Tag Archive for: community

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Ellementa – or – Why I’m Visiting a Cannabis Farm

I’m in California, six hours north of San Francisco, to visit a cannabis farm and learn about the plant from the roots up. IMG_7186If you know anything about me, you know I’ve never really been that interested in pot – so this is a new fascination. But not because I’m smoking it. I’ve been working with web pioneer Aliza Sherman to build a women’s cannabis community.

Contrary to what I’ve always thought, cannabis is not just for a bunch of stoner kids laughing at really stupid jokes as they melt their brain cells into their couches. Smart, successful women are using cannabis to help alleviate anxiety and depression, and using it to manage health and wellness issues like menstrual cramps, menopausal symptoms, and chronic pain. Women are also using different strains of cannabis to focus themselves, enhance their creative process, or relax after a long day at work or caring for their loved ones.

And now that 95% of the US population lives somewhere where cannabis is legal, people aren’t just smoking it. You can use it in all kinds of ways: from vaporizing it, to eating it, to absorbing it through your skin. You can get oils and extractions from the plant that separate the THC (the psychoactive) from the CBD (the anti-inflammatory and antispasmodic). There are even cannabis-infused personal lubricants (I may not be into smoking it, but BOY HOWDY, ladies).

Legal cannabis sales topped $6.7B last year, and sales are predicted to rise to $22 billion in the next five years.

Anyway, back to my trip to California. I stopped in a small mountain town to visit a “head shop” I found on Google maps. (Head shop is a colloquial name for tobacco/marijuana paraphernalia shop.) The shop was humming with young men and beardy old guys. It was decorated with Grateful Dead tapestries, skulls, and posters of pot leaves superimposed over buxom swimsuit models or skinny grey aliens in baseball caps.

headshop-interior-glass-pipes-water-pipes-paraphernalia-300x225This store, like many others I’ve been studying, was definitely not built for men nor for women like me in mind. Therein lies the rub: current cannabis culture is fairly intimidating – and frankly juvenile – to women of a certain age. And while I’m confident that the staff there was knowledgable and well versed in how to use the variety of grinders, pipes, bongs, and vaporizers in the shop, the store didn’t exactly welcome anyone outside of that particular culture.

I was hoping I could buy some CBD chocolate to relax my body on the cramped airplane ride home, but even though this shop had 1000 different sci-fi inspired glass blown pipes, there was no cannabis to be found. The woman at the counter said you had to order it through a delivery service. Even though weed is legal in many states, including California, each state and municipality has different rules and regulations about sales, consumption, and possession. It’s still the “wild west,” and it can be pretty confusing.

What is clear is that women spend $40 billion dollars on alternative medicine and an additional $5 billion dollars on health and wellness advice. And since it’s a well-known fact that women make 80% of purchasing decisions in households, shouldn’t cannabis be courting us? Shouldn’t this industry be creating on-ramps for women who are beginning to introduce (or reintroduce) cannabis into our lives?

Before now, there was no national resource, network or trusted brand for women to learn how to integrate cannabis into their lives. But Aliza and I are working to change that. We are launching an online community (that also has an offline element) for cannabis wellness especially for more mature women.

Ellementa will help bring cannabis wellness to the mainstream. We are producing instructional content to guide women to quality products with an additional element: women’s communities. We are organizing Gatherings and events across the country, face-to-face to meetings for women to talk about and learn about cannabis wellness together. You can sign up to learn more about Ellementa here.

IMG_7772As for me and California, I’m getting a feel for the countryside, and the grow rooms smell like fresh pine and fruity pebbles. For real. I’ll tell you more about that later.

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What if I’m Just Here to Pour Your Coffee

Yesterday I found myself listing all the things I’ve made and done over the last 7 years. I started this list not because I was particularly proud, or couldn’t keep track (although it IS getting harder to do.) I listed them because I was terrified they wouldn’t be enough. It’s a real fear, now that my children are all finally in school. I am terrified that I am going back to the same space I was in 7 years ago.

7 years ago I was waitressing, 7 years ago I was pouring your coffee. 7 years ago Chicago was the purgatory between my previous life as a cubical slave and my future life of big adventure. I’m equally terrified and feel incredibly guilty when it seems that taking the time to stay at home with my children was not the adventure, but just what I did while I waited for it. What if my children have begun their autonomous lives, and I’m still just… waiting.

I tell myself that this is irrational, that this feeling of panic over my own autonomy is normal if slightly unjustified. After all, I’ve done so much in these past 7 years. I tell myself all stay at home parents go through this when their kids go to school, my children are not leaving for good, they’re just leaving for 7hrs a day, 5 days a week… But this month, these last few weeks, have felt like a slow motion free fall. No longer anchored to playgrounds and playdates,  I am left struggling to make sense of the silence.

I have kept myself busy. I marketed and produced a conference and community, I’m days away from launching Where are the Women with Marian, I’m in a hotel room in Portland preparing to speak at an entrepreneur conference, I’m planning another RVSX excursion, and planning new classes and events for the CWDevs community. Despite all this, I feel like I’m standing still. Without the normal constraints on my time, without the tug on my sleeve or demand for a sandwich while I take phone calls, all this action feels like atrophy.

What if, after all this time, I can’t function without the freneticness? What if my hustle was just a way of keeping sane through the routines of parenting small children? What if breaking my day into those tiny pieces of attention was exactly what my creative brain needed? When I mention this confusion of time and pace, my friends tell me to slow down, take a breather… but these are my childless friends, my friends that haven’t been waiting 7 years for their lives to be even remotely their own. These are friends that don’t understand that the constraints of full time motherhood that made my accomplishments seem extraordinary last year, are no longer there, and I may just be ordinary, after all. What if I slow down and find I’m just “waitress”, what if this last 7 years of waiting didn’t count, what if I’m just here to pour your coffee?

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You’re Not Awesome.

Today, someone I never met took his own life in front of his neighborhood church. Today I looked at all he presented himself to be online, a helpful, wonderful, productive citizen – and I would have never guessed he would ever have wanted to take anyone’s life, much less his own. Every piece of his online persona was so warm and wonderful. Today people that knew him are grieving, and baffled, and angry, and my heart hurts for them. Read more

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Take Advantage of Advantage

Have you ever heard the term “Home team advantage” – usually having to do with either playing a game on your home turf or knowing your “team” has your back? I’d like it if everybody knew what their home team advantages were and took advantage of them. All too often, I hear of people wanting to succeed regardless of who their home teams are and I’m all for that, but through stubborn hardheadedness they work in spite of the home team advantage, inadvertently snubbing those that could help them most with subtle “I don’t need you, I can make it on my own” mantra. That’s fine, but unless you are the Clint Eastwood hero character in Dirty Harry it’s probably not going to work for you.

The world doesn’t need more heroes going it alone in inhospitable landscapes, it’s hard to follow a leader who refuses to foster community. The world needs people who take advantage of advantage, that know the worth of their “home team” and realize, especially now that social networking has enabled us to have a myriad of “home teams”, that we are all just one home run away from succeeding thanks to our hugely varied support networks.

My advice, take advantage of advantage, if you find you have it, and it serves you well without damaging your integrity, take it, run with it as you round all the bases – thank your fans in the stands for supporting you, take a bow, and show em’ how it’s done before doing it again.

(Sports analogies – a new one for me)

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