A lil backstory: 

This part of the website right here, feels like the most challenging part of the whole website for me to put together. I’ve been blessed to live a very big, strange, painful, yet ultimately magical life. In fact, I feel like my two biggest blessings in life have been the relationships I’ve been given, and the story I’ve been able to live. Yet the profoundness of this blessing makes it hard for me to condense the story into a few paragraphs. I’ve been trying to write my story for years now in a book to give it its proper honoring, yet things, developments and side quests keep happening at such a rapid pace. I often think it’s best to just let y’all tell my story when I’m gone and it’s been finished. Yeah I feel pressured to finish this website. So here we go! 

My port of origin is Portland, Oregon. Born to hippie parents that migrated from the bay with the back to the land movement my earliest years were spent on a pot farm. It was the hippie outlaw era, and my dad was definitely gangster in that way. He was a powerful figure, who had a gravity about him. I remember all kinds of cool, creative and strange cats hanging out making music and telling jokes around campfires too deep in the night. My mom was a shy choir earth, mama with undiagnosed autism, she spent her time with the plants and animals. It was a happy fairytale, until our place was robbed, and my father was murdered.

My mother, unsupported in her autism and CPTSD, developed a wicked drug addiction to try to cope, we became homeless bouncing from trap house to trap house. Oftentimes I wasn’t in school. My childhood innocence was over. 

A shy observant child, he can call either traumatized, or an old soul, or probably more accurately both. Neuro spicy like my mother I struggled to communicate, and to speak. Eventually, I was kidnapped by some other drug addicts who had in a not very well executed plot attempted to save me from my situation. Yet my situation with them was worse. Eventually, I was taken from them, and adopted. 

Unfortunately, after a few years with the man who adopted me, I was abandoned again at the house of an emotionally, mentally and sometimes physically abusive old lady who kept me because I came with a check. We moved around a lot, living in small town trailer parks, and section 8 housing apartment complexes. Always the new kid, I was bullied a lot. She changed partners a lot, and I had to deal with a lot of bad stepdad’s. Men who are also mean and abusive to me. 

A silver lining was that old lady’s ex-husband, my grandpa Dave. A larger than life logger, a big hearted hard partying collector of a tribe of orphans like me that he gathered into “a family”, it was a surprisingly a diverse tribe of people from various walks of life from other loggers to bikers to hippies, outcasts, weirdos and those who found their survival on the fringes of society and sanity. That was people of African-American, indigenous, Latino, and of course, European ethnicities. Being a part of that group was surprisingly influential. 

Like with everyone else, puberty was also pivotal. Within a few short years I had engaged in all those informal ancient rites of passages: I lost my virginity, I tried alcohol, cannabis, mushrooms, and acid for the first time, I became a Buddhist upon hearing about it for the first time, I watched fight club and the matrix over and over again, I fell in love with hip-hop, was given the name, Plaedo. I moved out of the house of that abusive old lady. The era of my heroes journey of being the orphan was over, and now began my explorations into being the wanderer, the warrior, and the martyr. 

After high school, I immediately picked up the family trade of growing and slang in cannabis on the black market. Without any guidance, I quickly found myself a homeless 19 year-old with a felony for growing and selling cannabis, lol. Still slang and weird. I met an older man who took me under his wing. He let me move into his house. Yet within a month or two, he had me selling coke. He had me on a quota, driving from city to city. He had no problem being violent and forcing out his competition, and they earned many enemies in the area. And a flash of drama, one day he and his girlfriend broke up, and he robbed me as well as his other foot soldiers and left town, none of us to see him ever again. Also, did I mention the police were after him as he was leaving town? The vacuum of his karma shifted a lot of gravity onto me. Police would pull me over in my car and search me for drugs, rival cruise would pick fights with me in public. It got so intense, I spent a year working 12 hour days doing roadside construction paying off court debt and saving money. After work I kept to myself, did psychedelics and began to write poetry. After I saved enough,  I took off to the other side of the globe and I moved to Thailand for most of a year.

Thailand was a rebirth, now a college student, I was blessed with the opportunity to be able to hang with cool college kids from around the world, explore, jungles, spend time in tribal villages, and go Feral at full moon parties, I also reconnected with my Buddhist foundation at the monastery local to my neighborhood in Bangkok, where I lived. One day before leaving, among those I have been studying with for a few months said I had the soul of a bodhisattva. Now this wasn’t in any formal ritual, but in my heart, it was a Satori moment. A moment I have spent the rest of my life exploring the meaning of. I do consider myself a bodhisattva and I’ve made my life about that actualization. 

