So, here we are… just short of seven years later… Quite a lot has happened over the past six years and a few months, some of it good, some of it bad (really bad) and some of it simply an evolution of my thoughts about this land, what it means to me and what it might become. Here’s the intervening history and where we are now. Advance warning: it’s a long post.
Acres of Pearls as an Artist Colony
The first time I decided what Acres of Pearls – or AoP, for brevity’s sake – should be, I was pretty sure that I wanted it to be an artist colony. You know, lots of studios and people working together in collaboration. Sounded pretty yummy to me.
I had retreated into a cave for most of 2010 and 2011 into early in 2012, dealing with a major betrayal and resulting lawsuit by close friends who embezzled a huge part of my trust funds, and had finally come out the other side back into the world at large wanting to participate again. Well, things were going pretty slowly out on the land and I wasn’t interested in going backwards to being a hermit again, so I decided to buy a building in Sedona to create a mini-version of what I was looking to create on the land.
After a false start with a down payment on a building that really wasn’t what I initially thought it was, I found a fabulous building on Birch Boulevard, named it Creative Gateways, and moved my studio from my garage into the new space. Almost immediately, I attracted a tenant who was a potter and acrylic painter. He was lots of fun and just the kind of collaborative soul I was looking for!
Unfortunately, the next few tenants either weren’t the types to collaborate (although they said they were in the interview) or they came and went fast enough to give me whiplash. I also ran into issues with the artists not being willing to really take personal responsibility for simple things like washing their own dishes and more important things like paying the rent on time.
In addition to those issues was the main problem with the gallery location – it wasn’t on the main highway that passes through town. Sedona is a very small town, with around 10,000 homes – less if you’re not counting movie stars and snow birds who are only here a few weeks or months a year – and only one main road. Highway 89A runs through Cottonwood and Sedona, then heads north into Flagstaff.
If a business is not located on that highway, it is very unlikely to do well over time, and Creative Gateways was not. And it struggled because of that, despite the money we were spending on marketing and advertising. Some of the artists left because of it, since we weren’t getting the foot traffic that the gallery needed to help the artists be successful.
As time passed, I realized that the same problems we were having at Creative Gateways would be far worse at Acres of Pearls, being half an hour outside of town. Even if we created a public gallery in town to sell the artists’ work, if we weren’t able to buy/build a big enough gallery building on the main street in town to really showcase all of the artists who were working at Acres of Pearls – unless we had some artists who already had strong followings – it would be difficult for them to support themselves out there.
So, I gave up that idea long before I sold the Creative Gateways building on Birch Boulevard and moved on…
Acres of Pearls as an Intentional Community
My next phase of thinking was influenced not only by my experiences at Creative Gateways, but quite a lot by Alison Armstrong and her workshops on partnership. I had been introduced to intentionality and intentional living via quite a few books, workshops and thought leaders over the years, but Alison was the one to really take my understanding of partnership to a new level.
The appeal of being around people who are not just shuffling through their days doing the same things, thinking the same ways and not interested in better themselves or their lives, is incredibly attractive. The difficult part is finding people who don’t just pay lip service to personal growth, collaboration and community.
I was part of several networking groups and personal empowerment and improvement groups over the years. I was amazed at how many people were seminar junkies who were looking for a quick fix to their lives, as I made large strides in getting myself out of the hermit stage of my life and made real changes in myself and how I interacted in and with the world around me.
Very few of those people who were going to the same workshops as I, reading many of the same books and participating in the same groups, actually integrated what they were learning into their every day lives. People who I met were largely unchanged from year to year, despite all of their workshop and book learning.
The real turning point for me was taking Alison’s 5 day Heart of Partnership course, working with horses – who Alison refers to as 1 ton telepaths – in rural Colorado. Standing out there in the sun for several hours each day integrating what we were learning in the classroom by implementing it with the horses after the classroom session was truly life changing. I got to see the difference in how the horses (and people) reacted to me each day due to using what we were learning in class.
