiphany that my friend brought. That breath can symbolize a state that we want to reach each day, of how we want to be, our ideal. Are we viewing our lives through a lens that is clear, pure, and conscious like a breath in meditation, or one that still needs cleansed, that is yet filthy in the effect of insane, or competitive and greedy spirits, or displaced guilt that serves no purpose to our greater good?
(Story Piece) (On The Way to the Tiny House Festival)
On the morning that the Circus of Purpose decided to leave Indiana for the Nashville Tiny-house Festival, I had just arrived back at Sage valley from my own venture, the one that reminded me of what I new about what. Rain had soaked the fields of the valley. The sun was barely ascending behind the overcast skys. My sleeping bag was laid out on the path between the beds of the green house.
I quickly made my way to the outdoor kitchen, stepping over puddles between tractor ruts at the edge of the garden, over the lawn past the hill pond, down the tinnis-shoe-drenching, taller cut grass path through the larger of the dewy fields, across the wobbly plywood bridge that the kids had painted and to the sort of living room field of Sage Valley, complete with the sacred fire, stage, outdoor kitchen, and multiple fire-pitted lounging area, where all the “family tents” line the tree line.
Pan, an enthusiastic clown who never wants his picture taken, was in charge of the kitchen. Knee high children ran about. I’d never seen such a small child with dreadlocks until I met the Medicine Tribe. People were sitting while pan and maybe one or two others cooked breakfast for everyone. I poured myself my coffee and brought “Living Tiny Legally Part II” onto the screen of my Samsung to play, sitting on something like a cooler or a stump or maybe a triangular folding chair next to the others who were talking in the kitchen. I listened to the documentary for awhile before getting up and walking over to the cooking fire to ask Pan, “What are you trying to achieve at this tiny-house festival?”
“I’m trying to have fun.” was something like his response.
We started talking with everyone there, the documentary still playing in the background. Tiny-houses simplify your life, bring you closer to the outside world so that’s more apart of your life and thoughts, encourage you to live through more efficiently and you think about the sustainability of your processes. This is probably a really important creative part of our whole movement! Afterall, tiny-houses were my first direction in pursuing my company. Vibe turned to me sometime in the conversation that morning and asked if I’d like to go to the festival. “We have room in my van.” She said. “Yeah let me go pack up my stuff real quick.”
An hour or so later we rolled out of Sage Valley in Vibes van. The outside of the van was all wildly painted in blue, yellow, and green like a child’s creation, with quotes and symbols, and in huge letters “Conscious Clowns”. Pan and Vibe were in the front, Jacob was perched on something in the isle aside the little kitchenette. Cat (Vibes Daughter) and the Norse Runes reader were in the back with me. The back seating and shelves overhead were stuffed overflowingly with Cat’s stuffed animals and our packs. Books from the shelves beside the kitchenette fell out as we rocked over bumps in the road. Jacob put them back on the shelf. Cooking pans on the stove-top fell off the kitchenette and hit Jacob. He looked hurt…
We made it to the outskirts of Nashville where we met up with the rest of the circus troop. They were parked in a park turnaround of a swimming hole, with really clear water and some strangers swimming in the river. Paths led off through the woods and past an old ruin-like bridge. The other circus van had tall bamboo poles (the supports of circus tents) strapped to the roof, and was painted yellow, brown, and green and read “Circus of Purpose” in moon’s stylish hand-style with smaller letters than the “Conscious Clowns”. All the words could fit on a door.
We hung around the swimming hole for a good while. Some of the girls got in. I didn’t want to get wet and be stuck that way and didn’t know how long we’d be there so I stayed out. Inside the van I sat in the Isle and talked to Vibe. She got out some little gypsy sacks full of gems and trinkets and took a hat off the wall. She said, “I’ve been looking for someone to give my hat to.” The hat was a black, Grass Roots California, flat billed hat covered in a stitching pattern of diamonds. In silver on the front was a pyramid with the all seeing eye and long thin diamonds pointing out from the eye like shine. The pattern of the shine had been drawn on the back of one of my notebooks by a man outside a church in Johnson City a couple weeks earlier; where the homeless were being fed. He had sort of randomly decided to tell me about his experience using the drug DMT and said he’d seen this pattern everywhere.
Vibe held the hat in one hand and a miniature playing card in the other. I couldn’t tell what card she was holding. She told me she had a card in the hat and she didn’t know what it was and she slipped it somehow into the fabric and put the hat on my head.
Then I held out my hand and Vibe handed me one of the bags of rocks and trinkets. “Put them in the hat” she said. I poured the sack out in the my new hat over my lap and went through the belongings with my fingers. “Anything you like in there?” “This things kinda neat, yeah.”
That night we were supposed to meet the other circus van at a truck-stop, but the two vans went in different directions and we were at the wrong truck-stops so we opted halfway through the evening for a two hour longer drive to stay the night at our friends farm, “The Garden” outside Lafayette TN. We got there just at a good time to go to sleep. Some overall wearing hippy greeted us to find out who had just rolled in. The little shacks and school buses were all quiet like sleepers aside from a projected movie on a screen before a small crowd near the gate of the property. The sky was starlit and no traffic could be heard that far out. I showed Pan where the stage was and we found nooks to sleep.
The next day or maybe one later, for a while, I bombed rows in the gardens, weeding. After-all if I’m here I should help somehow. This’ll be good for me, I thought. Apply your focus. Hold on. And a time not wasted. When the police rolled in I was closest to the gate. I walked over to talk to the man. “How are you today, sir?” My heart was sort of pounding. Something was totally up. “Is that your van?” the officer asked. No. “That van was reported stolen out of Denver Colorado.”
A half hour later Vibe was sitting in the backseat of the sheriffs car, still parked at the garden. The rest of us clowns had gone into the van and removed EVERYTHING, so there was a huge pile of belongings on the grass, everything you might have in your house, piled.
As it turned out, Vibe’s ex had let her and Cat use the van to leave, but then had asked them to come back and since they wouldn’t come back he called the police. The police were able to get in touch with him, though and Vibe didn’t have to go to jail, as he let go of his charges, but they still detained the van.
So now our clowns were all stranded at The Garden and the festival was only a couple days away.
The most wonderful thing happened then. “The Turtle Bus” was parked in the front lot and a couple travelers living in it. The girl staying in the bus had remodeled the school bus into a homey-schoolie house with her ex who’s name was “Turtle” and she decided in that day; that now, before the festival, was the time for the bus to go on it’s own journey without her. She gifted the bus to Vibe and Cat.
THIS WAS TOO MUCH! I could not comprehend emotion. I was totally in shock this was a huge gift! Everyone went about packing their own belongings. I saw Cat sharing a moment with the girl who was giving her their new home. They were hanging their legs off the roof of the school bus, everybody who was there for the gift took a HUGE family photo in front of the bus, which had two bed levels in the back, storage on top, storage in the back doors under the bedrooms, and storage under the bus, a little bench along the wall opposite a very fine kitchenet and pantry, and a sitting area at the front near the driver with beautiful, skillful paintings along the outside. I went about and organized the whole pile of belongings on the grass where the van had been detained.
Everything was packed up that evening. The sky rained. We spent one last night at The Garden. In the morning the sky’s had joy in them, but I really still could not feel the gift of this bus that we were riding in. The cookware was hung in the kitchenette across the isle from where I found my place with my hiking pack, on the little bench. The cookware, with bells and chimes jangled as we bumped out the lot and down the highway. Around the surfaces of the finely cleaned and ordered living space were crystals that had been with the bus, that belonged to the bus and on the ceiling above the sitting area, awe to me, was the design that man had drawn on the back of my notebook in Johnson City outside the church, the shine of the hat Vibe had gifted me a days ago.
We arrived at the tiny-house festival in our stylish, remodeled schoolie with so much energy. The bus parked behind the Circus of Purpose Van. Some of the friends from The Garden arrived. I skipped about the open lot outside Nissan Stadium backwards and then took off for a run, to return and help the circus get set up. And the so pleasant, peaceful event adjourned.
June (2019)
(I personally don’t enjoy this next months review at all.)
I don’t understand. Like being alone but everyone knows and I’m not supposed to feel anything about anything. But I have a lot of emotions now days and I’m reasoning which ones make sense.
Since I’ve returned here, my days have really lacked structured approach. The curb life just doesn’t suffice. What have I benefited from this month? I’ve found peace through the time with the vibrations of the city, but I’d be in a phenomenally better state with more control over my environment. I’d achieve so much more and maintain my agendas and comprehensions of time I think much better, too. I’ve good self discipline now days, though the downside is, I’m going off into little ideal poetry binges and what-all to cope with my lack of toys and company, I don’t want to share the poems really, it’s fine and not sufficient for me. I really just feel alone and without. But I’m fine with that feeling. I should feel that way. What should I do?
In the broken times of the past month, I’ve noticed some varieties of lenses that I’m perceiving the world through.
-There’s a crystal like passing, as I walk down the street sometimes, passing people, my thoughts are seemingly relevant to the individuals.
-I might apply myself to one aspect of what-all I’m working on or a new idea, for a day or two, and I’m always having to re-apply myself because what is feeling mouse-like? The streets are why.
-I’m improving on my ability to maintain application to my work, but also give it the breathing room that it requires I think, as I learn to co-exist with the sort of newer vibrations from the time since I returned to the city.
-I feel alone in the world even though everyone knows what I want and I’ve sacrificed so much for the knowledge that I’m now trying to sell, just so this movement can become sustainable. So I can create what I’ve reasoned is right.
I’m not mad. China, though.
Despite Peter Thiel claiming that Newspaper’s days are over in this book I’m reading again Copyright 2014, California / Silicon Valley person. I definitely prefer to read from trees and I’m not the only one, that’s pretty well how I get the majority of people to actually read what I’m writing. Thanks to you on this email list, though. I’m glad that I could entertain you with this much. I also found an article left on the city bus from the Wallstreet Journal about what’s happening in China. Activists evidently storming the governments buildings, spray painting the walls calling the government a disgrace. Let’s not go in that direction! Read about the foundation in this ideal! Is anyone listening? I want to be happy.
This will not be possible by (ME) alone, simply finding a job @the bottom and attempting to save back money. I don’t know how it would be possible. I feel inadequate. This isn’t some goal I thought of in a recliner, I decided that this is best from a dozen hypothetical recliners. This is from the trials of a life. Of that not granted. I don’t really see any way out of the place I’ve fallen to. I want people to see that there’s some greater value to me, that they could have in along side them in life. I want people to want to have fun with me, spend time with me. I don’t really want to say all of this. I’m being a genuine person.
You can’t just read my letters, my reviews, my project description, and say “Right on, I think what your talking about is very real.” And just leave it at that. You have to reach out to every possible “way” you can to enable this to become something more than a hypothetical project. Let it be a collaboration. I want you to want to be better. I want to be better. I don’t understand what my father thinks love is, if he isn’t trying to make life better for me. (He’s living simply and leading by example and if I want something different than the world we’re in he can’t really lead me to make that happen. I have / had to find my way on my own.)
