Kickstarting our Futures!
So we’ve launched! Not like Felix Baumgartner, the man who leapt from 23 miles above our local Land of Enchantment, but in our own fresh, new way. The uncharted free fall Slurp gives to us today delivers a sweet, rejuvenating high—an exhilarating little hum that keeps us buzzing as we leap into an uncertain outcome. We’ve set our soup ladles aside for the time being and catapulted our creativity energies into cyberspace with a Kickstarter campaign at: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/slurpsantafe/pop-a-book-celebrating-creative-airstream-entrepre
Our project–a beautiful art/food/design book–launches today, (Oct. 17th) and continues for 30 days, and we want to share it with you—friends, family, dedicated customers, blog followers, friends of friends, Airstream enthusiasts, and the amazing network of like-minded mobile Airstream entrepreneurs out there we hope to celebrate.
We chose Kickstarter because we love it! Kickstarter fits with what we’re all about—about celebrating creativity and developing momentum and action through the building of community. As most of you know, Kickstarter works when folks come together to support each other’s endeavors. If we can create a buzz and inspire others with our project, it will translate into the funding we need to make our dream a reality. If we don’t reach out enough and share our enthusiasm; or, if our vision somehow doesn’t translate, then we won’t get the funds we need, and our project will have to remain on hold.
Oddly enough, we walked into the Slurp Airstream yesterday to discover that we’d been burglarized. It’s always a little gut-wrenching when you feel that violation—when a place or a thing that’s meaningful to you gets so blatantly disregarded by another. There’s that moment where you stand, stunned, understanding what’s happened and just how helpless you are to change it. It will all be ok, of course. We have insurance, and maybe somebody has whatever it is he or she needs after hawking our stuff in desperation. But, as I moved around the spilled spice trails and upturned appliances left behind, I looked up at Carlos, who wore that look of disbelief and strange sadness that comes with the realization you’ve been robbed. He mumbled something about the trailer having been “abandoned” (read Ch…ch…ch…changes! in the archives)
In response, I pointed to the wording on an empty flour sack we have propped up in the corner. It reads “Promesa”—promise—and I reminded him that we weren’t “abandoning” Slurp, but keeping our pledge to “take it to the next level” for each of us in our creative lives. Then, all kinds of old blog entries came flooding to mind. There’s the one about author Molly Wizenberg’s quote, saying food is never “just food, but a way of getting at who we are, who we have been, and who we want to be.” Yep! Or, the one about “abandon,” in which I comment that a “Slurp” is a “sound full of life—a noisy sucking it all in.” Uh huh! Or, the entry that concludes with a “recipe” for our future that says “from the chaos comes the great chance to exercise wild creativity” and how I hope that we can “make it translate.” Get on over to Kickstarter, please, as soon as you finish reading this, if our creative vision DOES translate! Finally, there’s the one paraphrasing Steve Jobs’ comment on not being able to connect the dots forward and needing to “trust in something… why not paella?” (This one gets lots of play in our Kickstarter campaign, especially in the rewards we have in store for you.)
But maybe the old blog post that rings the most true of all the blog posts here, especially as we face an uncertain, but oh-so-hopeful and EXCITING future is the life maxim translated in the eulogy we wrote for Cliff, a late customer whose face shone in our window every Monday and most Tuesdays, the last year of his life. He’d order his 16-ounce bowl of Green Chile Stew and shout without fail, “…and put some chicken in it!” I promised him in that posthumous blog that we would! We’d “put some chicken in it,” I insisted, saying that “when ladling up soup and LIFE, we’d always opt for the meatiest serving.”
So here we go! A new creative project we can really sink our teeth into. Check it out at:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/slurpsantafe/pop-a-book-celebrating-creative-airstream-entrepre
Follow Rebecca on Twitter: @SLURPSantaFe
