My Journey
I hold a bachelor's degree in anthropology and political science from the University of Washington. I worked for five years as an award-winning journalist, covering food systems, craft beer, and farm-to-table culture. These were places where I found meaning and community during my first initiation: leaving an abusive marriage and beginning to reclaim my queer and trans identity after years of religious repression.
My professional work mirrored my personal initiation. As I remembered who I was, my writing and research turned toward the instruments of my awakening: consciousness exploration, herbalism, psychedelics, myth, grief, astrology, ceremony, traditional cosmologies and practices, and the intersection of science and spirituality. I came through suicidality to something far more sacred than survival: I fell in love with the world again, rediscovered magic, and once again saw every living thing as sentient, imbued with soul.
Since then, I’ve worked as a gonzo anthropologist, independent ethnographer, and ceremonial participant-observer—researching from the inside out. My second major initiation was participation at the Compassionate Inquiry and Ayahuasca Retreat at the Temple of the Way of Light in 2022. This helped me connect with others, the natural world, and my own queer nature, in every sense, and I began to shift my focus increasingly on these explorations.
I began the long process of coming home to my body and myself for perhaps the first time. The people I met, medicines that led me, and experiences I had helped me find a tenderness I never thought possible. When I had my third initiation, breaking my pelvis and sacrum in five places and healing without institutional support, leaning on community and natural therapeutic means, I dove headlong into healing, and found myself broken open on every plane. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever been through, and still live with disability and chronic pain. Yet I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.
In the process, life was re-enchanted and meaning restored, everything I once sought and never found in religion—and I emerged with a passion for helping others find the same.
I am a student of the subtle healing arts, immersing myself in practices and systems from astrology to ceremony, altar-building, plant medicine, and intuitive creativity. A neverending learner, I am also pursuing a PhD at the Transart Institute for Creative Research, where I explore the ways we connect, transcend, and heal through altered states, supported by nature and community. I study how humans have always used ceremony to reconnect with what matters—especially those who are going through major life transitions, include queer, trans, and neurodivergent people and those leaving repressive relationship, family, or religious structures.
