We make more than a direct impact on dropping DUI rates which have gone down 10 percent every year since we began, but also make an enormous impact, a human impact, on each other.

Good evening, good afternoon and good morrow! My name is Brett Banfe and I’m about six foot tall. I am in what one might call “the thirties” and I like the band called the Beatles. Now that we have found relatable ground, I’d like to tell you each a little story about my becoming.

I grew up in an amazing town full of eclectic, electric energy called Haddonfield, in New Jersey. I was triumphantly disorderly. The word “obstinate” correctly described my pattern of being.

When I was 18, I chose to take a vow of silence. For a year.

I can’t say exactly what brought this on. I sometimes think it was the relevance of “Silent Bob,” as portrayed by Kevin Smith, to my adolescent mind. Other times I think in earnest that I didn’t choose, but some entity I was to become chose this route for me.

Either way, I said sayonara to the reality which I knew, and I took the plunge. My goal was to go one year without speech. In some ways, I felt disloyal to the reality I’d been raised in, like I had turned my back to it, to pursue the closest thing to the life of an ascetic that a college freshman living in a dorm could ever achieve. The answers which I sought in silence became the resolve with which I applied myself.

“Who am I?” was never a question I directly pursued, but every thing existed indirectly as pieces, tiny little nibbles of this great wedge of cheese. Slowly the cheese began to disappear.

As I went further and further back into subtler and subtler associations and interpretations, I began to clarify less, and yet emphasize more. I was let out. No one was there to congratulate me. No one noted this release, but personally, perhaps spiritually, I gave in to the awesomeness that I found less and less reason to deny.

The first few years following the year I spent silent, including my resurfacing into a verbal and very surface-driven world that is in constant rush, I experienced something of a psychological equivalent to “the bends”—but I am a person of immense conviction. I was motivated by the openness to inform, drive and propel myself through the jungle of what was at times, a very disjointed perspective.

The times when I was barest of all I possessed everything of import.

There are so many theories and ideas that contextualized this for me. It’s something that I believe we all go through and we can identify its lessons in theories like “the hundredth monkey.” The effects of a conscious tidal wave have become increasingly clear and evident to even the most casual observers, as we delve deeper into the most serious of all topics, ourselves.

This is how I would like to introduce to you the organization where I work. I work at a Boulder, Colorado community non-profit called Bus to Show. Bus to Show exists as a membership community built around the arts, advancing our greenest and most devout sensibilities, consciousness respect, diversity and preservation as well as nurturing the futures we portend.

We also have operations in Denver, Fort Collins, Austin and Kansas City. On the ground level, we provide transportation to concerts and events vis-a-vis organization-owned buses. In doing so, we reduce the impact of intoxicated driving, and provide a safe option to our members which carries with it so much more.

The buses afford a community the opportunity to emerge more fully; both as a group in terms of its diversity, but also as individuals, inspiring our highest visions for each other.

As a non-profit, we grow organically by word of mouth and by being open to the involvement of our community, often growing most through osmosis. We are inspired by the Merry Pranksters who took to a bus as their safe haven. It is this revolution that inspires us greatest because it is a revolution in our capacity to love and recognize each other, and we pledge to carry this beautiful torch forward.

In the process, we make more than a direct impact on dropping DUI rates which have gone down 10 percent every year since we began, but also make an enormous impact, a human impact, on each other.

This impact is not very chart-friendly and only exists in the moment-to-moment interactions that take place as we build a bridge to ourselves and dance down every lane.

For the first time ever, we are moving to increase the scale of our relative visibility. We are inviting you to participate, emerge and count yourself among us. We invite you to join in celebrating this cause on November 29th, 2012 at the Rembrandt Yard on 13th and Spruce St. in Boulder, Colorado. Bus to Show holds itself to promote, support and solidify an eclectic arts movement, identify and celebrate the essential core that exists within all of us and unites us, supplanting the world with appropriate mystery and revelry.

We want to ask you to slow dance, and we want to hold your hand as you cross the street.

We want to do all this with great gusto while enriching each other’s lives, all in pursuit of the certified funk. Now that you know a little bit about us, we’d like to meet you in a more comfortable setting. Our website is http://www.bustoshow.org/ and we’d love nothing more than to hear from you.

Thank you. We may be a small organization, but we possess bold vision.

Brett Banfe, Director of Applied Consciousness

 

 

Brett Banfe is an author whose main passion is in developing non-profits. He has been on Oprah, The Today Show, GMA, CNN, LSD and MSNBC. He can be reached at [email protected]

 

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Editor: Jennifer Townsend

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