Category Archives: Quest

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Day (334) – Overcome

Day (334) – Overcome.

 

The Better Man Project

The world needs better men. This blog is simply my journey to becoming a better man every day and the lessons I learn along the way.

Day (334) – Overcome

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Sometimes we aren’t addicted to a substance or alcohol. Sometimes, we are addicted to something else. Whatever that might be, the experience is the same for those who are going through a fight to overcome what is in front of us. A long time ago after I had a my first elbow surgery, the doctors prescribed me two medications which in combination turned me into a shell of myself. I was completely useless. Permanently in a daze. The pain was gone, but after two weeks of this I had to go back into the office and beg for them to give me something else that didn’t have the side effects. Instead of giving me anything else, they told me that I probably didn’t need pain killers anymore and to just take Advil if I was in any pain. Thank god I thought that I was off of whatever they gave me. Little did I know the absolute hell I was going to go through. I remember my body itching and feeling like something was crawling under my skin. I looked up symptoms of withdrawals. Check. Check. Check. Check. But I promised myself to get out of it. This is a tiny example in comparison to what many go through with drugs and alcohol. I had a little glimpse of this pain…and knew that I would never venture into the land of substance abuse. I don’t like feeling out of control of my own body.

Like I said before though, there are many people who aren’t addicted to something that you can snort, shoot, or smoke. Pain, depression, sex, the list goes on. Their pain is just as bad as those who are ingesting their demise. And that’s what it really is. A path towards demise. Sometimes our minds are infected. This is incredibly dangerous because our mind is very convincing to our body. Whatever it thinks we become. If the mind is weak…the body will follow. By the way…I hope that you don’t think I am writing out of my ass here…this comes from deep down from experience.

Once you decide to drag your mind out of the gutter, the rest will follow. That’s why I started writing three years ago. I saw my path. I knew where it was headed…because I was given an incredible moment of clarity that I will never forget. That moment changed my course drastically, and while it hasn’t been easy and there has been that metaphorical “itch” and “relapse” a few times on the journey, the compass has always pointed in the right direction. You can overcome horrible things. I have seen it with my own eyes and I have seen others do it. But this has to be the start. Admittance. Standing…looking in the mirror and admitting that whatever it is…you’re addicted. Without the truth, everything else falls apart.

As I think more and more about the purpose of this project, it becomes clear to me that it is a search for truth. For what is right in life. Not what the world shows me, but what I can truly feel deep down in this heart of mine. I have been on the battlefield for three years, and I would never consider retreating to safety. The bullets flying, the bombs going off, the death of dreams and the loss of friends are all going on in this battle in my mind. But with all this loss, I have seen amounts of victory and bravery that I never knew I was capable of. I have overcome things that I knew were going to tear me apart if I didn’t learn from myself. Life is not always about being able to see the sun…it is also about being able to dance in the rain. This battlefield will come to an end one day, but until that time I continue fighting on. There is not a day that goes by where I don’t find something inside of myself that I need to dig out from the depths and bring to the light. Once it is exposed to light though…it crumbles. It gives me more and more reason to believe that our fears are a lie and all we have to do is have the courage to see ourselves truly for the way we are.

I have much left to do…but there is one major thing I need to charge at with all my might. Fear is present, but the courage in me and the sound of my heart pounding will outweigh that timidness.

 

Evan Sanders

Please Join My Dream https://www.facebook.com/BetterManProject

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Gypsy

What does all this DNA genetic ethnic testing mean for me…well, it boils down to Roma Gypsy! Roma Gypsy is my highest match for ethnic comparison. I am closer genetically related to the Rom People than any other. This is actually quit amazing to me, as I would have expected a much closer match to the average white American., but far from it. I am proud nevertheless and excited to explore and learn more about my ethnic heritage.

