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​Nexus Coffee and Creative

 entrepreneurs for compassionate community
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created by Susannah Stubbs, artist in residence for Open Horizons and regular at Nexus

Young professionals, entrepreneurs, and small businesses owners are essential to the building of compassionate communities: the building blocks of an ecological civilization.  Philosophers and theologians, teachers and artists, city officials and clergy, social workers and physicians, bricklayers and coffee makers -- all can help.  But without young professionals, entrepreneurs, and small business owners, there's really no hope.  Big ideas must come down to earth, the world's best hopes must find their legs.  Meet Amy Counce of Little Rock, Arkansas.  The Nexus Coffee and Creative, which she co-founded, is an illustration.  The Nexus Coffee and Creative, along with its remarkable team, partakes of, communicates, and foster that hope.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF COFFEE SHOP

​​"Straight from the definition, Nexus strives to be a meeting place - a point of connection, meaning, and creativity for our beloved city. The core of our being is community, whether you’re a local, a vagabond, or you’re here for a limited moment, we want that moment to be remembered here."

COFFEE IS A UNIVERSAL LOVE LANGUAGE
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​"The language of the tired, the busy, and the curious. It’s also the language of family, friends, and community, and is blind to borders and prejudice. A true confidant....We partner with local and non-local coffee roasters to support their business and community, and to give our customers the chance to try coffee from roasters they may never get to try otherwise." 

​PROUD TO HAVE LOCAL PARTNERS

"Based right here in our community of Little Rock, Leiva’s Coffee is a family-owned roasting company that sources beans directly from producers in rural Guatemala. They have a mission and heart to stop the abuse and exploitation of farmers and the environment by pouring directly back into the farmers and their business. We are proud to partner with the Leiva family!"

​"Round Mountain Coffee is based out of Conway, AR, and we are so excited to feature another local business! Their mission is to “pursue excellence in coffee, love our craft, and foster our community.” We will have their Pinnacle house blend on drip, their single-origin Ethiopian on slow bar, and their Ouachita blend on espresso. Come in and try a cup, or take a bag of their beans to go in our retail section!"

"It’s part of our culture and our being, it’s innately in us to create. We want to be a space that not only caters to caffeine, but that is created in itself to allow creativity to blossom. Our variety of seating options allows our customers to find a vibe that fits their needs, whether they need to meet with friends or colleagues or chill by themselves. We also offer two creative rooms that can be rented out if a closed off space is what you’re looking for."

MEET AMY
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Whitehead and Amy
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When I was in Little Rock, Arkansas, last year to meet with a former student and friend, Hope Montgomery, she said: "Let's meet at Nexus."  For a moment I thought she was talking about Whitehead's philosophy, since the idea of a nexus plays such an important role in his thought. (I'll say a word about this below, as a metaphysical afterthought.)  But she was talking about a coffee shop in downtown Little Rock called Nexus Coffee and Creative.  Its unofficial tagline is community is our focus, coffee is our way.

As soon as I entered I liked it.  Its atmosphere is creative and welcoming, comforting and inviting.  You can see some of this interior and learn more about Nexus by going to its website.  Click here.  It is an example of what is called a "third wave coffee shop" that focuses on social responsibility, community, and creativity.  Ir reminds me a little of a similar coffee shop I visited in Harbin, China called Rear Window.

On a subsequent visit to Nexus I met Amy Counce and thought of Whitehead again, not only because she liked the word nexus but also because her philosophy and practice are so in keeping with what we at the Cobb Institute (a Whitehead influenced non-profit) think important, namely the developing of small businesses that embody the ideals of ecological civilization.  Our aim is to help people grow together, creatively and compassionately, to help build ecological civilization.  Amy's whole philosophy is about growing together, creatively and compassionately.

What is an ecological civilization? It is a society where people live with respect and care for the whole community of life, with special care for the vulnerable.  They know that we are small but included in a larger web of life and that the whole all life matters.  They are committed to what Pope Francis calls an 'integral ecology' that is integrated with the earth and with human well-being, with natural ecology and social ecology.  At the heart of an ecological civilization is the language of creativity and love.

The building blocks of an ecological civilization are local communities that are creative, compassionate, participatory, diverse, inclusive, humane to animals, and good for the earth, with no one left behind. In order to build these communities to emerge, the world needs farmers, teachers, government officials, artists, poets, people of all faiths, and small business owners. People like Amy Counce, co-founder of the Nexus Coffee and Creative in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the many who work there. They are part of the world's best hope.  They are doing the great work.  We can, too.

-- Jay McDaniel

metaphysical addendum

Considering the idea of a Nexus in a Whiteheadian Way
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Everything we see in the world, all the public matters of fact, are nexūs.  Our bodies, trees, rivers, tables, stars, the atmosphere: nexūs.  They are forms of multiple togetherness: that is, multiplicities in which the fundamental actualities of the universe, “actual occasions of experience” or “actual entities,” while individual and unique, are gathered into some kind of togetherness, apart from which they would not exist at all.  The sounds of music are also nexūs, as are all other events such as a football game or a social gathering or a horrible battle.  They are public.  Even the things happening in empty space are nexūs.

I thought of nexūs when I visited the Nexus coffee shop in Little Rock, Arkansas.  I asked Amy Counce how she arrived at its name, and she said that, for her, a nexus is a place where things happen together and her hope was that her coffee shop could be a nexus for creative people interested in a better world.  That’s why she calls her coffee shop the Nexus Coffee and Creative. 

Needless to say, what’s happening at the Nexus Coffee and Creative is a bit different from what’s happening in a battle or in empty space.  All nexūs have their own unique characteristics.  Still, the Nexus Coffee and Creative is indeed a public matter of fact and hence a nexus.  Or, better, a nexus of nexūs.
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Amid the conversations at the coffee shop there are also what Whitehead calls private responses to what is experienced.  These are, in Whitehead’s words, the subjective forms of the people at the table, as they receive and respond to their conversation partners.  We cannot see these private responses in a public way, but they are as real in their way as are the tables and chairs, the signs and the sounds of the music.  In Whitehead’s philosophy nexūs and subjective forms are paired.  The public and the private; the visible and the invisible; the music and the pleasure.  In the world of process thought we attend to them and respond to them with the words nexus and subjective form.  That's what's going on at the Nexus Coffee and Creative.  Its decor, its finances, its staff, its coffee, its growers, its customers -- all are public.  And yet how people respond to one another at the coffee shop as they visit, as they look, as they tell stories, as they listen -- all are private, unique to them.  The Nexus Coffee and Creative aims to be a place where public and private meet, in service to love, through cofee.