I have worked over a decade in the environmental education and nature-connection field. My background in youth development, backcountry guiding, and therapeutic rites-of-passage settings. This unconventional journey has led me to pursue licensure as a couples and family therapist here in Washington State with the intent to be a part of the expansive network of people seeking to attune and help heal our lands, waters, and communities.
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My educational and career journey has been an unconventional one, informed by a life made up of many transitions. From a very young age, I felt most at home playing in the backyard, or using my imagination on endless adventures while summertime camping with my family. I also moved around a lot, setting me up for a young adulthood most comfortable on the move. In high school, I had the opportunity to go on a three-week kayak trip through a program at the Y, securing my awareness for a deep love of the natural world. In mid-late high school and before leaving for college, I found fulfilling work as a camp counselor, connecting with children and youth outside. Then, while I began my higher education journey as was expected of me right out of high school, I didn't last long. I wanted to do everything (and tried!), which led to a fast and furious burn-out, and an excellent life lesson. After my first year, I knew there were more pursuits I must follow before finding my path, and the right investment, in a college education. Just after my 20th birthday, I left university, moved to a small island, and began my full fledging process.
Living on my own brought infinite life lessons, and the next eight years I moved around working between W Washington and SE Alaska. I worked as a naturalist, deckhand, and fishing and kayak guide on an ecotourism charter boat, where I continued expanding my water navigation and boater skills, as well as customer service and small business competency. Between seasons in SE AK, I worked on several farms. I learned the ins and outs of organic farming and ethical animal husbandry, from early season sowing to year-round income planning. I worked for numerous small businesses while also teaching environmental education and farming: from kayak outfitters and small restaurants to a coffee roaster and an art gallery. I was trying to make a life for myself, paying off my student loans, but what I gained was vast competency in many walks of life, which led me closer to narrowing my future goals and orienting toward a life fulfilled by the intersections of purpose and skills.
After several years of effectively hustling through seasonal jobs and hard work, I had built a network of friends, colleagues, and employers who really believed in me, even when I faltered in my own sense of self. I discovered a program that inspired me to make another big transition, with the outlook of possibly starting my own forest preschool program. I signed up and attended a nine-month wilderness education program for adults, and gladly fell back into the gratifying role of student once more. I ended up staying around, attending and working for the program for five years, ever securing my awareness of integrating what I am most passionate about--wildness and nature-connection, community health, mindful relationships, creative processes--into a focused future career path. I learned and taught wildlife sign and tracking, ornithology, ethnobotany and plant identification, ancestral skills like fire-making, basket weaving, hide-tanning (making leather), navigation, and outdoor-based cooperation and leadership skills. This path was bigger and broader than my previous experience in state-based environmental education curriculum: it expanded my worldview of what education can do through integrating community-oriented and individually-led learning paths.
In my newly focused work in nature-connection, I spent time with three year-olds to adults of all ages, and the rewards kept pouring in. In a country where the average U.S. citizen spends 93% of their life indoors (according to the EPA), it became more evident as my years of experience progressed that nature-connection truly does enchant, enliven, and empower people of all ages and demographics, especially when integrated into their lives with relative consideration of their individual backgrounds. Witnessing and helping guide adults through their reclamation journeys of nature-connection, as well as knowing children for many years who grew up in nature-based education, the innumerable testimonials of lives realigned with their unique passions and purposes was an honor to behold. The young children's developmental abilities of self-awareness and responsiveness to age-appropriate self-regulation was proof enough that humans, when given spaciousness to be outside and some simple guidances of how find comfort in their bodies, minds, and hearts there, was both effective and necessary. But as I reached an easy comfort in my progress as a nature-based educator, I started to feel something was missing, and there was something even more essential to pursue.
Some seeds were planted when I went to the reservation of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to support the No DAPL protest in 2016. As it sprouted, tendrils of my many existential questions and revolutionizing nature became illuminated, as I became increasingly involved socially and politically in human rights and environmental justice. I also realized that if I wanted to protect what I dearly loved--the natural world--I must turn toward helping make more protectors in humans, which can only be done when people are empowered and resourced enough to show up beyond their own basic survival, rightly so. The more I discovered about the vast intersections of environmental protection and human rights, the more I kept asking myself, what and how do I serve? Where are my skills, passions, and interests most effective? ...And that dream of a forest preschool? Well, a wonderful program had already been started by someone else in the small community I called home, and I took it as a sign my future lay in a different path. Then, as we all experienced in our own ways--the COVID-19 pandemic hit the planet.
After having my hours slashed to near nothing at my places of work, I turned inward to try to sense what was next. I knew my work in nature-connection education and various other jobs meant to meet my bills was unsustainable energetically and financially in the long-term. I kept getting the hint--through my intuition and thought patterns, conversations with people, and the global circumstances--that returning to higher education was, while intimidatingly expensive, a possible trajectory in taking all my experiences and conglomerating them into a stable career. So, shortly before turning 30, I applied, was accepted, and transferred my previous credits (just before they expired!) to the Community Psychology program at University of Washington, Bothell. Since becoming a UWB student, I have thrived in my education and found a comprehensive, multi-step plan toward a career with ample possibilities to keep me motivated and curious.
