Season 2 – Episode 6. Released on March 17.
“Stirring the Pot” (with Lew Ross) Part 1
“Power and Love” (with Lew Ross) Part 2
PART 1
STIRRING THE POT
INTRO
Today I’m at Jim Warren skate park with Lew Ross, creator of Fickle Skateboards and social activists from North Side in Cincinnati Ohio. Lew crafts each board with the intention to encourage young skaters to be who they are and not conform to the ideals of the modern skating culture.
BUMPER
I am Tajci.
At 19 I was a superstar and I was lost inside. I left it all behind, switched continents and started all over. Years later I found myself lost again. This time in the American dream.
This is a story about awakening. About living the life you were created for. About going inward and discovering the joyous and purposeful person you and I are both meant to be.
This is “Waking Up In America.”
TAJCI
Welcome Lew Ross!
LEW
Thanks Tajci
TAJCI
I’m so excited we get to do this. Kids are friends. Seth is one of my kid’s best friends and when we moved to Nashville, we miss Seth. So, you’ve been a part of our lives and I’ve always been just fascinated by your dedication to make this world a better place.
LEW
Thanks Tajci
TAJCI
So you make skateboards
LEW
That’s one of the things I do. I make skateboards in a little workshop that used to be mortuary in the basement of my house that used to be a funeral home. So when we moved in we had a big parking in the back that’s slowly turning into a personal skatepark and we had an embalming table with all the gut hooks and bone saws downstairs – it was crazy. When we first bought our house they took out our embalming table and our basement became just a creepy basement.
TAJCI
Yeah
LEW
Instead of a full embalming mortuary, but now that if has bay of skateboard pressing equipment in it, I’ve got three presses and a full art room, and a spray room for making America’s skateboards. I make about 300 a month maximum
TAJCI
That’s a lot!
LEW
It’s not. It’s very few. Most factories are pumping out 40,000 to a 100,000 units.
TAJCI
But these are hand crafted.
LEW
Right! I’m handcrafting all of them. But I use the same tools that the factories use. So it’s less handcrafted as it is batch made – small batch. And that’s why the real difference between them is that hands are making them. It’s just that smaller batches mean greater care and a greater guarantee.
TAJCI
And what I know about you and what you do and how you do it, you’re breathing life into each skateboard as you’re sending it out.
LEW
Dude people are riding on positive juju soaked skateboards now, I mean when I’m down… if I’m bummed out I don’t make ’em which is why I’ve had to really guard my heart you know. A wise man once said: “Guard your heart for in it are the springs life.”
And so I had to really take time away from production at times to make sure that my inspiration is intact. Because it’s my inspiration, my love of skateboarding, and my love of people who skateboard. I have strong feelings about people who choose to go out and skateboard today.
TAJCI
So as a mother of three boys you know, I don’t know much about skateboards because they’re not yet in that you know, Dante is only 14 right now. But the little that I know skateboarding is usually connected with a certain culture: punk, rebellious, drugs
LEW
Look at me! Tattoos, crazy hair you know, borderline habits, yeah!
TAJCI
But I watched one video where the guy says skateboarding allows me to be who I am. It’s giving me this freedom to be who I am without worrying what other people will think. Talk to me about that.
LEW
So I started skateboarding in 1985. I was 12 and I didn’t know any skateboarders but I saw a skateboard at the KB Toys Store in Danbury, Connecticut in a mall. I remember seeing it and I said to my mom was a couple days before my birthday and I said: “Mom I know what I want for my birthday I want that.” And she just bought it for me.
And it was really wonderful. I took it home and I started riding every day in the subdivision. New subdivision went up across the street flat black top, bank curbs, and I didn’t know anything about skateboarding and I just started to push around and I started to ride the board up onto the curb and scratch my axles on the curves and come down and all on my own I was riding my skateboard.
TAJCI
So you were a clean-cut kid, good grades in school.
LEW
I was yeah, I was a pretty isolated nerdy little kid with… my parents are intellectuals and I was smart.
TAJCI
See, I’m totally making a social judgment
LEW
Well I think it’s not wrong to make social judgments I mean I’ve made the joke before: I’m not here to judge people I’m here to collect samples.
TAJCI
Yes
LEW
So my school experience was pretty unpleasant. I didn’t interface well with other kids, ’cause I was sensitive and I cared about things that… I’ve always been really sensitive about bullying, I never like when people pick on other people, and that’s all there was in New York back then in that culture.
I was kind of a loner and pretty maladjusted I’d say and on my skateboard I found a sensation of freedom that was you know what – transcended. I could have a terrible day at school and come and roll around on my skateboard push push push… I didn’t do tricks I didn’t have an idea of measuring up to any social values like being cool.
TAJCI
High pressure to perform.
LEW
There was no pressure to perform, there was nothing. So, my dials were set and still are to the experience of motion at will, and the freedom of getting a relief from the grinding pressures of social issues by riding my board. So from there I met a few people and they rode skateboards and I got introduced to the “trick” people. The guys who read the magazines read the ads and think they need to be like that. They live in a pressure cooker. Some of them have the gifts and the talent it takes to measure up and enjoy status.
TAJCI
That’s what first came to my mind like you know I’m looking at the skateboard park here and I’m thinking if I was here I would be like so super self conscious that…
LEW
Did you see that little girl, the little girl in a pink and blue hair? I said to the guys with me I said this little girl with the pink and blue hair on on a blue board with the pink wheels, I said, that is the spiritual image of what’s happening when I’m riding the skateboard. She was just so happy and colorful and she was not at all in touch with having to measure up. She wasn’t looking at any of us, she just loved her toy skateboard… That was me.
TAJCI
So, what we perceive as insecurity actually is, I mean you have to be pretty secure to show up at a place where people are doing tricks, or maybe it comes from place a longing to belong into maybe to challenge yourself or…
LEW
That’s a huge part of it, I think one reason there is a mainstream skateboarding culture you are a skateboarder, okay.
So mainstream skateboarding culture – you can open you can open the mainstream magazines – you pretty much have to wear certain cut of pant, certain kind of shoe. You have to pretty much have a certain aesthetic. Now, I enjoy that my preferences fall… I look kinda like that. And I enjoy acceptance on a superficial level ’cause I look like a skateboarder.
I do. I fit with the mainstream of skateboarding and it doesn’t bother me that I fit in. it doesn’t bother me to fit in, doesn’t bother me did not fit in.
I’m independent of that. My mind is me. And my spirit is me.
So being who I am in my inner world I don’t have the drive to measure up. I don’t have the drive to do those things ’cause I’m still 1985 rolling around before the boys told me that I had to do tricks.
And I got good on my skateboard. And I got good on my skateboard without…
I remember when I was young I would skate with my friends and some of them were doing really advanced stuff. I remember one kid, he would do kick flip melon grabs, big trick on a mini ramp, and he was 12 and by the time he was 14 his knees were done. I remember as a kid thinking you know, why would I…
What social pressure would make me value learning kick flip melon grabs blowing out my knees as a kid, rather than just learning stylish, enjoyable long line grinds and maneuvers that are fun to do at speed… Why would I spend time…
Now some people love the challenge and there is an authentic journey there. So I can’t look at the outside and just judge those people.
I am passionate about empowering people to dare to be who they are and to skate differently if that’s their thing.
To skate at a lower skill level if that’s more appropriate for who they are. To take it down to basics and learn to have elegant and high-quality basics rather than constantly trying to do some poppy flippy maneuver or some high-risk maneuver that’s gonna get them blasted. Whereas my critique is that the mainstream culture lifts up high risk, very difficult level, you know,…
The mainstream culture has for twenty years exalted almost unattainable skill levels with completely unsustainable risk levels and I’ve been watching it. Through the nineties, everyone was jumping down stuff everyone was just going nuts trying to get the banger trick and I resented that.
As a human being I resented the culture of having to do the banger trick and measure up. I resented it a lot.
TAJCI
I identify with that as a musician. I never was interested in playing the fastest or you know like, getting the chops and just showing off. I just really want to affect through the gift and I see that’s what you do. You are a social activist. You’re a leader. You’re like out there…
LEW
And I’m saying really unpopular things like, hey kids! One of my favorite like… you know the Facebook post is really where it’s at for me my facebooking is pretty controversial and I’m really enjoying it
TAJCI
Okay check it out!