One reason, I don’t think I could be happy, long term, in the off grid communities is because not all of my necessities are met. We could disagree with Maslow’s Heiarchy, but I honestly don’t. I do see everything mentioned on that pyramid as being relevant to my state of wellness. Brilliant Maslow, I’m your biggest fan #turningSuperfastJellyfishesInto-ink-for-gorillaz-since-like-2011WITH_HOMIES_IN_THE3amSUMMERmornings (We were naked in the rain in the storm of the system. Oh, idk…. Writing you from a stairwell by the bus station. Back on track. That top portion of being able to ask myself if I’m achieving my best. I see that as dependent on my pace, am I living a moral life, am I having fun, is there a better way to achieve what I want? Am I in good company? Self actualization requires an environment structured around a creative process and continual study, that maintains pace. I want my days to connect in and orderly memory like I know they can. I don’t have that, there nor do I appear to have any realistic way of enabling that for my life or all the others that are lacking and don’t even perceive the clarity yet of THAT’S WHAT THEY’RE LACKING or maybe they aren’t, but that’s all I’m asking for. I want to be happy, for real for real. I want success. But I don’t have that on the street either. With the approach I’ve defined, we could potentially generate that sort of well community necessary to meet the other “Psychological” necessities and also to enable an organized, willful approach to activism. As this is all part of what a Concept Store is. Maybe if there was a place to live with some other passionate, motivated people, then finding a job from that foundation, would be more worth the time.
At the end of the month here I’m existing through feelings of inadequacy, due to my seeming aloneness in my pursuit. There’s a lady, with money trying to steal every bit of perspective she can from me and market herself as a consultant, or a “Systems Engineer” lol this is my shit, but she’s creating a name for herself in the local community, from the comfort of a nice big house overlooking a little river through the mountains outside Asheville where she pays homeless people to do little O tasks as it suits her fancy. I’m a really good guy. I’m lost. I’m not a copy-cat business, though. “Is this a joke? Lady, you’re insane. You’re a horrible controlling person, not a leader. I’m not a leader either. I’m asking for help. Wear shoes that fit you.” That isn’t funny. That’s a real insanity. She must think it her role or something but that actually is sick. The truth matters. She’s welcome to get hit by a dozen cars and move to China.
I don’t know what to do to improve things for me. I do believe that I do my part for our company, though. Are we creating heaven yet? I don’t feel supported but very minimally. What I have isn’t heaven yet.
Example 1 (Is this the same thing?)
My Failure to connect in Los Angeles makes sense when Marianne’s opinions of the times of our political system (that our democracy is power addicted and fearful) are considered, and with also the general fear of the campaign network / the truth of disconnectedness of our relationships if reliant on such a thing. That social network isn’t real! If you’re in Skii City and you want to share the moment with me / get me to understand the spirits that you’ve found? When I’m standing in the snow, that’s the real thing. But despite the filthy lens in Hollywood, I demonstrated giving a damn. And I wasn’t just going to fly a sign about the children of the American Ideal (to fund my existence there). I answered the people’s questions and if they had met up, I had precisely what they were looking for. That was a month to leave someone waiting in hell.
White Collar 😉
I don’t know what anyone can do. How could you know? I was @ Starbucks the other day. There was counter between me and the sink-spicket that was used to fill waters. It was hot outside. I’d been listening to this older homeless girl, Gracie, preach on the patio. The sink-spicket was within reach. I could see how the lever functioned, but I would wait three times for the barista to refill my cup for me. That was curtesy. That isn’t what’s happening in my relationships, though. That counter, metaphysical wall, perception of what I am, for you, what this paper is, what all these stacks of papers I’ve written to define, what the whole is missing, what I’m missing, does this mean something more to anybody with power and the sense to wear the shoes that fit them in Heaven? Should a child just accept each world as it is or should you try to find something right? You can’t truly escape God. He will be there everywhere you go, but if you stand for him still you’ll be met with the wrongfulness of the world and if you voice yourself against it, only someone who has empathy will dig you voicing yourself in opposition to them. I traveled a lot of places and witnessed a lot of saving graces because I stayed close to the church and I was young enough that everyone wanted to help me. Time’s evidently caught up to me. There’s no way to progress this any further without someone else doing their part. It isn’t solely you that can help yourself.
(Perfect, He Overcame It)
I was sleeping behind a wealthy man’s office where he found me one night, this month. His advice was to get a psychiatrist, solely because I’ve no money. ($0 = sick) He also said that if I want to be wealthy, take advice from wealthy people. That thought made sense enough. But this doesn’t make sense for our lives at all. Look at all the people doing stuff. Do they have some sort of emotional attachment to their way of life? Make some money. What is the effect of you? And to what extent are you founded on wrongs? Do I have the ability to prevail over this? Not on the street and not in society, not alone. Should I get a degree. Is now a good time to start sharing? Two Sundays ago I was @ Westwood Baptist Church for Sunday School and Church Service. The Pastor was talking about coveting and the summery of the sermon was “we do that a lot.” One thought that was mentioned, next to lust and coveting, was told along with a story of visiting a friend’s mansion (the mansion isn’t a blessing). The thought was that the concept of a blessing has seemingly changed in how we perceive it’s meaning over time. It evidently once meant something of finding God’s grace in the struggle. I told the man regarding my $0 “I’m just getting to that class.” He was a dyslexic who had not gone to school but found some other way to pursue what he thought was success and he thought I meant something about going back to school, so he responded “I’m telling you, getting to that class isn’t the way.” Perhaps he wasn’t to be reasoned with. He was pretty set in his opinion for then. The world has been insane, though, in this disregard. This acceptance and it is going to require a shift in how we’re approaching our lives. Everything about what I’ve outlined in the 4part description matters.
Maybe I’m blessed because I’ve been able to step outside of our times and understand what I wanted to know about what was missing in my life? The being without seems this is as far as it goes, though. How do I create my Heaven? Isn’t that a trip to set your goal as in life? Am I wrong to be doing this? Do I have to be alone or is there any way at all?
Example 2
I don’t have a clue what the next step is for me. Could you do something? Am I out of my league? Am I capable? IS THIS REAL? I dropped Materials Farm and invested in where I was / left my hypothetical recliner for a new hypothetical recliner, but a reasonable one (AHOPE For The Foundation of a Life Movement (I decided somewhat quickly there was more to this though, helped by that lady (Not to sell her short. GET IT RIGHT! Not her though. She should retire to something else. She wants too much power, bleh. That’s outlined in Part I Philosophy.)) Writing about what I wanted in life from a zero degree sleeping bag last winter. I gave the thoughts to a friend who works @ the day shelter. She appreciated it. That was all. (And maybe that was all at that point for the better.) Do I have something worth an amount that’s worth my time yet? What’s my time worth. That changes, if you can improve it for me. If I can do that for you, is that worth your investment? I have better self discipline than half a year ago. I’m awake and I’m learning, but not at the pace I want, nor with the support. I don’t want to live alone. I don’t want to live with socio-paths. I want to be with good, moral, sane people. We should have some fun, and you should make this thing yours but let me guide, and whoever else find the worth in what we’re discussing can help outline all the how-to’s, or maybe with collective effort again I could be researching things and finding sources of knowledge that explain all that for myself and we could just have self and get everything arranged. Somehow, I have to both afford a life and save back money to make this start up happen. I don’t know how. I want guidance in every way someone can help me. I didn’t really ever have much guidance, maybe you could help me a lot.
Example 3
Urban Dharma told me they were looking for someone to write an article for them. I left it there a day. Things went crazy that day, as the city can do sometimes. The initial understanding was, “Oh neat, this is for someone else. I’ll pass it off to Larry.” Larry maybe never saw it. The place closed bizarrely for the rest of the week. But maybe this wasn’t the right reaction. The little Dharma thought isn’t very much to read at all. And I feel passionate about the potential the Dharma could be! This is a paper about us? What’s that mean? We don’t know about “What”? What I want you to do even if it isn’t for you, is to take part and say “What is this? Do you care if I mark on it? That sounds badass, I didn’t know they were looking for that. What is this thing worth that I have? The Dharma” How could you know? I’ll try again. This is a community reflection now. Not the essay, the process of understanding it. Hmm (I’ve attached the rough draft of that separately to this email. Tell me what you think.) ❤
I’m not selling myself short. I’m not claiming to have the answers to how to sustain myself in the world. I can give my all to a job. How do I get worth-while employment from here with no clean place or reliable anything? This isn’t going to happen. I think I want a family. Feeling like I’m not supposed to want something like that. I’m asking again. Is this real? Does this matter? Do you think I’m capable of achieving something in an environment built to suit? Basically like a classroom. When we think about housing the homeless we have some expectation of a HOUSE…. I’m not getting into that, but for our purposes, simple is good and if it is better than what we already have. You just invented a new technology. How trendy. But let’s remember that I’m really not meant for Yale. I always chose Kirby on super smash bro’s as a kid at sleepovers. I would swallow my friends and jump off the cliff. Lol I’m not competitive at all. I’m like there’s no WAY. I didn’t understand from the start. That’s why I left. I only understood from the experience. I’ve seen too much of this. What are you expecting of me. Expect well. Everyone else goes home at night. I’m not homeless. I’m people-less. But I’m not that either. So what’s wrong with me. Have I been out here too long? No. Put me in a right circumstance. I make sense. What would be a good first step? We can talk about all our company after that.
That’s really June. In early July there’s been some hopeful things. We’ll see where everything leads.
Your Friend,
Drew
July / August (2019)
-Your Friend,
Drew
The months in varieties of confusions on streets across the country, and the number of times that lifestyle has put me in jail in recent years has amounted to a legal debt that’s going to have to be payed for me to achieve what I want from life. This little-ity-bity debt, the years I’ve now spent without a drivers license, the hopelessness of June’s review, my relationships not seeming to be amounting to any reliable future, though I like to believe that my spirited investment in my people’s goals and trying to apply all that the whole collection of us are seeking to my own vision is amounting to something; (It’s amounting to this review and all the months ahead and we are building some things) but all that it’s amounting to doesn’t give me any security in what the future of my life consists of or how successful I’ll get to be with my Stores.
