The following identities are dreams—not untrue, but more like putting on my favorite clothes, or the way culture dresses up the land. Since I’m donning regalia, I won’t be mentioning the thousands of hours I play Royal Match or the time I watched a full season of Love is Blind. Regalia or rags, it all comes off at the end of the day.

My ancestors are Anglo-Saxon, Gael, Ashkenazi, Frank, Germanic, and the Indigenous peoples of Anatolia, the Caucasus caves, and Eurasian steppe. I grew up on Timacua, Yamasee, and Seminole land (Middleburg, FL), then spent nearly 20 years in the Ohlone territory of the Huchuin band of the Confederated Villages of Lisjan (Oakland, CA). Now I live with my husband and two kids on the ancestral lands of the Occaneechi–Saponi, Eno, Shakori, Sissipahaw, and Tuscarora tribes (Chapel Hill, NC).

It took me a long time to be able to introduce myself in a traditional way. Land, ancestors, and community come before me because I don’t exist apart from them. Grounding my identity in blood and biome, rather than nation, profession, or other surface signifiers, upends an entire worldview—the one that says I’m on my own in a material world. A world built on competition, personal advantage, and self-improvement.

My colleagues and I used to call this messy dismantling “losing our western minds.” In my indigenous mind, I surrender to synchronicity and allow myself to be dreamed forward by the powerful forces that put me here. My ancestors experience life as a spiral, not as a line. There’s no beginning and no end, nowhere to go and nothing to improve upon. There’s only adaptation—a collaborative now, unfolding in dynamic warmth.

Understanding my origins broadens my body and places me deep in my humanity. It gives me roots, fosters continuity and belonging with the people and lands that love me, and holds me accountable to my relationships, including future generations. When I remember who I am, I feel surrounded by family even when I’m “alone.”

When I meet with other traditional peoples, we put our relationships first to determine how we’re related. The elders I’ve met have been pleasantly shocked that I remember my stories. Lately, recovering the European indigenous mind has gathered enormous heart and momentum, which helps the process go more smoothly for all of us.

Growing up, my mom worked as a nail tech. When I was 11, she brought our whole family to a beauty expo in Orlando that included a drag show. As soon as these radiant, off-script beings took the stage, I knew I could live in this world. I stood right in front of the giant speaker as EMF’s “You’re Unbelievable” thundered through my body. I wanted to stay forever.

My mom went on to graduate from the Barbara Brennan School of Healing. She’s uncannily intuitive, and channels enormous love. When my brother nearly died in a dirt bike accident, she yelled at the priest (who’d come to administer last rites) to leave. Instead, she put her hands on my brother, and he recovered. Her gift has helped me through many situations of my own.

My dad installed cabinets and countertops for years before starting his own business. His side of the family includes teachers, preachers, circuit riders, and prohibitionists. They have a faith you could set a box on, and disseminated their devotion on horseback throughout the Southeast. My paternal grandfather died when my dad was only 16, but continued to show up in my Mammaw’s dreams for years afterward to help her raise their three boys. That’s how reliable my father’s line is. My dad provides. I did not know how lucky I was as a child to have two parents who loved me and plenty of food to eat. My brother takes after my dad. He can build a house with his hands, and makes sure everyone feels cared for.

When I was a teenager, I started having visions, precognitive dreams, and out-of-body experiences. Church didn’t help, and there were no elders. Eventually, mystic fervor sent me over the edge. I dropped out of the University of Florida’s fiction writing program after pondering infinity, then overdosed to join the perfection I’d glimpsed. I didn’t know refusing humanity made me a ghost, or that taking my life betrays all life.

It was hard to live in Florida. I loved the land absurdly and devastatingly. In my mind, each needless shopping center desecrated the woods that raised me, and a river of tears that eventually washed me to the shores of Oakland, California. I remember feeling helpless, like I did not have the tools I needed to uphold the land’s sovereignty. So, I finished my English degree at the University of North Florida in 2004 while working at Home Depot, and headed to California with $800 and the shine of youth.

I landed in Naropa University’s Indigenous Mind program, founded by Oneida/Frank elder Dr. Apela Colorado. For the first time, I got to sit with traditional elders while reconnecting with my own ancestors’ indigenous ways. My teachers—storytellers and medicine people from around the world—showed me that everything is natural; nothing is supernatural. Supernatural simply means we have forgotten our relationships. We relegate extreme experiences into “otherness” when we forget how to locate them in the web of interbeing. Ultimately, what I’m doing here is being dreamed forward by a culture robust enough to hold human and experiential outliers with ease.