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Johnny Appleseed

John Chapman, known as Johnny Appleseed was an eccentric and unique character who first appeared on the Ohio River about 1790 in a boat filled with appleseeds. His plan was to go in advance of the settlers planting orchards through the wilderness. This strange and philanthropic vocation he followed for some 25 or 30 years. His earlier career is shrouded in mystery but is made romantic with the tradition that he was early disappointed in love. He was a character of much ability in some directions and exercised in his peculiar way a serviceable influence upon the forest pioneers among whom he wandered. Rev. Newell Dwight Hillis, the eloquent pastor of Plymouth Church has chosen John Chapman as the hero of a fascinating and beautiful narrative entitled “The Quest of John Chapman.” Says Mr. Hillis in his preface: “Save Col. Clark, he (Chapman) is the most striking man of of the generation that crossed the Alleghanies.” Sir Walter Scott thought it a matter of moment to his countrymen that some one should preserve the story of that old man who went through the cemeteries rechiseling the names of dead heroes. But this scarred old hero of our republic is a thousand times more fascinating than Old Mortality or the heroes of the Nibelungen Lied.” Mr. Hillis with a vivid and artistic imagination and in the most felicitious and charming English initiates his narrative in the Town of Redham, New England, at the time of the departure of Mannasseh Cutler and his party for their journey to the Ohio wilderness. John Chapman is the son of the village minister and has given his heart to Dorothy, a daughter of Col. Durand. The latter is a prowd, high-spirited, influential gentleman who objects to the alliance of his daughter with John. Col. Durand and Dorothy are members of the Ohio Company.  Subsequently John Chapman seeks in adventurous wanderings through the western country, the home of his plighted love. There is, of course, a rival, fascinating and chivalrous, but unworthy. Mr. Hillis has with rare gifts of pen portrayal pictured the simple but perilous life of the New England pioneers who sought their fortunes and amid the Indian inhabited fastnesses beyond the Alleghanies.

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The Story of Johnny Appleseed
Early Childhood
Johnny Appleseed (born John Chapman) was a direct descendent of Edward Chapman, who came from Yorkshire, England, to Boston in the 1640s and became a prosperous farmer and miller in Ipswich. John was of the sixth generation from Edward. He was the second child of Elizabeth Simonds and Nathaniel Chapman, who were married at Leominster, Massachusetts on February 8, 1770. John was born in Leominster on September 26, 1774, and was baptized with his sister Elizabeth in the Congregational Church on June 25, 1775, the day his father and mother were received into that church. John’s father, Nathaniel, was a carpenter, a farmer, and a Revolutionary soldier. So far as any records show, he was a man of little means, though there is a tradition that he lost two good farms in the service of our country.

A letter from Elizabeth to Nathaniel, dated June 3, 1776, suggests that she was suffering from an advanced case of tuberculosis. At that time, Nathaniel was with a company of carpenters attached to General George Washington’s headquarters at New York. In this letter, Elizabeth states that she has money for her needs, though she has not bought a cow, for cows were scarce and dear. This was a time of hardship and war-time inflation when many a colonial mother had a hard time caring for her children.

On June 26, 1776, Elizabeth gave birth to her third child, a son. On July 18th, she died, and within two weeks, according to family tradition, the baby, too, was dead. Little John, not yet two years old, and his sister, Elizabeth, were cared for by relatives. After Elizabeth’s death, Nathaniel continued to serve in the Continental Army until the summer of 1780 when he was honorably discharged. That same summer he married Lucy Cooley of Longmeadow, Massachusetts. To them were born ten children.

We do not know if John and Elizabeth ever went to live with Nathaniel and Lucy, but we do know that John maintained close relationships with the family. Again according to family traditions, John at the age of eighteen persuaded his half-brother Nathaniel, a lad of eleven, to go West with him. This was in 1792.

Johnny and Nathaniel Head for the Frontier

Since the deeply-worn “Connecticut Path” from Boston to Albany crossed the Connecticut River at Springfield, one may presume that the boys saw emigrants passing to the West every day, and that they constantly heard glowing stories of that wonderful land. For almost half a century New Englanders had turned longing eyes toward the Susquehanna. They had first heard of it from missionaries returned from their efforts to convert Native American Indians to the Christian faith. These stories spread throughout Connecticut and Massachusetts by word of mouth and through the press. Little companies of emigrants were organized, and they set out for the fabulous country two hundred miles away, crossing the Hudson River at about where the present town of Catskill stands. This was just half way to the Susquehanna. Under the most favorable conditions, it took two or three weeks of the hardest kind of travel and labor to reach the headwaters of the Susquehanna.