The conclusion I’ve come to in my struggle with wanting to progress more than I can from this gypsy lifestyle, is that the ideals I’ve outlined for my life are still out of reach and nobody is really taking direction from me to give life to what I’m trying to achieve. I want to perceive my life like there’s years ahead of me consisting of much, but how to do that has been beyond my comprehension with everything happening all the time around me, and me clinging to this global water-skier rope, whipping me across the states and back, beautifully aligning us together and then taking me off into my own pursuits again, leading me to what I have to be shown. The comprehension of how my time now could amount to years of a reliable foundation has been beyond me and I couldn’t let go of that rope that was leading me. I was moving powerfully in the direction of my obsession, but then suddenly on the 17th of July it was taken from me and I couldn’t have my pursuit no matter how much I wanted it. In fact I couldn’t have much, not even enough. I was starved of nutrients, tortured, forced into a pressurized concrete box with some of the worst sort of people, all made of varieties of chemicals, without comprehensions of whole picture progress, the people were of an insane mentality and a lot of them thought it their role to chemically torture me for the next two months. Quickly in my concrete box, I finally understood that there’s a whole other side to my existence that I haven’t been acknowledging. Upon loosing what I had and being shown that someone else has control over my life who doesn’t care nor understands the torture that they can put a person through by shutting them in a county jail; I finally comprehended how I can look at my life like there are years ahead of me full of all the different pieces of my life that I want to hold onto, what values I have to be working towards in that time, that I haven’t been. What I understood from the concrete box, beyond the echos of voices and cards on metal tables in the room just over the balcony from my storage position (3C #36): what I wrote with a stub of a pencil in the margin of my arrest tickets as the C/O’s keys clinked against his leg with each step walking past the steel door, was that I don’t get to create this project for myself right now, but if the world survives and I postpone creating Concept Stores until after this next chapter of my journey, I can create my vision thoroughly and give the gift of that foundation I’ve defined to the next wave of Children of the American Ideal (That we are a people who if ever faced with, should seek remedy from, institutionalized oppression). In a sense, I have to actually allow there to be years ahead of me, to perceive my life like there are. But I’m back on the street now. And I’m waiting on things to happen and I still don’t have the present community that I need, and I’m back to trying to see through the haze of life with nothing in the city. And my ability to maintain agendas from this state is sad. I really need community and some way of getting myself running and achieving again. I’m struggling.
Comfort, evidence of commitment, and a reliable foundation for everything else, are the values I have to be working on for now. I have to sustain these values to enable prioritizing the multiple year plan of a college graduation amounting to a career, alongside which, I can finance my project for everyone else and me. What’s preventing further progress, is enough reason to understand the value of the comfortable life, guidance and rhythm of life at a school that would amount to better performance. This is seemingly the only way to look at my life as if there are years ahead of me and at the stage of development that I’ll be during the next 6years or so, the system of achieving for a degree is what I want. In postponing my project for this reason I should get to really live again. This’ll be a whole lot of fun.
To begin moving in the direction of achieving a degree and having a reliable career, I have an immediate plan, a two year plan, and a six year plan. The immediate plan is slowly out of reach as I wait for the ability to prove residence and get a new government I.D. and other documents to enable me a place to live at some anchor each night and as I’ve struggled to feel connected to the world after returning to the streets. But to begin I suppose I have to find comfort sitting somewhere with wifi, to research degrees and schools, to finish my books, to leave my belongings and run for an hour each day, and I need to be certain of the next few months of my life. Is it okay to ever cry for help? No, it isn’t lol. If you’re certain of the next few months of your life, you should tell me about what that looks like for you. I’ll love to hear of where your journey is at. I’m getting started. Sounds like I tripped. Something will work out for me. 😊 The six year plan is to be a full time student. I’ve read some about choosing schools and I’m excited to envision really, what all a college can be for me and my developing life.
Two Year Goals: Two years from now I hope to be able to show some credit of committed work, so where ever I settle as the slow-trip all catches up to where I’m trying to be at and aligns the world for what-all I’m wanting to achieve, deciding where I can be hopeful in committing to, I’ll begin applying to part time jobs. After two years I want to have entirely resolved my legal complications and have restored my drivers license and hopefully have a car. I’ll have maintained study and have up to date comprehension of all pre-requisites and courses that are required for the degree that I want to achieve. Some of my books will be published. My quality of life should overall be up to pace to where I want it and reflect in my amounted comfort.
In addition to the career approach…. Another thing I’d like to do to look at the world as if there are years ahead of me, is plan for the Holidays. My Birthday is Sept. 9th. All around the world people celebrate their birthdays. Birthdays are celebrations of life. I’ve been alone too many Holidays. I want to build this department of my life, to use all of the holidays, gatherings, solstices, as opportunities for having a festive living experience with the people I get to share life with for years of the journey ahead, so I’m beginning thinking of how I might be able to make that happen. This also goes with a new piece of our employee introductory education process, “The Beauty of Heritage”; which has amounted from all the same information about the discussion of spiritual justice and God’s Workmanship in today’s world.
Holiday Traditions
Store Direction: (Achieving This Out of Reach Ideal)
Refined Management Structure
(The thing about the mainstream is// it’s a thought process that you’re stuck to as long as you are, totally beyond your own ability to escape.) This fog is within my vision too and is what we’re going to overpower. 😉
Through the review process of us reaching our ideals as we bring together this company, our people become the branches of our mighty company tree. The initial sort of the branches comes from the current one “Noble” position, the departments are (1) a contracted lawyer, (2) accounting, (3) employee education, (4) investments and franchising, (5) retail, (6) culture, (7) product marketing, (8) client branches, and (9) human resources departments. The head’s of each branch with the (Noble)s/ (our highest company authorities) form the core group.
All of the departments might potentially deal with both costumers and clients. -Costumers are people who purchase goods or services from our company other than the product of our culture or the use of the company’s space.
-Clients in the other hand, are people officially recognized as worthy of the privileges gained with the title of “Creative Partner” or “Monastic Investor”/ (Members).
The “Client Branches Department” is how the tree turns food to flowers and consists of a record keeper who meets with Creative Partners and Monastic Investors about their progress reviews.
-Creative Partners are people permitted to use our space and participate in our culture as they wish, but their business remains their own and they don’t receive any of the company’s profit unless defined in a separate contract, which is also signed by both a Department Manager and a Noble.
-Monastic Investors are people who’ve shown an active investment in our way of life, “Monastic Investors” have been promoted from their position as a “Creative Partner” and are eligible for further promotion to and throughout all of the company’s departments, potentially enabling them to receive reasonable pay from our company.
*All Monastic Investors and Core Group Members are responsible for living their best attempt @ our “Ideal” way of life. They all too, refer to the Record Keeper, submitting process reviews, for individual periodic department performance meetings.*
Product Listing (For a Concept Store)
Membership: (what we’d be selling) (((Is $250.00 a month too steep for us or @ least worth our community’s compounding motion being brought together with this top down approach to founding a community on the people’s necessities being met?)))
-wifi
-(organized) community space
-community compounding motion
-our sacred influence
-gym-like comfort FOR TAKING FIRST STEPS
- Family Tree Resources (We’ll help you find materials)
- Introduction Education (To get us on the same page as a collective)
- Our Celebrations of life (Holidays and Gatherings)
- Kitchen Use and Family Dinners
-We’ll promote your business
-Keys to your Concept Store
Store Inventory:
-book stock
-daily materials for comfort
……cushions, matts, shoe insight, paper, stands, thread, stencil stuff, what you do, your materials, we got….
-use of thought space
-the whole life-style we’re trying to stimulate
-voice
-eventual market updates
-Membership (Family Progress Fund managed by accounting with investments and franchising)
-Residency for members
-Eventual Produce from sustainable processes
-renewable energy, composting, waves of arts and services, dharma and classes
Concept Store’s Current Publishing Projects
Storytime Books
****
Example: (5) “The Creating of Dorp-Aldre” is a picture book depicting the creative process of a child amounting from the act of writing one’s self a note, all the way until others are involved in taking his one little thought to fit their own purposes. Through the pictures of this book, each of the individual characters auras glow around them and their focuses according to their specific artistic medium, fading, and popping or becoming more prevalent in contrast. Each character has their own medium which also reflects in their specific environment. There are four characters.
-Parent: Arrives mid story, if standing alone in a mowed grassy field, would be depicted by ink pen sketches which glow in a fade of color surrounding the characters actions. (No Certain artist but potentially the artist for Kid3 will also work on the parent’s design.)
-Kid 1 (Main Character): Is present for the entirety of the story and if standing alone in a mowed grassy field is, as are the grasses and the trees at the edge of the field, conducted of a collages of words and pieces of images which follow the outline of each storybook page. Haven’t put this together enough to work out the fade yet. (I should have an artist for this already. This is what she does, she’s one of my biggest inspirations and her viewpoint’s phenomenal, I just got to get her to regard investing in this as worth the damn.)
-Kid 2: There’s an artist in Asheville, I’ll have to get in touch with. I’ve seen their work around and I’m inspired by it’s relevance to my life here. This character enters the story nearing the last part of the story she’s killing this business, the trees are opening their eyes, at the hangings of her dreamcatchers and she’s conducted of some sort of oil based medium with dark outlining shadows.
-Kid 3: Doesn’t arrive until very near the end of the book, but what this character does is brings the developing thought of the store to another dimension of the light spectrum. He’s got one of those hippy poncho jackets on, a boom box that he carries, and when he show’s up everybody’s got sunglasses on. Then they get to work and he pulls a world of his envisionings out of his hat, climbs up into it, and dances to his music, making the world happen until it’s time to go home. He climbs down out of the thing that’s still blowing snow or fallen leaves into the home / collective space and peaces out with two fingers “PEACE”. He’s what it’s all amounting to. The life he put’s to his and the groups ideals and “The Creation of Dorp-Aldre”. He’s made of colored pencil sketching’s. I met the artist for this part and the general background throughout the story in jail and he’s going to get in touch with me through homeless support once he’s out. He’s done tattoos a bit and it’s amazing what magic this man can conduct with stubby jail commissary colored pencils.
(Let me know if you’d like the opportunity to edit the script or work on another part of a story. It shouldn’t matter how many people we include in the penny royalties of creating heaven. We’ll just divide even for what it is.)
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(Five Picture books depict a Monastery Community where the activists involved attempt to reach their ideal way of life. These books are to start little children’s with a comprehending of how badass they can be in saving their future before their parents do. :P O_o)
(1) “The People of Dorp-Aldre” (Outlines values and ways of this monastic society by focusing on the peoples day to day lives)
(2) “What Brought Me to Dorp-Aldre” (The Journey of a transient man through circumstances of the world to his arrival and conclusion @ this Shangri-La like place)
(3) “Welcome to Dorp-Aldre” (A sort of aesthetic glide through Dorp-Aldre that introduces further concepts and social reform directions from a foundational approach through a main characters first welcoming to the community)
(4) “Renaissance in Dorp-Aldre” (Develops a comprehension of what a social movement is by depicting the events of a festival celebrating life in Dorp-Aldre)
(5) “Creating Dorp-Aldre” (Between a note and a child’s favorite place; one thought makes another, which leads to an Idea, creative resolve, and others’s artistic expressions involved passionately towards giving life to the groups ideals) (to depict a variety of creative action processes and creative thought processes as multiple versions of the same story)
Short Adult Non-Fiction
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(1) “(2019–2020)” or “(2019) Your Friend, Drew” (Collection of emails and monthly progress reviews outlining a man’s journey to understanding his circumstance in life over the course of a years travels.)
(2) “Out of Reach Ideal:” (An outline of one’s perspective on morals, their relevance’s to one’s life approach, and with that moral-life-approach considered, what God’s Workmanship would look like in todays world.)
Potential Documentary Product
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(1) “Creating Heaven” (as you can see, between the new management structure and the 7 other current Concept Store’s publishing projects all of this is deferent ways of organizing the same perspective and that perspective is the reality I’m trying to create. This documentary then could be created by a suitable team of Monastic Investors, recording the employee education process and the day to day joys and creative products of the world we’re creating with our collective’s collective motion for the purpose of promoting our loves through the process of creating this easier access to clarity and a sustainable creative processes; from which, the material processes and products of a sustainable life with the Earth, our people, and our financial world naturally emerge through our addiction to them.)