My Master's thesis, Reinstating the Role of Community Dreaming Using Traditional Protocol and Open-Source Technology, explores dreaming as a way of life and custodian of community health. My colleagues and I cataloged dreams by theme against an astronomical ephemeris to detect patterns and develop a dictionary of portent.

Remembering symbols is another way to remember relationships. Symbolic literacy allows us to read our dreams as well as our indigenous folktales, and to locate our place within them. Animism is continuous immersion in a flow of living symbols. Health is responsive intimacy with land, ancestors, and spirit. Culture is Earth, flourishing. My colleagues and I frequently dreamed the same thing at the same time. Symbols visited our community as we slept, just as they do in waking life.

After the harrowing delivery of my daughter, I had lucid dreams almost every night for a year due to exhaustion, so I made them into my lab. I learned many practical skills from the dream world, and continued recording and tracking thousands of dreams over decades. This rigor, while antisocial, fostered symbolic literacy. I love reviving our original language, which expresses human nature much more fluently than English does.

My ancestral journey to Ireland changed my life. I marveled at my Nuragic ancestors’ mastery of the interplay between land and sky. Thousands of fairy mounds still dapple the Irish landscape. These sophisticated stone monuments archive natural cycles and harmonize worlds. Being with the stones inspired me to pursue the unbroken traditions of Chinese calendar science and geomancy—in part as a means of remembering my own cultural capacity.

2005 was a fruitful year for teachers. My indigenous Mind colleague Heidi Guttman Corning introduced me to Liu Ming, Nyingma Dzogchen and Chan lineage holder, and Daoist priest gone rogue. I was all in right away, and began studying Mantic Arts, Polestar Astrology, and Path Dreaming. (This is also where I met the man of my dreams, Darren Gibbs.) Dreams are best read in community, but even individual dreaming holds profound value. Practicing non-dual animism under Ming’s guidance gave me legs, and laid a practical foundation for “Path Dreaming”—participating in symbolic reality with creative intent, day and night.

He also provided a structured understanding of sleep disorders and diagnostic dreaming. I love nightmares and recurring dreams as agents of awakening. I’m an advanced practitioner of terror due to poor choices, karmic reckoning, and ecological context. But something in me also finds joy in terror; I lose myself, or find myself, in the place where they merge. As much as I value story, abandoning it is at least as important.

The same year at Naropa, Joanna Macy introduced me to Systems Thinking and the Work that Reconnects. Her tremendous heart inspired the willing openness of my own, and relaxed rigid individuality into a much bigger belonging. I followed her to Land of Medicine Buddha to revel in her fierce, forward-dreaming love for all beings.

I used my English degree to edit projects for Joanna and for Ming’s Da Yuan Circle (The Butterfly Book), and I’ve served as a reader and informal editor for several other best-selling authors.

In 2007, I enrolled in Acupuncture and Integrative College, Berkeley to engage the medical aspects of Chinese cosmology. I practiced orthopedic medicine with Olympic and collegiate athletes at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as internal medicine at the Acupuncture and Integrative Medicine College. I interned with Dr. Robert Levine and Dr. Kalsang Wangyal, whose expertise showed me the reaches of East Asian medicine.

On the first day of class, my teacher Mary Stewart asked us what brought us to acupuncture school. I could say even then, “to apply what I learn to the land.” I came here to enliven the Earth by being alive. I love being outside in a state of listening until the land and I become continuous, or at least conversational. That’s what geomancy means, to me. It requires complete, receptive presence. It’s a collaboration that can only occur through humility. On a good day, that’s what happens in my treatment room and in my backyard. It’s such a welcome break from all the words.

If all this sounds ambitious, it’s not. My bones know the flourishing culture that dreams me forward. The hardest part is waiting for everything to come together. What I am is impatient. I want my children see ceremony spontaneously erupt from real culture. My indigenous mind knows there’s no need to impart a world, usher every Euro-American into their indigenous minds, or pioneer a revival of symbolic fluency. The land is dreaming me forward, just as it always has. I only have to take my place in right relationship, and wait for the next invitation.