During my birth, the umbilical cord became wrapped beneath my right arm and around my neck. My head came out, but the rest of my body did not. I was dying, and the doctor grabbed me by the head and pulled me out. In saving my life, my right shoulder blade was dislocated and my right arm was permanently injured.
My mother told me that for roughly the first two years of my life she could not hold me or even touch me normally without causing terrible pain. If she picked me up, I screamed. If she changed me, I screamed. If I rolled over and moved that injured shoulder the wrong way, I screamed. I was never held as a baby the way a baby should be held, because ordinary touch could hurt me.
My right arm has never completely straightened. It hangs outward to the right and has always looked different. When I was 12 years old, I underwent two surgeries on it. Those surgeries left a large scar on my upper right arm, but they could not erase the deformity I had carried since birth.
Children notice anything different, and I was different. I was mercilessly picked on because of that arm, and it went far beyond teasing. I was beaten up constantly. I was also a short, heavy kid, which made me an easier target. I knew what it felt like to be laughed at, humiliated, and physically beaten down.
Some of the deepest wounds, however, came from home. I remember my father introducing his children to people. My brothers and sisters would be introduced, each given their moment, and somehow I always seemed to come last. I would be mentioned quickly, and then he would immediately move on to another conversation.
It did not happen once. It happened over and over and over again.
I learned to pretend I did not notice, but I did. Every single time, I noticed.
That may sound small to somebody reading it decades later, but it was not small to the little boy living it. Children know when they are being celebrated, and they know when they are being tolerated. I grew up carrying the feeling that even in my own family there was something about me that made me less acceptable.
That is why I have such a difficult time watching somebody be bullied, humiliated, dismissed, or made to feel small. I know what it feels like to be the person everybody decided was safe to hurt.

My father put me around concrete when I was about five years old.
One of my earliest memories is him teaching me how to hand float concrete. He showed me what the float was doing, how to feel the surface, how to move it, and what I was supposed to be looking for. Then he saw it happen in my eyes. It was like a light bulb came on.
I looked at him and said, “Oh, I got it!”
From that moment on, I could hand float concrete. My father told me that watching that understanding suddenly click in a five-year-old boy was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen. I took to finishing concrete like a duck to water.
While other children were still discovering what they could do with their hands, I was growing up around physical labor. Concrete does not care how old you are, whether your arm is different, or whether somebody teased you at school. It has to be moved, worked, finished, and done correctly.
By my sophomore year of high school, years of physical work had made me stronger than I realized. One day my father told me, essentially, “Son, you don't have to take crap from anyone. You can knock out a full-grown man. You're big and you're strong.”
Something clicked. I had spent years seeing myself through the eyes of the people who picked on me. For the first time, I began seeing myself differently.
By my junior year, I stopped allowing myself to be everybody's target. I got into fight after fight, dozens of them, and discovered that I could stand up for myself.
But something else happened too. Once I knew I could defend myself, I could not comfortably stand by and watch somebody weaker get treated the way I had been treated. If I saw somebody being bullied, I stepped between them.
I remember people saying, “I don't have a problem with you, Dave.”
My answer was, “You do now.”
I was not looking for somebody to hurt. I knew what hurt felt like. That was the whole point. After years of wishing somebody would stand up for me, I became the person who stood up.
By my mid-20s, the concrete work that had started when I was five had become second nature. I remember being able to pour a monolithic slab about 30 feet by 30 feet by myself, finish the entire slab, strip the foundation, load everything back onto the truck, and be headed down the road in about five hours.
Anyone who has ever poured and finished concrete knows that is a pretty dang good feat. At that point in my life, though, it felt like a walk in the park.

In my twenties, I became a husband and a father. I have five children, and over the course of my adult life I was married three times for approximately 22 years combined.
When I loved someone, I did not know how to do it halfway. I wanted family, loyalty, honesty, and the feeling that somebody had chosen me and I had chosen her.
Marriage eventually became associated in my mind with being needed for protection and money, being cheated on, being lied to, never truly being opened up to, and never feeling that the love I poured out was coming back to me in the same way.
That does not mean there were no good moments. Human relationships are more complicated than that. But the endings were devastating.
Before all of those years had played themselves out, however, the greatest pain of my life arrived while I was still in my mid-20s.

