John Edward is a painter who turned an award-winning portrait into a coffee table because he couldn't sell it. He is a baker of sourdough rolls fermented with pine needles from the trees outside his door. He is a songwriter, a Reiki practitioner, a former BMX stunt performer, a psychic, and a house husband. He is the kind of person who ran free Thursday meditations for eighteen months and then stopped entirely when someone told him how to do it. He wants to belong, he says, but he is not a joiner. He has lived here since 2022 and has not yet built his community. He is not apologetic about any of this. .

John Edward came to Idyllwild the way he has come to most things in his life — sideways, through a series of events that made sense only in retrospect. His husband Michael runs Hunky Dory Records in town. The record store was their shared dream, built on a shoestring during COVID when everyone else was locked down and some people were angry at them for being out in the world building something. Michael's mother sent money they hadn't asked for. They drove up and down the hill almost every day for a month putting it together. When it was done, John says, that feeling — we did it — was the best memory he has of his time here.

Michael runs the store. John does not. "You're not really a part of this," Michael told him early on, because John's ideas, however creative, were not always good for business. John accepted this with the good humor of someone who has learned, slowly and with some difficulty, to know which engine he belongs in. "I love the engine," he says, "but I'm just the spark plug." He stays home, paints, writes songs, bakes bread, and tends to whatever is growing in him. He accepts this more gracefully than he once might have.

How He Got Here

He grew up in Hillsborough, New Hampshire — small town, same size as Idyllwild, which he notes with the recognition of someone who has always been drawn to a particular scale of place. He was the youngest of six children in a family where both parents were teachers, his father a college professor. He was bullied. He didn't fit. He was gay and didn't know it, or didn't trust what he knew. He found BMX biking and skateboarding at twelve, became part of a stunt team that performed at county fairs, and for a few years had friends who weren't from his school, a world that wasn't the one he'd been handed. He stood out, he says, like a sword.

From New Hampshire he went to Nantucket, where he became a master craftsman, learning to build and restore houses in the New England way — properly, slowly, with attention. He loved the winters there. Most people thought this was strange. He thought it was the only season that made sense.

In his thirties he went to Denver to build a house for a friend, ended up homeless and unemployed when it fell apart, and had what he calls, without drama, a nervous breakdown. A woman he was doing renovation work for saw something in him and sent him to a session at the Church of Religious Science. "That was the most pivotal thing that ever happened in my life," he says. It led him to come out, to start looking for people online, and eventually to a man from a small town in Georgia called Dallas. Not Dallas, Texas. Dallas, Georgia. A psychic at a fair had told him years earlier, before he'd ever painted a thing, that she saw him flying to Dallas with his artwork. He should have been paying more attention.

He ended up in Atlanta, then Los Angeles, then Palm Springs, where he lived for almost twenty years and started showing his work in galleries. He met Michael in a bar — he never went to bars in the daytime, but a boss dragged him in, Michael put his hand on top of his hand when they said goodbye, and that was more or less it. They figured the rest out later. Their first proper date was Valentine's Day 2014, though neither of them knew that when they made the plan. They've been together twelve years and married for nine. They got married in Joshua Tree. No real plans. A picnic and some friends.

The Gallery and The Coffee Table

He has been painting since 2004. Acrylics, mostly. Portraits. Large, serious work that has won competitions — a national portrait competition gave him third place for a piece he's particularly proud of. That painting is now a coffee table. He needed a table, and he couldn't sell the painting, so he made a decision that pleased him more than it probably should have.

His art hangs at Strawberry Creek Medical. "It's better than it sitting in storage," he says. No one calls. No one texts. No one is interested. He does not know why, and he has mostly stopped trying to figure it out.

He tried opening a gallery in Fern Valley in 2024. The location was wrong — no one visits that part of town — and the clientele wanted something for fifty dollars or less. "Unless they were really drunk," he says, "and I wasn't getting people drunk." He closed it.

