Intro

What you'll find here

Dear Reader,

Maybe you are in Austin, TX, Los Angeles, or Watauga County, NC. Maybe you know me because you came on a trip with me, maybe you are my best friend, my brother, a past business coach, or maybe we don’t know each other at all.

I write to you from the forest, sitting on a rock, next to a creek a little while outside Cullowhee, NC; this first draft on pen and paper. I’m in the area for the Cullowhee Native Plant Conference, and I’m writing during the last portion of a guided Forest Bathing session, when I knew I’d be tapped into the energy flow of the ecosystem.

I’ve been encouraged over the last decade to write - a book, a Substack, my silly stories, my “message”. I’ve frozen when I sat down to write - self-aware and dwelling in ego on what I wanted to share and how that would reflect on me, or watching the lines of thoughts swirling around me too restless to catch one. But like I’ve long known about my paintings, and recently learned about the food I provide for others, I am only the conduit.

A line that echoes in the chamber of my soul, shared with me by my late friend Will around 2014.

Through all of these ideas and stories I yearn to share in writing, I remember, like the painter part of me, that I am the conduit, the channel through which the forest speaks.

From The Forest

I come to you from the forest - as a place where I have been and emerge from. These words come to you from the forest - the forest has a message for you to hear, delivered through me, through this screen. Really though, the forest asks that you personally listen to hear the message. We’ll talk more about this.

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For this first note, here is an overview of some of the things you can expect to follow.

• I’ll share ecological concepts and their counterpart spiritual insight and vice versa

• Sustainability & public health. Intimately personal to broadly organizational

• Stories and advice on living with nature, like backpacking as luxury, natural fibers, foraging, recipes, Leave No Trace versus Wild Tending ideologies

• Experiences I create: retreats, backpacking trips, forest meditations, farm-to-table picnics. Invitations and reflections

  

• Photography, paintings, other creative projects

• I don’t like to include links in the writing itself because the split decision to click or not is a split in attention. I’ll include references at the bottom instead.

• I won’t share moving images because they, too, are distracting for attention

• I honor your attention and don’t take it for granted

• I’ll try to keep it concise with all due intention, while also allowing for spaciousness

• At a friend’s Summer Solstice Party recently, I set an intention for myself to go off the deep end with trusting myself, so I aim to not hold back - whether that’s out of fear for controversy, vulnerability, or imperfection. I hope you’ll find them all here

• I do anticipate that at sometime in the near future, I will set a paywall out of respect to the prior point

• At this time, I’m not sure the frequency with which to expect these letters

• I won’t be offended if you want to remove yourself from this email list. Maybe we’re just on different paths, that’s okay.

• If you do enjoy this note or where it’s headed, I ask that you share it.

  

Reference:

Make Me A Channel Of Your Peace - Westminster Abbey Choir