Learning how to hold my space – as well as truly feeling in my body what that felt like – was just one of the major keys to my understanding of not just partnership, but how I hadn’t had a chance of creating partnership before knowing this material. There is way more to partnership than that, but just that concept alone was a life changer.
As I integrated my knowledge of, and relationship to partnership, I figured out that partnership was not only what I had been longing for, it was also a key personal value of mine. I also noticed that a few of the folks at that workshop still weren’t able to truly “get it,” despite the feedback from the horses, Alison and the other instructor as well as the other people in the class. If they couldn’t fully grasp the concepts, even with all of that feedback, how could/would other people who didn’t have access to the feedback grasp the concepts?
The good news on this front is that I have found/attracted several people who seem to innately get partnership, even if they don’t have Alison’s structure and names for the elements of partnership. Working with them is always a joy and so much easier than working with people who want me to tell them what to do and how to do it. The bad news on this front is that it feels as though so many people who talk about intentional living and partnership really don’t grasp the concepts and only pay them lip service. So, I let go of the idea of AoP being an intentional community as its outward face and focus.
Acres of Pearls as a farm
As I first started working on the infrastructure and layout of the land – the pond, roads, drainage, the food forest, growing areas, pasture areas, etc. – I was introduced to Morgan Stine, who does solar installations as well as designing and creating infrastructure for people with large parcels of land. He was originally hired to do some consulting on the hydrology – there is a creek running through the parcel, several fairly deep drainage washes and an existing cattle tank – on my property. He was also looking at the viability of refurbishing the cattle tank that has existed on the land since the 1930s (or so I was told, I can’t confirm the accuracy of that assertion). We also wanted to make sure that any washes on the land could be either used to naturally flood irrigate our growing areas or be captured by the pond.
Over time, Morgan also consulted on getting the existing well going, since it had no pump and hadn’t been used in over a decade, and possibly much longer than that. That well had a shared well agreement that was turning into a problem because everyone who was a part of the shared well agreement reacted differently to my notification that I was getting the well going for my own use and they could choose to continue to be party to the shared well or not as each of them chose.
One party claimed they were not a party to the shared well agreement (despite signed documents saying otherwise) and some didn’t respond at all. Another party was downright belligerent that I had no right to do anything to the well at all without prior consultation with the other well participants, despite the agreement saying that the owner of the parcel the well was on could use the well for their own purposes at their own expense, if no other parties were willing to pay for use of the well.
Morgan also suggested applying for an Agricultural Exemption, which we eventually did, in order to reduce property taxes and generate some income to pay for expenses and taxes going forward. Although I was told after we submitted the application that the plan was approved by the county, that turned out not to be the case. We planted trees for two years running and graded a field for growing crops to prove that we were moving forward towards the goals set forth in the Ag Exemption we supposedly had approved, even though the county had no record of the approval of said plan.
He also drew up plans for two bridges across the dry creek, for a solar farm and solar trailer: a trailer with a 20′ cargo container mounted on top, which would have solar panels mounted on it and could be moved around the property. The solar farm would be the long term solution to powering the site, since APS didn’t have capacity to give us very much power, as we were at the end of their delivery line. The solar trailer would initially be used to power the well pump and then could be used for portable power anywhere it might be needed on site.
All in all, Morgan had quite a lot of ideas about what needed to be done on site, most of which were overkill for what I was trying to achieve and also quite expensive. I spent a lot of money on plans and ideas with a very small amount of implementation, and at the end of the day didn’t have very much on site to show for it. I became very disillusioned with the farming concept and the expenses I was constantly incurring without much of value actually happening on the land, so I fired Morgan and shelved the farm idea.
Acres of Pearls as a Tiny Home community
Towards the end of my work with Morgan, I met a wonderful gentleman by the name of Brett Labit. He is one of the few people I know who are naturally inclined towards partnership. He is wonderful at connecting people and helping them to work together toward a shared outcome – whether that be as simple as masterminding business ideas in a group or as large as creating tribes related to work affinities.
When I first met Brett, he was trying to develop an online platform for creating tribe called Local Impact Zones or LIZ. That platform went through quite a few iterations trying to find its feet and is now called TribeUp. Here’s the link, if you want to join my tribe related to AoP there: https://tribeup.com/tribes-invite?aff=Pilisa&tribes-invite=arizona. Brett became my gallery and business coach about 6 months or so after our initial meeting.
