About

Hey there. 👋🏼 My name is Jimmy. I work for a podcast hosting and analytics provider, rehabilitate an 18th-century stone house, travel around Iberia in a Fiat Ducato, and try to read and blog in my spare time. I also make a podcast called Left Abroad.

I grew up in the suburbs outside of Los Angeles on originally Tongva land, just below the foothills of what we now call the San Gabriel mountains.

After studying functional linguistics in Oregon and leaving as a philomath interested in everything, I moved to West Africa for most of my twenties. There, I taught primary and secondary school with the U.S. Peace Corps in northern Sierra Leone and at an international school in Nouakchott, Mauritania. From there, I took a yearlong sabbatical to backpack through Latin America with my wife, where we found and adopted our Peruvian pup Alqo.

Now, I live in a semi-depopulated village of the Ribeira Sacra, Galicia, a historical but stateless nation and autonomous community of northwestern Spain. It’s also the ancestral homeland of my better half’s family.

I eat vegetarian, overuse commas, and support the organization of society that prioritizes the planet and its inhabitants over the accumulation and consolidation of capital.

The title of this blog and expression among the stones is the translated Loko toponym of my host village in Sierra Leone. It’s also apt in Galicia. Among the Stones is about a few things:

• journal updates on what I’m up to and working on
• remote work in the rural world, sometimes about online things like podcasting, WordPress and community
• Galicia’s history, cultural heritage, geography, and relationship to Spain
• Islam and spirituality, from the perspective of a believer and convert skeptical of religious orthodoxies
• brief posts and photos of my travels in Upper Guinea, or of West African history in general
• commentaries on politics, usually on the American/Spanish anticapitalist left
• topical or interesting links about anything

I’m also interested in literacy, iOS, fantasy novels, gardening, podcasts, nature documentaries, camping and the #vanlife, Romance and Mandé linguistics, Dungeons & Dragons, histories of Upper Guinea, woodcarving, old maps, Murray Bookchin, notebooks, dub, folk, and electronic music, Rūmī and American transcendentalist poets, and a low-carbon future.

All opinions, annotations, and photos are mine, unless otherwise indicated. You can also contact me here.