"The highest ecstasy is attention at its fullest."
-Simone Weil

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

to be a good guest is to be a good person!

hospitality is the warmest kind of compassion

when traveling, it's fun to pretend you live there and keep the pace of locals--
seeing many faces & facets of a place with the people who know it most intimately.

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

One magical weekend in Brussels through CS; another in Asheville, NC

lots of independent couch crashing in England, France, around the U.S., Canada, and India--
staying with friends of friends of friends of friends...

living on farms with host families through WWOOFing (volunteer organic farming) in France.

Interests

all the arts (poetry & film especially), live music, histories of thought & the everyday

& whatever fascinates you most in a given moment -- I love to listen & ask more.

//

my life goals are:

to catalog contradictions

& curate banalities

--through art, thought, habits, & conversation.

• arts
• books
• poetry
• photography
• dining
• cooking
• coffee
• traveling
• music
• live music
• languages
• volunteering

Music, Movies, and Books

Everything equals poetry to me. Even small things, forgotten things-- things you might otherwise overlook.

Receipts? Street signs?
Worthy as art.

Overheard fragments of strangers' conversation?
The best works of literature.

The shuffle of feet & clinking of coins?
Pure music.

//

sweet smokey sounds:
Nina Simone, Django Reinhardt, Joni Mitchell, Cat Power, Arthur Russell.

--

I want to see every film these people made:
Ingmar Bergman, John Cassavetes, Agnes Varda, Chris Marker, Richard Linklater

And "My Dinner with Andre" has been very important to me. Especially where travelling is concerned.

--

I am reading lots of these folks lately:
Italo Calvino, Clarice Lispector, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Carson, Marcel Proust, Chris Kraus, Eliot Weinberger, Louise Gluck, Maggie Nelson.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Escaped a convent in Spanish Harlem.

Teach, Learn, Share

dark-room photography, book & collage-making
idioms & -isms

--
about plants & the soil
(or who lives on it, how they interact);
other languages-- any of them!

--
cooking & growing food
finding new angles, planes, and spheres to talk about anything & everything

What I Can Share with Hosts

Conversation! Fascination! Enthusiasm!

I often bring coffee & leave behind books. :)

Countries I’ve Visited

Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Colombia, Croatia, Hungary, India, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom

Countries I’ve Lived In

France, Germany, Serbia, United States