The Courage Way

3

Have You Met Your True Self?

There is that in me—I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me.

—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

Ed France still remembers the moment that sparked his passion for the work he does today. He was a young teen, visiting his grandparents who lived in a tiny Mississippi town where the commercial stretch of Main Street was abandoned and insects were louder than traffic noise.

Ed recalls one day when he was tidying up his grandfather’s woodshop, a little shed adjacent to the house. It held tools, scrap wood, hardware—seemingly all anyone would need to fix up a house or rebuild almost anything. His granddad had opened it as a retirement business called Dixie Do-Dads, but it was shuttered because the more he aged, the ...