Specification
I didn’t quite realize it before I began this first output packet but as I began writing it I realized that my life is an action-learning spiral made up of smaller action-learning spirals. My whole life has been filled with action learning spirals that have led me to where I am today. Even the process of writing this first output packet is an action- learning spiral. It is interesting to note that I’ve been doing action learning my whole life without being aware of it. The process of telling my life story has proven to not be the most simple of tasks. It was easy to write about my life, but when prompted to only write so much on my life it was difficult to squeeze it in. There is a lot more to the stories that I’ve told but I appreciate the practice of pulling out the best of each story. I decided to write about my life through the lenses that are most relevant to my life now. With this process I was able to see where I had come and how I got to where I am now. I feel that my increased awareness of where I’ve been and who I’ve become can only help me choose my path more precisely in the future.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Eco-awareness
Shrooming
Moving away
The message is in the music the music is in the message
Formal education
Community
Other guiding factors.
Concluding remarks
Introduction
This is my story of how I came to be who I am today. Knowing who I am now was heightened when I looked back to see where I had come from. I’ve narrowed down my life in to several lenses to explain who I am and where I am in my life. These lenses are included in the table of contents.
Due to the small frame with which to put it in I have had to select the most significant character building factors. There are several outcomes of this short autobiography. First, I will show through topics of lenses how these lenses have shaped and guided my life. Second, I will also describe where each lens has brought me and where they might take me. Third, each story I tell is only a fraction of all that goes along with it, but gives me practice in creating a succinct description of my life.
Eco- Awareness
There have been several circumstances and experiences in my life that have helped me develop eco-awareness. A natural birth, growing up in the forest, camping excursions, environmental destruction, consumptive awareness, and permaculture have been some of the major impacts in my life that have contributed to my ecological awareness.
I came into the world in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California between Tahoe and Yosemite. My arrival into the world in the comfort of my parents’ home surrounded by the forest was a great beginning to my eco-awareness. Being born of a natural birth had very positive impacts on me that weren’t always apparent to me. I’ve grown to appreciate my entrance into this world very much. Understanding the possible risks involved but feeling the outcome is amazing. Being the first homebirth child of three, my birth was special to my parents and in turn feels special to me. Within the context of our western society the homesteading approach to life that my parents adopted was becoming increasingly uncommon at the time of my birth. The possibility to grow up where I was born is common amongst indigenous peoples but not so common in our society that relies so heavily on western medicine. I feel blessed and grateful to my parents for their choice.
This is a painting that a friend of my parents did before I was born.
Growing up surrounded by the mixed coniferous forest of the Sierra was amazing. I had a younger brother and a younger sister and we played with the neighbors’ children in snow and mud. We built forts, rode bikes, hiked, and swam at the river and lakes. The forest was our playground and whatever we could come up with we did. We could hike to Big Trees State Park and see the biggest known living creatures on the planet. We drank water right out of the creeks when we got thirsty. As if growing up in the forest wasn’t enough my parents made sure to expose us to many wonders of nature. We explored all over the western U.S.. Yosemite was close by so we went there often. On our few visits to relatives in Iowa and Texas we went to many National Parks, camping along the way. We also drove down to Baja, Mexico on several different occasions and camped on the beach for weeks at a time. I had at least some geographic reference of where I grew up in the world as well as being exposed to many natural wonders.
My eco-awareness of human caused environmental destruction didn’t happen until I reached 7th grade. A woman wanted us to do a fundraiser for the Rainforest Action Network. What a powerful experience, we got to raise awareness for the cause and raise money for it at the same time. We sold t-shirts and bumper stickers and were educated in rainforest deforestation at a young age. This awareness had always stuck with me after that but I wasn’t always sure of which actions I could take. But now I was aware that there were actions to take and actions to avoid.
My awareness of our over consumption as a society was introduced to me when I learned about rainforest deforestation. But I believe it was enhanced when I saw the numbers in a college course more than a decade later. My awareness was also heightened when I started reading about permaculture.
