During my time in Uganda, I developed a deep burning desire for the world to be a better place. I went on to became a student of the world, of humans, and why things seemed to be so messed up. I studied the varied proposed solutions to this problem. From political philosophies like socialism and anarchism to worker owned cooperatives, non-profits, NGO’s, and grass roots activism. I studied various religions, forms of spirituality, and I thought of myself as a Christian anarchist for awhile (yes, that is a thing).

I became interested in mental health, addiction, trauma, poverty, prison abolition, all the -isms out there. I read about the various forms of protest utilized by those who believed that you couldn’t simply vote to bring about a revolution (if that was possible, it would probably have happened by now). Ideas such as nonviolent protests involving legally holding a sign on a sidewalk to illegally occupying parks and buildings, and property destruction.

I saw that pharmaceutical companies were propping up the capitalistic state by convincing everyone that something was wrong with their brains, while ignoring the many economic and political forms of oppression taking place around them. This led to me becoming a Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner to help people be on the least amount of psychiatric medications as possible. I became interested in the human psyche. During this time, I started facing some of my deeper wounds, fears I had, and connecting more deeply with the earth and myself.

After all this, I have arrived at the perspective that the revolution we seek in the world outside, begins inside of ourselves. That no matter what form of making the world externally better we take, from the personal to the political, that it will be very limited in its scope if immature parts of us, like the Wounded Children inside of us, are still running the show a good percentage of the time. All the supposed solutions ultimately come back to the same problem, which is that they are driven by humans who have done little to no inner work on themselves. Because of this, the amount of good that can come into the world through these avenues is quite small. Unfortunately, having really amazing and revolutionary beliefs, and a fiery passion to make the world better in some way are not enough. This is all understandable, most humans are in some form of survival mode, whether they are poor or wealthy, and it is extremely difficult to go deeper with your life while in such a state.

All of this is not a resignation from the political. It is a deepening of it. I believe that transforming how we relate to all the parts of ourselves impacts how we relate with each other and ultimately manifests as patterns in the world at large. I believe the journey to becoming more whole has been mostly a lost journey, and a missing piece in basically all attempted revolutionary movements, at least in recent history.

I hope to be a part of bringing the wisdom of the wild earth back into our personal and cultural consciousness, so that we can learn to take our proper role in the ecosystem of this magical place, earth, we all call home.

This is me. This is some of my journey, some of what I care about, and what I long to see come to fruition in the world.