While at UWB, I pursued classes that vastly enabled my comprehension, intellect, and empathy in social justice issues. This critical, always-expanding awareness will be essential in my current chosen career field in psychology as a couples' and family therapist. Historically, the field of psychology has been used as a majorly oppressive force against marginalized populations--even creating marginalization. Courses like Critical Psychology, African American and Black Studies, Environmental Justice, Community Psychology, Public Policy and Law, U.S. History of Mass Incarceration, Gender and Sexuality, Human Rights in Theory and Practice, Intergroup Relations, and the selective, on-site course, Washington D.C. Seminar in Human Rights, among a myriad of others and all taught by wonderful, diverse faculty, have been cornerstone to my growing understanding of power, privilege, status, and prejudices that so often work against community well-being.
Additionally, unbeknownst to me in my first year at UWB, a writing professor recommended me for a job at the campus Writing and Communication Center. The center reached out to me as a potential applicant, so I applied, interviewed, and was offered a job as Peer Consultant. Our pedagogy at the WaCC didn't dictate us "writing tutors" per se, as we were, after all, fellow students. But between my years as a PC and Lead PC, as well as on the student board of the UWB research publication, The CROW, my writing, communication, and dictation skills grew exponentially. And with increasing capability, so did my love for writing--which always existed to some degree but now intersected with more purpose. Working with a diverse staff and board, as well as an expansive student base including many English language-learning students, has (very gratefully) pushed my comprehension of well-rounded communication to edges previously unknown.
With a newly paved and focused direction, I have been honored with a spot in the 2023 graduate cohort at Seattle University in couples and family therapy. My manifold intention in this licensure includes a year-round career, an adaptable work schedule, the ideal prospective of collaboration with a therapy collective (multiple practitioners to find best-fit clients to practices), continued education in rites-of-passage and trauma-focused integration, partake in research in the burgeoning field of ecopsychology, and most importantly, supporting people as they might desire in seeking growth and attunement toward their lives and their loved ones. Because, as I have learned from my explorations in environmental education and justice, no healing journey exists within a vacuum, and to become protectors of all that is precious in this world, we must first find ease and resourcefulness within ourselves, our networks, and our concentric rings of communities.
Which brings me to today, working to be a part of societal-level revolution, as we look into a future with the intent to share hope, resilience, connection, healing, and community well-being.
Sometimes a Wild God by Tom Hirons
Sometimes a wild god comes to the table.
He is awkward and does not know the ways
Of porcelain, of fork and mustard and silver.
His voice makes vinegar from wine.
When the wild god arrives at the door,
You will probably fear him.
He reminds you of something dark
That you might have dreamt,
Or the secret you do not wish to be shared.
He will not ring the doorbell;
Instead he scrapes with his fingers
Leaving blood on the paintwork,
Though primroses grow
In circles round his feet.
You do not want to let him in.
You are very busy.
It is late, or early, and besides…
You cannot look at him straight
Because he makes you want to cry.
Your dog barks;
The wild god smiles.
He holds out his hand and
The dog licks his wounds,
Then leads him inside.
The wild god stands in your kitchen.
Ivy is taking over your sideboard;
Mistletoe has moved into the lampshades
And wrens have begun to sing
An old song in the mouth of your kettle.
‘I haven’t much,’ you say
And give him the worst of your food.
He sits at the table, bleeding.
He coughs up foxes.
There are otters in his eyes.
When your wife calls down,
You close the door and
Tell her it’s fine.
You will not let her see
The strange guest at your table.
The wild god asks for whiskey
And you pour a glass for him,
Then a glass for yourself.
Three snakes are beginning to nest
In your voicebox. You cough.
Oh, limitless space.
Oh, eternal mystery.
Oh, endless cycles of death and birth.
Oh, miracle of life.
Oh, the wondrous dance of it all.
You cough again,
Expectorate the snakes and
Water down the whiskey,
Wondering how you got so old
And where your passion went.
The wild god reaches into a bag
Made of moles and nightingale-skin.
He pulls out a two-reeded pipe,
Raises an eyebrow
And all the birds begin to sing.
The fox leaps into your eyes.
Otters rush from the darkness.
The snakes pour through your body.
Your dog howls and upstairs
Your wife both exults and weeps at once.
The wild god dances with your dog.
You dance with the sparrows.
A white stag pulls up a stool
And bellows hymns to enchantments.
A pelican leaps from chair to chair.
In the distance, warriors pour from their tombs.
Ancient gold grows like grass in the fields.
Everyone dreams the words to long-forgotten songs.
The hills echo and the grey stones ring
With laughter and madness and pain.
In the middle of the dance,
The house takes off from the ground.
Clouds climb through the windows;
Lightning pounds its fists on the table
And the moon leans in.
The wild god points to your side.
You are bleeding heavily.
You have been bleeding for a long time,
Possibly since you were born.
There is a bear in the wound.
‘Why did you leave me to die?’
Asks the wild god and you say:
‘I was busy surviving.
The shops were all closed;
I didn’t know how. I’m sorry.’
Listen to them:
The fox in your neck and
The snakes in your arms and
The wren and the sparrow and the deer…
The great un-nameable beasts
In your liver and your kidneys and your heart…
There is a symphony of howling.
A cacophony of dissent.
The wild god nods his head and
You wake on the floor holding a knife,
A bottle and a handful of black fur.
Your dog is asleep on the table.
Your wife is stirring, far above.
Your cheeks are wet with tears;
Your mouth aches from laughter or shouting.
A black bear is sitting by the fire.
Sometimes a wild god comes to the table.
He is awkward and does not know the ways
Of porcelain, of fork and mustard and silver.
His voice makes vinegar from wine
And brings the dead to life.
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