Why I Started A Cafe Podcast That’s Not (Really) About Cafes
A Journey Of Discovering A Culture of Care
Maybe it was just the way it was destined to be, or possibly it was just the sheer quantity of hours I put in. Perhaps I’ll never know the reason, but something about the almost 20 years of opening, owning, designing and managing cafes and coffee roasteries has finally produced a totally new trajectory for me.
It simultaneously feels like I’ve completed one journey and have begun another, but on the same path.
I’m having trouble figuring out the exact analogy, but it’s like the landscape around me looks the same, but so many of my tools for navigating it have changed. It also feels like it took me forever to get this far and yet everything still feels so familiar.
Does this make sense to anyone else? To mix metaphors, has your career got you feeling like you’re still in the game but the rules and the teams and the court have changed?
While the list below might seem to have been written for dramatic effect, it’s hardly an exaggeration.
The journey thus far has been both perilous and beautiful, complete with twists and turns, (sometimes literal) mountains and valleys, epic discoveries and desperate chances and frightening disasters and tears of sorrow and joy.
I’ll expound on these stories another time, but a few highlights include stumbling into coffee roasting and cafe design in my young twenties, signing a lease for my own cafe in Flint, Michigan a month before we learned of the Water Crisis, and opening a coffee bar a month before Covid, leading to a career pivot that led to woodworking and eventually literally building cafes for a few years.
I still haven’t mentioned the year or two of wandering around as a consultant, musician, and general-midlife-crisis-haver that led me to “randomly” become a photographer.
First, a lover invited me to travel with them to their photo shoot in the mountains of the Central Coast of California.
They hired me at the last minute when their PA dropped out of their shoot. A couple months later I found myself flying to Orlando to take photos for the national trade show Coffee Fest, and by the end of the year I was blending my new found writing interest with my newly developed photography career to create a magazine centered around the way people connect in cafes.
Sheesh, those are just the first few notable moments that come to mind and there are plenty more to follow. Maybe I will write a book about it. The long story short, though, is that this has been such a wild journey that I could have never anticipated, but in hindsight, it makes complete sense.
The thing is, I’ve always been a wanderer, moving from one place to the next, always excited and open to finding the edges of the story, the parts that make us come alive. I have insatiable curiosity for what is happening and why, and what it means for us in the way that we connect with each other as humans. If nothing else, this story has shown me our amazing capacity for beauty, which leads me to this particular moment in time.
As I’ve travelled along this path, I eventually began to see that while my story was unique, it was also very similar to the stories of others I encountered along the way.
We all have these twists and turns that somehow feel both insignificant and monumental, depending on how we’re feeling on any given day. We get moments of joy and sorrow, excitement, elation, uncertainty, frustration, and so on. We all really give a shit about what we’re doing and who we’re affecting. And to be honest, sometimes we don’t give a shit at all and we just want to make it through to the next day.
In addition to the deep well of gratitude that I have for my journey so far I want to note two things that I love in particular. The first is the person that I have become in the process. At times it’s been an especially difficult journey, one that I didn’t know that I would be able to complete. But I have such sincere appreciation for the strength that I have found and the lessons I have learned and the community that I have formed along the way.
The second thing is that so much of my journey has existed in third places. I have been surrounded by so many beautiful people and in so many beautiful spaces, I sometimes feel selfish for getting to live my life surrounded by so much beauty.
Just two years ago, I remember driving to a job that I hated and being in surrounding that were so unhealthy. I would think to myself, “WHY AREN’T WE MAKING THINGS MORE BEAUTIFUL?”
It’s because of this newfound privilege that I decided to start the we are cafes podcast, to share the stories of the people I meet along the way and celebrate the beautiful ways and places in which we connect.
These are the stories that need to be told: stories of artists and creatives and founders and baristas and shop owners and community advocates and parents and wanderers and business people and lovers and everyone else who gives a shit about creating beauty in the world.
I am blessed beyond what I know how to articulate, in both experience and perspective, and I need to share it with the world. It’s such an honor to get to do the work that I do, and I’m excited to have you along on this journey with me.
Thanks for joining, I’m excited to see what’s next.
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