CURRENT MISSION

Creating a life from thin air.

ABOUT ME

I live in a very small house in Flagstaff with one dog, one human, and several chickens. Our kitchen sink runs into the garden, and we compost our shit to grow food from it.

I am a calm, easy going and friendly person. I love where I live, and enjoy showing others around Flagstaff and especially the surrounding wilderness.

I can chit-chat and shoot the shit with just about anybody and enjoy it, but I really crave authentic, real, and down-to-earth conversation and relationships. I listen more than I talk.

I've spent most of the last 6 or 7 years involved in supporting various radical and anarchist actions around the southwestern United States, specifically direct actions relevant to indigenous rights, migrant rights, and environmental protection.

I love to spend time swimming in lakes, creeks, rivers and springs (not always easy to find in Arizona), go for walks in the forest, gather wild plant foods, and spend nights out camping.

I've traveled cross-country almost exclusively by riding freight trains or by hitchhiking and squatting along the way. Besides living out of a backpack for months at a time while on the road, I've been houseless by choice several times before in Flagstaff, and look back on those months as very beautiful, inspiring and creative times of my life while I squatted the forest or abandoned homes for shelter. Now I'm buying a home in Flagstaff, and could hardly be happier :)

I dabble playing clawhammer banjo, I brew all kinds of beer, wine, mead and spirits, and enjoy planting vegetables and flowers.

PHILOSOPHY

"And this is the simple truth--that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce." --Jose Ortega y Gasset

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

Not currently hosting at the moment, but this site has been a great thing for me in the past, and will be in the future!

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

I've spent many a night on a couch from friend and stranger alike. Enough to the know the importance of having a welcoming place to stay in a new town, or of just having a contact for a little help along the way. I love hosting folks in my home! It's so cathartic to have one or several travelers come through to swap stories, advice, woes and solidarity.

Interests

Sitting, thinking, and feeling. Freight trains, walking, reading, hitchhiking, learning.

Friends, fermented foods, homebrewing beer & wine, distilling, growing food flowers and medicine, poetry, fiction, cats, community, existentialism, anarchism, folkways, travel, bicycles.

• cats
• dogs
• chickens
• poetry
• dining
• wine
• beer
• walking
• gardening
• flowers
• reading
• traveling
• homebrewing
• backpacking
• camping
• swimming
• medicine
• hitchhiking
• lakes
• rivers

Music, Movies, and Books

Books & authors that mean something to me: One Hundred Years of Solitude/Marquéz, Almanac of the Dead/Silko, Arctic Dreams/Lopez, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee/Dee, T.S. Eliot, Pablo Neruda, Ursula K LeGuin, and the Field Guide to the Forest & Mountain Plants of Northern Arizona

Films I like: I Heart Huckabees, Coffee and Cigarettes, The Big Lebowski, Everything is Illuminated, There Will Be Blood, and many Hiyao Miyazaki films especially Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Pompoco, My Neighbor Totoro, and Spirited Away

music ~ folk, old time, roots and classic country, rock, blues

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Rolling on a fast, rattling freight train across the plains, mesas & canyonlands of eastern Utah, at sundown, with my brother and my sweetheart. We kept moving all night and woke up winding through the Rockies -- jagged valleys with gushing rivers, dense spruce forest, and all gave way to soft misty meadows as the sun rose higher in the sky. That was May of 2009.

Teach, Learn, Share

Accept the gifts and gratitude of others. They need it. You need it.

Countries I’ve Visited

Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, United Kingdom, United States

Countries I’ve Lived In

United States