Welcome to Touching the Elephant

When I share my stories, I find that I am constantly trying to weave together seemingly incongruent things, like gratitude and longing, love and fear, magic and the mundane, risk and safety, or faith and doubt. These opposite things are a braided rope, not parallel strands, and they are made stronger when we allow them to cross over in our lives.

I don’t have all the answers, nor do I want them. I quite like holding space for mystery. My favorite answer of all is, “I don’t know.” I love asking questions anyway, of course, deeply listening to the thing-beneath-the-thing when we take a shot at explaining what we are experiencing.

The inspiration for this newsletter is the old pan-Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant.

“A number of blind men came to an elephant. Someone told them that it was an elephant. The blind men asked, “What is the elephant like?” as they began to touch its body. One of them said, “It is like a pillar.” This blind man had only touched its leg. Another man said, “The elephant is like a husking basket.” This person had only touched its ears. Similarly, he who touched its trunk or its belly talked of it differently. In the same way, he who has seen the Lord in a particular way limits the Lord to that alone and thinks that He is nothing else.” -Saint Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa

This parable could be talking about God, of course. But it could also illuminate the blind spots we have when telling any story- even our own.

Perhaps if we listen rather than argue, and recognize our innate inability to grasp the ineffable, we can humbly begin to form a picture of what we are touching. May we press our ears to the heart of the great beast and say, “Shhhhhhhh. Just listen. It’s so beautiful.”

About me, your host…

I grew up in the Sonoran Desert, in the slender shadows of saguaro trees and the broader shadows of the purply-blue Catalina Mountains. I still crave the smell of creosote after a torrential late-summer monsoon, even now, here in Washington, where it rains all the time, but the smell of the earth never stimulates my senses in the same way.

I was raised Evangelical, which has required a lot of unpacking in the past few decades. But I was always safe and always knew that I was deeply loved. That is no small thing, and I am deeply grateful for the family I was born into. Among some of the less savory theological lessons pressed upon me early on, I was also taught to question things that didn’t make sense to me, and to be kind to others, and to love deeply, which is incidentally how I ended up here.

I graduated with a degree in Evolutionary Biology after being told for years that evolution was a lie (see the aforementioned “questioning”) and spent the next decade largely on boats and underwater, researching marine mammals and teaching kids about the ocean.

When I met and married my husband, I unpacked my bags and painted walls and built a chicken coop and got ready to “root” and “live a normal life” when all of that was tossed to the wind one day when he walked into the living room and asked me if I wanted to quit our jobs and sell the house and travel the world.

I said yes. So, we sold everything- the picture frames and the candles and even our beloved chickens and bought a one-way ticket to Africa. We spent the next eight years as homeless, happy vagabonds. For half of the year, we volunteered and explored this great big planet and lived with people a lot like us and not at all like us. We bought an old beater in New Zealand and drove it into the ground and walked across Spain and languished in the blessed, brutal heat in Central America. We spent a lot of time in hammocks and huts and other people’s kitchens. For the other half of the year, we worked at a back country lodge in the heart of Denali National Park. There, we found a community that made my heart, and my mind grow three sizes larger, and a vast, wild landscape that a piece of my heart and mind still reside in.

I got pregnant in 2019, and we decided that we didn’t want to birth and raise a baby on the road, so we packed up and landed back in our home state of Washington, in a beautiful valley at the foot of the North Cascades. It was incredibly lonely at first, but now, five years later, it’s not. And that’s something to be really grateful for.

Vision…

My vision for this newsletter is to create an online cohort of heart-led, curious seekers. I want this community to feel real. I am hopeful that you feel the warm embrace of my essays, the heartbreak and the beauty therein, and that somehow that will draw us closer together.

Let’s touch that elephant, my friends.