Review Your Year

My annual holiday letter, as enclosed in my cards.

Dec 24, 2024

Seasons greetings!

In Norse tradition, on each solstice & equinox (so each quarter year), we gather together to present a toast, a boast, & an oath. December 21st is the Winter Solstice. I do a personal version of this each quarter for myself, but I do a whole year-in-retrospect version for my annual letter. This is a longer version (with pictures and links) than the one I sent in my cards that went out over the past week.

Toast

My friend Tiffany Madison lost her two year battle against breast cancer in May this year. She was 41 & had 3 young children (ages 2-13). Tiffany was a pioneer in tech & medical research, an advocate for veterans to have access to healing plant medicines, a thoughtful writer & activist. I worked with her on the John McAfee campaign in 2016. She was a dear friend & losing her so young really shook my own sense of mortality. She was so brave.

*This photo was taken June 2023, at MAPS in Denver. I’m so glad we got to spend a day together. She was in a really good place, in remission, before the cancer returned in the autumn.*

Only a week later, I lost my longest & closest companion. Petrie, my Quaker Parrot, died at the age of 27 - I’d had him for 25 years, he was my soul mate in birdie form & it’s been one of the hardest things in my life to lose him. I wrote a lengthy eulogy of his life here - 6,000 words to try to describe how much he meant to me. I still can’t talk about it without a flood of tears. I miss him every day. He was the most incredible companion & changed my life in so many ways. I loved him so much.

This was a spontaneous photo shoot by my friend Jonathan Mariande in February of 2024. We were going to photograph me with both Pepper and Petrie, but Pepper found the flash of the camera scary, so it ended up just being me and Petrie. Which worked out so perfectly.

Boast

This year was again largely focused on work, but we love it. In February, our company launched our Shrüm mini as well as rebranding our mushroom genetics into the same company. In July, we launched our partnership with Mike Tyson, improving & rebranding our original 2 lb bag as MIKEADELICS, featuring Tyson on the box.

Our team with Tyson & his team & our product!

We brought in investment partners to streamline operations & at the beginning of December I recorded a video unboxing our product with Tyson in front of 200+ people! Sales are up, excitement is high, Tyson & I connected over our mutual love of birds, it’s been a crazy year.

Judd & I are both deeply focused on our shared missions. We celebrated 12 years together in August. We talk about having kids a fair bit at this point & I love that we want to build amazing things together, whether professionally or personally. His ambition & drive inspire me constantly & we make each other better. I want to do everything with him.

Judd’s cat Abby is 14, healthy & still cute & angry as ever.

Pepper (Peppercorn, my Indian ringneck parrot) is 2.5 years old. He’s obsessed with his mirror & tells us constantly to “gimme kiss”, “thank you babe”, & “peekaboo”. This summer he went through his first major molt (it’s puberty time for him) and he grew in his “ring”, which I think makes him look very dapper, as if he’s wearing a bowtie.

In October, 5 months after Petrie died, I met an adorable little green cheek conure with whom I found instant mutual adoration. Judd agreed it was time for another bird (& my birthday present), thus Tango (short for Tangerine, I’m on a naming-pets-after-food kick) joined our lives. He’s an absolutely adorable menace of energy & is completely fearless. He is six months old & already says “Tango”, “peekaboo” & “hey baby”.

The two of them are not friends, but they seem to have a tolerant dynamic.

I did manage to visit New England twice (January & April) this year to see friends & family. I also attended the Libertarian National Convention in DC in May, Freedom Fest in July, Burning Man in August, & another four trade shows for work. I also began working with DoubleBlind on psychedelic educational content, recording a new How To Grow Your Own Mushrooms course with them & contributing some articles.

Oath

Judd & I have some exciting plans for the development of our work, our companies & our professional mission in 2025, but some of it is still in the early stages & I can’t talk about it yet. I will continue to advocate for the liberation of our minds & bodies from gov’t overreach & I’m grateful to be able to integrate that both professionally & in my passions. I will be doing much more of that this coming year & in a much more public way - I’ll be building a lot of educational content. I’ll be starting another Substack specifically for the topic of psychedelics, but I’ll link articles here so you can check them out.

We would like to be able to embrace building a family in 2026, so positioning ourselves this coming year to be able to do that is important to me. I want to give my attention & devotion to a lot of things, but particularly those which can be creative, positive, inspirational & bring joy & light to myself & others.

A few other notes:

This is the design of my card this year.

If you read my letter last year, my friend Kitty’s mother Amanda died in 2023. She was an artist & one of her creative projects was creating Yule cards, particularly with Celtic knotwork. As they go through some of Amanda’s things, Kitty’s father Justin found thousands of these cards she’d designed in the 1990s, & sent me a few boxes worth. I decided to skip my usual annual self-designed card to honor her artwork and share it with you. The contact information on the back is out of date, as Amanda is no longer with us. If you’d like to honor Amanda’s memory, a donation to RAINN.org or a local no-kill animal shelter would be a lovely way to do so. If you are interested in her card designs, send me a direct message.

Our MIKEADELICS grow bag, our mini grow bag, and our liquid culture are all available on our website. There’s a sale from now until the New Year, and you can also get a small discount with my name as a coupon code: “Avens” at checkout.

As always, I hope to write more here in the coming months (I’ll be making more content generally, hoping to cross-post and share here). Subscriptions are welcome (paid are unnecessary, I don’t currently have any locked posts). I do maintain a public wishlist year round for people who want to support my work in that type of way. I am available for speaking engagements & possibly photography at select events. You can email me at avensATsubstackDOTcom to inquire.

I do regularly post on Facebook and X and Instagram if you want to follow my life updates in a more direct sort of way (a lot more recipes/food posts).

Previous years letters can be found here:

2023: