I grew up in the South-West of England. My mother is from the Canary Islands and my father is from Hong Kong, born to an Englishman and a Cuban Chinese mother. I come from a line of immigrants and going back many generations it’s almost rare to find an ancestor who was born in the same country where they would ultimately die. I spent my childhood fascinated by these cross-cultural and racial ties which spanned the globe, and how despite the distance the familial and economic bonds were nurtured and sustained in ways that seemed fairly uncommon for the age.
I grew up in a small city but enjoyed many trips to the woods in the surrounding countryside where whittling wood, making bows and arrows, sleeping rough in crafted shelters and cooking on an open fire were regular features. Around the age of 13 I fell in love with Hip-Hop and began writing rhymes which sparked a love for words and vocal expression which lives with me to this day.
My teenage years were a struggle. My spirit felt dulled by the mismatch between my desire for adventure and the parochial scripts that were on offer. After departing school at eighteen I spent months traveling in India where I experienced my first encounter with God. By that I mean for the first time the word took on an experiential meaning to me.
The impact of this coupled with the creative freedom I felt in the wildness of India and the aliveness of her people changed something in me. It prodded me out of my slumber and despair and for the first time as a young adult it felt like my dreams and internal compass might just be sufficient. That there was something within me I could trust enough to create a joyful and meaningful life. I remember sitting on a balcony in the foothills of the Himalayas listening to my friends speak about their upcoming year starting university and the moment that I decided that for me, the following year would be about learning Spanish and connecting to that part of my ancestry. A year later and I was living in the outskirts of Barcelona not too far from where I would return fifteen years later.
Following my time in Spain, the rest of my early 20s were spent in the south of England. It was a socially rich environment. An ecosystem of students, musicians and artists abundant in spontaneous expression but fairly sparse in forums suited for the reflections of the soul, so similar to my teenage years, psychologically these times were some of my most difficult. A lot of celebration, but in my malaise, it felt like there was nothing all that generative to warrant celebrating. It was all too finite and the limits all too perceptible. By twenty-four it was clear that a life lived with this particular make-up of things was not going to be viable for me.
I turned twenty-five in a Colombian shamanic community living on the edge of a hillside in the lower Andes. I drank Yage weekly and immersed myself in community life. It was a rustic existence of manual labour and human-scale cooperation embedded in the natural world. Many of the most remarkable feets of collaboration born from sheer will, vision and human vitality were experienced here. During this time, returning to my tent each night where I slept, I would gaze up at the vast blanket of the night-lit starscape and feel something similar to what I had experienced in India. The intensity of a universe feasting upon itself. I vowed to myself that I must somehow continue to live a life where I could feel a closeness to this intensity.
My following years were spent between South America, North America, The UK and the Canary Islands. While working on a permaculture in a farm in Scotland I heard an interview with Skinner Layne about a project he had started called Exosphere, “A Learning and Problem-solving Community” running entrepreneurial bootcamps in a coastal city in Chile. The vision struck a chord that felt true to me. A year later I was a participant and here I experienced the power of Scott Peck’s community building along with the potential and experimental capacity found in the meeting of truly diverse minds collaborating on the interesting problems which life throws at you. A couple of years later and I went on to work with Skinner as a mentor in the next iteration of programs in Brazil.
At this time I was wrestling with peak disillusionment and frustration with the state of the world. The work we did at Exosphere was transformative and for the first time in years I felt a glimmer of possibility that I might be able to engage more directly with society once again. Ultimately though the desire to solidify my connection with nature and place won out.
I left Chile for a remote island in the Canaries where I bought a small piece of land with a basic dwelling. This went on to become my home for the last seven years and the place I feel fortunate to have lived out my childhood dreams. I built a wooden cabin, turned the dwelling into a home, planted fruit trees, spear fished, adopted a dog and began mentoring people in creativity while exploring my own artistry.
This period humbled me in many ways. Through my relative isolation and creative ambition to challenge myself, I repeatedly bumped up against the hubris of my own self-estimation, loneliness and limited capacity. Simply how long things take when you are the only one doing them and how much of my energy for generative and creative endeavors were more a result of being in a shared context rather than that of isolated inspiration and heroic follow-through. My spirit matured greatly though and in these years alongside the slow development of my property, I became the most joyful, patient and accepting of all of my adult life. I learned to delight in the pace of nature and the island’s counterintuitive wisdom in its stubbornness and resistance to modernity.
During my time on the island, I also experienced the end of the romantic relationship which had been the one constant in my life since I had left England eight years prior. The unexpected severity of the breakup and the surprises which followed, coupled with the global pandemic was a repeatedly shocking and painful initiation into layers of illusion I was partaking in and creating for myself.
A mentor told me “the doorway to your pain may not open all that often, don’t miss the opportunity” and so I engaged in reflective practice. With the passing of time I self-inventoried and integrated the loss through writing, meditation, creative expression and relationship. The creativity coaching I offered took on new depths as I explored my own cycles of death and rebirth in parallel with the clients I was working with. Endings and renewals. The painful sincerity of a creative process rooted in the moment-to-moment truth of continual change. I began to look to outwards to the world once again.
In June of this year I came to visit Skinner at a moment that coincided with a number of past participants of Exosphere’s programs. During a group hike, while watching the sun set upon the Mediterranean town of Sitges from up high on the hillside of a forest, it became clear that this was to be my next move. I could see the overlap in Skinner’s and my paths, our respective periods of isolation and where our psychological, spiritual and creative outlooks were now pointing us. Within a month my life in El Hierro had wrapped up and I relocated to mainland Spain.
However peaceful my life had been on the island once known as “the end of the earth” it was still at some level a reaction and protective hedge against a world that scared me and systems I felt let down by. Stepping into WILD for me means embracing the inherent interdependence of my life with all life, and to discover the significance of my natural expression and care within a context of many others who are mutually aimed.
If you’d like to learn more about what we are doing with WILD or connect with me about your own life and desire to more fully express yourself i’m here to hear it, and where I can, to support you in that journey.
