Who Am I?
Who am I?
I was a fortunate child. I was considered gifted. I was decently skilled at everything I tried, to the point of not really having to try all that hard at much more much of my early life. I learned what this practice was and what I was dependent on through my later journey. I was free. I was well treated and from the way I was raised I went out into the world hopeful and believing there was potential in people, and that I could shape the world to make it how I wanted and live however I wanted, bravely.
As an adolescent I began developing what I later, after trying some different directions of pursuing myself, determined was my truest passion; through the way I was best able to bond with my mother during that time. She would occasionally invite me along on her work ventures. As the communications director for Missouri National Education Association (a teachers union) she made a once yearly tour to elementary schools around the state with the Cat in The Hat, and other periodic trips to specific school districts in the state when teachers working environments or students learning environments were threatened. When she would invite me along, she would explain what we was happening and give me a camera or an audio recording device and I would ask the people, the students, the teachers, the rallying community questions about their thoughts on whatever that event was about and take photo’s of the happenings.
One of my earliest jobs gave me a second piece to this passion that I was developing. The job was waiting on guests and working behind the scenes at a high-end, private wedding venue in a small dogwood forest outside Jefferson City, Missouri. In the fall, the setting sun would shine through the red leaves of the dogwood trees, through the windows of the ballroom, onto the granite floor. At about 15 years old, while I played video games with a friend in his bedroom, his mother came in and told us that her friend had a whole staff call in before an event at her venue and needed help preparing the place for a wedding. My friends sort of slacked off and took a long break through the whole thing while I continued, taking my work seriously and I ended up doing most of the work myself, so the owner of the venue offered me a job, which I ended up holding onto for the next 7years loosely as it gave me an unusual freedom and I simply fell in love with the work so deeply. Through high school I would work events, there, for a few nights a weekend; making $100.00 or so in a night for enough weekends to through myself into some direction of indefinite term travel for my own comprehensions of what the world was, and of what sort of person I wanted to be. One of the guys who I was working with there shifted my thoughts on what I wanted in the world as we were dancing, washing the dishes. He had really big, thick glasses that he sometimes took off because “don’t you just want to look through a distorted perception sometimes?”, he had wondered at times if he was on the autism spectrum just because of the way he was and he had this one thought about how maybe he was born in the wrong time in history, like he would’ve done better in the world if he’d been born much earlier, like maybe his destiny in life was to be something like a sheep herder in New Zealand. Actually, last I heard, he was working in conservation of a state park so I suppose he followed his dream. But this perspective about living authentically and simply and envisioning something different according to what I really felt I wanted, that I defined really inspired me and I began a list in one of my notebooks called the “Micheal’s Right List” drawing connections between the things I wanted of my life and what I felt needed to happen in the world, which initially was some idea of help “displaced people” find where they fit in. I sort of felt like an alien to the world that was, as well, so I flew to Hawaii for short time with the radical idea of networking farms to fit people where they best fit. I was still a child and had never been so far from the world I knew, and new nothing of what I was getting myself into.
I slowed this sort of search for myself for while, while falling in love once, and then twice, which redirected me for at least a couple years before I began free-thinkings about creating some entrepreneurial way for myself again. This time my passionate focus was on tinyhouses. One of my father’s friends from childhood was following me on social media and commented that if I could put together a business plan for my tiny house manufacturing company, then he’d fly me down to Fort Lauderdale for a weekend and we’d talk about setting goals. I didn’t know what a business plan included, so I asked the internet and began researching all the questions I had about each piece. This plan then, never stopped developing as I learned and it’s direction changed and it was the starting point of the business model I’m writing to you about now.
Now, through the more recent journey of developing my ideas, and understanding what my dream is going to require 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 and I need guidance in the managing the business, itself. I’ve such an extensiveness of my considering of what is best for making this project unlike the failures I’ve observed that in whole, medium.com measured the collective works of perspective and example storytelling as hours worth of reading and so I don’t include everything here. I’ve summarized the thoughts development in some more in depth story telling to make the read more enjoyable.
When this journey is all over, people will 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 Ryan, 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 enjoyably 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 how things should be for me and what all I could appreciate. I remember one note of that time, that made about a child who was being raised on the community going from person to person curiously as I had done myself to take interest in what they were doing, and I appreciated having that effect. It wasn’t a process everyone had. After my journaling, I left the land for a run / hike with an unusual goal. As, since I already wasn’t really feeling especially hearty with any friendships 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, necessity of 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 acquaintance (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 the city’s expression. 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 community. 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.
(Indiana) 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, I found that all the people I’d met around the town were in the congregation. I was overwhelmed by the crowd of people I’d met all being present and in the room with me, 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’s local business movement, 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 and I was yet a scared, determined, and not yet so humbled child, 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, what didn’t align with my values of what was available to me in the world, 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 truly 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 for more all encompassing comprehension. 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 Ryan’s house 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.
It was snowing in Knoxville at the time, and he’s lying. Idk if I struggled to communicate something, but I definitely didn’t say anything about being mental. haha
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 Companywas 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 back to the hand numbing cold, 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 in the result of this happening, 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 and then you loose your mind due to such a crowd as that homeless community waaaas. 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 all 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 an entrepreneurial 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 in Asheville; 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. “Maybe these passionate political people will innable this work outside of the political spectrum to build their market.” (They weren’t that deep.) 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 Activism Culture
@this point of leaving Loss Angeles I had begun a monthly reviewing process like management reporting to help with reflection on whatall I was working towards and what was working and failing.
