That’s 22-year old me.

With the great Angela Davis.

​

When I graduated with a BA in African-American

Studies, I wanted to work for the abolition of prisons.

Literal prisons. 

Now, I’ve dedicated my life to helping people get

free from spiritual prisons. 

​

The spiritual confinement that touches us all.

And that we impose on others.

 

 

 

 

grieving the past can be unsettling.

​

Reconstruction is courageous work. 

​

We’re not meant to do it alone.

​

​

 

My story

 

I spent most of my adult life running from the God of judgment. 

I was seven when I first experienced the fear of this God. My mom and I were bedding down for the night, and she started praying. I began to sob uncontrollably, overtaken by a fear that I couldn’t name at the time. “I don’t want to go to hell, I don’t want to go to hell.” I heard echoes of the sermon from that week in my head. The preacher had hollered from the pulpit, "Your prayers won't even get above the ceiling if you're not right with God!" 

 

I was 16 when I left the church for good. I’d fallen in love with my best friend and come out as bisexual. I’d been an insider to the horrors of what the church did to people like me. No, thank you.

 

In college, I fell in love with marijuana. It was like a key in a lock. I never wanted to feel any other way. 

​

In running from the God of judgment with His Hell for sinners, I'd found a different hell of my own making. A hell of disconnection and false intimacy. I would spend the next 16 years of my life disconnected. From self. From family. From a rooted sense of God.

 

I was 34 when I would finally be ready to do the work to get free of my addictions. As I sat nervously in my first Marijuana Anonymous meeting and surveyed the room, I saw someone I knew - an old beloved friend. At that moment, I was transported 16 years into the past, from that meeting in Berkeley, California to my dorm room in Amherst, Massachusetts. This friend who sat in front of me had held the bong the first time I got high.

 

It was a moment of synchronicity. It felt like the heavens had opened up and the very hand of God settled on my shoulder, saying to me, “I see your pain. I see your struggle. I am here."

 

That day, for the first time in my adult life, I felt the gaze of the God of love through the eyes of this dear friend. And I stopped running. 

​

As I leaned into the community and the work of the 12 steps, my grip on the destructive behavior patterns that had become so familiar began to loosen. My life was calling for a partner. I needed to reestablish my connection to a Higher Purpose. 

 

It was through this calling that I found authentic faith, living faith, that breathes, evolves, dances, inside of me, outside of me, surrounds me, blankets me, and calls me home - to myself, through Itself, and out into the world.  And always IN LOVE. Through this call into a deeper knowing of God and of myself, I have been able to understand my gifts and my place in this world with greater clarity and greater assurance. 

​

I worship a wild and diverse Source of inspiration, and She fuels a life filled with love, compassion, and authenticity. I seek out communities of faith that nurture different parts of my connection to God. My jam is a midweek contemplative prayer service, a silent retreat or a Saturday afternoon Zoom gathering. Though, I do sometimes make my way to Sunday mornings - in joggers, sneakers, and a t-shirt.

​

Along the way, I have committed to a daily meditation practice. This is where my hope is renewed.

 

I have burned in effigy that God of judgment and fear. I have erected in its place a temple for the mystery of who and what God is.

 

The world has come alive in a new way. There are messages from the Divine everywhere I look. I have new eyes to see. 

 

I have become emotionally reattached to my life, to God.

 

THIS IS MY WORK IN THE WORLD.

CONNECTING PEOPLE + INSPIRING HOPE THAT WE CAN ALL CONNECT 

TO THE DIVINE AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.

 

If there's a birthright and a calling that we all share as humans, I believe that it is the reclaiming of our authentic expressions of faith.

​