LEW
Controversy is a good thing. I think can be a good thing if it’s stimulating an awakening of thought and if it’s stimulating people to reevaluate thought systems that maybe they were highly invested in. And if you question authority, if you reevaluate your relationship with idea systems like mainstream skateboarding’s exaltation of high-risk and unsustainable you know skill level and risk levels and all this. If you look at this..
One of my favorite ones is to tell is to say hey kids, if somebody tells you, you have to have this new hat, don’t sleep! they say don’t sleep get to the skate shop and buy this new hat. Don’t sleep get to the skate shop or get to the store and buy this new this or that. Don’t miss out, don’t be left behind… all those messages, to me those are insidious.
Those are, what are they called pernicious, man that’s sick. And it makes me feel the emotion of anger.
As an old punk rocker who grew up and cut my teeth on the value of individual thought and that same ethic is driven me outside the mainstream making…
I make skateboards not because I love wood, I make skateboards because I can’t have a skateboard brand unless I can believe in the product.
I couldn’t control the product with the factories I couldn’t believe in the product as the proprietor and I love skateboard branding.
I love running a brand because running a skateboard brand is the way that I can reach to the culture and say: hey kid, you don’t need the hat, you don’t need the pants, you don’t need the right shirt. You are! Whatever you wear is right because it’s on you. Your spiritual being, your intellectual being is what is most important. If you come to the skatepark and you are enjoying doing some maneuver that everyone else might be taught through our media that it’s a ‘Barney’ move or a ‘kook’ move or… Well we wanna tell you that nah nah nah nah! You do you.
But what a lot people aren’t ready for is how brave you have to be
TAJCI
Well that is hugely empowering and that’s what you know, we’re all trying to do… to say wake up and, you know, even as a kid you know you gonna have this place as a skateboard park and you’re gonna learn, you’re gonna practice showing up the way you are and then that’s going… you can apply that in other areas of your life.
LEW
The skateboard parks are really interesting because they’re like a pressure-cooker. They take what I learned slowly and they make everyone cross-pollinate. It’s wonderful. I love it. I want there to be diversity. I want there to be cultural diversities.
I want there to be, you know, I really don’t want there to be misogyny and racism and phobias of any kind you know I don’t want homophobia or xenophobia, or any other… arachnophobia is okay. You can keep that one, ’cause spiders are pretty much horrible.
TAJCI
So you can show up in your in your shirt like you said, who you are, if you’re clean cut or if you’re…
LEW
Or if you’re riding a scooter or if you’re on roller blades, or on a rib stick or if you’re rolling and enjoying motion like I did when I was a kid. I mean we’ve got people who say the most horrible things about what you’re riding at a skatepark and I realized that… you know bigotry is something we become desensitized to.
And if a human community is going to be bigoted about what you’re riding in a skatepark, than that community is definitely gonna fall like dominoes when it’s time to be bigoted about other things.
And we need to be careful about bigotry and I call it… I call it fascism. The enforcement of community standards based on monetary values. culture, subcultural values that I don’t espouse.
TAJCI
But like you said before if you question the authority if you question and reestablish the connection with the truth with what’s the larger.. And you show up as who you are because you’ve practiced being yourself, and you become, you’re brave enough to to show up as yourself that’s huge.
LEW
In our industry, in skateboarding, if you do that, you’ll be run out of business very quickly because the number one thing in skateboarding, the number one rule, it was published in an article by Jenkem magazine this year, is a: don’t speak evil of the industry whatever you do, do not break with loyalty of the established monetary industry.
TAJCI
But that’s the thought that to me is completely contrary to the American spirit and that’s why I’m so interested in stories like yours and the work that you do and you say it’s the sticks that stirs..
LEW
Yea, our ad in Confusion Magazine says: Skate sticks specifically crafted for stirring the pot.
TAJCI
To stir the pot. Beautiful!
LEW
The existence of a workshop brand is is not new but the thing is that my brand exists in an activist capacity. I make skateboards in a workshop for one brand direct to the customer, with the team representing an ethical skateboarding of wide open acceptance, diverse, diverse stylistic manifestation and opened cultural welcome to whatever your whatever your background is.
When you’re skateboarding all the stuff you worry about, how you fit in society – it doesn’t matter when we’re rolling on skateboards. You could be on the opposite end of the political or social spectrum from me. When we skateboard together, that’s not there.
And I wanna nurture that, preserve that. Create it where it doesn’t exist. Make sure the fat kid and the kid whose skin is a different color, the kid who is struggling with acceptance around their sexual identity, the kid who is struggling with acceptance around their socio-economic identity and strata. We want the strata to be destroyed when we’re rolling together and I’m passionate about that through my branding I’m passionate about that in my business and I’ve gone ahead and said so and I’ve criticized our mainstream culture.
You know, skateboarding subculture used to be a manifestation of the American spirit independent thinking, independent living, independent lifestyle choices. It’s been subverted. And I remember the American spirit. I mean let’s talk about it for just a second because America has been on the one side about independent exploration and identity but on the other side America has been about conformity and about manifest destinies of monetary, you know…
We’ve always had both going. There has always been a tradition of conflict in America and I’m continuing the conflict.
TAJCI
Well I think what you’re doing is you’re awakening people and awakening you know, providing this, the right amount of…
LEW
Controversy
TAJCI
Controversy, thank you, to cause the awakening.
LEW
You need twelve good men
and only find eleven.
They are six young lives
still waiting for number seven
I may be living on earth
but I’m living for heaven.
PART 2:
“POWER AND LOVE”
INTRO
Today on “Waking Up In America” we continue our discussion with Lew Ross Creator of Fickle Boards, and shift gears to his early life as a sensitive young misfit searching for love in a world driven by power and influence.
BUMPER
I am Tajci.
At 19 I was a superstar and I was lost inside. I left it all behind, switched continents and started all over. Years later I found myself lost again. This time in the American dream.
This is a story about awakening. About living the life you were created for. About going inward and discovering the joyous and purposeful person you and I are both meant to be.
This is “Waking Up In America.”
TAJCI
When you were young and you came to the skateboard culture you said, you didn’t do drugs…
LEW
Yea, I was Straight Edge – ’cause Straight Edge just got invented when I was like 14. You know, “use of today” and the New York hardcore scene hit and I went Straight Edge.
I was also in martial arts. When I started skateboarding at 12 I also started in martial arts which is another independent… you know, you’re competing with yourself, it’s really about improving and developing yourself. Skateboarding is about self development. Even teams skateboarding, still is an individual journey so I’ve always gravitated toward those things.
TAJCI
Right I understand, ’cause you have to practice one thing over and over and over again to get really, really good at it…
LEW
Only you can do it.
TAJCI
And it’s your practice so it’s very much like martial arts.
LEW
It’s not a team sport
TAJCI
So when was your shift?
LEW
Oh well, I mean… Okay. So martial arts and skateboarding were a big part of how I began to find my way in the world. You know, 12-year-old kid, you know, sensitive, socially maladjusted, pretty badly bullied… I got bullied pretty savagely. So many people have that story and.. I was…
I got into a really dark place, I mean, do we want to talk about that?
TAJCI
Yeah, I’m interested.
LEW
I got really gnarly ’cause the world is extremely unwelcoming toward organisms like me. People who are sensitive and idealistic really get… they really get the business in the world. This world is… I mean, there’s plenty of movies about it. It’s on the internet.
TAJCI
It’s a very universal story.
LEW
It’s universal. There’s nothing rare about being a misfit because you just aren’t what everyone else is trying to be.
TAJCI
There you go.
LEW
Yeah and that was made to a T and I didn’t think that up or invent that. That just happened to me and I found my personal context in a spiritual experience that centered around a person of Jesus. Man I became a radical Jesus kid at about seventeen. I was just about to turn 17.
TAJCI
And this was coming out of that dark..
LEW
Things got really dark. It got really bad because, even if you think about it really, if you take the snap from eight or twelve years old you know being socially maladjusted. And when I say that I just mean really being an anxious kid, being a sensitive kid and really, really understanding that the world around me was filled with bullying influences.
TAJCI
So if you’d if you’re okay with talking about it sharing, you didn’t come out through drugs or through… where it did come through?
LEW
What happened is, at twelve I was really bullied savagely. And you know the story where the kid gets really savagely bullied and then he chokes the crap out of his bully? So at about 11 or 12 years old I choked the crap out of my bully. My poor bully. And I feel, I have feelings today about that process and I, at 12 concluded that the development of personal power was the way to go.
I didn’t really know, I mean I was a kid and I was young. When you’re 15 years old or 13 years old and you try to take power over your life you try to get some control over this really bad situation all the time, you know, being sensitive realizing how this amazingly impactful it is for people to be super negative to each other. And all this fear, negativity, and inferiority flying around all the time and I can never stomach a bully. Having been bullied I never could stomach when someone was picking on other people and I got my butt kicked so many times…
So I went on the martial arts journey. What happened was I let anger be my personal power you know if it was a twelve-step approach it became a 12-step approach for me: anger and rage were my personal higher power. And I picked them. I actually took some twelve-step language as a kid and said, then anger and rage… rage will be my personal power, my higher power.
Because rage, when it cut through all this negativity and a lot of that New York hardcore super… it was positive punk, but it was extremely aggressive. And that stuff became my way. And what happened with me is that all that anger… it wore me out. And I started to just…
TAJCI
Well, especially if you’re the sensitive
LEW
I was a kid yeah. I was a sensitive person and I was young and I didn’t have perspective and I began to wear out. And the more I trained in martial arts and the more intense I got the more I started… I just call it… I just started unraveling. I started self-harming.
Self-harming became a real way for me to take control. And to take control of the moment and to cause a relief… a sense of relief in a moment, very drug like, very addictive, very impactful to my life. Self-harming.
I was extremely disillusioned with the things people do to relax. For me drugs always seemed like just… they were a postponement. And it only got worse while you were feeling better about them.
I rejected drugs as an option early on, knowing that once I start taking them I’ll never want to stop. I’ll die in the gutter and I’m not sure wanna go out like that.
TAJCI
And it’s not a solution.
LEW
And anger was powerful and it had a lot of perks. And I had a lot of perks because I was very strong in anger and good at martial arts and I got a little crazy. I shaved my head back before people really shaved their heads a lot. It was the first skinhead movement that wasn’t neo-nazi. It wasn’t white power it was just power.
And I was very into that with Straight Edge movement I was not high in the movement I wasn’t recognized, I was a kid I was a little brother of the people who were really doing it but I sort of rattled apart. I got to 16 years old and I realized life, you know, I’m I’m losing it… I had a couple of these weird fits, they were obviously anxiety based fits – very strong spiritual cries for help and my friends began to back away from me because I was so crazy. Because of my interest in martial arts I really had a Daoist kind of philosophy. You know every kid is a synchrotist.
Kids just kind of pick and choose their ideas and that’s great. I think it’s great
TAJCI
And if we allow them they will find the way.
LEW
People should. If they question authority, they might find some reliable authority. And so I was looking at Daoism and I had a lot of friends were Hindu and Daoist and Eastern Eastern thought and philosophy, and they were wonderful to talk to. I really enjoyed talking to them and listening to them and they had a huge impact on me because they were willing to discuss ideas.
My family was nominally, and just a little bit involved in church stuff, and it disgusted me because there was not really a capacity to discuss ideas. They had sort of pat answers to things that were totally unsatisfying to me and it wasn’t working for me at all. It seemed like a sham so to tell you the story…
I went to this Pastor of a church we attended, and said: what’s the deal? What’s it all about out Alfie? And he said: I’ll give you the reason it’s here. Number one, you wanna be in the Christian Church because it’s the glue that holds the society together.
Who wants to be glue? You want me to be glue?
This isn’t Maoist. I don’t have a Maoist background where I want to be part of the collective. I’m not Soviet. I don’t want to be part of a collective I’m an American! I know the value of individual identity and expression I don’t want to be a glue, bro! Take your glue away from me. So that was really hard for me.
TAJCI
And you already, like you said, you’re trying to find your place and you know you’re not being recognized for who you are.
LEW
That one was hard. His second reason was: many, many people had become very rich by following the teachings of the Bible. And I almost flipped the table not realizing how much like Jesus I would have been being in a moment if I had turned the table.
TAJCI
But maybe he meant like spiritually rich.
LEW
No, he meant money. He meant money. He started talking about Rockefellers and people like that. It was crazy!
And then the last reason really hooked me He says… he holds up the Bible and says: in this book are the answers to every question you’ll ever ask. And if you only know how to formulate your approach to it so you can find the answers you will never lack for guidance in your decisions…
Now that sounded great. That sounded great. That sounded like power. He framed it in power and I was like, so much of the Christianity around me was all about accruing and gaining power and influence but it disgusted me because it was totally insincere to protect. I think what he said got me and I took my Bible home, and said, well that’s the power I could dig.
I opened it to Matthew and I started reading. They got the Matthew chapter 5 and I’m an angry punk rocker looking for spiritual power. I’m in dialogue with Daoists, and hindus and Confucianists, more eastern approach to life, even the Straight Edge movement was Sun Young Moon, Unification Church based. It was it was all Eastern.
I approached the Bible from this Eastern thought and I’m looking in it and Jesus in Matthew Chapter 5 and 6, he teaches me that if I have an intention in my heart that it’s as real as a reality of action. If you wanna kill… if you are angry at someone may as well have killed them. And I read these words that Jesus said at probably 15 years old, and I said, well I’m a bad person. I’m really bad. Really angry and really violent and I have… that’s who I am.
And I close the Bible, I put it away and I went on a journey of admission that I was an angry wicked person and I was abusive toward my body, toward others from that age, and I guess two or three years… I just was wild and abusive and I traveled pretty much every dark path as a young kid with this kinda philosophical anihilism that the only reality in all of life is that we are dead at the end of it. It’s the only equalizing factor.
And during that time I wrote in my journal, I was 15 years old and I wrote: beauty is the greatest deception of all. ‘Cause it makes you want which you cannot keep.
And I was extremely ugly. I valued decay and death very highly, like religiously, and became a very, very dark, evil person for short time. And then I just got whiplashed around. I started to shatter. I started to fall apart. It was too much for me, all this negativity, and all this decay in all of this, very sincere punk rock anihilistic engagement. I started to fall apart.
TAJCI
You said it was exhausting, draining.
LEW
I was exhausted. I was wearing thin. It was some like Bilbo and the ring, Golum thing happening to me, where I was getting changed by all this negativity. It was crushing me And I began to cry out to God. I said: God, I read some of your book and it taught me I’m bad.
You must care about us. I didn’t read any more. That was I’d read.
And I said, God you must be out there. You must be in these avatars of the Hindu faith. You must be in the wisdom of the Buddha. You must be in the teaching of the Dao. You must be somewhere. You must be reaching out to us ’cause I can feel it. You must understand if you made us.
I was I was a believer. I always was a believer.
TAJCI
It’s amazing. You know, you look at kids who are overcome with anger and who are into cutting, or drugs
LEW
I see my little brothers and sisters.
TAJCI
You see them and we have no idea that this is what’s going on in them. They’re searching..
LEW
I did
TAJCI
They are longing…
LEW
It drives me nuts, because those kids are…
TAJCI
But you’ve been…
LEW
Those guys don’t have like anybody
TAJCI
Exactly!
LEW
It bugs me…
TAJCI
You’ve never learned, you know you’ve never been given a channel to even show up to to talk, to speak, to be heard because of the sensitivity
LEW
You know when I later on became a Christian and there was a pretty quick period during which I was exposed to the teachings of Leo Buscaglia. Do you know who he is?
TAJCI
Oh absolutely!
LEW
You did! Oh nobody knows that guy!
TAJCI
He was at my beginnings as well
LEW
So, I watched a talk by Leo Buscaglia with my mom and I kinda touched on it, and I just began to weep. I remember I was weeping uncontrollably and I left the room ’cause, you know, I hate my parents now I don’t wanna, didn’t wanna talk about it and I didn’t wanna have any feelings and I… it was like one week I saw Leo Buscaglia speak on TV and it busted me.
I called my Hindu friend up that night and I said, there has to be a god. And I said I discovered it. God has to be love!
TAJCI
Yea, that was my thing too.
LEW
If there’s a god then his fundamental nature must be love. And my Hindu friend loved it.
Cause he was struggling with Hinduism is a second-generation. He was a son of an immigrant and Hinduism was just superficial and he wanted the spiritual experience of God. So he and I were on a journey together.