Of every title I have ever carried, none meant more to me than Dad.
I got to be a daddy, and I still consider that one of the greatest honors God ever allowed me to experience.
My children were taken from my arms when they were very young, roughly three to five years old. I was still in my mid-20s.
What happened surrounding my children remains the deepest wound I carry, and there are parts of that story I would not wish upon my worst enemy.
The greatest anguish was knowing that I could not protect my babies. I lacked the knowledge, the ability, and the understanding of the systems around me that I desperately wish I had possessed then.
My poor innocent children needed their daddy to defend them, and I could not do what every cell in my body was screaming at me to do: protect them.
There was a day when I learned what had happened to my children. My legs stopped supporting me. They simply stopped.
I collapsed to the ground and screamed.
In that moment, I remember feeling what I can only describe as the hand of God upon my back, and my mind went immediately to Job.
People sometimes tell the story of Job and concentrate on what he later received. That is not where my heart goes. I do not need anybody replaced. I do not need another set of children to make the numbers balance.
Love does not work that way, and loss does not work that way.
Those were my babies.
I am still holding the grief and the mourning. I had been given this beautiful badge of honor called Daddy, and then it had been ripped from me.
Nothing replaces that.

Years passed, and my children grew older. They had been away from me for much of their childhood and, from my perspective, had been deeply influenced against me during those years.
Then, when they were teenagers, I got them back.
For about one year, after losing them when they were little, I had my children under my roof again.
But even that did not end like the scene people imagine when somebody says the kids left home. There were no daffodils, no butterflies, and no proud movie moment where everybody hugged at the front door.
It ended in pain, anguish, shame, desperation, and a police escort.
Once again, my children were gone.
Through those adult years, my relationships had also taken their toll. I remember one night after a relationship fell apart, collapsing in my driveway and curling into a fetal position because the pain in my chest was nearly unbearable.
There is emotional pain so deep that it becomes physical. You feel it in your ribs, your stomach, your breathing, and your entire body.
I loved hard, and when those relationships ended, I broke hard.
My most recent divorce came when I was 42 years old, and I have remained single for approximately 11 years.
By then, I looked back over my life and felt as though I had been stomped on by nearly every institution and relationship I had trusted: police officers, officials, government representatives, bosses, parents, uncles, brothers, sisters, cousins, people I loved, and even my own children.
Whether every person involved would describe those events the way I do is beside the point here.
This is what my heart felt.
I felt disrespected, thrown down, spit on, kicked, used, and finally left for dead.
Something inside me said, “Enough.”
I remember thinking that I would rather die in a gutter than continue giving everything I had to a world and a system that seemed determined to take away everything I ever loved.

I pulled the back seats out of my minivan, put a twin mattress inside, and said:
“I am not coming back unless I find something worth coming back for.”
At that point, I had no moxie.
That is the best word I know for it.
The part of me that had always pushed forward was gone. I was frightened of death. I did not truly want to die, but I could not bear the idea of continuing to live the way I had been living.
During that period, my despair took me into dangerous places. I would deliberately wander into remote bear and cougar country with almost nothing protecting me.
Part of me knew exactly what I was doing.
I was putting myself somewhere that something could happen to me without having to make it happen myself.
I drank heavily during portions of that period too. Sometimes I was not chasing adventure; I was chasing oblivion. I wanted the pain quiet, the memories quiet, and the questions quiet.
I wanted to know whether there was any reason left for me to keep going.​

My sabbatical lasted about two years before the night on the mountain that changed everything.
I wandered across this country from California to New York, New York back to California, California to Texas, Texas back to California, and through those trips north and south across the United States.
I did not keep track of the states. That was not the point.
I was not sightseeing. I was searching.
I would find forestry roads where almost nobody was and disappear into the woods. When I needed food or provisions, I would find a little town, get what I needed, and disappear again into the forest, the mountains, and the silence.
Sometimes I sat, walked, drank, thought, or meditated, and increasingly I prayed.
I kept asking God what I was supposed to do now, why all of this had happened, and what could possibly make any of it mean something.

