Turning Points
November 2012
When he quit going to school, Micco Emeson found god.
By 17 he had moved out of his parents’ home, and shortly after was introduced to Christianity. The church community fulfilled a yearning for the normalcy his childhood lacked, and he devoted himself fully to it. He read and translated the bible several times over as he completed rigorous ministry training.
But in his extreme and impulsive service to the church he was testing his psychological endurance, and it caught up to him. “I was driving…and I just had to pull off onto the side of the road,” he says. He pulled off the highway and ambled into a sweeping meadow. “It was a moment of reflection…I realized that I was not enjoying the lifestyle that I had chosen,” he says.
Today Emeson remembers the moment in the meadow as pivotal. That day marked the start of a regression into old habits that he looks back on disapprovingly. “It was probably the most tumultuous time in my life.”
When his life wandered off-path, he found old friends—one of whom was living in Maitreya, a free-spirited eco-village where the buildings are constructed mostly of mud and straw.
“Maitreya was a crisis point for me… I started kinda living there. It was cool being there because it was a whole bunch of people with like minds getting together and just hanging out…there was no emphasis on wearing the right clothes or being super cool.”
Being in an environment of voluntary simplicity pushed Emeson to take inventory of the pressures he was putting on the planet. At Maitreya he was forced to create what he needed from what he had. Instead of buying a wheelbarrow to haul leaf mulch from one end of the garden to the opposite, he jury-rigged two rusty bike wheels to either side of a large crate he nailed together out of scrap wood pieces. When a mechanic asked $500 to fix the brakes on his car, Emeson spent a month collecting the parts and tools to fix them himself, which cost him $30.
Today, Emeson uses his car to drive between the eco-farm he is living on to community college, where he is earning a degree in environmental engineering. The goals he now has are more secular than they were two years ago. “I want to own my own piece of land some day… And build. I love to build.” He’s currently doing a research project on constructed wetlands for his permaculture class. “I’m really stoked on it,” he says. “I’ve never really been stoked about anything before.”