The Perks of Doing What You Love

A wise man once told me "You have to know what you're willing to die for, to find out what you will live for."  I was told my whole life to follow my dreams, but the paths people were pushing me in were against my dreams, in many ways and I never bothered to consider that until a few years ago.  In the last 5 years, I've stopped pursuing the dreams others held for me, and started pursuing my own   I realized most of the people telling me what to do were dreamers that never had the balls to pursue what they truly wanted.  It is for this reason that many of these people are no longer in my life, as they pushed me to pursue their dreams for them.  

The choice to say "Fuck it all, I'm doing what I want" wasn't easy as I was raised to try and please those around me.  When planning my future, I didn't really consider what I actually wanted to do with my life, I considered things that others said I should do.  I took their advice, as they had not done what they were advertising and their lives sucked.  In reality, I should not have been taking advice from people who don't live how they preach.  Life would have been both harder and easier for me in many ways, but I would have been much better off. 

Against everyone in my family's advice, I dropped out of college and started pursuing what I wanted.  I got a lot of backlash, first from friends, confused and worried.  I had a friend say he was concerned when I told him I wanted to build an earthship (a sweet self sustaining partially buried off grid house) and be a farmer.  Needless to say, he wasn't my friend much longer.  My family saw blips of my off the grid lifestyle and touted how it was no way to live, while all of them had been talking about living that same way my whole life.  Through all of this, I kept pursuing the things that are important to me, and it finally seems to be panning out.  

The past four years have been crazy, wonderful and rough all at the same time.  I've been in varying stages of broke, or running out of money the whole time. I've been building myself up from zero in many ways, having pretty much no skills to speak of other than art and baking before these past few years.  My relationship is not perfect and I definetely recognize my role in how things are.  The opposition I've faced from my family and now the law have been extremely tough to deal with.  Despite everything, I'm glad for (most of) the choices I've made in terms of following my dreams.  I'm finally starting to feel some of the perks of doing what I love, instead of what I think I'm supposed to do.

For one thing, when you start doing what you want, your schedule frees up.  All the sudden, I went from a strict time lifestyle to doing things when I want, depending on the priority of the task.  This meant one day I could be cleaning at noon, the next I could be cooking, or gardening, or sewing or any of the many things I pursue in any given day.  People who work from home or for themselves enjoy the fact that they work on their schedule at their pace.  Being your own boss is nice too, as you have only you to answer to.  There's freedom in that.

For the last 4 years, I've been working at getting started lamp-working borosilicate pipes, or in easier terms, glassblowing.  I've had the glass bug my whole life, having watched glassblowers at all sorts of events and music festivals.  I got a lampworking apprenticeship in college, which was brief at best.  Basically the only people who continued in that were the ones who had the money to fork over for their own setup, which wasn't me. The guy that taught me glassblowing told me I needed 10,000 USD to get started, at a minimum and that he had actually spent more like 15 thousand in the 8 months prior.  I was a bit discouraged but I resolved I could do it cheaper.  I found I could, but it honestly never made sense to allocate the funds towards glassblowing in the states, when it could be better served investing in other things.

When I moved to Mexico that all changed.  Within the first week or so we had acquired an investor for the glass business, and we got our torch, some tools and some glass.  This was accomplished with his donation, plus the donation of a few others.  We waited for our friend to bring us our materials and moved up the mountain with them soon after receiving them.  We ran out of money and the torch sat on a shelf for months, when we finally got a few investments to kick start the business. 

My first several attempts at pipes were pitiful and stressful at best.  It caused a lot of anxiety in both John and I as we had gotten more donations and investors and I wasn't producing what I said I could.  In many ways, while my quality is way up, I still make mistakes and I take way longer than I should to get things done.  Despite that, I'm seeing the perks of the job. I've blown glass in front of a lot of my friends, getting to see the wonder in their faces.   I've sold some pieces to friends and got to witness their first use of their pieces.  

I sold a sherlock that took me a long time to a friend recently.  I took that sherlock, and many smaller cheaper pipes with me, hoping maybe they'd like it as much as I did.  I successfully completed a few difficult techniques to make it happen, and it honestly turned out way better than I expected for my skill level.  I showed the pipes to my customer and she instantly gravitated to the sherlock, saying that was the one she wanted.  She then disclosed it was the first pipe she had ever owned.  That's a cool feeling, being the one to make someone's first pipe, and getting to see their excited faces over something you produced.  I explained how I made it, which made it more real.  I blow glass to make pipes that work well, that people love.  

The time I sold my first bong is another great feeling, in a different way.  My friend bought it both because she wanted a bong and because it was my first bong.  The decent price probably had something to do with it as well. It was just a 3 inch tall clear little bong with a funny bend in the next, as I forgot to poke the carb hole until it was too late.  She took a liking to it and bought it, and we all tried it together.  That mini bong was the first bong one friend had ever hit, and it was the first I had ever made.  For what it was, it hit well.  Her only problem was the small bowl sized, which I fixed by the end of the evening.  It worked so well for her, she tried to use her mouse as a lighter one day.  

I wrote an article recently about how I learned to cook.  Anyone that read that, or knew me at that time, knows I was terrible cook before the last several years.  At this point I've had several agorist food businesses, my most recent in Acapulco, which is blossoming into a private chef gig too. I've come a long way from bland food and undercooked beans.  My favorite moment is after I've finished cooking and my guests are eating, with smiles on their faces  You know you're finally a good cook where just about everyone who eats your food is surprised.  Most of the people in Acapulco who have eaten my food have become regulars, or as much so as their budget will allow.  It helps that I offer American style comfort food in Mexico. It also helps that I'm using higher quality but cheaper mexican ingredients. Nothing beats being far from home and tasting food that takes you right back, in the way only an American chef can produce it.  

In my last 4 years as a farmer, I've made a lot of mistakes.  I've killed a lot of plants, both directly and indirectly.  I've wasted a lot of fruit, just by not staying up on harvesting.  I've had a lot of loss by things I couldn't control, like frost. All in all, I'm getting to the point where I know what I am doing, I just have to put the work in, both thought and physical work, to make it happen. 

At the end of the day though, there's nothing better than walking around your yard and coming with a basket of tomatoes or a giant watermelon.  Just walking through a healthy garden, even if it's not producing can do good for you, if you're the one that made it happen  There's nothing better than picking your own flowers, and producing your own medicines.  It's a great moment when you do a dab and you know you produced it.  You feel the healing effects and you know you can produce something that works.  I get the same feeling every time I use my plaintain herb and comfrey leaf salve and it gets rid of a mosquito bite, or my giant spider-bitten lip.

It's moments like these that remind me why I am doing all of this.  They remind me why I chose to go against the grain instead of with what everyone felt I should be doing.  Moments like these make the times you have no money and rents coming due worth it.  At the end of the day, I could be in the states, in the rat race with everyone else.  Instead I live on a mountain in Mexico, and I live a life that's actually interesting.  I produce things that people value, and despite my pessimistic outlook, things are starting to pay off.