Origin

I studied International Political Economy at UC Berkeley, with concentrations in Global Poverty & Practice and Middle Eastern Studies. The coursework gave me frameworks for understanding how systems of power and resource distribution actually work — and how often they don’t work for the people they claim to serve.

The Turn

Somewhere during or after Berkeley, I sat my first Vipassana retreat. Ten days of silence, no reading, no writing, no eye contact. Just sitting with your own mind. [placeholder — what specifically shifted during Vipassana? What question formed?]

That retreat cracked something open. The academic frameworks I’d spent four years absorbing started to feel incomplete. I understood the political economy of poverty. I could analyze trade policy and institutional failure. But I didn’t have an answer to the more personal question: what was I actually going to do about any of it?

Going South

[placeholder — when exactly did you first travel to Latin America? What pulled you there? Was it a specific invitation, a vague instinct, something you read?]

I ended up in Guatemala, then Costa Rica. I taught English for a while. I designed clothing. I moved between communities that were trying to live differently — permaculture farms, intentional communities, indigenous-led projects. The first regenerative community I visited [placeholder — which one? What did it feel like to arrive? What surprised you?]

The Space Between

Those years between Berkeley and what came next were messy and unstructured. I wasn’t building anything legible yet. I was absorbing — learning Spanish, learning to listen, learning how communities outside the Western development framework actually organized themselves.

Looking back, I can see the thread. But at the time it didn’t feel like a thread. It felt like wandering. The restlessness was real. So was the fear that I might never find the thing I was supposed to be working on.

[placeholder — what else from this period matters? Any specific people, moments, or turning points that haven’t been named?]

What I didn’t know yet was that the people and places I was encountering — the lake, the volcanoes, the communities building at the margins — were already shaping the next decade of work.