John Chapman is said to have been in the Wilkes-Barre region some time in the 1790s, practicing his profession as a nurseryman, but just when he embraced the Swedenborgian faith and began his missionary activities we cannot be sure, though it is probable that it was before he ever reached western Pennsylvania. There are some early accounts of John speaking of his own activities as “a Bible missionary” on the Potomac when he was a young man, and Johnny was seen for two or three consecutive years along the banks of the Potomac in eastern Virginia, picking the seeds from the pumice of the cider mills in the late 1790s.

From the Potomac, the Chapman boys could have worked their way westward to Fort Cumberland. From Fort Cumberland, they could have followed Nemacolin’s Path, better known as Braddock’s Road, to the Monongahela, and then perhaps followed the Monongahela to Pittsburgh, a route that many New Englanders took because there were fewer Indians to be encountered along the southern route.

We do know that John and Nathaniel arrived at last at Pittsburgh and from there went up the Allegheny River to its confluence with Olean Creek at Olean, New York. They expected to find an uncle there, but he had moved on. The boys appropriated the cabin and stayed through the winter, suffering much hardship. The next year they took up the nomadic life again in western Pennsylvania until their father, with his large family, came West in 1805. Nathaniel the younger then probably quit moving around with his older half-brother, John. The Ohio farmland was fertile, compared to the rocky soil of New England, and Nathaniel, senior, and the large family had much to work with. But John had another calling and vision for his life.

Johnny Becomes a Land Developer

Records show that John Chapman appeared on Licking Creek, in what is now Licking County, Ohio, in 1800, when he was twenty-six years old. He had probably come up the Muskingum River to plant near the Refugee Tract, which would soon fill up with settlers, when Congress actually got around to granting the lands. In April, 1798, the Continental Congress had ratified resolutions to donate public lands for the benefit of those who had left Canada and Nova Scotia to fight against the British in the Revolutionary War. The lands were actually set apart in 1801 and patents issued in 1802. Grants of land ranging from 160 acres to 2,240 acres were awarded according to the exertions of the patentee in the War. Johnny, with true Yankee enterprise, went ahead and planted his nurseries before the refugees arrived. Licking County, then a part of Fairfield, contained only three white families. By the time families were ready to settle the area, Johnny’s tracts of land were ready for market.

This is the plan that John Chapman followed for the next half-century. Johnny Appleseed went ahead of the great immigrant flood ever sweeping westward. He planted with an eye to future markets, and seldom did he make a poor choice. It is uncanny how many towns have risen on or near his nursery sites.

One of the pervasive myths of Johnny Appleseed is that he never lived. The late Robert Price, English professor at Otterbein College, researched John Chapman’s life for twenty-five years. Published in 1954 by the Indiana University Press, Johnny Appleseed: Man and Myth remains today the best historical gathering of factual data of the life that came to be a storybook legend. And the facts of the real man provide some startling contrasts from the romantic image of Johnny Appleseed that has grown up in American folklore. Perhaps the most ironic twist is that though John Chapman never domesticated himself for very long in one place and certainly never had a home in the traditional sense of the word, he was no mere dreamy wanderer. The record on Johnny Applseed reveals him to be a careful, organized and strategic businessman who, over a period of several decades, bought and sold many dozen tracts of land in advance of the frontier expansion, and who developed countless thousands of productive apple trees throughout the upper Midwest.

John Chapman didn’t simply walk around the countryside planting seeds and communing with nature. He was methodical in the selection of his nursery sites and the planting of his seeds. By instinct, he practiced the Van Mons theory of improving fruit by seeding rather than by grafting or budding. He always selected a good loamy piece of ground in an open place, fenced it in with fallen trees and logs, bushes and vines, sowed his seeds, and returned at regular intervals to repair the fence, to tend the ground, and to sell his trees.

