(upbeat music) - Hey, out there, Akronites.

Welcome once again to "Around Akron with Blue Green".

And do we have an amazing show ahead of us today.

I'm gonna head down to Summit Art Space and check out a few artists there.

Then it's over to Cuyahoga Falls to learn all about Ruff Guide Maps.

And then, I'm gonna head to South Main Street and learn all about medical cannabis at Galenas.

Now, to kick this show off today, I'm gonna head down to Summit Art Space and meet up with ZaBre Inspire.

I'm gonna learn all about their photography, their graphic design, and their t-shirts.

Let's go see what ZaBre Inspire is all about.

(gentle music) - I mean, I have a degree myself and my wife for graphic design.

So, illustrations is how things have started, but it has evolved.

So like I am also into like negative space.

So negative space is either can created digitally or you can create it with materials.

So it just depends on what I'm working with at the time.

So, I'm a combination of both, a combination of that and I'm looking into putting my hands on the blend of all three, photography, some kind of material and graphic design together, 'cause it's something that we don't really see that often.

(gentle music continues) There are moments that we won't forget.

Moments that kind of inspire us.

And we all have stories where there's a particular time that something has affected us or sent us on a certain path and we're like, I'm never gonna forget that moment.

I'm never gonna forget what that person said to me or how that inspired me.

So the words that I create or capture is really all about like the moments.

The moments that we experience in life and how those moments in life, how they affect us, either one way or another.

So, sometimes words like be encouraged it was meant for a particular purpose.

So, it's something that people won't forget.

But my story is different when I wear it compared to if you were to wear it.

Be encouraged would mean something different to you, but the words would matter.

(gentle music continues) Like I have lupus, so people that have like a chronic illness, like I can relate to them in my art.

So that's another reason why inspiration is so important to me, because people deal with so many things that others just don't know about, 'cause either they're afraid to share or it's just hard to understand.

So, sometimes people get isolated.

So another reason why ZaBre Inspired it does exist is because we want to be able to encourage people of all walks, dealing with all situations in life.

And lupus being that for me is one, of those things that I just wanna shine light on.

So, when my apparel makes it places or even an interview here, I can speak to something that's important to me like that.

So, being an advocate for that kind of chronic disease is something that it's just a terrible feeling.

Not only to be in, but also to have family members that see you go through it.

So, but it is possible, because my story is so much different than others, because I'm thriving even though I have it.

So, I just wanna encourage people to let them know that you can make it regardless of where you are.

Just have to have to fight.

(gentle music continues) Lupus is an autoimmune disease.

So, the easiest way to explain it is your body is tricking itself into believing that something is wrong with you or not wrong with you.

And it is fighting it as you need protection.

So for instance, you might get a common cold, well, my body is like that's not a cold.

So, I'm gonna fight something else.

So it causes extreme fatigue in people.

It causes like memory loss, it causes fogginess, which is probably the lupus fog is what we call it where you just get, I don't even know where I am.

So those things happen, loss of sleep, you have weight loss, weight gain, there's muscle pain, which is probably the one of the biggest ones for me.

So my muscles always feel like I just worked out like for three hours, so it's super sore.

But over time I have found ways to combat those things.

So long showers, saunas, swimming pools, the correct diet.

So those things come up and it makes life so much easier.

But for me, it's just a way of life.

So now I've embraced it and however I feel is however I feel, but it doesn't stop me doing whatever I wanna do during the day or going forward (gentle jazz music) Can't see it.

I think that's probably the hardest part for people with lupus or any kind of autoimmune disease that's chronic.

Like you can't tell, like you look at me I could be freshly shaved or I'm have a smile on my face and you never would know that inside it feels like my muscles are being torn apart.

So that's something that you would never get from me and you wouldn't be able to know unless I shared it with you.

So that's the hardest part.

And even as you mentioned like artists it's hard to share, because of what people might believe or what they might think of you at the time.

So that's probably one of my hardest things is being able to share that with people, 'cause I didn't want them to look at me differently.

So I didn't want them to say, oh, you might need a little extra help.

or maybe I'm not gonna call him today, because he might not be able to make it.

So, I've pushed myself really hard to always be available, to always be doing, to do things that people normally would expect from me without sharing how I truly felt.

So that was a mistake for me.

So I should have just been honest and open and which would make my story able to show people that it's possible.

So other, especially other men with lupus to come out to, to let people know how they feel and to get help, get treatment, get better.