The art community experience hadn't been much easier. Years earlier, a gallery owner in Palm Desert had wanted his work but told him he couldn't sell it because John hadn't yet sold anything over ten thousand dollars. "That's not my job," John told him. "That's your job." He walked out and stopped painting for anyone other than himself. He has watched musicians buy tickets to their own shows and hand them out to friends so they can get on stage. "No," he says, with the finality of someone who has considered it and closed the door.

I Haven't

Ask John Edward how he has built his community here and he answers before the end of the question.

"I haven't," he said.

He has acquaintances he likes. He goes to events when something calls to him. But real friends — the kind you call when something is happening that isn't Michael's to carry — those he doesn't have. The people he'd most naturally connect with up here tend to be healers and practitioners who charge for their presence. He wrote a song about it. The running joke is that friendship in Idyllwild costs $333 a session. "Friends are free," he says. "Go on a hike. Have tea at someone's house." But the people he'd want to do that with seem only available as clients.

He ran free Thursday meditations for eighteen months. He didn't charge anyone. He just wanted to share something. One person came and told him to do it differently. That was enough. "I'm done," he said, and stopped.

"I'm an objectionable person," he says, with a kind of calm self-awareness that makes it hard to argue with. "I'm not a go-along kind of guy. I'm not a follower. I want to belong, but I'm not a joiner." He has found that there are others like him up here. They recognize each other. They do not, as a rule, hang out very much. He is 80 to 90 percent comfortable with this. The other 10 to 20 percent, he says, is the part that just wants someone to talk to.

He painted a portrait of RFK Jr. because he found him a fascinating subject. The reaction from people in town was not what he expected. He doesn't follow political factions — he sees most of what gets called politics as one entity performing division for an audience — and when he tries to say this, people repeat back the news story they heard last week. He has mostly stopped trying. "I don't want to say I'm above other people," he says. "But my mind is elevated to a different level of understanding."

This is the thing about John Edward. He knows exactly how this sounds. He says it anyway, because not saying it would be performative, and performance is the one thing he has spent his whole life trying to escape.

The Island in the Sky

He thinks of Idyllwild as an island in the sky. He loves islands. He lived on Nantucket for five years and loved the winters when everyone else had left. He finds something in containment, in edges, in the particular intensity of a place that is bounded by water or altitude rather than sprawl.

His spirituality is not easy to summarize, and he wouldn't want it to be. It is built from breathwork and salt baths and the Church of Religious Science and psychic fairs and Reiki and twenty years of paying attention to what moves in him and what doesn't. He considers himself a transmuter of energy. He breathes in what is around him, processes it through himself, and lets it go. Sometimes, he says, he senses entities — presences, energies, things that come not to harm him but to be released. He takes them in and sits with them and lets them move through. He describes this carefully, aware of how it lands on people who haven't felt it themselves.

The mountain, he says, is sandpaper. If you are already in self-love, deeply and genuinely, this is a magical place. If you are not, it will make you go through things. It is doing that to him.

He bakes sourdough rolls, proofed for days, wide and flat like English muffins, with a touch of barley malt for flavor and no added sugar. He ferments his starter with pine needles from the trees outside — stuffed into a cloth tea bag and steeped in the mix, adding vitamin C, making the sour sharper and more local. He supplied Raven Hill until he couldn't keep up with his one oven. He once FedExed his bread.

He is not sure he will stay long term. There is more adventure in them, he and Michael, and he doesn't want to settle before he's ready. He says this plainly: he feels safe here. For someone who has spent most of his life building from nothing, in strange cities, safety is not a small thing.

His favorite hike is an unmarked trail above Saunders Meadow that doesn't appear on any map. Of course it is. He found it himself. He goes quickly, alone, and doesn't tell many people about it. From there, he says, this place looks exactly like what it is: an island. Small. Defined. Surrounded by sky.

He can see his whole life from up there, and none of it looks like a mistake.