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.

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

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 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.

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.