(gentle jazz music continues) - Next, it's up to the third floor of Summit Art Space to meet up with Susie Lilley of Flashes of Life Photography.

Let's go see what Susie Lilley is all about.

(upbeat music) - It was always a joke in the family that we were all born with a camera in our hands.

So, I think, I remember coloring of course, in grade school, but I never was really, I never took an art class in high school.

Very, very seldom.

It wasn't a major or anything.

It wasn't until later in life that I started getting into photography more.

At first, I was using those point and shoot disposable cameras and then we would use, I got a 35 millimeter when my kids were born so that they could document their growing up years.

So, that was my first official camera.

I just started observing things around me and taking more and more pictures.

My son finally told me, mom, stop taking pictures of flowers.

We know you can do that.

(upbeat music continues) I have a BFA in photography with a minor in ceramics and I also really focused when I was getting my undergrad.

The aspect of not having a photograph have to be in a frame to be enjoyed.

I believe that they should be tactile.

So I put photographs on textiles, I've made blankets, I've made scarves, I've made a dress, I've made a, I don't wanna call it a robe, but it was a shawl.

I've put the pictures on mugs.

I've taken photos with decals and like I made a pot, it's a pineapple.

And I took pictures of pineapple made, put the decals on them and glazed those on and made the top that looks like a pineapple.

So, it's my jar at home.

(upbeat music continues) They'll see an eclectic grouping of photographs, because I have several different series of photographs, but I can't put all of them up on the wall.

So I'll have a few of them.

And then I have photo books that would be available for purchase.

But I also have, so that they're like a mini portfolio so people can look through if they don't see a particular thing on the wall that they like, I can show them, well, here's more to this series and you could maybe pick from one of these.

And they're all framed and ready to go or matted.

So it wouldn't be a hard thing to get my hands on something for a sale if it would become necessary.

(upbeat music continues) I'm a Gemini, so this is like the perfect marriage for me, because you have totally dusty, which is the ceramics and then totally undusty, which is the photography.

And I'm learning to get those two put together pretty well I think.

Yeah, I do like both of them.

They both serve to slow me down, to center me.

It's very zen both of them.

Especially, when I shoot with my film camera, I find myself being very cognizant you only have 10 shots per roll.

So you have to be very aware of what's in your frame before you take the picture.

That slows me down.

It makes me very intentional and I need that.

I need that kind of discipline.

And when you're throwing clay, you can't be haphazard, because you can't center a piece of clay in the wheel if you're going all over the place, you have to center yourself.

So it's very good for me, it's very therapeutic.

(upbeat music) Summit Art Space is a godsend, because I had been coming, like every month we had a pop-up market, it was for the art walk, 'cause it was the first Saturday of every month.

And I would pay my money and schlep 200 pounds of ceramics plus my photos and everything up here and set it up and then schlep it all back home.

So when a space opened up, I jumped on it.

I was so happy to get that space and it's perfect for me.

I couldn't be happier here.

Everybody is friendly, everybody is helpful.

It's incredible.

It's really incredible.

Well, and we're so diverse.

We're just such a diverse group of artists, but there's that common thread.

Our need to create.

(upbeat music continues) Play with it, make it fun, just make it fun.

My kids buy me stuff all the time to shoot, like little mirrors or little pieces of glass that refract the light differently.

And we just go to town.

We just go to town.

So just play with it and don't be afraid to experiment and don't think it's crap just because it doesn't look like how you expected it to look, because it's a learning process and you have to make one step at a time.

And I had someone tell me when I was first throwing ceramics, he says, well, you're gonna look back at this bowl and go, oh my god, this is an embarrassment, because he says you're gonna improve that much.

And he was right.

I look at some of my first things and I'm going, oh my god.

And I was so proud of that, but it was a stepping stone and you have to go through that process.

- Next up, we're over to Cuyahoga Falls to learn all about Ruff Guide Maps.

Let's go see what they're all about.

- Started going in the woods, because I had irritable bowel.

Had a hard time going to the bathroom, literally.

I couldn't go in a bathroom.

I discovered that by going out in the woods, like a bear, I was able to go to the bathroom easier.

I was like shocked, amazed at like, I went to doctors.

I had my mom giving me all kinds of laxatives and stuff to try to get me to go.

I had trouble in school so all the kids picked on me.

My mom would buy me art supplies so that I would relax and I'd go to the bathroom.

A lot of my drawing kind of spawned from me trying just to get my body in order.

