Where the Path Starts
If I’ve learned anything about beginnings, it’s that they rarely announce themselves.
Most don’t feel like beginnings at all. They show up after something ends, when you’re standing in the wreckage, trying to make peace with the mess and call it growth.
A few years ago, I sent off a genetic test thinking it would confirm the usual family folklore. Instead, it handed me a map connecting me to centuries of wanderers and dreamers: Scottish highlanders, Irish drifters, Manx islanders, English settlers, and German laborers. A lineage of people who traded one uncertain life for another, chasing possibility or running from something unnamed. I guess I got that gene too.
My mother used to call it “itchy feet,” as if it could be cured with lotion instead of therapy. But it feels older than that, something woven into bone, the need to move when life starts to feel too still.
That instinct carried me across an ocean at seventeen, to Europe, where I realized that travel isn’t escape. It’s translation. It’s learning to see your own culture from the outside and think, “Wow, we really are as weird as everyone says.”
Since then, I’ve learned that life isn’t about arriving. It’s about movement, sometimes toward meaning, sometimes just forward. At thirty-eight, I have no family, no kids, no white-picket anything. Just a constellation of places that have shaped me more than any mortgage ever could. I’ve lived out of a van, traded comfort for freedom, bandaged people back together in emergency rooms, and stood in protest lines in the rain. My life has swung between wildfires and fluorescent lights. Sometimes it stings, the rootlessness and repetition. Other times it feels like the only way to stay honest in a world that keeps selling comfort and apathy as purpose.
I’ve always been drawn to other cultures, fascinated by language and how it carries the soul of a people. I feel a deep pull toward Indigenous voices, land protectors, and the kind of ancient wisdom you can’t find on YouTube or in a mindfulness app. Maybe that is what keeps calling me toward deeper understanding.
Spanish is the third language I’ve set out to learn well enough to actually live in it, and I know there’s only one real way to get there: immersion, not as a tourist or an Instagram nomad, but by living, listening, and participating. Learning it is how I show respect, how I try to belong without taking up too much space.
Recently, heartbreak knocked the wind out of me again. The kind where love and faith collapse in the same breath. It made me wonder if I’ve been walking toward something or just in circles. But maybe that’s the point. The path is the circle. You walk it until you start to recognize yourself again.
Writing Wild Resilience has been its own kind of pilgrimage, part healing, part roast of my own coping mechanisms. I’ve unearthed ghosts, relived fires, and learned that healing isn’t cinematic. It’s quiet, messy, and usually happens when you think you’re just cleaning your kitchen at two in the morning.
Now I’m heading south, toward Mexico. Maybe it was inevitable. I grew up on a horse ranch in Northern Nevada with a mom who spoke English and Spanish, not because it was trendy but because of her own wild detours: Spain in college, a marriage to a Salvadoran man, a life that crossed continents before mine ever did. That curiosity rubbed off harder than any career advice ever could.
Spending time with people who live close to the land taught me that not everything worth knowing comes from books. Some truths you learn by listening. Some live in your body, even when your brain is busy overthinking.
So maybe that’s what’s pulling me now, Mesoamerica, new words, new ways of seeing. Every time I learn a language, it rewires something in me. Maybe that’s what I’ve been chasing all along.
Not because I’m lost, but because movement, like language, is how I find myself.
This space is the map between destinations.
Where the path starts, again.
And now, I’ll be sharing a short passage from my upcoming book, Wild Resilience, for a first glimpse into the journey that started it all.
Cracked Horizons
Living in Europe didn’t just expand my horizons, it shattered them, leaving cracks that let the light in. I learned to navigate a foreign language, immerse myself in another culture, and even appreciate the art of protest. The Iraq War was at its peak, and while classmates back in the States were shipping off to fight, I found myself cross-legged in an underground socialist club, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette.
A Mexican exchange student named Mario, always in a Che Guevara shirt and a Palestinian keffiyeh, had invited us. “Free food and beer,” he said. He wasn’t lying. Giant pots of stew bubbled on dented stovetops, crusty bread passed down the line, and beer handed out like communion. A donation jar sat at the end of the counter, and everyone gave what they could, knowing it would feed next week’s crew.
But these places were more than soup kitchens, they were electric. Conversations sparked and tangled, equal parts philosophy, grief, and radical hope. Young Germans spoke bluntly about the war crimes of their grandparents and the responsibility that history placed on them. They didn’t bury their shame, they turned it into fuel. They challenged authority, demanded accountability, and refused to forget.
It made me wonder why, in America, pretending we’re flawless somehow counts as love of country.
Something in me cracked open. I began to see how deeply history shapes the present, and how asking hard questions isn’t unpatriotic, it’s the truest form of love a citizen can offer their country. Sitting among people the same age as those being sent to war, dissent no longer felt like rebellion. It felt like love, for truth, for justice, for humanity.
