About me

I am supremely perturbed by the unsettling of the world around me: how we are strangers to our own bodies and unwilling to love all that sustains and resources us. Due to that I am suspicious about where most systems place their wealth, meaning, and kinship to our many faces.

Wendell Berry put my suspicions quite well in his determined voice:

One of the most troubling characteristics of the specialist mentality is its use of money as a kind of proxy, its willingness to transmute the powers and functions of life into money. “Time is money” is one of its axioms and the source of many evils—among them the waste of both time and money. Akin to the idea that time is money is the concept, less spoken but as commonly assumed, that we may be adequately represented by money. The giving of money has thus become our characteristic virtue.

But to give is not to do. The money is given in lieu of action, thought, care, time.

These proxies of Western-industrial-patriarchal-capitalistic-imperialistic neuroticism never quite touches into embodied values of a wealth beyond a worship of obtaining, gaining, and improving. Instead, I am more interested in the sacredness of giving, reading in to how generous Earth's own regenerative networks are considering how much we have unearthed into concrete rivers, buildings of no community, and our arrogance in all the land built upon taking, not relationship.

What I want to pierce directly into is the wealth of being with, suffering with, and a fierce vulnerability to soothe ourselves into truth however it may disturb the sickening peace and comfort that is removing us from each other and the world around us. For to be that shatters our filtered reality, one needs to embody those painful, distressing, and peace-breaking cracks in the glass to disintegrate our forlorn systems today.

I felt the disturbance wash me into what was unborn—all that loomed through me and was emerging as me.

I would aliken this through Aboriginal and Indigenous perspectives. Those of which I fondly would like to connect with, as someone in touch with their wisdom once said how wealth is within giving before receiving, and letting our minds engulf vaster circles in wholeness rather than a system of scarcity and deprivation. And the prophesying of how "what has happened to us will happen you," meaning how the uprooting, dislocating, terror, and genocide of the Indigenous peoples may very well happen to us (it already has) as it has had to them. Could this speak to our systems lack of gratitude and how capitalism convergences on what we want and how resources can be strategically restricted and exploited in isolated squirreling, not meant to be shared outside of our small circles of identity? Could this speak to the very systems that create salvation out of endangering others? Could this speak to a system out of balance?

As the saying goes, the tree that bends is the tree that survives, so with our storms how can we divinely lean upon each other in an interdependence that defies self between the binary of selfishness and selflessness. The challenge of leaning in rebellion to our cultures of independence is something I am so leaning into now.

I am interested in pirouetting the question: "how does death affirm life?" in a circular way. As Goethe once said, "As long as you do not know how to die and come to life again, you are but a poor guest on this dark earth." so, too, I wonder what home there is found right within the dark. For the roots of all that grows up begins in the shadows... hidden unless unearthed.

A wheel without its spoke is leads to an isolated circle, so if you are orbiting in my direction, feel free to contact me here.