And in doing that, I ended up figuring it out that it wasn't medication or diet or anything like that, it just came down to exercise.

(upbeat guitar music) A lot of it was because of how jacked up the park systems were.

Like say 30 years ago, I mountain biked, I trail ran, I climbed and all in the parks around here the parks did not want to allow climbing.

They did not allow mountain biking, because I was at that age, that awkward age of like rebellion and like, oh, I hate the man.

I wanted to create some propaganda to influence people to get them to come to the park and use the park and demand the recreations that I was demanding.

I was always inspired by these little comic books that the folks at the Church of Latter Day Saints would leave for for us during our moment of struggle.

The beauty of the illustrations like Cadney and then also the idea of leaving them just around parks and leaving 'em in the bathroom.

So I started making my own little comic books.

Ruff Guide kind of became like Ruff Guide Comics and it would have information about climbing and things that you could not do in the park.

(pulsing upbeat music) I realized I can whine and complain about access, but in order to actually make any difference at all in the parks, you actually have to invest something of your own, your time, your money, your whatever.

And I decided, I was just like, I'm gonna get in from the bottom and just work my way into a position.

So it was like not only making the maps for it now, but it was also building trails in the park itself, which was awesome, like giving back, I started realizing how I mature I was at that point too, 'cause it was like there's other people like me that were complaining and wanted access, but didn't wanna do anything about it.

And everybody wants something for nothing, and the parks give you that.

They really do.

It's free.

But like here in Ohio, we have like one of the most extensive park systems due to the MetroParks, Summit MetroParks the Cleveland MetroParks and the Cuyahoga Valley.

Like that big chunk of green space creates this innervating endless trail of adventure for people.

(somber music) One of them died in a car wreck and so we lost him and then the other, Jeremy, he ended up committing suicide.

And that was pretty, it was pretty impactful.

That changed everything for me for a long time.

And I was really depressed, somewhat suicidal myself and was trying to find some way to shake the depression.

And I started running like, which I had always ran but I only ran like three miles at a time and nothing too great.

One day I was so depressed and I was just crying and I was in the park and I was hoping, and the park wasn't like making me feel any better.

And before I knew it I had ran like 15 miles and did not even plan on it but I was so jacked up from that and I felt better after running the 15 miles and I was just like, oh, I'm not suicidal anymore.

So I like realized, oh, this is an actual way of getting some sort of medication without taking medication.

So I started running long distances to kind of get over the death of my friends who also were making fun of me before they died, because they're like, you're not a runner.

You're a kid that wants to eat cake, eat cookies, draw pictures.

You don't want to go work out and they're right.

I was trying to impress a girl and I started entering races to impress her.

And then, they made fun of me so much like at one point I was just like, well, okay, I'll prove it to you.

I'm gonna do the Burning River 100-mile race.

And before I could actually complete it they ended up both of them dying.

So, it was a promise I made to 'em.

And I've been DNFing for the last, oh, five, six years.

I go into the Burning River every year and thus far every year I've got a DNF like I've gone unconscious a couple of times and I ended up getting linked into the whole 100 community like where you're running ridiculous distances.

So I ended up finding a lot of healing through the running.

And in that, I also realized making maps for these courses these 100-mile courses is deeply me.

Like 'cause these races are meaningful to people and the parks that we have them in mean a lot to us.

And actually, making a race map for somebody who is doing 100 miles is different than say making a map for climbing.

It's just like the investment that the people put into their bodies all of their time goes into working towards these things.

So all of a sudden, I had a group of people who wanted maps for 100-mile races.

And that's when everything really started churning.

And I started putting out ridiculous amounts of maps.

I started getting commissions every week for like races all over the country.

- Now, to wrap this show up today, we're headed to South Main Street to learn all about the medical cannabis industry with Galenas.

They're gonna give me a tour of the entire place and I'm gonna learn all about medical cannabis.

Let's go see what Galenas is all about.

(gentle music) - There's a list of allowable conditions in Ohio that you can get a medical marijuana card for.

It's everything from very serious conditions like AIDS and cancer and some terminal illnesses down to more I don't wanna say common, but chronic pain is a condition that a lot of patients get their card for and that can span a lot of different things.

So, we do have strains that have different, we'll say profiles that are kind of tailored to deal with certain issues, whether it's a pain issue or sometimes bowel issues coming into play.

And so, depending on what the condition is we can make certain recommendations to our dispensary customers in terms of what they might wanna see.