The beauty of our heritage…. Two grant winners in Asheville were given $200,000.00 of unrestricted grant money each for their community leadership, and actions towards “social justice”. I don’t know anything about the two people, but both said they wanted to help improve black leadership in the community, which is solid. I understand the feeling of inadequate foundations for achieving one’s goals, but given the general echo of this conversation, and a thought to what actually needs to happen to lead us in the direction we want to go….(Obsessive Compulsive Disorders and N.A. meetings aside) We need to fall deeply and wholly in love with the beautiful opportunity of life that we’ve been presented with, and all the varieties of people that we Americans get to know and be, letting go of the wrongs that different groups have allowed or pursued since the beginning of time and simply get our lives right. So my friend who was in jail with me, one of Concept Store’s creative partners, who I hadn’t seen since December, until I found him in early August on the 5th layer of the detention center that I adjourned to some months time into my detainment, asked me to tell him more about my company. I shared and a few days later he shared an idea for a creative direction. He asked how much I new about the Mayans and I said “I know my astrology” and told him about Jason Bedard who had introduced Mayan astrology to me, then he told me his understanding of the Mayan society and that he’d been having visions of symbols and was wondering what they were and wanted to learn more about the different languages and symbology of things in past societies. I sort of jumped on this with a physical skip held down by my jail flip-flops then a fist of righteousness saying, “That would be badass, man! If you were to express yourself creatively through ancient Mayan symbology.” A few days later more of how this thought could be important had aligned to define a small piece of our employee education process. With each new member of our group we can research briefly each of ours’ heritage and design our uniform according to the individuals stars and the language of their specific ancestors. On one wall of our whole-picture-workspace we can then have a world map the outlines the various people’s that have been across it, and like everything else in the whole picture space, we’ll add to that map as we apply ourselves reasonably and learn more. And that’ll be our demonstration of righteous diversity in leaderships. We’re all leaders. We’re all pioneers. We each have a beautiful and fascinating heritage that’s amounted to the collection of us.
My Introduction into a Community
-Project Re-Entry
There’s a fellow named Tony Shivers, with a program in Asheville that help’s people transition from incarceration back into society. He appears to be a really great dude and had a say about his 4 current sources of income and what he’s looking for, for the 5th. He gave me his business card when we talked. If I’m in Asheville for a commitment of two years, then I’m going to call him, go out for lunch with the man, work with him as a client through his “Project Re-Entry Program” and then see if he’s interested in our project as a potential 5th source of income to invest in and baby like all of us have to do. He also gave me some information from his acquaintance, a local publisher, who I plan to speak with when I’m competent. Currently. Progress. Is. Slow.
-Establishing Residence
In addition to Mr. Shivers’ 4th source of income (A $2000.00 a piece investment in flipping houses that I want to ask him more about once I’m here for a committed time.) I want to stay at a shelter and a low paying job to prove commitment as soon as I can and begin my studies until I or me and a group can get our own place to piece everything together from. Postponing this is killing me. I’m already able to afford my piece of a shared rent, reliable with social security each month so if you would be interested in getting a place with me, let’s do that. That would be an ideal first step, WITH YOU I can make this HAPPEN! My shelter may have to wait a few months though. After my release, I really need some spiritual cleansing and Micheal’s got a piece of land in Pennsylvania that he’s trying to start a community on, so I might go live on that project for a period of recovery before diving back into the social ocean. O_o I might not even re-enter here, although I love the little city here, Asheville can be rough.
Invitation for an indefinite gathering through the seasons
I propose we have an indefinite gathering (forever, everyone plan to stay), beginning with regular meetings and the celebrations of the Holidays, and our employee introductory education process. If you’re digging the thoughts I’ve communicated and have your own value to everything but like me haven’t known this past adventure in a sense that you could see the years ahead consisting of all that you wanted them too, but instead were pre-occupied with one day at a time, but you’d like to join this movement towards pushing the collective conscience in the direction of the clarity that we more profoundly want, I’d like you to share the Holidays with me on the streets as we create our foundation of an activist culture. This will be after we’ve returned from the PA project and depends on what Micheal says over the next week or so about how many people the project can have, but then he plans to return to AVL after a few months anyhow, so at that time we can launch into the motions for building our community within the city here. (Asheville’s a remarkable place. A valley, a bowl in the mountains (Are the mountains walls encasing our spirits?), great homeless support, a real rainforest (it rains a lot), a community known to BUY LOCAL and is this lively place only coincidentally the federal government capital of The United States of America? We may never know. But Asheville’s voice is like a mix between mine and the haunting traumas that we’ve all experienced in the past so I think it’s a perfect place for us making our righteous stand together.)
(Conversations with Micheal and Dragonfly)
We were talking about a lot of cool stuff at the beginning of summer. Dragonfly phoned back from his Grandparents in Texas after the People’s Project bus journeyed to observe the wall @ Mexico (I was on buses with families getting out of the Jails along the border as well as pipeline workers headed to oil country in Texas. Dragonfly and I spoke of our relationships in the modern day and what wasn’t working. From conversations between Micheal and me, and Dragonfly and me; June and Early July thoughts arose about wanting people to organize better and begin with comprehending the path ahead from a “community’s ability for connecting, stand-point”. Money was discussed in it’s relevance to us achieving what we want. A lot of other people said “call if you’re doing the newspaper / phone book thing”. I talked to a few of you, but I got lost under a bunch of waves and then locked two months in a cage and you’re all real far away. I wonder if Dragonfly made any progress on any of his motions.
July in AVL prior to arrest
I’m always meeting people in this city. I like to go to church when I can. There’s people everywhere and everybody’s sort of working on their own thing and often, as everything naturally aligns we’re standing next to each other in a common conversation.
During July before I was arrested, I was as lost and hopeless as June’s Review. I was doing what I could to network what I thought was the best way to pursue my project, but with an underlying hopelessness and feeling of inadequacy that comes with one’s lonesome journey through years under waves.
Reconnect!
If anyone has contact with Dragonfly, I’m trying to get in touch.
Books!(I’ll begin now sharing this list to be added to each month. These books are good reads!)
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Non-Fiction:
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-Zero to One
-How to Win Friends and Influence People
-The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need
-Healing The Soul of America (Original and 20th anniversary editions)
-The Five Tibetans
-Real Happiness (The Power of Meditation)
-Looking Beyond The Ivey League
-Until The Leaders Obey (Voices of Latin American Social Movements)
-Toddler Wise
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Story books: (If it’s good)
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-LOTR
-Harry Potter
-Narnia
-The Treasure of the Celtic Triangle
-Lonely Planet Travel Anthology
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Kids (My favorites)
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-Jangles
-Night Animals
-What Do You Do With and Idea?
-La La La
-all of Dr. Suess
Late Summer through December (2019)
Late Summer turned into fall and I was most passionately invested in the Seek Healing community, learning what I could and authentic relating with them and volunteering further into their organization. I was definitely very high in my head and felt that there was inadequate return on what-all a gave; though, from my experiences since then, I see that what I learned from them was a huge gift to have gained for free and I feel that all my gifts were well given and deserved. They had parties on Halloween and Thanksgiving that I really enjoyed. Nothing much more than a light mingle, maybe 20 guests at most, but sweet parties. Regardless of my love for the time I spent with them, I found that the stability of my life couldn’t hold strong while being close to their organization and decided to end my relationships with Seek Healing.
During that time I was also eating my lunches mostly at 12 Baskets, the By Donation Café, where everyone has something to offer. I attended the West Asheville Neighborhood meeting that the police led, where they asked some people from 12 baskets to be present (the community primarily discussed public drug use and property thefts at the meeting). In the café, we were talking about the whole picture of activism in today’s times, I gifted relevant books to bring our perspectives together, suggested first steps towards stimulating collective motion, I was present and connecting regularly, but the ship ultimately sank when one of the volunteers, a very powerful soul decided it would be funny to put the weight of her damn, on me. I actually genuinely vocalized a need for support, for help, my life was spinning out of my control and I was frustrated and wanted her to know that I wasn’t okay. She became fearful of me. We had been friends before, but then suddenly a separate group of her friends was regular at the café and the conversation had lost its substance. The people were in mental ruts damning me against any sort of heart shaped rock and the cat had our tongues to a destructive state in our relationships. The environment wasn’t unhealthy for me and I had to leave the café, which had once been progressive potential, but was now beyond my ability to save.
At this time of leaving these two primary communities behind, I followed my friends offer of a job working in the kitchen at the preschool she teaches at in the town I grew up in in Mid-Missouri. I weighed my options in person. That was December of 2019. About half the month was really solid before the world just sort of looked like a flickering of overpowering nothingness, an echo of other people’s broken lenses, to me, I stayed with a friend from when I was much younger, a little over half the age I am now, Shilo. Her and her brother have an apartment that’s the top floor of a house in Old Munichberg, on top of a hill that I never noticed before, has the most beautiful view of the Missouri river bridge and the downtown end of the boulevard. On the first night that I was there, both Shilo and her brother were working. I poured myself some Hot Tea and stood in the cold, on the deck, looking out across the city of my childhood, atuning to the quiet desertedness of the place. Where Asheville had been a constant flow of cars and community for months, this town was a total break. The winter skies in Missouri (overcast) have a depth of beauty that I could never really appreciate without having spent time away. The rocks are unique to the dirt. The forest are not the plain forest’s I saw as a child, but they are the same forests. They’re Missouri forests. I live in an eastern US temperate rain-forest now and just like the sky’s I feel so much more compassion for the Cedar Trees on the outskirts of Jefferson City now. What I realized by going home to Jefferson City, like the stillness of the moonlit streets that first night, was that this community, like so many others across America, didn’t have the foundation for supporting transients or for giving the people clarity to move in progressive directions, like Asheville has. I’d been living easily with a healthy diet for free in Asheville, navigating a wealth of passionate community, but in JC I had to support myself, there was nowhere to connect to any sort of movement towards the world that I want, towards the way of life I want. The movement didn’t exist. The reason I’d moved to Asheville was to take interest in the local business community. One of the first things I found in the city was the Go Local directory. Go Local is an extremely successful fundraiser and gives the city some voice of subscribing to local business as well as helps anyone make a conscious decision to support their own people being the bests of their own dreams that they can. If we were to create a local business directory for Jefferson City, that would be Horizontal Progress and probably a very successful entrepreneurial endeavor. We could do this everywhere. Horizontal Progress would make the movements less consolidated to one place. This could disperse / relieve things like homelessness frustration. I began contemplating the idea of horizontal progress, of mimicking successful pieces of the foundations of the movements I’ve known for the greater good and how to go about creating a foundation for people to have the clarity to move in the direction that we want them to go and regarding this new project as The Foundational Demonstration (2020)
With what may be a calming after a very long storm,
My reflections,
You’re friend,
Drew
(April 29, 2020)
January / February (2020)
Your friend,
Drew
In January and February I was back in Asheville. I remember eating at Haywood Church for breakfast one Sunday and having the thought (since I’d left much of my sources for community behind, that I wanted more community. I remembered the Toast Masters group that would meet at Wesley UMC in JC, when I lived there. I searched for Toast Master’s in AVL and began attending. I had a chance encounter (also at Haywood Church’s “Welcome Table” which is a volunteer and donation run banquet twice a week where people from all walks of life are welcome to be served a free meal of 3 courses or so on nice plates, or you can just have a bowl of cereal with blueberries. If you do, you won’t be alone. There’s a man, there, who always gets just that.) I had this chance encounter with a spiritual friend, who I’m not sure what she does, but she connected me with two more communities, The Jubilee Church, and the entrepreneurial networking meetups (Woah, why was I in Asheville? I got so lost in where I was but now she linked me back up (to some extent) to what I had wanted all along.) I began going to One Million Cups at 9a.m. every Wednesday to listen to speakers, Toast Masters at 6:15p.m. on Thursdays and One Million Cups connected me with another meetup called Mindful Mornings, in which a presenter shares their own work on progressive topics with the activist community who knows about the presentation once a month, and also the Chamber of Commerce’s demo day at A.B. tech which was actually sort of brilliant in what the businesses were that presented. ie. an interior design firm for veteran medical offices, a Norse Bath House (Look that up. It’s an experience.), a seltzer Tea (imported from Uganda)…. Having the Demo Day and the Toast Masters both at A.B. Tech got me looking into the lil school to maybe use the system to amend some of my own foundations for livelihood. I was just having so much fun around the community college. I enjoyed using their library too. They’ve this giant cozy alien looking chairs in a nook of the basement that I can sit in to read LOTR (which I’m very gradually getting through) or research or write about ideas.
