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Hello and welcome to The Jediism Way!! Many of you who knew me from a while back might be thinking what is going on?? For those that don't know this site has been online since 2004, just in a number of different versions. For the past probably 8 years or so it has just been a static site with only the information. I will take another post to really talk through the history of the site and the goals of its rebirth but mainly, I just missed talking with like minded people. It is something I don't get to do much in my neck of the woods aside from my wife! There will be a main page on the website that talks through the history as honestly as possible!

So for those that don't know me, I go by Xhaiden online and have been involved in the Jedi Community in one way or another since around 2002. I grew up in Western NY, in the Rochester area but quickly moved to Maine after graduating high school. We have always spend the summers in Maine and I had always loved it. I received my Instrumental Music Education degree in Maine and spent a few years substitute teaching until I finally found a great job in Northern Maine where I have been teaching grades 5-12 instrumental music since 2007. I also became the technology director in two school districts along with coaching a few sports...yes...I like to keep busy..lol. I also promised my wife I would not take on anything else...lol.

I have been with my wife since 2000 and we finally were able to purchase our dream home a few years back! Sadly, due to the way life can be sometimes we are not able to have kids so what better then to not have kids but have 4 Siberian huskies...I will post photos!! We have about an acre of fenced in yard and we live on 23 acres that is mostly woods along with winter conditions about 5-6 months out of the year so perfect for them..lol. We are huge animal lovers and have had many cats and dogs over the years, they are our family!! 

As a musician trumpet is my main instrument and I have played in a ton of groups over the years! I am mainly an orchestral/solo trumpet player or at least that’s how I was trained so I’ve done a number of solo performances along with playing with a number of orchestras and community bands. Currently I play in a local community band, a brass quintet, and a Motown/oldies/pop group. That group has taken me out of my comfort zone which has been a blast as it is more what is called lead playing, high and loud music..lol. It took me time to adapt but now I have so much fun as we are a group of 19 and play music ranging from Chicago, Earth, Wind, and Fire, Huey Lewis, and even older music all the way up to some modern pop songs like Uptown Funk. We play around 10 gigs a year as it’s tough to organize that many people..lol but we love playing with each other and it has made me such a better player!! I record myself now sometimes and just surprise myself..lol.

I have a ton of interests and hobbies, sometimes to the point I have to move on from some as I just don't have the time. My largest one outside of music and technology is golf. I have been coaching golf for about 18 years and I am an avid competitive golfer around the state and have been lucky to win a few tournaments, but overall, I just love to play!! I also run a YouTube channel specializing in tech help and also basic music reading skills and it’s done pretty well, just need to get back to it as I haven’t posted in a long time. As a music teacher I really focus in on audio/video equipment and even teach a media production class at school in addition to my normal band classes!

So how did I get started on this path, I have always questioned religion. I was like many, forced to go to church as a kid and go through confirmation but through all of that I always found the contradictions absurd. Through early college and never really knew what I was but I knew I was an atheist. I finally sat down one day and just wrote out some of my beliefs and found I was ticked a lot of boxes in like Buddhism, Taoism, and a few others. For a while I never really had a name for my beliefs but just knew what I believed. Towards late high school a friend turned me on to Start Wars. When I was substitute teaching there was a TON of down time so I had been into the Star Wars expanded universe fiction for quite a while. I really started reading the books heavily, just enjoy the world but I was reading so much of it a light bulb came on and I began realizing most of my beliefs lined up with the Jedi. I decided to go looking online to see if there were others and back then stumbled across the yahoo Groups which had a very active Jedi Realist/Jediism community and I really dived in. I had finally found a home for my beliefs. I had some tech skills so I built this original version of this site back in 2004 and over the years it went through many transitions and had some great highs and a few big lows. Due to still being a bit young and not too financially stable I made a number of management mistakes along with just not being able to afford things like I was able to at first things had to come to a close. This site has always been running in one way or another but over the past few months I started realizing how much I missed being a part of a community.

Since I am now very stable I thought this would be a great time to really invest some money into making this site what I always dreamed but could never afford to do, along with my lack of management knowledge. Now is just the right time for it to all come together and I could really make an investment for something that can go for a long time. I really hope to see many old faces and many new faces!! 

  • Xhaiden changed the title to Welcome & My Introduction

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