Elsewhere
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.
The title of this blog is the translated Landogo toponym of my host village in Sierra Leone. It’s also apt in Galicia.
Here
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 work remotely doing support and content for Castos, a podcast hosting and analytics platform that also develops a popular WordPress plugin.
In my free time, I spend time with loved ones and neighbors, co-run a coworking space in town, practice Spanish and Galician, host a language exchange at a local café, and volunteer with an NGO that supports asylum seekers. Every so often I get to explore the area in my camper van with my dog Alqo.
I’m drawn to language in all its forms, from the mechanics of grammar to broader questions about literacy, translation, and culture. My spiritual life orbits around heterodox Islam (whatever that means) with adjacent interests in meditation, perennialism, and the transcendentalists and Sufi poets. I’m pulled toward any anticapitalist thought and the question of how those ideas intersect with technology and faith in the 21st century. The rest is journaling, photography, woodcarving, maps, D&D, and falling down Wikipedia rabbit holes.
This site is where all of it lives.
Stack
This site runs on WordPress with a customized version of the Simppeli theme, hosted on DreamHost. Most writing starts in iA Writer. You can see a fuller list of what I use here.