Jubilee has a lot of “Teams” and motions for activism. I appreciate being informed through them of petitions and public input sessions, but I didn’t really enjoyed my days of trying to be active with them. I recieved som evident frustration in response to my all in attitude and ultimately, I just felt uncomfortable when at the church. There was a local artist making hats with stuffed animals attached to them that were to be gifted to refugees in Greece, where the church has an ongoing mission project, I spent a morning helping her. I attended the church on Sundays. One cool thing was how in all their rainbow gypsy style, they bopped a beachball that looked like planet Earth all about, over the whole congregations heads while singing Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, during a service. That made me so excited, I wanted to hit the ball too; with so much excitement! I read their community publishing (The Main Thing). Within their teams there is leadership and not really activism, only sort of passive, what the leadership can do within their closed lifestyle. They appeared upset at my persistence, yes. (Nothing has ever happened of what I’m trying to achieve. Prior to anything included in this I spent many months of years on creative pilot projects and living lives with others that didn’t work out.)
I began staying nights occasionally at a shelter in Black Mountain. It helped me to get out of the city for a break, get a shower, have some conversation, refocus.
I met a girl Named Pamela one Wednesday at Haywood St.’s Welcome Table, she works with Tony Shivers now! Remember me talking about him when I was release back into society? They have a young Non-profit who’s goal is to keep people out of institutional care (prisons and mental health). They focus on the family’s foundation. We hit it off and she told me to stop by her office sometime to chat. I love this concept of just dropping in! That’s activism. So I did, and not only that I read an article in the mountain express saying that Tzedek was going to lead Asheville in a radical approach to social reform, so I stopped in at Tzedek too and gave the only girl working, a spill all about Activist Houses and what we really actually need to make things shift in our world. (to them, “radical”, means financial, and they’re only interested in (direct) approaches to one specific topic (black leadership)) Tzedek didn’t really see anything special in me, and the girl didn’t comprehend the relevance of the foundation for a people to her specific interest and she was busy beyond interest ultimately. $forgranted.
With a couple of the volunteers from Haywood and 12 Baskets, two friends Hank (who I also attended S.H. with) and Miguel, I was beginning to move our talk in the direction of organizing more immediate action towards a fun entrepreneurial project that we would work together on, Hank at least responded and critiqued the letter I was writing for North Carolina Idea Foundation, but with the March 2020 shutdown, on April 30th as I write this, the project is currently and has been pretty out of reach for progressing. I’ve turned my focuses in some other directions now, but the letter I was scripting is as follows. My approach was to go over the Foundation’s website, and read the magazine from the Speaker that One Million Cups hosted, and apply my ambitions and experience / what I want to achieve as closely as I can to what they offer (structuring my thing around their breakdown.) Hanks critique was that I should really define my Company in the letter. That was some of the most considerate feedback I’ve ever received.
Letter to Tom Ruhe at NC Idea Foundation:
I appreciate that you value me more than my idea. What’s been missing in my pursuit is an adequate foundation and right community, which is why that’s primarily what I’ve defined the extents of for starting this company on it’s best footing (Spiritual principles that will be maintained through our processes and achieve our goals for the greater good of our people). Not having adequate foundation is also another reason why I’m so stoked to be writing to you! That’s what you do! I got the feeling, when one Million Cups, in Asheville, hosted Amy; that you might see the value in me through the deeper lens of my transient journey and really understand my value.
The rest of this letter is separated by page breaks in the following parts:
First: (I’m like you.)
Second: (Your grants)
Third: What have I been doing?
You might want to enable my vision.
I think my mission is really the same as yours, that humanity’s full potential will be achieved once we empower everyone with an entrepreneurial mindset. As an entrepreneurial writer, the book I’m currently finishing is called “Out of Reach Ideal” as the first part of us resolving the unsustainable and not just foundation and directions of us that we were born to is to define for ourselves the ideal of how we would like things to be. What’s really cool is that once a person has defined the ideal of their life for themselves and then begun attempting to apply themselves to that; the resulting life approach looks a lot like an entrepreneurial mindset . 😉
(1) I was sitting on a star-bucks patio last June, listening to an old homeless girl preach to me about the madness of her relationships and how the people who have power in her life don’t comprehend the real worth of her or how she could contribute the whole of our lives. Twice while I listened to her, I went into the store to have my water refilled. I would wait each time beyond the counter to have the barista refill the water for me. This waiting for the barista is courtesy. I understand how the sink-spicket works and it’s within arms reach. I could very easily reach across the counter and fill the water for myself, but I wouldn’t. This isn’t how our relationships and foundation for our potential should be, but that’s how our relationships and our foundation for potential IS, we’re all waiting on the barista to work for us to make the world the way we truly deeply all want it, but it’s sort of like the barista is gone and isn’t coming back and if we truly want to refill the water of our lives, we have to change our ways and do something very unusual, reaching across the counter (of our relationships, of the system) and make the sink-spicket do what we want it to, which requires a foundation for our way-of-life that maintains us clarity of what that change that we want, really, most deeply, is.
(2) “Justice” is the best potential of our whole. To reach our best potentials we have to enable a clarity of the whole picture of our lives and (3) create easier access to the resources for reaching our best potentials in a collective motion. (4) we can do this less by hiring another individual to work from an office and more by considering what the foundations of our lives really are and devoting ourselves to a collective process of progressing and achieving our bests. Part of that is not having to step out of one’s way to stimulate activism towards another’s objectives, but instead to have that activism be part of one’s way.
Your Grants:
Because our missions are so aligned (entrepreneurship / best potential of our people), I think my plan is maybe less of a candidate for one of your grants and more of a potential branch or product of the NC Idea Foundation. Braden Rawls claims you helped her take something new that people might not understand and give it credibility. That’s exactly what Concept Stores needs to stimulate a culture of activism in the people of this age of acceptances. (I’m in no way a non-profit. This is definitely to stimulate re-occurring income and a sustainable / just foundation for my people)
If you think that my project would be less a piece of NC Idea Foundation, and more only my personal thing, then I think I’ll be most relative to your Ecosystem Grant (my project is a way of building your market, generating culture and collective motion.) And relative to your Engage Grant because the foundation I’ve defined with our Concept Stores, Relationships, and Activism Concepts is how we can enable the best potential of us and how we can enable people’s comprehensions of the whole without them having to step out of their “way” through living and working closer together.
Your Program for Entrepreneurs:
(Refine your business model and learn more about your costumers.)
-The goal is too….
and then no doubt much improved on through trial and guidance with your program. I think also, it’s especially important to outline what I’ve given as so often people want to ask something in return for their product, in the initial relationship, but I’ve been giving the entire outline of the foundation for God’s Workmanship reaching it’s best potential for free, as if it wasn’t my yet amounted life-experience in addition to specific gifts pertaining to individuals needs and interests, simply for the opportunity to see the people advance to where they might become a new market that lifts me to a higher place (Though, practically, that would take reaching across a really solid relationship-counter in recognition of true value which would be a very rare action). (I want this lifting up much, much more than financial freedom). It’s important to acknowledge that as of yet, maybe the exchange has been very fair, as I’ve been gifted the opportunity of witnessing so many different ways and processes of achieving what people have “wanted” to build, new, for their way of life, thought I’ve only a story to reasonably show for it. I could share the experiences, but that would take some resources.
(Identifying / targeting potential costumers)
-In June I developed a power point and sort of brainstorming guide that follows the same information I include in my “Ideal” to guide a group through the process of developing their own “Ideal” for structuring their environment and life-style, to enable our whole to shift in the direction we truly, deeply want to go and know we can go if we do so collectively. This (after defining and applying to ones life) really is actually part of mental health approach reform, in which we have to begin by analyzing a persons environment, lifestyle, ability for / opportunity for connection to their community, and comes down to a desire for a true experience of living together for achieving the collective bests and requires a specific shift in our expectations of life. The people define this for themselves. This course, I developed in June, might be a way of communicating more deeply with potential clients. I’m also a huge fan of the movement towards the new age practice of “Circling” also called “Connection Practice”, “Authentic Relating” and “Emotional intelligence Training” as a way of comprehending each’s community deeper and it’s both part of the foundation for a culture of activism that we require and part of my own ideal for self improvement (This is something I was introduced to from Seek Healing during the months I was decided to be active at their events and with their direction.) That’s my reaching across the counter thoughts, but I humbly would be so incredibly stoked to be granted your guidance in connecting with potential interests!
(Validating Product Market Fit)
-My market wouldn’t be necessarily that same as yours. The first people we’d be working with would be nations under 40population of “Activists” and their community in effect.
Most Recently (Where am I now?)
I’m looking forwards to change in my viewpoint from, if I can find a way to provide for a life, as I try to shift back into society from this transient mentality I’ve seemingly fallen freely through’s development.
What have I been doing?
Giving my book “Out of Reach Ideal” to everyone through its’ development. This is like giving my life and future children for free on faith that that’s exactly what I need to do to build for my life and future children what we actually more deeply want. The act of giving my book, opens an initial door for creating righteous relationships based on the foundation I’m seeking to create for our company and gives me insight into the people’s relationship to me as I seek motivated people to carry out what I want to see happen in the world.
