About

This site makes one argument seven different ways: in the books, the dictionaries behind Coding, the op-eds on Press, the ledger on Funds. This page states it plainly.

The claim

Every living thing starts out fully alive, biologically and spiritually whole, no assembly required. The Stardust Dictionary calls this the spark: "the difference between alive and not alive." What looks like dysfunction, shame, isolation, addiction, a bad city block, a rigid school day, usually isn't a flaw in the spark but drift: what happens when the systems around a person suppress presence and substitute rules, screens, scarcity, or fear for direct experience, or as the dictionary puts it, "your thumb scrolling after your soul already left."

The corrective is return, not more control: to the body, to feeling, to forgiveness, to the people and places nearby, recovered rather than performed. WACK draws this as a spectrum, Zombie and Ghost at either edge, both labeled Hell, Body and Soul meeting in the middle at the Star, "not the midpoint — the maximum of both at once." The books never ask a reader to choose between biology and spirit; they're the same signal, read from two ends.

What's suppressing it

Three words name what suppresses the spark. Shame is "society telling you your body is wrong... your body is gross, your urges are wrong, control is moral, release is sin." The Matrix is "society's agreed-upon fiction — the set of rules and taboos that suppress the animal and spiritual truth of human beings," with one boundary: it means the pathological version of society, not "the version where two sparks choose each other freely, witness each other, build something together." And drift is the daily mechanism, reaching for the phone, the bet, the scroll, instead of what the body actually wants.

The way back

The return path is small and repeatable, not one epiphany. Forgiveness is a physical release, not a thought: "jaw clenched before forgiveness... that release — the physical one — is where forgiveness actually lives." Empathy has an almost mechanical definition, reused across the books: "asking your mind to imagine a feeling, then moving that feeling into your body until you're not imagining it anymore... you start in the mind, you finish in the body." Presence is the practice underneath both, interrupting to notice a real sensation right now: "Touch your jaw. Is it clenched? Touch your neck. Is it tight?"

Sex shows up constantly in this material because it's "the most concentrated place where the whole system becomes visible... it is the door, the voltage point — not the whole building," one example of body and soul meeting at full volume, not the point of the project.

The books

The Stardust Dictionary is the foundation: about 130 entries, flat and alphabetical, covering the vocabulary everything else draws from, with one rule for any ambiguous entry, pick "whichever definition is closer to the body, closer to quiet, closer to feeling — not the one closer to the noise of the mind."

WACK: Turn On builds that vocabulary into a full illustrated book for teens, one word per page, no therapy language, closing with a bibliography of its influences: Alan Watts, The Matrix, Rumi, Mary Oliver, Bowie's "Heroes," and forty more names.

The Outlaw Dictionary takes the same cosmology to its rawest edge, written "for the person alone at 3am who needs to know they are not the only one." Peacemaker carries the claim into myth, eight planets each governing a force, locked in what looks like permanent war, with a twist for readers who finish it. Playbound City is a picture book built from kids' own drawings, not an adult redraw of them.

Full list on Books.

The city

The same drift-versus-presence argument, applied to the built environment, gives this studio its name. The Urban Wolf Dictionary calls a walkable neighborhood "a human right," not a luxury feature, and treats trail-building as the first move: "before the buildings, before the plans — build the trails. Connect the people." Press carries this into real outlets: a Chicago Tribune piece on Galewood's density against Lakeview's, a Streetsblog Chicago piece on Seattle's unfinished bike-levy miles, and a Seattle Times piece written from inside his own homelessness.

The platform, and the fund

Stardust DS, on the Coding page, turns the same dictionary structure into software: every kind of content stored the same way, a Term with one or more Definitions, each carrying an optional Position across three axes, grown from WACK's own Body/Soul framework, and seeded with hand-scored entries from these same books.

The Idea House Fund is the same idea in its plainest form, money: mid-pilot with Recovery Cafe, incorporated as a nonprofit (EIN 42-4388998, August 2026), making small in-kind grants to people navigating homelessness, listed on the Funds page by ID number only, never by name.

Why one person is doing all of this

Jeremy Wolff writes the books under the pen name Sage Peace. He's bipolar, has been homeless in Seattle, and has spent about twenty years working with kids, in camps, classrooms, an orphanage in Kenya, an after-school program, and a school turn-around program he quit after six weeks. WACK's author note states the logic plainly: "Homeless. Outside society, near the edge... that distance is the qualification for this book."

The op-eds, the dictionaries, the platform, and the fund are the same claim at different volumes: presence and connection are worth building for, whether the infrastructure is a sentence, a street, or software, and the person who's stood outside the system is the one who can say what it's missing.