About

Hello, it’s nice of you to visit.

Looking to find out who’s behind the curtain?

So am I, actually, which is probably part of this blog’s purpose.

But an apprenticeship  in living my life and paying attention to patterns offer clues.

Here’s an assortment of the factual: Born in 1970 (so, no that’s not a recent photo) in northern California, grew up in both urban southern CA and a town on the mid-coast, married for over twenty years, two kids.

And an assortment of the interpretive:

My life as a novel has no plot but it’s strong on character development. I am working on extricating myself from a story that says I have no story. Yes, I see the irony there.

A few strange physical features tell of my origins: I’m part elf (one ear is pointier than the other), and am descended from royalty (my grandmother swears that’s what long second toes indicate).

I grew up in a family and community without much interest in a questioning/questing, creative life, didn’t bring up anything numinous outside of normal bounds (church), expected a very mainstream existence.  I practiced not being noticed and haven’t recovered from years of feeling like a freak and an outsider.

I don’t love travel for its own sake, though I enjoy going somewhere new.  I’d rather settle in to experience a place than drag out the journey without really knowing any one place.  I dread being a tourist. I’ve lived in Thailand, China and Germany and haven’t settled anywhere, which is disorienting.

I love gnarled oaks and bay laurel woods, redwood groves and greening toward golden hillsides. Northern California is heart’s home. Somehow I keep moving overseas though. That’s probably related to my assessment of having a story-less life and trying to refute it.There is tension there.

Still here? Wow, you’re long-suffering! What else would you like to know?

Some other randomness:

Though I don’t officially collect anything, I have collected small brass bells, crystal prisms, a list of writing topics, and a few lullabies.

Some of the more enjoyable things I’ve done:

aikido, letterpress printing and linocut illustration, an internship with the Nature Conservancy where I chased bugs across beach dunes for a summer, being a bike mechanic, ranging about looking for wild foods and windfall fruit, renegade gardening by taking over the landscaping near my apartment and putting in edibles instead, writing (when I can hit the ecstatic feeling of channeling something powerful), helping build a cob house (earthen construction),  permaculture training, a bunch of DIY projects (from worm-bins to fiber-arts to crafty stuff with my kids)

The best towns have creeks running through them.

I like the stories birds tell.