Before I became a full-time first-grade teacher, I worked as a substitute. Every assignment meant walking into a new school, a new classroom, and a room full of children who had never met me before. Naturally, they had questions. They wanted to know who I was, where I came from, and eventually, someone would ask the question that seemed to be on everyone’s mind.
“Are you a boy or a girl?”
My answer was always the same.
“Neither. I’m an alien.”
That was usually all it took.
The room would erupt. Some kids laughed. Some immediately believed me. Others were determined to prove that I was lying.
“Coach Thomas is an alien!”
“What’s it like in space?”
“What planet are you from?”
Suddenly, everything I did mattered. They watched what I ate, how I moved, what I knew, and anything else that might give them evidence. The classroom became part investigation and part imagination. I never corrected them. I let them wonder.
Years later, when I became a full-time first-grade teacher, the question found me again. This time, my students waited nearly three months before popping the question. One day, while we were playing basketball, they noticed my tattoos and finally asked.
“Coach Thomas, are you a boy or a girl?”
I gave them the same answer I had given so many classrooms before them.
“Neither. I’m an alien.”
From that moment on, proving I was human became serious business. I ate human food. I played human sports. I drove a human car. Surely an alien could not do all of those things. At the time, it was mostly fun. It became part of our classroom story, and I loved watching how far their imaginations would take it. But somewhere along the way, I realized there was something deeper happening in those conversations. The children were curious about what made me different, but they were not afraid of it. They did not need to completely understand me before making space for me. They asked questions, imagined possibilities, laughed, challenged me, and kept going.
That stayed with me.
Seeing how different each child was—and how naturally curious they were about me—helped shape a belief that became the foundation for how I began to understand life in all its forms, and the ways we are connected to one another.
I have spent much of my own life thinking about belonging and what it means to exist in a world that often wants to understand what you are before simply allowing you to be. Over time, my own experiences and those classroom moments began meeting in the same place.
A belief started becoming clearer to me: we are different expressions of a living source.
That belief became We Grow Here | Apparel for Intelligent Life.
When I began thinking about how to tell that story, I kept coming back to the alien. Not the alien I jokingly told children I was, but a life-form character who could enter our world and experience it with curiosity; slowly discovering what being here—and being alive—truly means.
That character became Friendly Visitor 001. And Friendly Visitor became the beginning of Earth School.
Earth School follows Friendly Visitor, a distant being sent to Earth on a mission to remind us of what we knew before fear, lack, and separation taught us otherwise, and invite us to return to Love. Told through chapters, the Visitor experiences life with curiosity, connection, and play, discovering more of itself and our world along the way.
And we all know, every journey has an arrival.
I think that is why Arrival feels like the right place for this story to begin. Friendly Visitor does not know everything yet. They do not have all of the answers. They are simply here, willing to experience what comes next. From personal experience, I think there is something familiar about that in all of our stories.
Long before Friendly Visitor had a name or a character design, pieces of this story were already happening—in those classrooms, on jobs, through conversations with strangers, and throughout my travels.
Maybe they were onto something.