As we worked together on my businesses, he kept running into references to Acres of Pearls, since it was quite the money pit at the time. He started consulting on that business as well, trying to figure out ways to create some income out there without spending very much money to create some income. It was at the time that Tiny Homes were becoming quite the trend, both as a way of downsizing homes and as a source of new inexpensive AirBnB properties for rental income.
His suggestion was to put 10 AirBnB short-term rentals, daily or weekly in duration, 10 medium-term rentals of monthly duration, and 10 long-term or (potentially) permanent units for people who were interested in settling in at AoP. He had a few meetings with the county that went well and felt promising. Unfortunately, around that time, we came to an unexpected understanding about the gallery business…
The gallery business is rather hard to do with employees, as they drain the profit margins down to almost nothing. Most artists are accustomed to getting a 50/50 or 60/40 split between the gallery and themselves. Given that the gallery often has to pay monthly rent, plus utilities, plus marketing and advertising costs to bring people into the gallery, there really isn’t much left to pay employees with. So, the most successful galleries are either owner operated or they spread out overhead costs across several locations.
When COVID hit this year, that reality came home to roost. At that point, I started running the Creative Gateways gallery on Birch Boulevard in Sedona, Lera started running the Kuivato/Creative Gateways location in the Tlaquepaque Shopping Village in Sedona, and Brett was trying to build out and run a Creative Gateways gallery in Scottsdale Fashion Square Mall in the greater Phoenix area. We had a few employees that worked at each location and we had to lay off all of them until the businesses could reopen. When we did reopen, we found that it wouldn’t make sense for other people to work in those galleries, except to give the person running it some time off.
During that initial closure, we all had to look hard at the financial end of all of these businesses and the reality of owner/operator became glaringly obvious. Nothing was going to happen out at Acres of Pearls while we all grappled with these realities, so I put the Tiny Home idea on the back-burner and didn’t pick it up again.
Acres of Pearls now
As I wrestled with all of the gallery business issues, I came to a conclusion: I personally didn’t want to be in the gallery business, I wanted to be an artist, period. I didn’t want to be a farmer or a gallery owner or a rental manager of Tiny Homes or anything else. Once I came to that conclusion, it was an easy decision when Brett offered to buy me out of all the Creative Gateways galleries – mostly – I am still an investor and minority owner.
That, in and of itself, was a huge relief! I could stop spending the majority of my time and energy trying to make something work that wasn’t making me happy, and I could instead focus on my art, which is really what I want to be and do. I could also let go of having to try to run a farm out at AoP and instead look for someone who would be a farm manager and deal with all of the planting, growing, watering and infrastructure issues.
Oddly enough, despite the fact that I had been trying to find someone who wanted to be a farmer since 2017 or so, with a complete and utter lack of success, now I had 2 candidates who are totally competent and capable of handling such duties to choose from! So, farming might not only be resurrected as part of AoP, but be happening out there sooner than I could possibly have expected.
In addition, there are now about 5 people who are seriously interested in living out there permanently. As in, they actually want to pay me money to buy parcels of land carved out of the AoP parcels and have the means to build houses of their own to live in. It would be so nice to have this business no longer be a money pit, but become self-sustaining or even cash flow positive!
If we can come to some agreement on cost per acre and AoP sells off a few small parcels, AoP will have the cash on hand to be able to finish off the pond refurbishment, get a bit of growing started, as well as put up gates and fences to keep some of the local critters out and potential new critters like goats and chickens in. We might even decide to put a few Tiny Homes up after all to bring in a bit of rental income too.
And, just 3 weeks ago, the county finally issued the permit for AoP to finish up the cattle tank refurbishment to create the pond! We will be able to finally put water in the hole, water our trees and go swimming come spring or summer. Picnics by the pond would be excellent to look forward to as well, once the temperatures starts to rise!
And that’s where things are right now. I’m actually looking forward to seeing what happens next!