Meet Jesse Stone

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jesse Stone. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Jesse, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?

The kid version of today me grew up in one of those culty end-of-the-world survivalist churches of the 1980’s, where we didn’t watch tv but we had some bomb-ass potlucks. Always watching out for government spies and ubiquitous Satanists was super stressful, but being surrounded by women in long dresses who baked great bread made me feel pretty safe. By middle school though, the wind had shifted, the church was gone, my family didn’t function well outside a cult, and I started spending a lot of nights on the streets or the couches of my grade school friends. By high school, I was an anxious achiever, who missed her church, didn’t know how to do basic things in the regular world, and just wanted some home-and-family ties.
Because I suspect my culty church was right and the world really is magic, I found a real life commune right after graduation. Like, a commune’s commune, where there is a giant communal closet for 100 people to share clothes, 5 vans we all drive, one two story kitchen where we all eat, one 8 spigot shower where we all use Dr. Bronner’s. Also conveniently, my parents still assured me that the world was going to end before I was 30, so it would be a total waste of my time, despite my gifted label, to go to college. I spent the rest of my young adult life living in that commune or it’s similar friends, and in between briefly joining other religious cults (including the Amish), because I REALLY MISS THOSE DRESSES.
Another stroke of luck, that commune was entirely secular, so I learned how to self govern with 100 other people and no hierarchy. I learned how to mediate between people with major disagreements to the point of keeping them happy living together. I learned how to embrace and enjoy every kind of person from almost any walk of life. I learned how to budget and run businesses, how to do office work and farm work, and I also unlearned a lot of my religious programming, which alone was an immense gift.
Eventually I did try out the mainstream world, I did put myself through college, I married a man from my OG church upbringing, and he was just as problematic as they’d taught him to be. My mistake!
So there I was in my 30’s, with the worlds best baby boy on my hip, no money, no family, and just barely staying housed. I’d been selling my art at a local farmer’s market (a big one, with big crowds and incomes) for money, because it let me work without needing childcare, as long as my toddler would stay in his fort under my sales table. Once a year this market had a big meeting for all its members, and they served a catered meal while they talked about the market’s year. Of course I went for the free meal, and of course I brought Tupperware and my knitting along, because I was truly only there for the food. The meeting came to election time, where the 100 vendors voted in their new representative to the board, who would help steer the ship of the market for years to come.
I was knitting and pearling and wondering how to transport soup. The presenter explained that this position required precise skills. This role needed someone who could mediate between people in heated disagreements, enough that they could work well together week after week. It needed someone who was familiar with the many cultures at the market, particularly with the ESL farmers and the Amish farmers. It required a person who could be as comfortable with the traveling weirdo visiting artists as with the corporate sponsors checking on their investments. It needed someone who knew both how a farm works, and how a spread sheet works, and more than anything, it needed a person who understood how to create and cultivate community. Thank God I’d lost interest in my soup, because by the end of that list I think the lights in the room had gone out and a spotlight had just come down on me. They might as well have added that the right person could only have long red hair that’s always in two braids. (Me again).
The presenter then announced that they had selected a millionaire cattle rancher, or a millionaire land-baron for the job, and we could vote between them. I just put down my knitting, walked up to the podium, asked for the microphone, and said that I would like to run too, as I met all these credentials. I won in an easy-peasy land slide, whether because my entire life trajectory had molded me for this moment, or because the other two candidates were ridiculous for the gig, I’ll never know.
In any case, that board position let to my managing this whole market myself. It bought us a house and my first this-decade car. It requires every seemingly unrelated quirky skill I’ve picked up on my path, it lets me do work that helps others and that I really care about, and it has taught me that I can navigate in the mainstream world, which was my biggest surprise of all.
My purpose was always to best share my heart and my skills in a way that fed me and my family back, but that’s every person’s purpose, so finding a way that I actually get to DO that, is pretty effing great.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I run a huge farmer’s market, where in the past 5 years that I’ve done this, I have double the income of our vendors from a collective almost 1 million to 2.
I am an artist as well, and I sell my art at my own market as well as several other outlets. I started out hand stitching curse words on tea towels, but that is a terrible un-scalable business model, so now I hand paint designs that look hand stitched, print them, and sell those. They bought my house! Doing this work is fun because it makes a lot of people happy, but the best part is that it keeps my anxious hands busy, and I get to listen to a lot of great rap for “work” since I often use rap lyrics in my designs.
I’ve just rounded out the second year of my podcast Cults I’d Join. It’s about cults I’d join. Since I have actually joined a lot of them, and also lived in many settings that people might call cult-adjacent, I often know someone from a group I cover, or have interacted with the group myself. Because of my own family background, my culty upbringing was often a comfort to me, so my show is usually about what I like about each group I cover– and my listeners and I agree that even the bad cults would make for an interesting potluck!

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

My therapist just told me this morning that my most important feature is that I am resilient. I said that I am often overwhelmed so I am no such thing. She pointed out to me that I’ve never once not gotten back up.
So, I would say this:
I am resilient and I am tenacious, but I work hard to keep my hear soft.
Getting back up every single time is a really big deal. My art has been rejected, my applications have been rejected, my self as a person has been rejected, and by the people who were supposed to love me the most. I didn’t know what to do besides get up the next day and try a different angle, because I was hungry and I felt I had no choice. Now I know that other people don’t necessarily do that, and maybe it’s because they don’t have to. So I’d say if you want something, get back up every single time, and stay open to the people and possibilities around you. Sometimes giving someone else help is the thing that leads to what will nourish you. Eventually you’ll get the version of that something that was meant for you, I’m pretty sure that happens every time.

Awesome, really appreciate you opening up with us today and before we close maybe you can share a book recommendation with us. Has there been a book that’s been impactful in your growth and development?

I stared reading chapter books when I was four. I credit my religious parents with this, as this is when they got rid of the tv. I spent every minute I could reading, and I read the Little House series countless times. Yes, they are cozy, but if you really read them, they’re also terrifying. The Long Winter had them twisting straw into little logs to burn for scraps of heat and swiping their neighbors seed wheat to grind for bread. Pa often ate raw turnips in the field so his family could have the little dinner. In their Kansas homestead, their door was a quilt and they had to watch through it while wolves circled their house at night, and then that home just burned down altogether. I had a lot of stress as a child, often being out of my home on my own very young, and even at home always preparing for the apocalypse. I was constantly afraid of mountains of survival level things, both real and (now I know) imagined. The way that Laura could face the real dangers and hurts of her life, but always paint a picture of the beautiful prairie, or the love of her family, or the way the light from one lamp in a blizzard could make her feel safe, it always let me imagine that I could be strong and even happy like that too. It also made me forever obsessed with bonnets.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.lewdlinens.com
• Instagram: lewdlinens
• Facebook: Cults I’d Join Spiritual Besties
• Other: You can also find my market at www.loveyourfarmer.com

Image Credits

All images are mine, except the one with the paint splatters, that’s Jessica Crosswhite, Epic Photograpy