Before the Words: Three Beginnings

By Campbell Auer A Manifestinction Article

None of this started with an idea. It started with showing up — three times, in three places, before I had a single word for what I was doing.

The Mountain

It was winter solstice in Prescott, Arizona. I left in the dark, hours before sunrise, and climbed Granite Mountain alone. I carried balloons and small pieces of paper with messages on them — intentions, hopes, things I wanted to offer to something larger than myself. I didn't call it manifesting then. I didn't call it anything.

The cold bit into me on the way up but I barely noticed. By the time I reached the top, the eastern sky was just beginning to separate from the land — that thin line of light that isn't yet color but is no longer dark. I took off all my clothes and stood there the way I arrived in the world, with nothing between me and the sky. Bare feet on cold granite. Wind finding every surface of skin.

I put the messages in the balloons, blew them up, and released them into the updrafts coming off the mountain edges. They caught the air and rose — fast at first, then slower, then just drifting, getting smaller, until they were indistinguishable from the brightening sky.

I stood there watching until there was nothing left to watch. Just me and the sunrise and the feeling that I'd handed something to the world that I couldn't take back.

Something in me marked that morning as a beginning — though I couldn't have told you of what. I was releasing intention into a field I couldn't name, trusting it would land somewhere that mattered.

The Rooftop

Not long after, I was helping my sister build her house in Prescott. I was on the roof, hammering nails in the middle of winter, in short sleeves because I'd come from Michigan and Arizona felt like summer. Five different geographies meet in that area — mountains, plains, rivers, high desert — and from that rooftop I could see it all.

I could also see what was coming. The roads unspooling. The parking lots encasing the land. Structures overtaking the natural spaces I loved. Everyone wanted to live in Prescott, and the landscape was disappearing under the weight of it.

I came from the design world. I'd been trained to see how structures shape the way people live. And standing on that roof, I saw it clearly: the structures we were building weren't serving us. They were consuming the very thing that made the place worth living in.

Something inside me said: There has to be another way.

I didn't plan to spend the next four decades thinking about it. But that moment on the roof handed me a problem I couldn't put down. I saw what was wrong. I just didn't have the answer yet.

The Boat

I'd been developing an idea — something about community, about how people might live differently — and I realized I couldn't test it from a desk. I needed to find a place where people lived without the infrastructure I was questioning. No electricity. No running water. No roads.

I didn't tell my family. I didn't tell anyone. I parked my truck on a hill in Nogales, walked across the border into Mexico with a sleeping bag and a backpack, and started looking. If I hadn't come back, nobody would have known where I was.

Eventually I heard about a village you could only reach by mailboat — a small community at the mouth of a river between two mountains, where the Pacific met the coast from the north. Less than a mile of beach before the mountains took over. I sailed in with the weekly mail.

I didn't intend to stay. But there was homemade tequila, and time lost its edges, and there was no exit plan. So I stayed.

The first night I slept on the beach. The village dogs — left to roam free — found me and peed on my sleeping bag. So the next morning I went looking for shelter.

I found half a broken fishing boat — a hand-carved dugout, split in two. I propped it up in the sand on Y-sticks that I spent a day shaping in the jungle without tools. Then I built a small picket fence from sticks to keep the dogs out of my yard. And that was home.

The children came next. They appeared from the village carrying pages torn from magazines. The only paper we had for writing were the white margins — the edges nobody uses. That became our notebook. I taught them English letters and words by candlelight, and they taught me what community actually feels like when there's nothing between people but presence and whatever's at hand.

No ledger. No blockchain. No charter. No curriculum. Just showing up.

I didn't stay forever. A dream pulled me out — someone I felt was in trouble, and I needed to be there. Getting out of Mexico was its own adventure. But when I came home, I didn't feel like I'd succeeded. I'd gone looking for proof of an idea, and I came back with a feeling. So I filed it away and moved on.

For decades, I thought I'd failed.

What I Didn't See Then

I didn't see that the feeling was the proof. That I'd lived inside the very thing I was trying to design, and it worked — not because I'd engineered it, but because people showed up for each other with nothing but what the place provided.

The mountain set the intention. The rooftop showed the need. The boat gave me the answer. I didn't see it then, but one thing was leading to the next — each moment a building block I didn't know I needed until much later.

I didn't plan this work. Something in it matched something in me, and I never found a good reason to walk away. I'm still not entirely sure what I'm doing. I just keep showing up. After all these years, that's the only thing I've learned for certain: showing up is the whole thing. It always was.

This is mythology. One person's memory, offered as story. Nothing here asks to be believed. If any of it rings true, it was already yours before you read it.