“Living safely is dangerous” -Friedrich Nietzsche

I was born and raised in Sarasota. Visiting my grandma’s cypress-walled home and the nearby beach on the barrier island where my mom grew up I learned much about the juxtaposition of beauty and impermanence: witnessing the sublime solitude of a Great Blue Heron hunting in a mangrove bayou or the intricate network of a playful pod of dolphins flowing through the Gulf while beginning to realize that tides and winds constantly shift sands and that a storm could strike and irrevocably change all that was familiar to me. A love for wild Florida has been a supreme teacher of the aphorism that where there is love there is pain.

I’m a proud graduate of Florida public schools, from K-12 through graduate school. I received a BA in American Studies from New College of Florida (2009), an MA in History from UF (2017), and an MSW from FSU (2019). At New College I wrote a thesis on the postwar changes within the American anarchist movement and for one independent study project completed a student residency at the San Francisco Zen Center. At UF I studied the environmental history of psychedelic compounds and co-founded the Art of Aging program. At FSU I completed a Gerontology/Aging Studies Certificate (for which I was fortunate to have received a grant from the Usona Institute) on the potential relationship between psychedelics and the theory of gerotranscendence. I have presented on psychedelics to the Florida Historical Society (2016) and the NASW-FL (2019) annual conferences.

Most of what I know I’ve learned outside the boundaries of formal education, for all that it has provided me. Before coming to clinical social work I’ve been a bookstore clerk, busboy and waiter, lifeguard, and yoga teacher (at Wild Lotus in New Orleans, having done teacher training with Soul School and the American Viniyoga Institute). I’ve volunteered at animal shelters and taught yoga to at-risk youth. For the past five years I’ve been a social worker with nonprofit, community-based hospices in Tallahassee and Sarasota, accompanying patients and their loved ones through the dying process, most recently at a rural hospice house. In January 2022 I completed Fluence’s Psychedelic Integration: Premise & Promise course. 

When not working I am often swimming, dancing, walking my rescue hounds, cooking (and washing dishes) and generally trying, and often failing—to cite a poet who drew deep from peninsulas and barrier islands—to make the most of this one wild and precious life.