I've always gone toward the thing.

Glider pilot. Eighty hours logged in silence-
birds, clouds, searching for wind above the earth.

Western Australia, studying Murdoch, 
swimming with whale sharks. 

Then my first independent film project aired on local TV in Los Angeles.
Joshua Tree: A Place of Solitude that is Slowly Dying.

Whales and desert solitude, well before they became social media moments.

Radio journalist in Cape Town- two frequently-aired features.. 
     One: 4am at the taxi ranks, 
profiling a soulful man, who drives one of numerous unmarked white vans 
through the streets, long before the city wakes, hoping to feed his family.

The other: Several cage dives with great whites, 
researching the effects of chumming on recent local 
shark attacks. 
Solely for the story, of course.

Jumped out of a few airplanes. 
Ran with the bulls in Pamplona 
after a semester with Hemingway-
The Sun Also Rises,
 words and nuance- 
and what it means to really 
show up for your own life.

A rental car in Durban that came with a gun. 
Destination: Hlabisa, KwaZuluNatal-
the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic. 
Driving North alone, not once but twice, 
on handheld maps and trust, to a village 
so stunning I couldn't conceive of one 
in three people there living with HIV 
or full-blown AIDS.

I came home with my eyes more open 
than they'd ever been.

That film became my Master's thesis at USC.
Hlabisa: An Unbroken Spirit.

The Maasai — elders navigating 
the edge of a world trying to erase them. 
Maasai at the Crossroads premiered at the 
Santa Barbara International Film Festival, 
narrated by the late, great Calestous Juma — 
head of Innovation & Technology at Harvard 
Kennedy School.

The Cheyenne. Horseback riders carrying 
ancestors home across the plains- across 
massacre sites the history books called 
battlefields. That webseries, The Ride Home, 
brought me to Bozeman in 2012. And to the 
life I didn't know I was looking for.

I came to yoga through a marathon — chasing 
performance, finding presence. 
Bryant Kest's donation-based studio,
3rd Street, Santa Monica- a game changer.
Ashley Turner's class several times a week-
the discipline that held me together after 
coming home from Hlabisa, KwaZuluNatal
That same studio helped me realize I needed to teach.

Certified at YogaWorks in 2004. 
Co-leading 200-hour teacher trainings in 
Santa Barbara by 2009. 
For six years I ran Mountain Yoga 
in Bozeman — a sanctuary, a community, 
a marriage in the truest sense of the word. 

Then I closed the doors.

The winter before the world stopped, 
I wrote this.
→ Turning Toward the Mystery

What followed was solitude. Nature. 

And then: a cancer center. The honor of 
walking patients through the hardest, darkest 
days of their lives-
many through their final chapter. 
All the while witnessing an institution 
slowly revealing the distance between its 
mission statement and its ethics.

I'm a journalist. A filmmaker. A yoga teacher. 
A retreat facilitator. 
A mother. A daughter. A sister. A wife. 
A Witness.

It's by no means been pretty.
But boy oh boy, has it been 
heartbreakingly beautiful.

I'm glad you found your way here.

Love Always, KJ