But one of the things we pride ourselves on is having a pretty wide variety of strains that we're offering out to the market so that if you are a patient with a particular condition, you are probably unlikely to have an issue that we don't have some kind of offering for.

(gentle music) - Most of these plants' life cycles will be around 120 days.

So they'll start, we'll have a mother or a stock plant that plant will take our cuttings off of in our propagation room.

We'll root those plants in a peat medium basically.

And then, when those plants are rooted they'll have their first introduction of soil.

So everything we do here is in a live or it's called a living soil, but basically, like a biologically active soil.

So as soon as that plant sprouts its first roots it'll be introduced into a biologically active soil.

Then it'll grow in like a little tiny container until its roots have developed enough to move to the next size pot.

Then it'll move into the what we call the vegetative cycle.

And in the vegetative cycle, the plant is at 18 hours of light.

So that 18 hours of light keeps it from moving into its reproductive cycle.

And the vegetative cycle is really important, it's critical to the development of the rest of the plant, because that's when the plant builds all of its structure.

So it's gonna put on a lot of biomass, grow a lot of leaves, it's gonna kind of establish its architecture or it's like morphology.

And then when the plant height and progression is where we want it to be then that plant will move into flower.

And what triggers the flowering or reproductive process is shortening the day length, basically.

So we're duplicating the natural daylight cycles of what occurs later in the summer and toward fall when the day starts shortening.

And when cannabis reaches a threshold of about 12 hours of light or less then that triggers it to move into its reproductive phase.

And then, we will reduce our light in this room to 12 hours.

After about a week, you'll be able to start to see the pre-flower develop on the plants.

They'll stretch, so they'll like get like very tall very quickly and then the flower will develop and the plant will essentially ripen, which is what we see right here.

So these plants are at week six, almost at week seven.

They're wrapping up week six right now and they'll flower out for approximately nine weeks.

So these plants have about two and a half weeks left to go until we'll harvest this room.

(ethereal music) - We were the first all organic facility in the state of Ohio.

We're now one of only two, I believe.

And our whole ethos around the way that we do this is an eye towards absolute sustainability.

And the way that we produce these plants, in Ohio we're not allowed to grow outdoor.

So we had to come up with a way to do this indoor that was as environmentally friendly as possible.

And so, we're growing in all organic soil.

We don't use any chemical pesticides.

We are doing this as naturally as we can given the rules that we have in the state.

And we're trying to communicate the benefits of that to the patient population that exists out there.

This is not like mainstream agriculture at all where we're spraying lots of pesticides on these plants.

We do very much treat this plant as a medicine first and foremost.

And so, everything that we do that revolves around this operation is geared towards making sure that we're treating the plan as best as we possibly can so the patients are getting the best possible products.

(ethereal music continues) - Kind of like in a restaurant where you have the front of the house and the back of the house.

In the front of the house with the servers, in the back of the house you have the cooks in the kitchen.

Same thing happens in a cannabis cultivation facility.

So you have the cultivation side of things and then you have the post-harvest production side of things.

So right now in cultivation, like as you can see I have some people back here that are pruning and getting these plants cleaned up a little bit and getting 'em ready to harvest.

Just prior to harvest, we'll strip the majority of the leaves off of the plants so that when we do cut them down and we cut whole plants and hang whole plants on racks that they'll all move into our dry room.

And then in the dry room, we want 'em to have as few leaves as possible so that they can dry at a consistent rate.

And they'll stay in our dry room for approximately 10 days.

In the dry room, their moisture levels will slowly go down to where we feel comfortable pulling them out of the dry room to begin processing them.

So that's somewhere around 13 or 14% moisture.

Then when they reach that moisture level, they'll move into our back of the house operations, which is the post-harvest production areas.

So at that point the plants are what's called bucked, which is the flowers are removed off of the stems, and then after that they're trimmed.

So everything here is hand trimmed.

So we have a squad of hand trimmers that then will trim each flower individually.

And then after that point the product moves to packaging.

We also package everything here in house and then it goes to distribution.

So, once it goes to distribution, we have a dedicated delivery team that then delivers to the majority or if not all of dispensaries in the state of Ohio.

(ethereal music continues) - Thank you once again for watching this episode of "Around Akron with Blue Green".

Now, if you have any questions or any comments, you could always catch me on social media.

Thank you, and have an amazing day.

(upbeat music) (Blue Green imitating Mario Brothers' theme song) Use your hands.

Have you have... You will watch this show.

You will tell your friends about my show.