Coming back to the states, I knew I couldn’t go back to my old way and my old scene, Still a college student, I threw myself into the studies of anthropology, sociology, psychology, creative writing, history, and most profoundly philosophy (I would eventually earn philosophy in general studies degrees). One day, still fresh back to America. I was walking through campus and I saw a sign for an upcoming anti-war protest. I went to a planning meeting, and although I never performed before or thought of performing before, my sacred intuition, a mysterious impulse bloomed out of me, and I asked if I could read a poem at the protest. They were confused, as was I, but they needed speakers so they said yes. That day I performed a poem that was given to me in Thailand, “Let your light shine” by Marianne Williamson. After my first performance, I got a lot of positive feedback, including from a female college student who would go on to be a major figure in my life, my first major love and my baby mama. After the performance, my life changed rapidly, a female college student, and I began to date, and I began to organize and perform at events around campus and the community. I became a local folk hero in that small college town. And I became depressed. As soon as I graduated, I used my status as an award winning college slam poet and campus activist community organizer to book a national tour. I hit the road, performing and gathering experiences exploring places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and New Orleans. 

While, still on the road, one night after a show, I had my first experience with DMT, now that’s a whole story for another context, but it was terrifying to say the least. I left the experience in a dissociative state. I left the road, went back to my college hometown, broke up with my girlfriend and moved out of my place. I found myself wandering the streets of Seattle Washington. I had no direction. I had no Community. I found myself reading a lot, I found myself drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes hanging out with crows in parking lots. I wandered more streets and performed at open mics. I began to make the transition from Poet to rapper. I reconnected with my old teacher Buddhism. I began to speak to my ex girlfriend and future wife (and future ex-wife! lol) again. We decided to start a life together in Eugene, Oregon.

And upon moving to Eugene, Oregon, I found my home and my Wandering art type era of life was over. For now, it was time to become the warrior and the martyr in the hero's journey. Our experience in Eugene opened up like a portal of synchronicity, instantly we found ourselves living in a groovy custom built mini mansion from the 1970s, I found myself working as a Permaculture gardener for the American shamanic practitioner and pioneer Nikki Skully, who have been married to the manager of the Grateful Dead. I found myself working amidst the aged elders of that scene while learning about Permaculture gardening. Another string of serendipitous events led me to seeing the first Occupy Eugene, March in front of thousands of people. I did a great job and instantly I was known all over town as a cheerleader for the revolution. All of my work and Eugene to this day Reverberates out of that day. I began to organize protest camps for homeless people to sleep in. I co-founded the Eugene Avant, an anarchist Permaculture gardening group that was active for years and delivered a TEDxBend talk on the experience. I mentored at risk street youth. I performed at festivals and raves. I raised kids with my family on a permaculture homestead I cultivated. At the closest my life would ever be to becoming “normal” was the moment, another call to initiation came with a rapturous force. 

We’re call it the 2019-2021 portal that had to happen before I could once again be reborn , this time as the Raccoon Wizard. Within 2019, I saw numerous traumatizing events while working street outreach culminating in my client murdering someone a few hundred feet ahead of me. The aftermath of this event would lead to my program being shut down, me losing my job, and me being the star witness on a murder trial.  Meanwhile, one of my closest friends and someone who I was then regularly spending time with, a righteous Latinx activist, was murdered the day after we spent a day working in our community garden together. It was also during this time that my wife of 12 years would leave me for another man and I would leave my Permaculture garden, my family, my home. 

Costa Rica was also a life transforming portal, a pilgrim edge that leveled me spiritually, socially and artistically. I returned to America and moved in with my new girlfriend and started a new life on my first day back in the country little would I know that within a month Covid quarantine would begin. Little did I know that our house will go for sale at the beginning of the quarantine and we will find ourselves homeless at the time that I’d accepted a job working at A now legal Homeless Camp . Account that was created in the way of our legal protest activity years earlier. Now this new relationship, I found myself in a relationship with a woman who would be my twin flame if there ever was such a thing in my life. We had such a strong connection, but the timing of our meeting was equally as bad. And it was one of the most beautiful, transformative, and heartbreaking experiences I’ve ever had. After many, make up and break ups, make up some break ups. I moved out and spent the rest of the Covid era alone learning to sit with my pain. 

In a lot of ways, Covid was the grand reshuffling of Society event, and as social life re-emerged that was on that early wave out performing at renegades, illegal forest parties, through these experiences, I found a new audience, I found my way into the house that I’ve lived in and been the facilitator of ever since. A house known for years now as a local gathering spot of powerful souls and epic gatherings. It was turning this time that became an early employee, an architect of Everyone Village, arguably the most successful legal transitional housing program i.e. Homeless camp in the state of Oregon. I began to offer workshops and step into my role as a facilitator and teacher. I continue to raise my kid, and enjoy being a soccer dad when not out performing at all festivals and raves. I continued to cultivate my powers as my reputation grew until I became known as somewhat of a folk hero, hood legend known around the way, as the raccoon wizard bodhisattva philosopher of play, Plaedo. And I continue to work, love, spread magic and play…