Long before I had words for it, I was apprenticing myself to the other-than-human world, drawn by curiosity, wonder, and a wish to belong. I spent my childhood crouched beside ponds and ditches, collecting bones, catching frogs, and brewing secret potions I hid in dark corners of our home. I was a little witch then, devoted to Mystery itself — to life in all its forms, to the small creatures I longed to understand, to feeling myself as part of their world.

As I grew older, that wild devotion began to meet the world’s expectations of order, obedience, and restraint — lessons every wild thing learns in captivity. In Turkey, where I grew up within the strictness of a Muslim culture, I begrudgingly learned to keep my mouth shut and my opinions to myself, to stop questioning, to sit still and be proper, to hide my body and get my curly hair under control. And yet some part of me always longed to feel the earth on my skin, to be close to what was real and alive — to come home with dirt on my hands and sticks tangled in my hair.

For much of my life, I’ve wrestled with what it means to be wild versus civilized — and how much of each belongs in a life well-lived, one shaped by curiosity, courage, and the willingness to risk intimacy over comfort; a life woven into a living ecology where difference invites relationship and belonging arises through participation in the wider web of life. That question came into sharper focus while I was working with a feral rescue, Simone. I found myself wondering what she needed to learn in order to live among others without losing herself. In the process, I began to question my own domestication — the parts of me trained into obedience and the parts still wild and vitalized.

In many ways, that tension between wild and domesticated became the thread I followed — one that led me into the disciplines and lineages that continue to shape my work. I began with Dance in college — an early inquiry into embodiment and reclamation. In the years that followed, I apprenticed myself to the work of healing and aliveness: four years with the Barbara Brennan School of Healing, four with Psycho-Energetics, and twelve in apprenticeship with the Hero’s Journey Foundation. Earning a Master’s in Transpersonal Wilderness Therapy at Naropa University wove these threads together. My ongoing studies in psychodynamic, Gestalt, and ecotherapy practices — together with ongoing de-domestication work — continue to deepen my understanding of how the soul’s expression is awakened through conversations with the living world, each calling the other into fuller being.

I now live just outside Boulder, Colorado, with my partner, my thirteen-year-old bonus son, two dogs, a hive of bees, a small pond of fish, several fruit trees, and ducks. My days are spent mostly outdoors, often with clients on the land — noticing insects, tracking birds through the seasons, wondering about their habits, and feeling myself part of a larger, living story that reminds me daily that the work of tending psyche and soul is inseparable from tending the living world.

The wild child, the dancer, the one apprenticed to land and Mystery — and the one schooled by both study and soul — all remain alive in me and in the work I do today. I’ve come to trust that healing moves within the larger fabric of life, yet it asks for our steady participation — the willingness to turn toward what calls for attention, in relationship with what is human and more-than-human. I still end my days with twigs and leaves in my hair, small signs of a conversation well tended — where dragonflies, weather, and people move within the same living rhythm.