The more time that passes, the more I realize an About page is insufficient for introducing myself. That said, here’s some information about me that I’ve had here in various forms for awhile.
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, I moved to West Africa for most of my twenties. There, I taught primary and secondary school in northern Sierra Leone with the Peace Corps and at an international school in Nouakchott, Mauritania.
Home for me now is in the heart of the Ribeira Sacra e Serras do Oribio e Courel Biosphere Reserve in Galicia, a historical, but stateless nation in northwestern Spain.
I work remotely for a podcast hosting and analytics provider. I enjoy exploring my adopted home with my dog Alqo, sometimes in a camper van. I’m slowly renovating a little house in a town of around 18,000 people. I host a language exchange and spend my time with friends and neighbors, on many dog walks, and probably browsing Wikipedia too much.
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. But Among the Stones is mostly about me, the things that I give my attention to, and a refuge from algorithmic engagement bait social networks.
I’m also interested in literacy, photography, learning to speak and read Castilian Spanish and Galician, neurodiversity (particularly ADHD), “heterodox” Islam and Sufism, meditation, Human Design and the enneagram as tools for self-individualization, immigration, poetry, podcasts, entheogens, documentaries, iOS, meetups, camping and (temporary) van life, Romance and Mandé linguistics, Dungeons & Dragons, histories of Upper Guinea and Iberia, woodcarving, maps, Murray Bookchin, notebooks, dub, folk, and electronic 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.