Hi! I'm Jared, from California -- storyteller / musician / educator / backcountry cook

jaredwood (58)in #introduceyourself • 7 years ago

Hi Steemians! (Steemers?) (eSteemed?)

eSteemed Steemians,

Hi! My name’s Jared. I'm really stoked to be here, so I brought you some yums.

I’m an educator, a musician, a word wizard, backcountry chef, urban schemer, utopian dreamer, and I have more harebrained ideas than I know what to do with. When I'm lucky, the ideas get a hold of me and just don't let go until I get them out.

Like this one, which woke me up at 4AM and wouldn't let me sleep til it was drawn:

pan perdu.jpg

It’s an album cover of my band in bed with a human-sized piece of French toast, if we were called “pan perdu” (that's misspelled French for "lost bread," or French toast), and we did a cover album called "covers."

Actually, we're called Open Sorcerer. Here we are playing a house show and benefit for the Ugandan Art Consortium, surrounded by their vibrant paintings. I play keys.

open sorcerer.jpg

Right now I'm in the foothills of the Sierras with my partner, Brooke, on a little retreat. She's pretty great. She took a lot of these pictures, and she's taught me a ton.

me n brookey.jpg

Most of the time I live in Berkeley, California, across the bay from San Francisco. 90% of the time I tell people I’m from Berkeley, they ask, “Are you a student?... or… professor?”

About 5% of the time, they go, “BERZERKELEY???”

Yeah, I go. BERZERKELEY.

[photo by Wikimedia commons user Urban~commonswiki]

I love where I live. I love the people-- so many artists, wingnuts, activists, queers, healers, community builders. People of all stripes, unafraid to live life unabashedly, and, often times, not only accepting of people's differences, but celebrating them.

And the land! Coastal hills, ocean, redwoods, birds, wetlands, food that grows wild in the soil or on the rocks and fog that tucks you in at night; super dreamy, especially if you're a water and mountains person like myself. It’s a damned privilege to be here, and I don’t take it for granted. In fact, I’m super privileged. I live in a concrete castle:

orange castle.jpg

I've been in The Orange Castle 2.5 years. It’s the first time I’ve ever had creative control in crafting a living space, the first time I've ever had my own place, and it feels really really good. The orange room GLOWS in the morning sun. Admittedly, the heights are not quite as awe-inspiring as this castle I got to look over once upon a time in Patagonia Chilena.

Cerro Castillo.jpg

Anyway, before totally lucking into my current abode, I lived in housing co-ops with lots of people where we lived like a big, happy sometimes-dysfunctional family. I even co-founded one while I was a student: The Trash Farm. There, I proudly fed 11 humans on a diet of 95%+ dumpster dived food.

More often than not, we ate really good food thrown out by fancy markets. Once or twice a week I'd come home with my little hatchback packed to the brim with food they tried to throw away. Then we'd have to figure out what to do with 20 pounds of tomatoes, like in the pic below, from wikimedia user Sigurdas.

Discarded_food_(2).jpg

Other times, it was day-old bagels. Lots and lots of day-old bagels.

I shared my first room at The Trash Farm with 3 other people. It was just a couple mattresses on the floor, and when you wanted to go to sleep at night, you cuddled on in wherever you could find space. Freed up from needing to make money, it was like we could do whatever we pleased. Ahh, youth... Forever naïve!

In a talk I saw about the future of money systems, Charles Eisenstein said that what the world needs right now is people who are absurdly naïve, because our problems demand solutions well beyond our current conventional reckoning.

Well, that was pretty affirming, because I had just come out of putting all my energy into an absurdly naïve dream that failed gorgeously: Villagecraft.

Screen Shot 2017-06-29 at 11.02.30 PM.png

Our idea was to build a network for free and cheap in-person educational activities and a platform where people would be merited by what they teach and share, and what they’ve done to offer their gifts to others.

She's drilling a log to make room for some shiitake spawn so that wood will into mushrooms.

And he's showing folks how to start a fire with a bowdrill:

And everyone's having fun!

Just imagine if all skills and knowledges were freely shared, and people got to choose for real what they wanted to do, and how to contribute to their communities.

That was our dream, and we went for it for 2 and a half bootstrapped years before burning out, having almost no conception of how naïve our aims were. Only afterward did we find out that projects like these apparently just don’t get funded, because investment professionals consider them to be nearly impossible to carry out.

Whatever.

Still, I say: forever naïve!

Oh, and, speaking of naïve… Check out the guy in the top right of this picture, still wearing his oven mitt.

That's @ItchyKitten, with his "empanada assembly line." Villagecraft was actually his brilliant brainchild, which he invited me into co-creating. I met @ItchyKitten years ago quite serendipitously and circuitously through couchsurfing and he’s easily one of my favorite humans ever. It's largely due to his encouragement that I'm here writing this now. And the strange coincidence of simultaneously finding out about Steemit from another cherished and revered friend, @AnwenBaumeister.

Thanks, internet! You work in mysterious ways.

That's a “visualization of the network structure of the Internet by Hal Burch and Bill Cheswick," recopied from Livin’ in a Mycelial World by Claire L Evans for ScienceBlogs.com.

Looks a lot like a mycelial network, the vastly interconnected underground structures that give rise to mushrooms [below left]. Or like 'dark matter,' whatever that is [below right].

mycelium:dark matter.jpg

Or multiple instances of a basic pattern for truly durable non-linear existence.

In his "6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World" TED Talk, Paul Stamets said:

I believe the invention of the computer Internet is an inevitable consequence of a previously proven biologically successful >model. The earth invented the computer internet for its own benefit, and we, now, being the top organism on this planet, are >trying to allocate resources in order to protect the biosphere.

This idea totally blew my mind. It just makes so much sense.

Can we make it true together? Pretty please?

The internet needs our help. Because sadly, like just about all other technologies, it seems, it has been leveraged by powerful people in a way that has actually increased inequality of wealth and prosperity-- to their most unjust global proportions yet. Even The World Bank said so, as reported in this 2016 NY Times article.

wealth distribution.jpg

Just look at that! WHAT THE FUCK! Where in nature does anything like that happen? Certainly not in any places I'd ever want to live.

By contrast, mushrooms do an amazing job of breaking down nutrients and distributing them amongst ecosystems,
and they have been around before any other lifeforms, and they will outlast us for sure. They know what's up. Decentralization is the time-honored way of the world, not centralization.

So now we're kind of back to why I am SO fired up for Steemit and related appropriate technologies. They could maybe actually help us transition to the only truly sustainable and abundant future possible: a decentralized, collaborative and cooperative one.

And, as you can tell, I love writing. This place is just the extra oomph I need to serve up some long-simmering stews. Like the unlikely cooking adventures I go on in the wilderness.

twiggy fire.jpg

Or this pizza baked on a camp stove…

Or reflecting on my work as an experiential educator, focusing on project-based learning and getting the most from one's direct experience of everyday life, encouraging rather than stunting the glorious natural genius all kids have.

Just check out this shrine my 12-year-old homeschooler made for his first ever houseplant, BUM, Beautiful Utter Magnificence: