Tommy

 

 

1900A Jentsch Ct.

Austin, TX 78745-3191

512 560-8778

 

 

I am the soul inhabiting the body that my parents gave me. I am an organizer, an admirer of Samuel Adams and Saul Alinsky and Martin Luther King, Jr, who each reside in my Organizer Hall of Fame. I am a warrior, a lover, and a healer. For this moment, I am who I have become, after I realized, in 1995, that, in spite of what happened to me in the US resource war in Vietnam, I was okay, not permanently ruined, after all. I am an artist. I am the adventure most people won't allow themselves. I carry Cherokee blood.

 

After multiple jailings in high school from working in the Civil Rights Movement in Camden, Arkansas, I joined the Navy to get out of town for good and ended up in Vietnam. I went to "A" school in San Francisco (Treasure Island) in late '68 and early '69 and Vietnam was exactly as the anti-war movement folks said. I organized Chu Lai Base Camp against the war and had to wear my M16 all the time to keep the Navy's war freaks from killing me. I got along fine with the Vietnamese and the Black Panthers. In four months I had six courts martial. After the last one, I was discharged within a month on a Section 8, psychologically unfit for further military duty. Sixteen years later, I got sober and started to heal. The VA finally had a clue about what to do with me. Vet Center therapists and shamanic practitioners I met in my shamanic training gave me back my self so, in 1995, I could again live in my body, in my life.

 

I organized Houston Greens. After the '96 Nader campaign, I organized what became Harris County Green Party. Then I went back to college. I got a BA, a MA, a MFA, a PDC, and a divorce. In a few years, I returned to Texas, only to Austin instead of Houston, in August, 2006. In December, 2006, I met Sandy, a woman who understands passion, and we got married January 6, 2008. Sandy's a singer and actress and the sweetest person I've met in this life. I'm a lucky man.

 

I've been at work on a novel since 2003.

 

I'm active on a few Permaculture listserves. I'm organizing a descent movement in Austin, beginning with a Study Circle studying Howard and Elizabeth Odum's "A Prosperous Way Down." I'm at work designing an ecocity project for Austin. The only design I've done for money was for a kitchen garden in Lockhart, TX next to a groovy cob house. The client was a woman who had not met with success as a gardener, so I listened to her and designed a garden easy to manage, a series of food berms, like a bunch of keyhole beds connected to each other, made of high-quality bought soil. We left it heavily mulched for the winter. She paid me more than I asked. I call my design service Green Shaman Permaculture Design. Mostly it languishes because I don't market it much. I'm too busy doing politics. I'm into Invisible Structures.

 

 

please see PROFILES page for protocol for how to do this ..

 

 

 

 

.