About me.

My path with story has been meandering. I went to art school to be an illustrator and left with a fascination for stories as constructed narratives that form the fabric of our realities. Blame Roland Barthes. I was spat out of university into a recession, and doe-eyed, I figured it was a sensible time to start a business. In 2012, I co-founded a magazine that positioned itself at the intersection of outdoor lifestyle, environmental stewardship and regenerative living. Creating this story world was a process of enquiry, collaboration and curation with our community, audience and contributors. We celebrated the joy of being in communion with the world and the awe and wonder that arise from feeling into our planetary interbeing. However, the subject matter brought me into increasingly closer contact with the unravelling that’s underway. How was I to conjure joy on the pages of the publication when I felt so much grief and pain?

As I held this question, two pivotal things happened. First, the book Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer landed with me; it moved me in monumental ways that gave some relief from the pain I felt. I still hold strong to the passage, “I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the Earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.” Second, I began working on a feature story about seed saving, learning about the collaboration that’s been unfolding for thousands of years between plants and peoples, which is exhibited in our rich and beautiful diversity of food crops. I was enveloped by the stories that seeds carry: tales of people, plants and places, of migration and movement, of adaption and survival, of creativity and imagination. I was soothed by this but quickly learnt of the very real threats to communities’ seed sovereignty and the homogenisation and theft driven by commercial entities.

Seeds have taught me a lot. Holding them, I contemplate their passage through time and wonder about my own ancestral connection to place. Many cultures, myths, stories, languages and ways of knowing have emerged from the kinship between people and their places. Seeds have helped me more deeply integrate a systemic worldview that knows our interdependence with all else and recognises diversity as integral and homogenisation as degenerative. Monocultures weaken and lead to the collapse of systems. I think about this in the context of stories; pervasive and invasive narratives colonise, spread and dominate. This has happened and continues to happen now. Certain narratives prop up worldviews that are inherently degenerative and perpetuate cultural homogenisation. In this process, many ways of knowing are lost, potentially forever, along with wisdoms that may be nested in them of how to coevolve and thrive with the world.