Just after I began studying permaculture and getting back into gardening I worked for a local organic farm and enjoyed harvesting and planting vegetables throughout the year. I had a sense of the importance of fresh locally grown produce after years of growing a garden with my family and enjoying the fresh harvest. Permaculture taught me about designing ecosystems to be resilient and productive. So rather than degrading ecosystems or sustaining them we can design systems to increase their productivity and go beyond sustainability. I was working in the garden on my family property at the same time I was working on the organic farm and soon stopped working for the organic farm. I had learned too much about permaculture and even though the farm was organic I was ready to spend my time reaching for the permaculture ideal.
I have learned that human ecology and natural ecology are inseparable and that if we are to survive here we need to harmonize our ecology with that of the planet. All of these experiences have helped me to live a life that is working towards living with nature rather than against it. I’ve spent countless hours working with the land that I grew up on. Improving the land for us as humans and for the overall health of the ecosystem. My eco-awareness has brought me to a life of every day actions that offer solutions to ecological problems.
Shrooming
This may have arisen from my ecological awareness or vise versa. At a young age my uncle introduced me to morel mushrooms. As I grew older I became more attuned to their cycles and their whereabouts. I had questioned the possibility of different mushrooms that were also edible. But having no mentor I lost interest. As a high school student I checked out a Mushroom ID book in hopes of finding some hallucinogenic mushrooms. I had no experience with a dichotomous key and there were so many mushrooms. I had no luck identifying anything I found. I thought my mushroom identification would be limited to morels forever.
Years later on a particularly wet fall my brother, myself and some other friends caught word of an older Italian man that hunted edible mushrooms locally. We ended up finding oyster mushrooms, porcinis, butter boletes and manzanita boletes that fall. I now knew of five edible mushrooms that grew locally. I began to learn about the conditions each mushroom needs to thrive and their season.
Since the beginning of my mushroom knowledge with morels. I’ve come a long way from picking my first morels with my uncle. In my locale I’ve found several more edible and or medicinal mushrooms, including zeller’s bolete, short-stemmed slippery jack, shaggy mane, lion’s mane, chicken of the woods, matsutake and giant saw tooth mushroom. I’ve gone to the coast of California to pick mushrooms that don’t grow in the sierra, or at least in my region. Black Trumpets, candy caps, golden chanterelle, white chanterelle, yellow foot chanterelle, and hedgehog mushrooms have all been added to my pantry.
I expanded my mushroom knowledge by taking a ten-week course in mushroom cultivation when I was at UC Davis. My teacher, Mike Davis is a well known mycologist, told us we would learn everything we needed to know about mushroom cultivation to become mushroom farmers. I have since inoculated several hundred logs and I am enjoying some of the first flushes of oyster and shitake mushrooms. It is my intention to build a mushroom growth chamber so I can have a continual supply of fresh mushrooms.
Over the years I had slowly gained knowledge of the mushroom industry. I had learned that there was a whole mushroom economy and culture that existed around the wild mushroom harvest. The strong taboo we have in our culture on eating wild mushrooms has made it difficult for me to market them, especially in the rural community I’m from. Even if I did come up with a large haul for the season or if I knew where a large haul was, time constraints and the daunting task of finding a market within our cultural taboo prevented me from doing so. So I continued to dry my bounty and started stockpiling dried mushrooms. I was able to find a small market selling dried mushrooms at a farmers market, but driers are different than fryers. We don’t have a farmers market during mushroom season when the fryers are good to eat fresh. Local restaurants have been good customers of fresh mushrooms but still can’t keep up with the bounties locally available.
