About
My passion is for co-creating experiences, skills, knowledge, and lifestyle amendments that serve our individual and collective re-membering (coming back into an embodied relationship with) and understanding of our connection with, responsibilities toward, and reliance on and reliance on the ecosystems in which we live.
I am called to share this earth-connected work for two reasons. Firstly, so that others can join in the reverence and wonder I am continuously struck by. But mostly, I share it because it’s only by recognizing and recommitting daily to our contract with the earth that we can build a future in which we can live. As I understand it, my contract with the earth, which I invite others to consider, is that: I am fed, my thirst is slaked, and all my needs can be met; and in return my only obligation is to steward the earth in right relation.
As such, I’m not doing this work as some intellectual exercise or esoteric speculation…
Working to deepen connection is the only way I know how to survive in this world
Not only does it make my life more meaningful, but it is the only path I see toward healing the unwell cultural forces that are causing the exponentially cascading impacts of climate cataclysm and ecological disruption that we live among today.
Personal History
While I grew up eating of the earth (through foraging plants, tending gardens, and the slaughtering and the often elbow-deep process of turning farm animals into sustenance), mushrooms didn’t enter my life until 2018. The first time I identified, cooked, and ate my own mushroom find (Coprinellus micaceus, which has a special place in my heart now), I was immediately consumed by this passion. I’ve been an active member of the Sonoma Mycological Association since September 2018, and of the Mendocino Coast Mushroom Club since 2022. While foraging edible mushrooms for the kitchen was my doorway into the fungal queendom, my interest quickly expanded to fungal ecological roles as a whole, dyeing fiber with mushrooms and lichens, and some cloning and growing of mushrooms at home.
Eventually, I couldn’t keep the joy I find in these practices to myself. In 2020, my project Human Becoming came into reality. Through this platform, I invite others into co-creating experiences that support earth-connection and ancestral skills practices. We play through forays, workshops, and retreats that focus on mushroom and plant foraging, fiber arts, food, and much more! I began offering guided plant or mushroom hikes and workshops that have included: salve-making, wild fermentation, mushroom, lichen, and plant dyeing, making cord out of plants, slaughtering support, and more!
An acknowledgement:
I don’t have all the right words to express what it means to be a white settler on this land who engages with earth-connection practices. I have benefited from my family’s legacy of and participation in the colonization of the land I live on. Both my maternal and paternal lines were Irish and Western European colonizers on the land we now know as Berkeley and the South Bay Area, and have lived in those areas since the late 1840s and early 1850s. My blood-and-bone lineage connects me inextricably with the displacement and genocide of the original peoples of those lands.
With this complicated legacy as my inheritance, I do my best to recognize the ancestral stewards of both these lands and the land on which I now live, 120 miles to the north. I aspire to stand in solidarity with the past, present, and future peoples of these places in their fight against the ongoing genocide of indigenous people and lifeways. I humbly wish to build authentic relationships with these communities and work toward rematriation, ancestral lineage healing, and the liberation of all people. I have a long way to go in this process, and offer gratitude to all the teachers and community members who have lit my way in these efforts. I also honor the well and good ancestors and transcestors of my lineage (I’m assuming these wise and well ones are mostly from deeptime) and give gratitude for the prayers they had for me during their lives as well as their support of me during my life.
An Invitation
Personally, I haven’t found a better way to interrogate whether the choices I make in my life (big or small) will be fulfilling and support me in being who I want to be than by asking, “is this species appropriate?” Is singing around a fire with those I love species appropriate? Is working 40 or 50 or 75 hours a week species appropriate? Is consuming a wide variety of nutrient dense foods species appropriate? Is living in a place in which street lights shine into my windows, cars constantly rush by, and the recto-linear aesthetics of built environments proliferate species appropriate??
While I’ve found that personal practices, study, and learning how to analyze one’s self and culture is an extremely powerful tool, none of us are meant to move through this world alone. I am who I am and I know what I know thanks to the help of teachers and community members. I’d love to support your journey by sharing whatever perspectives I can offer.
