While consolidating all of my work and personal web projects for my work with VAUX digital, I realized that I have grossly neglected my personal website and blog here at zacknewsome.com. My last blog post, a post about having not blogged for the 3 prior years, was posted in 2013. Effectively, I hadn’t contributed anything to this site for over 12 years.

If I’m honest, during the past decade or so, maintaining a personal blog (especially one named after myself) seemed too vain and self-focused to put time and energy into. As it does for most of us, my life has changed drastically since my posts in 2010. Back then, I was busy running Communitas – a faith collective in Phoenix experimenting on the edges of Christian practice and community development. Since that time, we shut down the efforts of communitas and moved homes into a nearby part of Phoenix. At the time, I was working at MethodLab – the design and branding studio I had founded in 2006. Now MethodLab has evolved into VAUX digital and I’ve refocused our work around website design & digital marketing. During the past decade of my silence, my kids have grown through the adolescent and teenage years and are readying to head off to college shortly.

In 2010, I was a different person. For the past 12 years, I have been trying to re-discover myself, my convictions, and my passions.  During this time, my family, my close friends, and my work occupied all of my attention.  Being involved in ministry work as a pastor and a community leader carries a public responsibility.  Back then, I believed that it was my job to be the center of attention. After all, a “leader” must always be at the front and must be loud, right?  But as I shed the role of a public leader, I enjoyed being in the background and my family and I appreciated the return to life focused on us – and not others.

As I stumbled across all of my old posts recently, I realized that while I am a VERY different person now – that’s its important to reflect on my journey and where I’ve been.  I’m not one to take photos to document memories and my iPhone camera roll has more reference photos (broken stuff that needed replacement) than memories. I have been awful at documenting anything for the past 10 years.

So I made the decision to move towards documentation once again – not for anyone else, but for me. This site (zacknewsome.com) was long overdue for a redesign and I’ve begun that process.  As this is a purely personal project, I will take my time to get things right around here, but I wanted to keep the documentation alive.

In 2022, I’m also launching some exciting new projects that I’m really proud of.  I’ve launched a new outdoor apparel and accessories brand, hoping I can help others discover the joy of the outdoors.  With Outward, I hope to inspire others around the mental health and environmental benefits of more deeply connecting with wild spaces.  The adventure of getting beyond the city has helped me in my path of rediscovery and is a experience of reflection on what is truly important.  I’m excited about how Outward will grow and evolve in the coming years. Along with an online store filled with outdoor clothing and accessories, I’m also launching a blog, Outward Spaces, to share stories of adventure and reviews on outdoor gear.

Last year, we purchased a small rental cabin in Greer, AZ – one of my favorite small towns in Arizona.  When we purchased this 2bed/1bath/650sf foot cabin, it was much unchanged from its 1983 build date and we’ve been working tirelessly to update and renovate it for the past year.  It’s a cozy little place in a beautiful mountain town and is the perfect basecamp for nearby adventure.  We’re excited to offer it for rent for others.  If interested, you can view availability and rates here.

I’ve also been hard at work developing VAUX digital to continue to do work I am proud of with clients I enjoy working with.  I love working with underdogs and a renewed focus on small businesses and nonprofits will help these organizations level the playing field with larger and more established competitors.  VAUX still specializes in the

web, with web design and development being at the forefront of our service offerings, but we are also offering digital marketing services to help our clients’ websites work harder at meeting business goals. You can view all of VAUX’s services offerings here.

I’ve also been involved in some cool projects through the years that I hope to add to this website – to give me a place to store the stops along the journey.

With 10 years of silence behind me, this site doesn’t get much traffic, but in case you happen to see these words, thanks for stopping by and I’d love to hear from you.  Leave a comment below or reach out via my contact page.

It was almost 3 years ago (August of 2010) that I last wrote here.  It was an article about how, despite not writing much, I needed to – to express much of the random thoughts, opinions, & musings constantly streaming through my mind.  It’s ironic that after writing such an article, I failed to write for the past three years.  I guess I wasn’t as ready as I thought I was.

But the past is the past. And while I’m not making any grand commitments to write a lot, I want to start again.

The past three years have been strange ones for me.  Up until the summer of 2010, I had life pretty well figured out (or so I thought). I was at that time leading an experimental faith community, communitasPHX, in downtown Phoenix.  I was running my small web/print design studio, MethodLab.  I was working to expand both.  I had dreams of building communitasPHX into a more established non-profit exploring spirituality in the developing urban space where traditional faith and church structures aren’t embraced.  We had opened a community art/event space known as fractal (at some expense to my personal finances & without any real business plan).  CommunitasPHX hosted events such as the PHX Brew Party & Taco Day had grown to include larger numbers of people that we knew what to do with. We were in process of bringing on our first paid staff member to pursue new sources of funding and to develop the organization.  As for Methodlab, known as MethodLab Media at the time, we had new office space housed within the fractal space.  My work as Methodlab was becoming more and more public.  As a designer, I was involved in the local design community which offered some amazing relationships & partnerships that benefitted my endeavors.  Business was growing.

And just as quickly as it all happened, it all fell apart.  Fractal quickly became painfully expensive and exhausting to manage.  Some serious miscommunication (I’m sure mostly on my part) caused the relationship with the new communitasPHX staffer to disintegrate. Volunteers we relied on moved away. Trying to develop my design business bored me.  Instead of renewing the lease on our rented 1910 bungalow, Kelli and I decided to purchase a bankruptcy property in Uptown – adding the chaos of moving and a house renovation into the mix of our lives.

Somewhere in all of the chaos and life change, I lost my faith. It wasn’t a complete loss, but enough to shake up my entire world. For the past 3 years, I have been simply existing as a spiritual person, little, if ever, nurturing that part of myself.  But it’s time to reconstruct a faith using the pieces that remain and combining them with pieces that have been newly discovered.

I hope to rediscover a part of myself that has never ceased to exist, but has instead been misplaced. I’ll detail some of it here, but more in depth posts on spirituality can be found at the Open Abbey.

For now, I just needed to get this first post (as jumbled and all over the place as it might be) written as a first step.