About

Hey there. My name is Jimmy. I teach English, work on my old house, and try to write and read in my spare time. Sometimes, I build websites with WordPress. 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.

I studied linguistics in Oregon and left as a philomath in awe of everything. After that, I taught primary and secondary school in West Africa for around seven years, first with the U.S. Peace Corps in Sierra Leone then at an international school in Nouakchott, Mauritania. Needing a change of pace, I took a yearlong sabbatical to backpack through Latin America with my wife, where we found our Peruvian pup Alqo.

Now, I live in rural Galicia, an autonomous community and historical nation in northwestern Spain. It’s also the ancestral home of my better half’s family.

I eat vegetarian, practice Islam, overuse commas, try to read widely, and holler incessantly into the void for an ecological and perhaps anti-capitalist world that’s hopefully much kinder to people and the planet.

The title of this blog and expression among the stones is the translated Loko toponym of my host village in northern Sierra Leone. I guess it’s about a few seemingly unrelated things:

• quotidian life as an estranxeiro in Ribeira Sacra
• posts on Galicia’s history, cultural heritage, and geography
• multilingualism and practicing languages (castellano and galego)
• iPhone photos, especially landscapes
• mobile technology and conscientious use
• Islam and spirituality, from the perspective of a believer and convert skeptical of religious orthodoxies
• commentaries on politics, usually of the American/Spanish socialist left
• interesting links about anything

As a decent barometer for what’s on here, some highlights include: leaving Mauritania, a van trip budget for Andalusia, on ‘becoming’ Muslim, living in the late Anthropocene, walking and cultural heritage, Nunca Máis and the Prestige Oil Spill monument, finding a landing spot in Galicia after leaving Germany, Fernando Pessoa and the monte, hiking and finding similarities between Sierra Leone and Galicia, ‘coherent heterodoxy’, Spanish republicanism, the strange 2020 DNC primaries, rural quarantine guilt, some 2020 Ramadan reflections, veranda philosophizing, a request for a Galician keyboard on iOS, post-quarantine house-hunting trips, Couchsurfing and its future, the 2020 Galician elections, tweaking blogging and WordPress shortcuts, fasting from Twitter, veranda philosophizing, recording podcasts, personal epistemological crises, and the modern emphasis on ‘law’ in Islam mixed with some photos from Turkey.

I’m also interested in literacy, iOS, fantasy novels, gardening, podcasts, nature documentaries, camping and the #vanlife, Mandé linguistics, Dungeons & Dragons, histories of Upper Guinea, woodcarving and carpentry, 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. I link to Wikipedia (use citations) and Twitter. You can also find out the mobile technology I use or contact me.

Updated: Monday, 29 May 2021 from Monforte de Lemos.