Johnny’s Way of Life

If he had to remain long with a nursery, he put up a little Indian hut of poles and covered it with a bark roof, leaving a hole in the center for the smoke to escape. His housekeeping equipment consisted of a camp kettle, a plate, and a spoon. He sometimes made a bed of leaves inside the hut, but often he slept on the bare ground with his feet to a small fire. Sometimes he slept on a bed of leaves beside a log; again, he might make himself a temporary shelter by leaning great slabs of elm bark against a fallen tree; inside, on his bed of leaves, he slept serenely, confident that nothing could harm him. Many frontiersmen came long distances to buy trees from him, and stayed the night. With his meager equipment, Johnny boiled mush and dispensed hospitality as graciously as any housewife.

In the Mohican country, Johnny visited every cabin religiously, feeling that he had been commissioned to preach, to heal diseases, to warn of danger-in short, to help God take care of the settlers. He planted his nurseries around Mansfield, Loudonville, Perryville, and the Indian village of Green Town, living in a little cabin near Perryville. When asked why he feared neither man nor beast, he replied that he lived in harmony with all people, and that he could not be harmed as long as he lived by the law of love. He is said to have sown the seeds of medicinal herbs wherever he went: dog fennel, pennyroyal, catnip, hoarhound, mullein, rattlesnake root, and others. For a long time, fennel was called “Johnny weed.” He often appeared at the door of a new settler’s home with a gift of herbs in his hands.

Johnny made friends with many of the Indian tribes and was known to have learned many Indian languages well enough to converse. Memoirs from settlers who knew Johnny well indicate the impression that many Indians held Johnny in a high regard, and that his unusual zeal for serving others led some to believe he was touched by the Great Spirit. For that reason, they allowed him to listen to their council meetings, and he was therefore sometimes able to avert trouble between a tribe and incoming settlers. He is said to have had compassion for the views and needs of both cultures, and was a fine communicator. He possessed a peculiar eloquence and a resonant voice that was persuasively tender, inspirationally sublime, or when needed witheringly denunciatory. He had a keen sense of humor and was quick to make a witty retort or a cutting rebuke. And he was sincerely patriotic. He had unlimited faith in his country. On one occasion, at least, he made a Fourth of July oration at a celebration in Huron County.

He had unusual ideas about charging for his trees and collecting for them. He would take a reasonable price in money, some cast-off clothing, a bit of food, or nothing at all, according to the circumstances of his customer. To him, it was more important for a settler to plant a tree than to pay for it. He never liked to have a note dated for a specific day, for, he said, it might not be convenient to collect that day, or it might not be convenient for the customer to pay on that date. He never asked a person to pay a debt, for he reasoned that if God wanted him to have the money, God would move the customer to pay. Besides, the customer knew that he or she owed the money, without being reminded of it.

He was not the only person involved in such activities. What made Johnny legendary is that he stayed itinerant his entire life; his ability to exist harmoniously with Indian cultures as well as his own; his colorful personal habits. For instance, though appearing outwardly impoverished, John Chapman was not a poor man. While his assets probably never accumulated to a fortune, he had far more cash than he needed. He never used banks and relied instead on an elaborate system of burying moneys that he might not come back for until a few years later.

He lived on foods provided by nature, and he never killed animals. Humane societies might well claim him as a forerunner, for he would rescue aged horses left to fend for themselves and pay some farmer to care for them. It is said that he once rescued a wolf from a trap, with the result that the wolf adopted him and followed him for a long time. It is said that he could walk over the ice and snow barefooted in the coldest weather and never feel it. The skin was so think on his feet that one of his acquaintances said it would kill a rattlesnake to try to bite Johnny’s feet.

The End of a Long Journey

In 1842, Johnny made his last trip back to Ohio. While there, he made his headquarters at the home of Nathaniel, the half-brother with whom he had set out on his remarkable life fifty years before. Upon his return to Fort Wayne in Indiana, he resumed his work as “a gatherer and planter of apple seeds.” On March 18, 1845, he died of pneumonia in the home of his Richmond County friend, William Worth, and was buried not far from Ft. Wayne.

John Chapman lived in complete harmony with nature. In field and meadow and forest, he walked, concerned with the spacious thoughts of God. The singularity of his thinking and his living was inextricably entwined with his religious views. What was it about the “new” Christian doctrines that came from the writings of the Swedish scientist and Lutheran reformer, Emanuel Swedenborg, to guide, nurture and inspire such a life?