And then I said, if there’s a God, his fundamental nature must be love. If his fundamental nature is love we must be able to find him by following the bread crumbs to him. Of love. So I began to…
And then the next week I went on a thing with my school, big peer leadership seminar totally not a religious thing but deeply spiritual. And I had a transcendent experience with love there because I saw the universality of everyone’s need for love once again very strongly. So it’s like, here you got this anihilistic punk rock kid super, super high philosophical anger wearing out, losing my sanity, self-destructive and I encounter Leo Buscaglia one week, go on a peer leadership weekend the next week, and then third week I go on a Emmaus Walk Tres Dias Cursillo deelio thing and get introduced to the fuller teaching about who Jesus was.
And I found in Jesus everything I’d been groping around for in the Dao. Everything that I’d been then wondering about in the different avatars and things like that I found in one place with Jesus. And I couldn’t believe people weren’t talking about it all the time.
They didn’t talk about that in church. I’d been in church before and they didn’t talk about Jesus like this. I mean it was sick. I was blow away and I became…
I told him, I said: I’m gonna be the worst Christian you’ve ever had but I’m gonna be yours ’cause I heard he takes those.
Cause they were talking about how even Nicodemus, the religious expert Jesus was like, nah nah, nah that’s not what it’s about buddy. It’s about this being spiritually renewed by me. And I thought well I wanna be spiritually renewed. I needed spiritual life infusion yeah. So I went to Jesus and I just kept coming back to him and I haven’t stopped. I’m 41 now. I was 16 then. So whatever the math is that how many years I’ve been like looking..
The funny thing is that all of the groping around I was doing in the dark, you know, and all of the looking for the way forward has been, in a way… Jesus has made it worse and better.
Being exposed to acceptance and love at a baseline level have… it’s caused me to sort a file a divorce with this world and its dumb fashion rules and it’s dumb conformity and its “oh well you have to wear this or wear that or look like this or look like that. You have to be cool, or you have to be thin, or you have to be beautiful, or you have to be gay or straight, or black or white, or all these you know all the Bob Marley-ism schism you know.
All that stuff was just done for me. Done with it! So when I’m out riding my skateboard and I’m just having so much fun now, there’s a certain freedom I enjoy because certain issues are just settled. But there’s a certain trouble I cause because I also don’t care about certain things people value greatly. I don’t care about conformity and when conformity is this subculture’s greatest dynamic, skateboarding right now.
Your kids don’t wanna skate board. The reason your kids don’t want to skateboard because they’re happy. And skateboarders aren’t happy. Look at them, they are throwing their board because they can’t do the trick. And if they don’t do the trick, they lose their place in the culture. If they lose their place in the culture and the community because they can’t do the trick there under a lot of pressure so they throw… And your kids are too smart to do that.
Your kids are already happy people why become miserable?
TAJCI
But you’re changing that culture.
LEW
Working on it, if I can survive.
TAJCI
I actually watched some YouTube that a guy said look skateboarding is really great and this is why you should skate: one thing it’s healthy, it’s fun
LEW
OK
TAJCI
And it’s safe. Wait, wait, wait, safe… did you say safe? I understand healthy, but
LEW
It’s not safe. (laughs)
TAJCI
It’s not safe!
LEW
You need twelve good men
and you only find eleven
there are six young lives
still waiting for number seven
I may be living on earth
but I’m livin for heaven.
Man with a woman
like lizard on a rock
Man with a woman
like lizard on a rock
I don’t say I understand it
that’s the way Solomon used to talk
I got my black leather jacket
the one I wore through all my youth
I got my black sun glasses
I feel just like William Booth
They don’t ask me nothing about nothing
Maybe I, I just might tell you the truth
TAJCI
So we’ve talked how it’s so easy to feel like we’re not fitting in. Where we get into a situation where something happens to us when we are real little and or teenage years or whenever we’re forming this idea of who we are and then there’s two ways to go – destruction or indifference or just delaying this question: Who am I and how do I show up in the world? Because if we show up in the world as who we are not, if we are living something else’s dream, we can’t really live the purpose
that we are created for and make the change in our world.
Thank you Lew so much for sharing your story and for changing the culture and awakening, and stirring the pot.
LEW
I’m not sure I’ve done it. I’m really happy. I’m gonna stay in there. I’m gonna keep being who I am, I have no other choice.
TAJCI
It’s a process, it’s a life flow, it’s what we are called to do.
LEW
Thanks Tajci
LEW (skating)
That’s it! That’s for my mom!
(Logen, DP): Cut!
(Matthew, producer): That’s great!
(Tajci): Awesome! That was great!
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