In the fall of 2009 I finally got my break in finding a market that can handle the amount of wild mushrooms I have access to. I became a subcontractor for Far West Fungi, which has a retail store in San Francisco at the Ferry Plaza Building, or Pier 1. This was great as I made more money than I ever thought I could by selling choice porcinis, butter boletes, and manzanita boletes. I continued working as a subcontractor for Far West Fungi in the spring of 2010 picking morels. But as I’m writing this now in the fall of 2010 I am eagerly awaiting the chance to make a delivery to Far West Fungi. I just got off the phone with the purchaser telling him I won’t have a delivery for him this week but hope to have one soon.
I would like to create a well-developed business around wild and cultivated mushrooms and will invest some of my income from mushrooms in that business.
Moving Away
For the first 18 years of my life I lived on Love Creek Road in Avery, CA. Even when my parents divorced when I was 13 my choice was to spend most of my time where I grew up. I didn’t choose between my parents but rather chose to be where my heart was. My lack of consciousness of what lie beyond where I grew up kept me around for another year after high school. Yet eventually I had to push that edge to see what was out there. I followed my passion of snowboarding to South Lake Tahoe and lived there for 9 months. When I didn’t feel that was working out for me I moved back home briefly and then spent the following year in Seattle living with my mom. I was driven there to spend time with my mom and for the experience of living in a city. After a year of city life my passion for snowboarding brought me to Bend, Oregon to live with high school buddies for the winter. I enjoyed my time playing on the slopes and hanging with friends until I started feeling the need to go to school. As I wasn’t a resident in Oregon, I figured I’d better return to California to get instate tuition and use the resources available at my home.
Spending several years away from my hometown granted me a new appreciation for my old stomping grounds. With a refreshed sense of appreciation for where I grew up I spent the next 5 years going to college at a local community college. Now my commitment to school was going to prompt me to follow my education when my time at Columbia Community College was done. I chose to move to go to UC Davis and spent the next three years there. I am now living back home since 2007 and my action-learning spiral has brought me back home with ever increasing knowledge and understanding of the site. I have no intention of moving anytime soon but I won’t count it out as the world has lots to offer.
The Message is in the Music, The Music is in the Message
It is an interesting story of how I came to become a reggae DJ. Growing up, my parents had a pretty decent music collection. Being mostly from the 80’s it may not fit in my own collection today. However, my dad was rather fond of reggae music. When my dad lived in San Diego, a friend who owned a reggae record shop had introduced him to reggae. My dad’s friend, Brian, influenced me indirectly through his love of reggae.
My brother, sister and I had heard so many reggae tunes growing up that we knew many of the choruses. I almost resented reggae after awhile. As I was growing older I explored pop music of all sorts from alternative to rap/hip/hop and classic rock. When I had opened my perception of the world through using cannabis, the lyrics of Bob Marley and others resonated deeply with my core. Several years went by still before I was to explore reggae music on a deeper level.
After finding many boxes of records that were in storage at home, I came across a stack of reggae “wax”. I pulled out the wax and felt like a kid in a candy store. It was all from a decade prior to the reggae I had grown up on, which happened to be on cassette and CD. It was all foundation reggae music from the 70’s. I even recognized one of the records and remembered listening to it with headphones when I was about 7 years old. They were all gems and I recorded them all to tape so I could listen to them in my car. I had contracted reggaemylitis. I started going to Reggae on the River in 1995 and went for the next 6 years in a row. I went to many reggae shows and festivals over the next ten years and was ecstatic when Sierra Nevada World Music Festival moved to within 30 minutes of my house. I resonated more and more with the message that was in the music and the music that was in the message. As I was living a simple lifestyle I was in tune with a rastaman lifestyle. I had already become a vegetarian through Buddhist teachings and began to lock up my hair in honor of the great spirit, some call Selassie, Jesus, God, creator, Buddha, Allah, and so on. I was also growing my own food.
The Reggae Express on 94.1 FM KPFA out of Berkeley, opened my awareness of reggae considerably. They introduced me to several artists and still do. I listened to and recorded the shows every Tuesday night for several years. The message was so loudly positive to me that I wanted to share the message with others. My brother was getting the same vibe and we began collecting records of our own. Eventually, my brother and I invested in a sound system so we could share our music collections with others. We named our sound the Mountain Lion Sound and it includes two more of our friends that we grew up with.
