Bio

Rather than explain who I am or what I do by whatever title my bread-winning may necessitate, it is far more accurate to tell you I am a female human, with all the perfect flaws and desires that suggests.

Years ago, when I thought I'd maybe lost my way, I asked for guidance -- and what I received were new eyes to see the world around me, and I then realised with great laughter that indeed there is no map, that the path itself is always and forever the goal. I am happy to say I know less now than ever before, and cannot tell you whatsoever what I'm going to be when I grow up.

After many years in the halls of academia, I have come to value the information of my heart and spirit where I once held a tight grip on myself and reality via the seemingly safehouse of the rational. Yet, it was these many years of theory and in particular philosophy that brought me to the love of inquiry and seeking that I continue outside those stony palaces of "correct" knowledge -- after grating for years against the institutional hierarchy I am learning again to write as a practice; for my community, for my family, for spiritual growth, for healing myself and others.

The Buckminster Fuller quote above has become as a mantra for me -- I do believe we are powerful beyond measure. As humans, we have the incredible tools of heart, spirit, and mind, too -- I turn mine daily to how to realise the great beauty of our possibilities. Lately this means the hard work of choosing love over fear, through releasing rather than fixing, through unlearning, through working with energy, through acknowledging the wisdom of nature, through honoring and training in the wisdom traditions...

In dispelling the illusion of the real, and finally beginning to grasp the enormous joy of this (rather than the emptiness it can suggest, at first), I have set about creating the world I believe we can and do inhabit in our best selves, in every part of my life.

My current work is in family building: I have just entered into a covenant of the highest order, beyond the understanding of the courts, or institutions: in February I came to inhabit full female mammalhood in the birth of my daughter Beckett Rose, who I had with my good friends, Matt and Dan, a gay couple. Our daughter will live with them, but I will remain always in her life as her mother. This process has already taught me more than I could have fathomed. There are so many ways to build family, and so much to learn from choosing love, every day.

I will continue to thrill on this path, and find both great happiness and solace in sharing it. I seek fellow journeyers, mystics, dreamers, lovers, teachers, students, mammals, friends.

Skills and talents

I've got more edumacation than is good for anyone. This means most of a PhD in Cultural Anthropology, and a Masters in Urban Design and Planning, and several years of a professional degree in Architecture. Somehow they let me teach various things at the college level, where I sneak in lots of critical thinking skills, do meditation sessions, and talk to my students about the functionality of the institution in maintaining the illusion. I don't get paid much for this, and I may be fired, eventually. C'est la vache. I write. We are constantly in a battle to communicate across and through eachother's versions of reality, constantly translating. I hope to continue to use words to clarify, honor, share, interact, and grow with myself and others. I grow, I cook, I feed, I make. I do many things. Whether I am "skilled" at them is a relative issue to their usefulness and application. I'd like to cook for you, sometime. This gives me great pleasure.

Interests

Agriculture/Slow Food/Permaculture, Alternative Economics/Currencies, Buddhism, Burner Culture, Ecology, healing modalities, quantum physics, Shamanism, Yoga, you

What I'm Reading

EVERYTHING

What I'm Listening To

Lots of radio. Story podcasts. World Music (Brazilian, Cuban, Yoruba, Sonati/Persian, Sufi...). Philip Glass and Ravi Shankar's collaboration, "Passages," on repeat. Baroque and renaissance chamber music. Django Reinhardt. Louis Prima. Devandra Banhardt. Jamiroquai, still, somehow.

Education

High school

Friends Seminary, New York NY

College

Swarthmore College, PA [Fine Art/Sociology-Anthropology]

Graduate school

Masters of Urban Design, City College of New York/CUNY

Additional study

Cultural Anthropology Doctoral Study (4 years), American Studies Certification: The Graduate Center, CUNY