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 a great team. Exploring my adopted home with my dog Alqo (sometimes 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 a language exchange. Outside of work, I spend my time with friends and neighbors, taking many walks, practicing a few languages, reading as widely as I can, and for sure browsing 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 interests and hobbies are never-ending and too much for one lifetime:
- Spanish, Galician, podcasts, literacy, language meetups
- Heterodox Islam and Sufism, mantras and meditation, Human Design, the Enneagram, perennialism, Rūmī, the transcendentalist poets, neurodiversity (especially ADHD), entheogens
- Nature documentaries, histories of Upper Guinea and Iberia, immigration, Murray Bookchin, post-capitalist theory
- Journaling, photography, poetry, Dungeons & Dragons, woodcarving, sewing
- Camper vans, coliving, coworking, long walks and hiking
- iOS automations, WordPress, the independent web
All opinions, annotations, and photos are mine, unless otherwise indicated. You can also contact me here.