​When COVID arrived, I was so detached from normal society during my sabbatical that I did not even know what was happening.
At one point I was sick and shaking while coming off heavy drinking, suffering from what I used to call the “bottle flu.” I called my friend Lou, and he said something about maybe having COVID.
I remember asking him, “What's COVID?”
As I eventually became aware of what governments and institutions were doing in response to the pandemic, I developed very strong convictions about what I believed was happening to individual freedom.
I watched mandates, restrictions, governmental power, and arguments that control was justified because it was supposedly protecting somebody.
That connected with something I had experienced throughout my life: people can justify almost anything once they convince themselves their reason is good enough.
Greed, anger, control, taking from someone, hurting someone, and trampling a person's rights can all be justified if the justification is wrapped in the right words: protect the children, fix the roads, educate the children, protect society, protect this person from that person.
There always seemed to be another justification.
After spending a lifetime watching human beings justify hurting one another, all I kept asking myself was:
“Why?”

​Eventually, after roughly two years of wandering, there was a night alone on a mountain.
There was no audience, no organization, no Black Diamond Guild, no Ascending Awareness, no Project Home Base, and not even a name for what was about to enter my mind.
There was only me, God, and what felt like the wreckage of my life.
I talked to Him.
Really talked to Him.
I told God that my life felt like a slow-moving train wreck, not one giant explosion, but a wreck happening slowly enough that you get to watch every car leave the tracks.
I thought about my childhood, my injured arm, being beaten up, my family, my marriages, my children, the betrayals, people hurting one another, institutions hurting people, and the endless ways human beings found to justify what they did.
And sitting there alone on that mountain with God, I asked Him one question:
“What would this world have to look like for none of this shit to happen to anyone ever again?”
That was it.

​In a flash, the answer came together in my mind.
It was not gradual, and I did not sit down with graph paper and develop a business plan.
The idea was to make housing attainable, give people the ability to own a home, give them control over their basic infrastructure—their own power, water, and sewer—and create an abundant food supply right outside their homes.
The idea was to reduce what it costs simply to exist and give people assets, knowledge, practical skills, and enough stability that survival no longer consumed their entire lives.
My immediate reaction was:
“I can do that.”
I knew construction, housing, and infrastructure. I had engineering education. I understood design, materials, utilities, research, buildings, codes, and how systems fit together.
God had taken everything I had learned, even the things I had learned through pain, and suddenly laid the pieces together in front of me.
The mission did not yet have a name, but in that moment the idea that would become Project Home Base was born.

​Something happened to me emotionally on that mountain that was almost more important than the idea itself.
My moxie came back.
I had left home feeling beaten, ashamed, discarded, and unnecessary. I had spent two years wandering because I did not know whether there was anything worth returning for, and suddenly there was.
God had not simply handed me work to do.
He had handed me a reason to live.
Something inside me stood back up.
I was no longer willing to define myself only as the deformed little boy, the bullied kid, the failed husband, the father who could not protect his babies, the man crying in the driveway, the man sleeping in a minivan, or the drunk disappearing down forestry roads almost hoping a bear would decide the rest for him.
All of those things had happened to me, but they did not have to be the final definition of me.
I had a purpose, and more importantly, I had something to build for other people.
If another family could have stability, another father could spend more time with his children instead of breaking his back just to keep a roof over them, or a young person could establish a home and the necessities of life without giving away the next 40 years simply to survive, then perhaps everything I had lived through could become something other than tragedy.
Perhaps it could become purpose.

I came off that mountain with my moxie back, a reason to live, and a mission I believed God had placed in front of me; in 2020 I began pursuing the formation of a church and the work that would grow into Project Home Base, in 2023 I founded the Black Diamond Guild, and in 2026 Ascending Awareness was established as the spiritual Church and Ministry carrying that work forward.
I took a vow of poverty and have spent the last six years pouring myself into this mission, often 70 to 100 hours a week, using the construction experience, engineering knowledge, research ability, faith, hardship, and determination my life gave me.
Today, all of those years have brought me here: still building what I saw on that mountain and working to help people gain stability, independence, ownership, freedom, and ultimately their time back.