Homeless Support (my vision is totally relevant to the foundations of our people and also our least considered people):
12 Baskets and community: I spent some months being a regular at 12 baskets while it was good. I attended the West Asheville Neighborhood meeting that the police led, where they asked some people from 12 baskets to be present (the community primarily discussed public drug use and property thefts at the meeting). In the café, we were talking about the whole picture of activism in todays times, I gifted relevant books to bring our perspectives together, suggested first steps towards stimulating collective motion, I was present and connecting regularly, but the ship ultimately sank and I’ve decided the environment is unhealthy for me and I stay away.
AHOPE: Last winter I wrote an essay for AHOPE called “Ahope for the Foundation of a Life” talking about relationships in today and my initial thoughts, from the street, of the direction for amend. There was no real regard of me by AHOPE as anything other than another AHOPE client and so no creative approach emerged.
I Am Home Art Project: I gave them copies of my ideal, and have shared my perspective with the girls who run this regularly through my pursuit. They really weren’t interested in any bigger space or deeper project of “Resource for best potential” and turning Maslow’s hierarchy upside down to shift our weakest considered members (their clientele) in the direction of comprehending their bests.
Deanna and Susan: Had their own American Dream projects, one wanted to create a transitional housing space for transient kids. The other wanted to create a process of kids apprenticing trades through remodeling old houses and also hosting promotional events where artists, musicians, and all creatives could collaborate. She believed that if there was a thriving art community the rest of the community would benefit. I helped both piece together their management concepts and define what they were trying to do to communicate that to others, but ultimately decided neither were a way to success.
Organizing from Haywood Street:
Recently this connected me with Sparc, One Million Cups, Toast Masters, and the Jubilee Community which ought to help me with my presentation and might lead to a foundation for my life that better enables my goals for my time. One suggestion Pamela at Sparc had when I stopped by her office to chat yesterday was of visiting Haw Creek Commons. I did hang around the Bethesda Methodist Church (Where Hawcreek Commons is in the first floor of) for awhile last Summer. I helped in their garden, attended service and a potluck at the intern house, but the people I found weren’t especially ready to work with me. Maybe I’ll try again this next Summer when the community renews.
There are also a couple other activists who volunteer regularly with the homeless support kitchens who I’ve been discussing getting together to give life to a business, but I think comprehension of our missing foundation and the extent of that’s relationship to our lives and goals is sort of across a river in everyone’s peripheral and that’s why this is taking so long to get together over. We almost have tell ourselves, “I don’t fully see that project there. If I did fully comprehend it, I would take action right now to make sure I was giving it all I could.”
Jubilee has a lot of Teams and motions for activism. I appreciate being informed through them of petitions and public input sessions, but I haven’t really enjoyed my weeks of trying to be active with them. I’m reading their community publishing (The Main Thing). Within their teams there is leadership and not really activism, only sort of passive, what the leadership can do within their closed lifestyle. They appeared upset at my persistence. (Nothing has ever happened of what I’m trying to achieve. Prior to anything included in this I spent many months of years on creative pilot projects and living lives with others that didn’t work out.)
I’m attending Toast Masters and One Million Cups as often as I can which has also led to Mindful Mornings. Following the mindful-morning on February 7th, I read over the website for the speaker’s project (Collaborative Awareness) to relate my perspective as well as I could to her specific interests and decided with the rest of the people around me at Odds Café that this was not the way and ultimately that that particular leadership is insane like how Peter Thiel states in Zero to One “Competition is an ideology — -The ideology that pervades our society and distorts our thinking”.
Seek Healing (Their goal is to prevent addiction through building community):
My contribution: I saw potential in this non-profit and led by example by making the project my own. I left purposeful books on the shelf in the entry to where they meet. Donated real buckwheat and cotton meditation cushions to encourage posture and balance where they were sitting on leg crunching thin slouch-and-use-your-hands-for-support sorts of cushions. I helped make gift baskets for their fundraiser, attended the City-County Opioid epidemic discussion with the staff, and regularly brought fresh prints of the mountain express to share with their office. I gave the core members copies of my book Out of Reach Ideal to open a door to moving them in the direction of my intention. I gave the Head-Heiina / Jennifer, a copy of Zero to One: Notes on Startup Companies and she met me at Olaries Coffee to discuss potential directions for their non-profit, to discuss goals, and for me to share my perspective of their relationship to all our people’s movements towards the greater good and within the organization, then having a meeting with her core group after their meeting she put into effect a feeler project in the direction of generating re-occurring income for their community.
I gave them my all for the months I was present (like it was my family) and ultimately I decided the focus on Addiction was too consuming and that I wouldn’t be able to achieve what I wanted with their organization and stopped so that I still could achieve what I wanted.
Though with the more recently developing, “Foundations for Activism” focus, I called Jennifer to tell her what I’ve been finding of another “Spiritual Center”s project and asked if we brought the community or some established institutions (such as a collection of church youth-groups or schools) together for the Sunrise Movement’s foundation for bringing the under40 environmentally passionate crowd together for structured movement, would she or some of her trainers be interested in sharing their “listening training” and “Authentic Relating Practices” to the community as part of our first community’s foundation.
Vacations Throughout (This has proven as important as reconnecting, in my ability to see really what we are, beyond the lens of here and now and all wrapped up in where I’m at, what we’re capable of through time as us alone and what isn’t working and has also simply enabled me to share my perspective with possible other routes to starting-up continually):
Books Shared with:
Tribe: This is where my true transiency really began. I gave books, meditation cushions, roofed a schoolhouse, gardened, helped however I could. In Indiana I connected the sustainability project with a wealth of the local community through the Methodist church because I enjoy going to church.
Tallahassee: Gifted copies of my Ideal as I found my way further
Austin: Gave copies of my Ideal to the founder of The End of The Line (The largest homeless and disabled tiny-house community in America) (No-Response)
Nashville: Tiny-house festival and essays as gifts to my friend’s lady who is earning her doctorates in Sociology at Vanderbilt and was specifically interested in studying homelessness. (No-Response / this is okay, reading my work is a gift to me that not everyone invests in, as they’re caught up in their own lives.)
Knoxville: This turned out to be a flunk, the man I went to see represented himself as a life coach and I thought ooooo how interesting that might be someone who could help with an employee introductory process and ideal defining, but he turned me away immediately and I was stranded in the snow until I could get out of town.
Church in my home town: I’ve given them essays of my perspective as it developed throughout time and spent months pacing in the basement their with all my brain-storming spread all around or working at a table in the fellowship hall, but nobody ever really seemed to understand that I was really really really trying to do something. Or maybe they really did understand, but communication wasn’t the strongest in how I eventually decided it was time to find something new. This quickly worked out for me and let me to the Art House project.
Political Activists (I don’t believe in the democratic process after being apart of campaigns but I do see potential in people coming together for the purpose of activism. And I appreciate anoyone who will really talk about the details of something like the Green New Deal and tell me how it doesn’t actually make sense. The political groups themselves (non-partisan or partied) don’t appear to do this much at all. Maybe someone will see what IS.):
Contribution: Canvased, talked to voters on the phone, listened to the results with everyone at the pub, felt the love, shared all that I wanted to happen freely, showed up IN PERSON to L.A. because the internet and all the peoples processes with that isn’t anything real for our relationships or for us to build something together. I was totally prepared to join the discussion about social reform and creative approach to no avail, barely a response. I poured myself into it. Answered all the peoples questions about Marianne according to reading her books in April (which nobody else did, officially with or just following the campaign), applied photos of dreamcatchers to all my answers to lead by example of making it my own and show that I was doing something. Nobody met up with me. Gave them my book but left the city just terrified and with bleeding feet. Attended public input sessions, city county meetings, homeless coalition meetings, a police led neighborhood meeting, anything I would hear about that sounded interesting, as I talked to various non-profit workers and volunteers throughout my city.
Statement: Lot’s to reflect on with this, but Marianne’s summery of “power-addicted and in effect fearful” is well put (though not in my home town).
I’m also now taking an interest in (and using them as a first step in my “Business Model”) the Sunrise Collective, who are approaching the nations youth to inspire political activism for motions towards material sustainability. I feel like I (my business model) might really be the spiritual (effect of self) experience that the kids really need and think if these environmental activist groups were to get connected with the Conscious Carnivals movement of traveling circus’s who’s missions are the promotion of sustainable processes, and who is also spread across the country in numerous smaller circus “troops” I worked with a really cool one (The Circus of Purpose, who are less of a carnival and more of a circus) at the Nashville Tiny-town, tiny house festival last May, the effect would be a beautiful campaign that would quake, travel, and fully live, reshaping our world for sure, but my approach is actually directly giving communities the resources / way for building the conversation and seeing clearly their lives so they can reshape that how they want to. Part of that is living an experience that they can’t envision for themselves yet, and then after that comes their own creative, improvements.
Meetups and Mountain Xpress:
I made an opinion in the mountain express according to the conversation on transit improvements that was being discussed. And cheering on the progress that has been discussed there and on the street and the fully suggested the idea of “Activist Housing” and a description of what “Circling” is and that we should all have some basic understandings of this practice as we continue seeking justice. I try to keep up on Mountain X’s voice of our community. I’ve been browsing some meetups and seeking in the community. This has shown me that there’s a lot of people working towards the same goal, defined differently, but nobody really yet passes my critique of complete understanding of the necessary foundation for the company that my experience has defined for me.
My Ideal:
I continue pursuing which is an ever changing process. I need some sort of return on my gift of life that is more providing than the ever evolving experience itself. What I really need is to solidify my foundation in community and for the communities I invest in or share with to recognize me as something of value, like a brother, to see me as worth and invite me to live better and achieve with them, because ultimately I’m sure that there is a way if the people can see the difference in worth between God’s workmanship of sustainability and our best potentials (justice) and the abstraction of value in our current economic state. To not move in a backwards direction with this, I have wanted to remain open and active, but within this I see that I have to find better ways to protect me against unhealthy relationships and im at a point of potentially deciding that I might be the only one who will provide for this.
I’m considering my options for creating a bridge through time for some years of my life. Maybe I won’t totally have to postpone Concept Stores and Activist oriented intentional urban / suburban homesteading for current stability or evidence of commitment by subscribing to the already in place system: for me, alone, to ultimately found my ideal, years down the road; as a foundation for the next generation of kids who we’re raised by the spirit of us being a people who if ever faced with, should seek remedy from institutional oppression. Though, to not have to be postponed until then, someone else will have to give. And can I keep the spirit alive through that time? I’ve already been greatly humbled by this pursuit.
Our Justice system doesn’t enable the best potential of our people. Our Mental Health approach is destructive and often rushed. Our people have expectations of lifestyles that don’t align with their deeper values. How do we create this shift in our people and how would this stimulate new markets for entrepreneurs?
I’d love to share the deeper philosophy, reasons, experience, and directions.
Letter to Tom Ruhe at NC Idea Foundation:
I appreciate that you value me more than my idea. What’s been missing in my pursuit is an adequate foundation and right community, which is why that’s primarily what I’ve defined the extents of for starting this company on it’s best footing (Spiritual principles that will be maintained through our processes and achieve our goals for the greater good of our people). Not having adequate foundation is also another reason why I’m so stoked to be writing to you! That’s what you do! I got the feeling, when one Million Cups, in Asheville, hosted Amy; that you might see the value in me through the deeper lens of my transient journey and really understand my value.
The rest of this letter is separated by page breaks in the following parts:
First: (I’m like you.)
Second: (Your grants)
Third: What have I been doing?
You might want to enable my vision.
I think my mission is really the same as yours, that humanity’s full potential will be achieved once we empower everyone with an entrepreneurial mindset. As an entrepreneurial writer, the book I’m currently finishing is called “Out of Reach Ideal” as the first part of us resolving the unsustainable and not just foundation and directions of us that we were born to is to define for ourselves the ideal of how we would like things to be. What’s really cool is that once a person has defined the ideal of their life for themselves and then begun attempting to apply themselves to that; the resulting life approach looks a lot like an entrepreneurial mindset . 😉
(1) I was sitting on a star-bucks patio last June, listening to an old homeless girl preach to me about the madness of her relationships and how the people who have power in her life don’t comprehend the real worth of her or how she could contribute the whole of our lives. Twice while I listened to her, I went into the store to have my water refilled. I would wait each time beyond the counter to have the barista refill the water for me. This waiting for the barista is courtesy. I understand how the sink-spicket works and it’s within arms reach. I could very easily reach across the counter and fill the water for myself, but I wouldn’t. This isn’t how our relationships and foundation for our potential should be, but that’s how our relationships and our foundation for potential IS, we’re all waiting on the barista to work for us to make the world the way we truly deeply all want it, but it’s sort of like the barista is gone and isn’t coming back and if we truly want to refill the water of our lives, we have to change our ways and do something very unusual, reaching across the counter (of our relationships, of the system) and make the sink-spicket do what we want it to, which requires a foundation for our way-of-life that maintains us clarity of what that change that we want, really, most deeply, is.
(2) “Justice” is the best potential of our whole. To reach our best potentials we have to enable a clarity of the whole picture of our lives and (3) create easier access to the resources for reaching our best potentials in a collective motion. (4) we can do this less by hiring another individual to work from an office and more by considering what the foundations of our lives really are and devoting ourselves to a collective process of progressing and achieving our bests. Part of that is not having to step out of one’s way to stimulate activism towards another’s objectives, but instead to have that activism be part of one’s way.
Your Grants:
Because our missions are so aligned (entrepreneurship / best potential of our people), I think my plan is maybe less of a candidate for one of your grants and more of a potential branch or product of the NC Idea Foundation. Braden Rawls claims you helped her take something new that people might not understand and give it credibility. That’s exactly what Concept Stores needs to stimulate a culture of activism in the people of this age of acceptances. (I’m in no way a non-profit. This is definitely to stimulate re-occurring income and a sustainable / just foundation for my people)
If you think that my project would be less a piece of NC Idea Foundation, and more only my personal thing, then I think I’ll be most relative to your Ecosystem Grant (my project is a way of building your market, generating culture and collective motion.) And relative to your Engage Grant because the foundation I’ve defined with our Concept Stores, Relationships, and Activism Concepts is how we can enable the best potential of us and how we can enable people’s comprehensions of the whole without them having to step out of their “way” through living and working closer together.
Your Program for Entrepreneurs:
(Refine your business model and learn more about your costumers.)
-The goal is too….
and then no doubt much improved on through trial and guidance with your program. I think also, it’s especially important to outline what I’ve given as so often people want to ask something in return for their product, in the initial relationship, but I’ve been giving the entire outline of the foundation for God’s Workmanship reaching it’s best potential for free, as if it wasn’t my yet amounted life-experience in addition to specific gifts pertaining to individuals needs and interests, simply for the opportunity to see the people advance to where they might become a new market that lifts me to a higher place (Though, practically, that would take reaching across a really solid relationship-counter in recognition of true value which would be a very rare action). (I want this lifting up much, much more than financial freedom). It’s important to acknowledge that as of yet, maybe the exchange has been very fair, as I’ve been gifted the opportunity of witnessing so many different ways and processes of achieving what people have “wanted” to build, new, for their way of life, thought I’ve only a story to reasonably show for it. I could share the experiences, but that would take some resources.
(Identifying / targeting potential costumers)
-In June I developed a power point and sort of brainstorming guide that follows the same information I include in my “Ideal” to guide a group through the process of developing their own “Ideal” for structuring their environment and life-style, to enable our whole to shift in the direction we truly, deeply want to go and know we can go if we do so collectively. This (after defining and applying to ones life) really is actually part of mental health approach reform, in which we have to begin by analyzing a persons environment, lifestyle, ability for / opportunity for connection to their community, and comes down to a desire for a true experience of living together for achieving the collective bests and requires a specific shift in our expectations of life. The people define this for themselves. This course, I developed in June, might be a way of communicating more deeply with potential clients. I’m also a huge fan of the movement towards the new age practice of “Circling” also called “Connection Practice”, “Authentic Relating” and “Emotional intelligence Training” as a way of comprehending each’s community deeper and it’s both part of the foundation for a culture of activism that we require and part of my own ideal for self improvement (This is something I was introduced to from Seek Healing during the months I was decided to be active at their events and with their direction.) That’s my reaching across the counter thoughts, but I humbly would be so incredibly stoked to be granted your guidance in connecting with potential interests!
(Validating Product Market Fit)
-My market wouldn’t be necessarily that same as yours. The first people we’d be working with would be nations under 40population of “Activists” and their community in effect.
Most Recently (Where am I now?)
I’m looking forwards to change in my viewpoint from, if I can find a way to provide for a life, as I try to shift back into society from this transient mentality I’ve seemingly fallen freely through’s development.
What have I been doing?
Giving my book “Out of Reach Ideal” to everyone through its’ development. This is like giving my life and future children for free on faith that that’s exactly what I need to do to build for my life and future children what we actually more deeply want. The act of giving my book, opens an initial door for creating righteous relationships based on the foundation I’m seeking to create for our company and gives me insight into the people’s relationship to me as I seek motivated people to carry out what I want to see happen in the world.
Homeless Support (my vision is totally relevant to the foundations of our people and also our least considered people):
12 Baskets and community: I spent some months being a regular at 12 baskets while it was good. I attended the West Asheville Neighborhood meeting that the police led, where they asked some people from 12 baskets to be present (the community primarily discussed public drug use and property thefts at the meeting). In the café, we were talking about the whole picture of activism in todays times, I gifted relevant books to bring our perspectives together, suggested first steps towards stimulating collective motion, I was present and connecting regularly, but the ship ultimately sank and I’ve decided the environment is unhealthy for me and I stay away.
AHOPE: Last winter I wrote an essay for AHOPE called “Ahope for the Foundation of a Life” talking about relationships in today and my initial thoughts, from the street, of the direction for amend. There was no real regard of me by AHOPE as anything other than another AHOPE client and so no creative approach emerged.
I Am Home Art Project: I gave them copies of my ideal, and have shared my perspective with the girls who run this regularly through my pursuit. They really weren’t interested in any bigger space or deeper project of “Resource for best potential” and turning Maslow’s hierarchy upside down to shift our weakest considered members (their clientele) in the direction of comprehending their bests.
Deanna and Susan: Had their own American Dream projects, one wanted to create a transitional housing space for transient kids. The other wanted to create a process of kids apprenticing trades through remodeling old houses and also hosting promotional events where artists, musicians, and all creatives could collaborate. She believed that if there was a thriving art community the rest of the community would benefit. I helped both piece together their management concepts and define what they were trying to do to communicate that to others, but ultimately decided neither were a way to success.
Organizing from Haywood Street:
Recently this connected me with Sparc, One Million Cups, Toast Masters, and the Jubilee Community which ought to help me with my presentation and might lead to a foundation for my life that better enables my goals for my time. One suggestion Pamela at Sparc had when I stopped by her office to chat yesterday was of visiting Haw Creek Commons. I did hang around the Bethesda Methodist Church (Where Hawcreek Commons is in the first floor of) for awhile last Summer. I helped in their garden, attended service and a potluck at the intern house, but the people I found weren’t especially ready to work with me. Maybe I’ll try again this next Summer when the community renews.
There are also a couple other activists who volunteer regularly with the homeless support kitchens who I’ve been discussing getting together to give life to a business, but I think comprehension of our missing foundation and the extent of that’s relationship to our lives and goals is sort of across a river in everyone’s peripheral and that’s why this is taking so long to get together over. We almost have tell ourselves, “I don’t fully see that project there. If I did fully comprehend it, I would take action right now to make sure I was giving it all I could.”
Jubilee has a lot of Teams and motions for activism. I appreciate being informed through them of petitions and public input sessions, but I haven’t really enjoyed my weeks of trying to be active with them. I’m reading their community publishing (The Main Thing). Within their teams there is leadership and not really activism, only sort of passive, what the leadership can do within their closed lifestyle. They appeared upset at my persistence. (Nothing has ever happened of what I’m trying to achieve. Prior to anything included in this I spent many months of years on creative pilot projects and living lives with others that didn’t work out.)
I’m attending Toast Masters and One Million Cups as often as I can which has also led to Mindful Mornings. Following the mindful-morning on February 7th, I read over the website for the speaker’s project (Collaborative Awareness) to relate my perspective as well as I could to her specific interests and decided with the rest of the people around me at Odds Café that this was not the way and ultimately that that particular leadership is insane like how Peter Thiel states in Zero to One “Competition is an ideology — -The ideology that pervades our society and distorts our thinking”.
Seek Healing (Their goal is to prevent addiction through building community):
My contribution: I saw potential in this non-profit and led by example by making the project my own. I left purposeful books on the shelf in the entry to where they meet. Donated real buckwheat and cotton meditation cushions to encourage posture and balance where they were sitting on leg crunching thin slouch-and-use-your-hands-for-support sorts of cushions. I helped make gift baskets for their fundraiser, attended the City-County Opioid epidemic discussion with the staff, and regularly brought fresh prints of the mountain express to share with their office. I gave the core members copies of my book Out of Reach Ideal to open a door to moving them in the direction of my intention. I gave the Head-Hiina / Jennifer, a copy of Zero to One: Notes on Startup Companies and she met me at Olaries Coffee to discuss potential directions for their non-profit, to discuss goals, and for me to share my perspective of their relationship to all our people’s movements towards the greater good and within the organization, then having a meeting with her core group after their meeting she put into effect a feeler project in the direction of generating re-occurring income for their community.
I gave them my all for the months I was present (like it was my family) and ultimately I decided the focus on Addiction was too consuming and that I wouldn’t be able to achieve what I wanted with their organization and stopped so that I still could achieve what I wanted.
Though with the more recently developing, “Foundations for Activism” focus, I called Jennifer to tell her what I’ve been finding of another “Spiritual Center”s project and asked if we brought the community or some established institutions (such as a collection of church youth-groups or schools) together for the Sunrise Movement’s foundation for bringing the under40 environmentally passionate crowd together for structured movement, would she or some of her trainers be interested in sharing their “listening training” and “Authentic Relating Practices” to the community as part of our first community’s foundation.