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The Real McCoy

Elijah McCoy

The term “the Real McCoy” is more than just a catch phrase. Since it first started being used more than a century ago, it has also been a signal of quality as well as an affirmation of the intellect and perseverance of Elijah McCoy, a man whose legacy is a source of pride not only for black Canadians, but for all descendants of North American chattel slavery.

Elijah McCoy was a famous inventor and engineer who was born in Canada, grew up in the United States, studied in Scotland, and made great contributions to manufacturing and locomotive industries around the world. The third of twelve children, he was born in the mid-1840s (historians cannot be certain whether his year of birth was 1843 or 1844) in Colchester, Ontario, to George McCoy and Mildred McCoy (née Goins), two escaped slaves from Kentucky. When Elijah was a young child, the McCoys returned to the United States. They settled in Michigan, and his father found work in the logging industry.

Blacks in the United States had a hard time obtaining mechanical training, so Elijah, who exhibited an aptitude in that area, went to Scotland to study Mechanical Engineering. When he returned, despite his qualifications, he was unable to work as a mechanical engineer in either Southwest Ontario or Michigan, and so he began working for the Michigan Central Railroad as a fire man and oiler. As a fire man, his main job was to fuel the steam engines of trains; his duties as an oiler included lubricating the train’s moving parts, axles and bearings. It was while working as an oiler that McCoy noticed a persistent problem with moving machinery, and devised a solution for it.

Trains back then needed to be lubricated periodically, to prevent the corrosion of metal due to high-pressure steam and to stop the machinery from overheating. Every time a train’s engine had to be lubricated, the train had to be stopped completely. McCoy created a way of using steam pressure in the train’s cylinders to supply the machinery with drops of oil from a cup as the train continued to run, eliminating the bothersome process of shutting down machinery to lubricate it.

McCoy was issued his first patent on July 12, 1872 (U.S. patent #129,843) for his self-regulating lubricator, and railroad and shipping lines quickly began using McCoy’s machine. Clearly one to push the envelope and look for improvements wherever possible, McCoy continued to build new inventions while improving upon his own designs, and was awarded more than 50 patents during his lifetime in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France, Austria, Germany, and Russia. The Michigan Central Railroad promoted him to an instructor’s position so he could teach others about his inventions and the proper way to use them, and he later worked as a mechanical consultant to companies like the Detroit Lubricating Company.

Machine buyers everywhere began asking for “the Real McCoy,” meaning that they wanted nothing but the best – genuine Elijah McCoy inventions, and not something that a copy-cat had put out on the market. To this day, the name connotes quality and authenticity. With the exception of a folding ironing board and a self-propelled lawn sprinkler, all of his inventions involved automatic lubrication, and they were used on locomotives, steam ships, ocean liners, and in factories around the world.

Ironically, many of those who asked for “the Real McCoy” were not aware that they were calling the name of a black man, and McCoy continued to face racial discrimination after he had become a well-known inventor. There were even times when the scheduled appearances of this innovator, who had proven himself to be a mechanical genius and made significant contributions to the industrial world, were canceled at the last moment.

By the early 1880s, McCoy and his second wife, Mary Eleanora Delaney (he had married an Ann Elizabeth Stewart in 1868, but she died four years later) had moved to a non-segregated neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan. In 1916, he patented his Graphite Lubricator. McCoy described this as his greatest invention; it used powdered graphite (a substance which could easily withstand high temperatures, but was previously prone to clogging engines) mixed with oil to lubricate superheated locomotive engine cylinders. In 1920, he established his own company: the Elijah McCoy Manufacturing Company.

Sadly, McCoy suffered in later years. He and his wife were injured in a serious car accident in 1922; she died as a result, and his health was never the same. After spending a year in Michigan’s Eloise Infirmary, Elijah McCoy died of senile dementia caused by hypertension on October 10, 1929 – less than a month before the stock market crash that sparked the Great Depression. He has been inducted into Ohio’s National Inventors Hall of Fame, and he was also nominated by the International African Inventors Museum for induction into the Canadian Railway Hall of Fame. To this day, when people ask for “the Real McCoy,” it is understood that they want the best and nothing less.