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, wind battered, 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
The monthly reviews continued outlining my experiences, my attempts at progressing and all my failure through the end of the summer with very small focuses and points about my life, at which point they became more of a quarterly review of greater oversite…
Late Summer turned into fall and I was most passionately invested in the Seek Healing community (S.H.), 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 I gave; though, from my experiences since then, I see that what I learned from Seek Healing 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 S.H., 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 et. a public posting board separated into Justice and Sustainability motions (which if we had, everyone would know that a J was planning a benefits show for 12 baskets, but without it few other than me knew that this was in development). 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. Students from a local school were helping by serving tables as a field trip and within my thoughts I was shaking my head, Micheal was saving me, by bringing about healthy conversation as if the background wasn’t present, telling me about where to start building, something like “We have to begin with the people’s ability to connect with each-other.”
At this time of leaving these two primary communities behind, S.H. and 12 baskets, 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. Kate Rapp (my most active follower through 2019). I wanted to weigh the option 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 Shilo, a friend from when I was much younger, a little over half the age I am now. Her and her brother, Isaac, 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. Asheville was an eastern US temperate rain-forest and just like the sky’s I felt so much more compassion, now, for the Cedar Trees on the outskirts of Jefferson City. 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 that 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, or the larger neighbor, Columbia 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)
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) I want 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 little 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 received some 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 beach-ball 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.)
In January, 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 for 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 a 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 first draft of this letter, 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 the foundation’s website’s 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.
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 enough to respond, 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 NO IT’S A TRAP, she’s a sociopath, a classic child unloved who grows up to love what we despise or it’s someone else hurting her!). I left the letter, but it was all in my computer and then it was in my email and it was in my hand 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 psyber weapon 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 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 (it was the beginning of Covid), but because of it all, 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 shop 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 (Goddess-like, beautiful, powerful looking) 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. I’d spent the morning writing about the foundational demonstration at a table surrounded by the clients of the soup kitchen. My emotional perspective of her meeting me here, was along the lines of I want to take you and show you everything I’ve experienced from the fog rolling in off the pacific over your shoulders on the bluffs along Highway 1 to the fire dancers between bins of spraypaint at Nashville Night market, to the Medicine Tribe, the church I lived inside for years in Missouri and One Million Cups in Asheville. I definitely wanted to claim her, but couldn’t after so much time of being on my own, comprehend the feeling of what it meant that this person could actually be my one other. Mary and I walked to her car, stashed my pack inside….
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, both of us smiling wide. 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, standing on things like a garden bench and hopping over sidewalk railings in a natural way 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.
In Early March, I was investing myself in this little community I’d found. Applying the foundation pieces and what I’ve acquired as a new market researching list to their community from a table at Panera Bread and to greater success by going to a couple churches and the chamber of commerce in person, this was all fine, and I was running and meditating and reading; tuning back into myself and my heart and mind were both aloft with love hormones they’d forgotten existed, but that was when the world became aware of Covid. This changed everything and everyone closed off. Now I didn’t know anyone. I was lacking resources and I was alone in a forest in a foreign place in what looked like it could be the apocalypse and people were scared of strangers. The following months were a series of traumatic experiences and I didn’t really find myself again until later summer. I made it back to Asheville, started writing book reviews as a hobby, watched the whole Black Lives Matter experiences from Pack Square park through the summer, started talking to the Asheville Survival Program about intentional community (setting a hearty example and seeking their deeper investment in me), and where I found myself was in the buskers of the late summer streets. I would find someone playing beautiful music and sit nearby for awhile to vibe with them and talk to people as they passed. This is how I met Yssabel. Yssabel is 17 and plays all sorts of instruments, busking and has acquired a sort of local fame because she plays beautiful music and dresses in clothes she makes herself. She’s the girl who’s always wearing a top hat. I started asking her and her friends if they’d figured their way or established their activist house yet and we got eventually to me pitching her the idea of recycling old nice textiles from dry cleaners to make meditation cushions. Maybe we could work with local growers for materials too. After all, they’re increasing in popularity. Asheville City Schools teach meditation, but when I was in school I wasn’t gifted that curriculum. Meditation cushions have gone up in price $10 in only a few years. I know because I’ve gifted them to friends like Mary, to the medicine tribe, and to Seek Healing throughout my journey. There are a few US made organic meditation cushion brands but I would pay more for a cushion that Yssabel made from recycled textiles, with local buckwheat fill. I bought Yssabel a meditation cushion and she told me she’d measure it and first make a cover and see what she could do. Ultimately, she is still simply having fun at 17 years old, though. She doesn’t have the same vision yet, that I have or feel compelled to work, how I’m driven. Just before I left Asheville so that I could apply myself to pushing my life forwards and continue my seeking, here in October 2020, we had a night juggling and talking, led by a clown on Pack Squares soap box preaching to us about a Lobster God Cult, he would shout “Can I get an Amen?” and all us gathered around would shout “AMEN!”. That night, her and her roommate who’s a passionate photographer were talking about “traveling” and excited for their trip with the Clown down to New Orleans for Halloween. After a couple weeks of turning the Carolina Cushion’s Company idea over, she told me she wouldn’t want to commit to much.
