Spirituality

Growing up I imagined the spiritual world to be somewhere out there. A place outside of myself that I would maybe get to one day if I was good (Heaven) or burn eternally in if I was bad (Hell).

I grew up in Atlanta, GA in the 1980s and 90s and was subject to a pretty conservative Christian framework of what life was on Earth. After moving to California when I was 25, my whole world changed. 

My first ten years were spent in San Francisco where I was exposed to a more cosmopolitan view of the world. I started having firsthand experiences with people who held wildly different perspectives. They shared yoga, vegetarianism, ecstatic dance, plant medicine, psychedelics, and tea ceremony.

I fully immersed myself in the culture. I grew a goatee several inches long. I got invited to private communities that would host all night parties that had…well, those are stories for another time…point is my world was exponentially expanded.

Pandora’s box had been opened for me and there was no way to go back to the way of thinking I had once held in the bible belt down south. 

The most transformative piece of my everything I was experiencing was the storytelling project SOULS of Society that I started in 2011. I walked the streets everyday connecting with strangers to hear their stories and take their portrait so I could share them on my blog with the community.

That project educated me on life and the nature of reality more-so than any class, textbook, or center of higher learning ever had. I was learning firsthand in real time from the diverse demographic of an international city. I communed with everyone from tech workers at Twitter to homeless people in the Tenderloin. I absorbed the stories of yogis in Noe Valley, street kids in Haigh-Ashbury, and professional cookie makers in Dolores Park in the Mission.