An About page never quite captures everything, but here are a few things about me that have made their way here over time.
I grew up in the suburbs outside of Los Angeles, California—on originally Tongva land—just below the foothills of what we now call the San Gabriel Mountains. After studying functional linguistics in Oregon, I moved to West Africa for most of my twenties. There, I taught secondary English in northern Sierra Leone with the Peace Corps and first grade at an international school at the edge of the Sahara in Nouakchott, Mauritania.
These days, home is in the heart of the Ribeira Sacra e Serras do Oribio e Courel Biosphere Reserve in Galicia, a small, historical nation and autonomous community in northwestern Spain. I’ve grown intensely fascinated by Galicia since the first time I visited, with its green landscapes, distinct culture, and rich language.
I work remotely for Castos, a podcast hosting and analytics platform, with an amazing team. Exploring my adopted home with my dog Alqo in a camper van, I’m also slowly renovating a little house in a town of about 18,000 people. On certain Thursdays, I host language exchange. Outside of work, I spend my time with friends and neighbors, take many dog walks, practice a few languages, read widely, and for sure browse Wikipedia too much.
The title of this blog among the stones is the translated Loko toponym of my host village in Sierra Leone. It’s also apt in Galicia. But Among the Stones is mostly about me, the things that I give my attention to, and my refuge from algorithmic social networks full of engagement bait.
Like other hunter-gatherer minds, my intellectual interests and hobbies are never-ending and too much for one lifetime:
podcasts, literacy, photography, poetry, learning Spanish and Galician, “heterodox” Islam and Sufism, mantra meditation, Human Design and the enneagram as tools for self-individualization, immigration, the perennial philosophy, poetry, entheogens, documentaries, iOS, meetups, camping and (temporary) van life, Romance and Mandé linguistics, neurodiversity (particularly ADHD), Dungeons & Dragons, histories of Upper Guinea and the Iberian peninsula, woodcarving, sewing, old maps, Murray Bookchin, notebooks, dub, folk, and electrónica music, Rūmī and the American transcendentalists, and a low-carbon, capitalism-free future.
All opinions, annotations, and photos are mine, unless otherwise indicated. You can also contact me here.
