From a young age, I wanted to be wild.
When I turned eighteen I packed a backpack, walked to the highway, and hitchhiked away. I spent the next year zigzagging the US and Mexico, thumbing rides, jumping trains, and camping wherever I landed. I wanted to understand the world from the inside out. I wanted to experience everything.
Since then, I’ve traveled tens of thousands of miles by bike, foot, thumb, and boat. I’ve cycled across Iceland, Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, both coasts of the US and Canada, and the Great Divide. I’ve hitchhiked twice across Latin America, guided treks across volcano ranges, deckhanded sailboats in unruly seas, and backpacked for months in swamps, deserts, mountains, and forests around the world. I’ve spent over a thousand nights in my tent.
In between journeys, I lived and worked for 13 years in experimental communities in the US and Central America. We built our own homes, planted forests and farms, practiced communal self-governance, and taught grass-roots classes to thousands of people.
For most of this time, I lived in tiny houses, usually off-grid or low-grid, without Wi-Fi or running water.
When you open yourself fully to the world–when you seek the whole thing–you find wholeness, which also contains brokenness. The world is not simple, it’s a kaleidoscope. Cracking, fusing, shifting, growing. It’s a beautiful, gleaming prism of everything all at once.
What I’ve found after twenty years of human-powered travel, extended time alone in nature, and intense experiments in communal living, is that we’re all on journeys of transformation. Our lives are crafted from infinite possibilities. And the world around us–the nature of all things–is fundamentally kind.
I now work as a freelance writer and visual storyteller. I often write while hiking and biking long distances around the world. I built this website in public libraries while hiking 1100 miles on the Florida Trail; I’m updating it now as I cycle 3,000 miles on the Great Divide. I love working from the wild because this is where I feel most at home.
When I started this path, I expected everything from the world. Now I expect nothing. I’m just really, truly, happy to be here.
This is the adventure.
