I had a strong connection with nature as a child and this connection was fostered by my parents. But it wasn’t until I finish school and started a career that I began to realize that the spiritual world existed, and that part of my evolving connection with nature had to do with beginning to feel that all the beings around me were alive, thinking and feeling.

As I became dissatisfied with my career, feeling like it was just not making my heart sing, I became very ill with what we would now call auto-immune issues. In my search for healing, I found plant spirit medicine and Eliot Cowan. Two different people, who had never met one another, were telling me to read Eliot’s book Plant Spirit Medicine. I thought it sounded weird and woo-woo and didn’t even consider reading the book for months. But when I finally gave in and read the book, I had an amazing dream of journeying, and connecting with indigenous people, and of shape-shifting. I found in this dream that I could shapeshift into a dog, a little black dog. There was an older man who was a guide in the dream who accompanied me on my journeys and to whom I felt very grateful.

Two years after I began studying with Eliot Cowan, I told him about the dream in the context of some work with animal totems that I had to approached him about. As I describe the dream to him, he became very thoughtful, considered for a few minutes and then looked deeply into my eyes and said, “here’s how you apply to be an apprentice.”

Sometime later, I would find out that that in one of the Wixárika sacred stories there’s a small black dog who can shape shift into a woman. My dream seemed to have echoes of this story, including a journey over water.

Thus began my journey to becoming a mara’akame. Through years of pilgrimage and apprenticeship, I learned and grew and developed deeper relationships with the living world around me and the divine forces that make up this world.

I began praying to find a partner to walk with me on this journey and in life. Several times I saw a face in the fire and then I met him. He is also now a mara’akame. We created a beautiful home together on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border. Nature surrounds us and we work to deepen our relationship with one another, with our community, with our spiritual path, and with nature.

As someone who grew up in suburban America, I work to find balance between my love for the natural world and my spiritual path and my need to live in this world, to serve my people, to bring forth healing to help us all to move forward in a good way and find our way back to a sustainable way of living. Technology, like this website, can be a helpful servant, yet so often it takes over our lives and isolates us from one another.

In addition to my healing work as a mara’akame, I offer monthly fire circles where people can connect with one another and the transformative effect of the fire.

Fire teaches us that the world is about love, exchange, sacrifice. All the beings of the world are in relationship, exchange and communication. I have devoted my life to this work, to bringing healing and balance to my people, and helping people to be in better relationship with the world around all of us.