When I moved to Davis to go to school I jumped on the chance to have a radio show. I had a show called Riddim Sounds on KDVS for three years and did over 150 reggae shows on the air. I have done dozens upon dozens of house parties, festivals, and clubs, and continue to collect “wax” but will take the music in whatever form I can get it. My dad’s friend Brian recently has blessed me with several hundred original press records in exchange for making digital copies for him. I look forward to continually sharing my collection through mix tapes, in the dancehall and other events.
Formal Education
I began kindergarten as one of the youngest kids in the class, I turned 5 just as I began school, having never gone to preschool, it was new to me. For the next 6 years my interest in school ebbed and flowed. Sometimes my grades would be good, other times, not so good. I had so much fun growing up in the forest that I could occupy myself for hours outside, yet when it came time for homework I’d get bored and put it off, producing lackluster results or sometimes no results at all. By the time I got to 7th grade I began to improve my study habits. My high school career was pretty good but by the time I graduated I began to lose interest. I finished strong but had no intention of going to college. In the next few years I took a college course here and there but never was serious about going until about 5 years after I graduated high school. I had to get a better sense of this world before I was inspired to go to school. I returned with a new sense of the need for education. I had a lack of understanding of my world and where I was to go. School, I hoped, would open up new opportunities for me that I wasn’t aware of yet.
I wanted to become more aware of the world I lived in. I took courses in Natural Resources, Geology, Biology, Geography, Sociology, Anthropology, and field courses of all sorts. The first semester at Columbia Community College I had some exiting and inspiring professors. One in particular had a great impact on me, Ted Hamilton. That semester I took Cultural Geography from him. The way the class was presented was unexpected. I was to make my own connections of the subject matter. My own thoughts were valid if I could support them through evidence and graphic presentations. This was totally different than the regurgitation method of education I was used to. This experience helped propel my excitement for education. I took many more courses from Ted and his wife Paula Clarke until I finished my stay at Columbia College. By the time I finished Columbia College I filled up on credits, nearly completing two associate degrees from there.
By the time I was finished with Columbia College I was exited to propel my education further than a bachelor’s degree.
I got accepted to UC Davis in 2004 and in the fall I began a B.S. in Agricultural Management and Rangeland Resources with an Emphasis in Sustainable Production Systems. Sounds great right, I thought so too, and although they did have some great courses, there were some that I felt were relevant to my education that was not included in the major. Ted and Paula had planted the seed of an individual major in me so when I ran into problems with my chosen major I decided to write an individual major. I had recently taken my Permaculture Design Course at the Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute (CRMPI).
So I wanted to name my major Permaculture and include as many relevant courses that I could fit in the remaining units I had left. Now I could include classes like mushroom cultivation, culinary and medicinal herbs, cultural ecology and my PDC to my major. I felt a little better about the pathway I was on even though I was within the belly of the beast, trying to do permaculture in a school that was more interested in industrial agriculture. I graduated from UC Davis in 2007 with a Bachelor of Science in Permaculture.
In 2009 I took a permaculture teacher training course at CRMPI. With the intention of teaching the PDC when the site of my family’s property was ready, I began designing a course in the fall of 2010. I wanted to get credit for all of the projects that I would be doing along the way of developing a Permaculture demonstration site and PDC. I was aware of Gaia University when I graduated UC Davis and thought about going yet but put it off. Gaia University has offered the opportunity to work on self-guided projects and get credit for them, so eventually I could no longer turn it down. I am happy to have arrived at this opportunity and I look forward to a well-developed pathway.