Vacations Throughout (This has proven as important as reconnecting, in my ability to see really what we are, beyond the lens of here and now and all wrapped up in where I’m at, what we’re capable of through time as us alone and what isn’t working and has also simply enabled me to share my perspective with possible other routes to starting-up continually):
Books Shared with:
Tribe: This is where my true transiency really began. I gave books, meditation cushions, roofed a schoolhouse, gardened, helped however I could. In Indiana I connected the sustainability project with a wealth of the local community through the Methodist church because I enjoy going to church.
Tallahassee: Gifted copies of my Ideal as I found my way further
Austin: Gave copies of my Ideal to the founder of The End of The Line (The largest homeless and disabled tiny-house community in America) (No-Response)
Nashville: Tiny-house festival and essays as gifts to my friend’s lady who is earning her doctorates in Sociology at Vanderbilt and was specifically interested in studying homelessness. (No-Response / this is okay, reading my work is a gift to me that not everyone invests in, as they’re caught up in their own lives.)
Knoxville: This turned out to be a flunk, the man I went to see represented himself as a life coach and I thought ooooo how interesting that might be someone who could help with an employee introductory process and ideal defining, but he turned me away immediately and I was stranded in the snow until I could get out of town.
Church in my home town: I’ve given them essays of my perspective as it developed throughout time and spent months pacing in the basement their with all my brain-storming spread all around or working at a table in the fellowship hall, but nobody ever really seemed to understand that I was really really really trying to do something. Or maybe they really did understand, but communication wasn’t the strongest in how I eventually decided it was time to find something new. This quickly worked out for me and let me to the Art House project.
Political Activists (I haven’t believed in the democratic process for the longest time, after being apart of campaigns but I do see potential in people coming together for the purpose of activism. And I appreciate anyone who will really talk about the details of something like the Green New Deal and tell me how it doesn’t actually make sense to them, but I really support this more demanding action, myself. The political groups themselves (non-partisan or partied) don’t appear to do this much at all. Maybe someone will see what IS.):
Contribution: Canvased, talked to voters on the phone, listened to the results with everyone at the pub, felt the love, shared all that I wanted to happen freely, showed up IN PERSON to L.A. because the internet and all the peoples processes with that isn’t anything real for our relationships or for us to build something together. I was totally prepared to join the discussion about social reform and creative approach to no avail, barely a response. I poured myself into it. Answered all the peoples questions about Marianne according to reading her books in April (which nobody else did, officially with or just following the campaign), applied photos of dreamcatchers to all my answers to lead by example of making it my own and show that I was doing something. Nobody met up with me. Gave them my book but left the city just terrified and with bleeding feet. Attended public input sessions, city county meetings, homeless coalition meetings, a police led neighborhood meeting, anything I would hear about that sounded interesting, as I talked to various non-profit workers and volunteers throughout my city.
Statement: Lot’s to reflect on with this, but Marianne’s summery of “power-addicted and in effect fearful” is well put (though not in my home town, there, one of the candidates running against my friend went to the same church as my friend and me and we were all contently family as that ultimately should be).
I’m also now taking an interest in, learning what I can about (and using them as a first step in my “Business Model”) the Sunrise Collective, who are approaching the nations youth to inspire political activism for motions towards material sustainability. I feel like I (my business model) might really be the spiritual (effect of self) experience that the kids really need and think if these environmental activist groups were to get connected with the movement of traveling circus’s who’s missions are the promotion of sustainable processes, and who is also spread across the country in numerous smaller circus “troops” I worked with a really cool one (The Circus of Purpose, who are less of a “conscious-carnival” and more of a circus of sustainability and building trust). We worked the Nashville Tiny-town, tiny house festival last May. If this youth political movement and these offgid homesteading gypsy circus people got together and fell in love, the effect would be a beautiful campaign that would quake, travel, and fully live, reshaping our world for sure, but my approach is actually directly giving communities the resources / way for building the conversation and seeing clearly their lives so they can reshape that how they want to. Part of that is living an experience that they can’t envision for themselves yet, and then after that comes their own creative, improvements.
Meetups and Mountain Xpress:
I made an opinion in the mountain express according to the conversation on transit improvements that was being discussed. And cheering on the progress that has been discussed there and on the street and the fully suggested the idea of “Activist Housing” and a description of what “Circling” is and that we should all have some basic understandings of this practice as we continue seeking justice. I try to keep up on Mountain X’s voice of our community. I’ve been browsing some meetups and seeking in the community. This has shown me that there’s a lot of people working towards the same goal, defined differently, but nobody really yet passes my critique of complete understanding of the necessary foundation for the company that my experience has defined for me.
My Ideal:
I continue pursuing which is an ever changing process. I need some sort of return on my gift of life that is more providing than the ever evolving experience itself. What I really need is to solidify my foundation in community and for the communities I invest in or share with to recognize me as something of value, like a brother, to see me as worth and invite me to live better and achieve with them, because ultimately I’m sure that there is a way if the people can see the difference in worth between God’s workmanship of sustainability and our best potentials (justice) and the abstraction of value in our current economic state. To not move in a backwards direction with this, I have wanted to remain open and active, but within this I see that I have to find better ways to protect me against unhealthy relationships and im at a point of potentially deciding that I might be the only one who will provide for this.
I’m considering my options for creating a bridge through time for some years of my life. Maybe I won’t totally have to postpone Concept Stores and Activist oriented intentional urban / suburban homesteading for current stability or evidence of commitment by subscribing to the already in place system: for me, alone, to ultimately found my ideal, years down the road; as a foundation for the next generation of kids who we’re raised by the spirit of us being a people who if ever faced with, should seek remedy from institutional oppression. Though, to not have to be postponed until then, someone else will have to give. And can I keep the spirit alive through that time? I’ve already been greatly humbled by this pursuit.
Our Justice system doesn’t enable the best potential of our people. Our Mental Health approach is destructive and often rushed. Our people have expectations of lifestyles that don’t align with their deeper values. How do we create this shift in our people and how would this stimulate new markets for entrepreneurs?
I’d love to share the deeper philosophy, reasons, experience, and directions.
My point in development: (to be completed with experiences and ideal description as is defined in Out of Reach Ideal)
Am I?
(1)Ambitious and do I react accordingly:
(2)Persistent:
(3)Pivot when necessary:
(4)Committed:
Hopeful!
You could surely help me so much despite the outcome!
Drew Angstead
Entrepreneurial Writer
@ Concept Stores
Continuing with February:
A Mindful Morning: I woke the morning of this networking event in the shelter in black mountain. Two young dudes who were also there, one 30, one 19, drove to Asheville with me and we all listened to an old girl tell us about how society’s viewpoint is backwards (focusing on the problem to stimulate amend) and sharing her experience of growing up with a hormonal struggle that effected her lungs and how when she was feeling hopeful and optimistic her health was doing better and when she focused on her struggle, she suffered more, and how this related to approaching social reform. I raised my hand at the time of Q&A and asked her “So would you like us to define our ideals in order to refocus our movements in the right direction and send them to you?” She responded. “That would be amazing.”
I spent the next two days reading of her website for the Center of Collaborative Awareness to relate her perspective to my ideal and how I might be able to contribute or how she could help me. This was like a bullet to the head. I sort of did, but didn’t quite understand what was happening. I couldn’t think. I was taking for ever to read a very little of the website and at the top of the article it said (3minute read), how strange? (Is my coffee or something? Is someone shooting up some new thing in the bathroom or in their car? What’s happening?) The second day of trying at this letter, the entirety of Odd’s Cafe in West Asheville, sitting around me was trying to tell me that it was my computer that was making the weird brain dead and physically painful freeze happen. (OH SHIT IT”S A TRAP, she’s a sociopath, a classic child unloved who grows up to love what we despise). I burned it, I left, but it was all in my computer and then it was in my email and it was in my hand-style and I was trying to let it go, and then I did let it go. I let it all go, and I got sick in the after effect of it, bluh. But ultimately to entirely get away from this psber weopen that I’d been targeted with took weeks and by the time I was falling in love in early march I was still filtering through my life to escape it and it was between me and her and our ability to feel and it had abstracted our reasoning along with this other (Mooresville) communities drug usage. The phase II there( despite the neighborhoods being mostly very nice (with a strange “Fatboy” vibration) was opiod helly and like a mockery of disgraceful not-funny-jokes, tormenting my thoughts with unreasonable emotions (chemical reactions in my head). I got into encrypted email, the riseup network, proxies, web-servers, learning about what technology I could to help create walls between that cyber weapon and me, to take my life back into my own control. I really needed to make my own coffee, but because of itall, I couldn’t quite see yet how I’d implement that process or make a decision from the curb to make it happen. As this all was going down, I was not fully comprehending all the incompleteness that was happening until after it’s effect.
So February ended for me with a 4 day seminar in Mooresville which is a suburb of Charlotte. While I was out for a run in the morning (the seminar was going to start at 6p.m.), I dropped in on this cool little show I found with little angel wing trinkets and incense and crystals. There was a girl talking to the lady who owned the shop at the counter. I sort of smiled and waved a greeting and nosed on through the shop, stopping in a far room to sit in an arm chair and center myself. When I did this, I could hear the conversation at the front of the store. “I’m so glad that there’s other metaphysical community in MOORESVILLE.” I sort of popped into the conversation about spiritual community. I remember when I used to use the word metaphysical to define this sort of thing. That’s been years. The girl talking to the clerk appreciated the conversation taking new direction and told me that if I needed a friend I should get in touch with her and that I should send her my book. The next night, I got out of my seminar at midnight and responded to a text from her saying that we should go for a run. We made the plan at 1a.m. and the next morning at 10 she met me out of the Soup Kitchen which a homeless man had guided me to knowing about the first night I was in their town. We walked to her car, stashed my pack….
We ran through the nearby neighborhoods on the edge of Mooresville’s downtown. I skipped backwards, she skipped and we were watching each other as we did, her died hair was bopping and she was almost tom-boy, a really appeasing and trusting spirit in this moment. We talked, she expressed eventually that she was ready to end the run.
We paced the lot where her car was in a mild waltz of a conversation and I told her stories of all times of my life, people and places that I’d found.
We sat on the curb by her car and we kissed. I told her about how I wanted to start building a foundation for activism, about Sunrise Movement and their February hub meeting where the sunrise activist house team ended the meeting with this chant. I said to Mary, “repeat after me.”
“Forget your sacred offering!”
she sang a little softer than me …forget your sacred offering.
“There is a crack in everything.”
She repeated! …there is a crack in everything
“That’s how!”
!! …that’s how
“The light”
!! …the light!
“THAT’S HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN!!!”
She grinned really big. She loved that.
We talked on until she had to be getting to work.
There was so much that had amounted to this moment in my life falling apart. The disaster was already happening. The world was about to shut down. This girl, though, Mary Amen, helped me see that I needed to slow down and really feel the world again / live through processes of bettering myself like I really wanted to do. I decided to stay in Mooresville.
If I take one thing from her, truly to benefit myself, I think I’ll make it this. She told me before everything lost control, that I made her believe that she could achieve all the things she wants to in her life. That all of her ambitions are really possible.