Thank you so much for your kind words, Colin! Yes, we were in Bend for the last 5 years or so. My family and I relocated to Portland just this past year. I have never been to Eugene but it is definitely on my list of places to visit!

Guns to Gardens is an ongoing project that is about to have its fourth official event at Antioch Church in Bend on March 15th. Now that I am in Portland I am working on connecting people who might be interested in standing up similar events in other cities. Here is my number if you would like to connect some time! (408) 528-5377. I’d love to chat more and learn about the work you are doing with the Elsewhere Ensemble. I was a music major in college and studied the trumpet for many years so I was very excited to see a musician/composer within the cohort!.

I wanted to let you know too that I loved seeing your garden spade in your video (really beautiful) and I was very excited to hear you talk about Guns to Garden Tools. I had heard Jer talk about it on a podcast and I was telling everyone about the project after that. Just hearing about it gave me a lot of hope. It struck me as such a creative and real way to address a very polarized issue and I thought it was such a shining example of finding a third way. So I was very excited to see that you had been a part of that!

Thank you for your post too, which so simply and clearly brought out some of the points that really resonated with me …but much more so in retrospect after reading your post and the way you framed them. “Who wins and who loses?” really got me to thinking that the current administration is very strongly entrenched in the idea of winners and losers (and making sure that someone is the loser). I like to believe there’s another way, beyond this winner and loser binary…one which lifts everyone up in different ways. It sounds like you all touched on that with the Guns to Garden tools project. I’d love to hear more about your experience of that at some point and if it’s ongoing?