Other guiding factors
After high school when it came time for me to start making my own decisions in life I chose to stick around home and continue doing construction. Carpentry was a skill that I acquired from my dad. I started helping him during summers since I was 12 years old. I helped to do just about every aspect of homebuilding. I realized that it was very hard work but it was also rewarding to create so much with my own hands. I knew I wouldn’t do construction forever but it was good at the time and I definitely acquired some skills. The thought of doing construction forever helped keep me motivated in school. I continued doing construction off and on for a living until I graduated community college. Since then I used my skills to help build the house that I live in right now and for my own projects. I am grateful to have the ability to create useful things with my hands.
Snowboarding had a major impact on my life, as it was the only sport I did in high school. I did learn to ski when I was 6 but when I tried snowboarding at age 13 I fell in love. I never went back. Living so close to a ski/ snowboard resort I had a lot of opportunity to go when I was young. I had several friends that I snowboarded with growing up. Many of my weekends in high school were spent on the hill in the winter. We would send ourselves flying off jumps or cliffs into big puffy pillows of powder. We didn’t know too much about what we were doing but we had fun doing it. We were the first generation of snowboarders at our local hill and the sport was still developing.
After graduating high school, snowboarding kept me around my hometown for another year. The following summer brought a friend and I to a snowboard camp in Oregon to improve our skills. Could snowboarding be my calling in life? I decided to move to Tahoe and see what would happen. I spent the winter of 95/96 living in South Lake Tahoe and hitchhiking to Kirkwood for work and play. I had a very amazing winter with lots of powder days at Kirkwood. I began to realize my calling in snowboarding was to enjoy it as much as possible. When I lived in Seattle, I spent less time on the slopes. The lack of access to the slopes promoted me to move to Bend, Oregon where some of my snowboarding buddies from growing up lived. I had to spend one final season as a snowboard bum. My real calling of education brought me back home in 1998. Having explored many other resorts I had a new appreciation for the mountain I grew up riding. I continue to snowboard every winter for the pure love of the sport. The self confidence I gained through snowboarding has helped me have self confidence in everything I do.
I was introduced to Buddhism through the book Be Here Now by Ram Daas. I red the book when I was 19. Through reading this book I was introduced to the yoga way of life. I began practicing yoga poses and learned much about maintaining my body’s flexibility. I also learned about healthy eating. Even though I grew up on whole foods, I wasn’t hidden from junk foods. Reading about food from a yogic perspective has helped me realize what is food and what is not food. These self-care practices have proved to be healing and nurturing to me.
Community
I was fortunate to grow up in a neighborhood that had a great sense of community. Many of the young couples helped each other build their homes when they needed a barn raising. During holidays many of the residents of Love Creek Road would gather and celebrate. The elders watched a whole generation of youths come to age. It felt as if we had one big extended family. Moving away for several years has helped me gain a sense of the greater community that I’m from. It is a small town feeling where it’s hard not to go anywhere without running into someone I know. It’s great because the friends I have here are friends for life.
My parents divorced when I was 13 but it didn’t affect my sense of community. They were still able to be friends and we would sometimes spend holidays together. My parents have accepted the situation and have strived to keep our family close.
When I lived in Davis I got experience living in an intentional community called the Domes. We made our decisions with the 28 residents through consensus. Also, when in Davis I was on the staff of Whole Earth Festival for 3 years, which also operated by consensus. It was great practice for me in working with people that I live and work in community with.
All of these community experiences have given me the inspiration to continually be engaged in community. As of now I plan to work within my community to help create positive change. Many young people choose to move away and never come back to the area. I would like to help foster the idea that my community and bioregion has a lot to offer. I hope to work with family and friends to make it a reality.
Concluding Remarks
All of the lenses I have chosen to show you my life through are examples of my path of spiral learning. I have definitely changed and acquired new skills along the way allowing me to see with refreshed eyes. While the story I’ve told is only a glimpse into my life to see some of the influences that have shaped me, it is by no means a complete story. It has been a good experience looking back at my life and I feel that I can look forward with more clarity. I intend to refine some of the stories that I’ve told here as well as add parts that I haven’t lived yet. I’m looking forward to seeing how my story may unfold in the future.