The long way here
Where this comes from
This life started in Japan, moved through San Antonio and Austin, and now settles, for now, along the singing Tennessee River of northern Alabama. Travel has been a steady companion along the way, and the years have become a long, slow study of what it means to be a soul moving through a body, and a body moving through the world.
For more than a decade this has also taken the shape of healing work, through massage and CranioSacral therapy, learning to read a body with the hands and to trust what it says before words arrive. That same listening is the one carried to the page.
In 2012, hands closed around this throat, and there was a murder. What met me on the other side was full acceptance, mercy, and grace, and a color never before seen in this world. What it showed is layered and endlessly complex, and at the same time the simplest truth there is, that we are loved.
The harm was done at the throat, and so speaking of it asks the hardest thing of this body. It still recoils to guard the place it was hurt, and finding the voice to tell this story has been its own slow healing. The experience did not break this life so much as open it, and everything written and taught now grows from that ground.
These days the work gathers into a few shapes. A book taking slow shape, letters written alongside it, and rooms where people gather to move until something honest comes loose. The book is coming. This voice is how it is learning to carry itself.