Jasun "Plaedo" Wellman
"I had a rough childhood," says Jasun Wellman, who grew up in Estacada,
Oregon, until age seven, when his father died, then wandered through
Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, "a lot of different schools, drugs and
violence, police visits and poverty." Adopted at age 11, he lived with
his grandma when he graduated from high school in Deary, Idaho. "I was
always a good student," he notes. "School was a respite from chaos at
home. I concentrated on poetry and history." He enrolled at the
University of Idaho in Moscow, where he escaped the scourge of drugs
with the help of a sympathetic policeman, who caught him with drugs but
let him go free, and a poetry professor, who arranged a year of study
abroad at a Buddhist monastery in Thailand. On his return to Idaho, he
stood up at an anti-Iraq-war rally to read the poem that was slipped
under his door in Bangkok, "Our Deepest Fear," by Marianne Williamson.
A woman in the crowd got up to say that the poem had changed her life.
"She's now my wife, Megan Swan," he says. Swan chose to call him
"Plaedo," a name that inspired him to change his major to philosophy,
and later sparked his career as a story-telling hippie-hop philosopher,
workshop coordinator, and social justice activist. Shortly after he and
Megan moved to Eugene in 2011, Plaedo MC'ed a rally for Occupy Eugene
that drew 1800 participants. He co-founded the Eugene Avant-Gardeners
food activism group in 2013, and currently works with at-risk youth in
the city's Downtown Youth Initiative. He hosts monthly events at the
Peterson Barn Community Center. Catch his performance at 2:30 pm
Saturday, July 14, in Community Village at the Oregon Country Fair.
happening people
photograph and story by Paul Neevel
Eugene Weekly /28 June 2018
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