My main motto: Aim to make a life instead of a living--in constant pursuit of greater understanding, greater community, and greater love.

Despite my undying love for academia and study, I took time off from my university studies in 2015 to travel, and I have been working and traveling on and off since then, with no desire to change that any time soon. 

My travels have taken me to twenty-five states and sixteen countries so far, with trips anywhere from a couple days to six months, and my experiences have broken me open in ways I didn’t know I needed but am eternally grateful for. After four years of being transient, living out of a backpack or my trunk, always losing my toothbrush, and not quite knowing where home was between trips and flights and short-term work and moving all the time, I am newly settled in Asheville, figuring out what it looks like to stay somewhere for a while.

This includes privileges like having way too many houseplants, my art hung on the walls instead of stored in boxes, a consistent place for my toothbrush, but most of all, a home to welcome people into and a table to break bread around. 

My main paid work since 2015 has been working with children with intense behaviors or children that come from trauma, either one-on-one or in a facility setting. The most significant years of this were 2016 and 2017, when I worked as a cottage parent at a residential foster home called The Crossnore School and Children’s Home, where every other week, I was a 24-hour mom, helping raise and take care of nine to ten kiddos who had been taken from their homes due to physical or sexual abuse, extreme poverty, drugs, parental incarceration, neglect, and other traumas. This work drastically changed my life and led me further into my studies about trauma, its effects on the brain, and the importance of opening up our wounds so that light might dissolve the darkness. 

In 2018, I did the scary thing of saving up to fund writing full time for a few months the summer/fall of 2019 so I could finish and publish MY FIRST BOOK!! And after the many hurdles that 2020 threw at us, The Courage to Go is finally here.

The Courage to Go is an exciting, chronological adventure narrative/memoir based on a road trip I took when I was twenty. Some things had happened in my life that I wasn’t looking at, and in order to give myself space to process, learn, and heal, I got in my car and drove West, not knowing when I would return. Amidst the adventure of driving across the country alone, not knowing where I was going to sleep every night, backpacking through intense wilderness for the first time, and meeting up with some interesting characters along the way, vulnerable dialogue is woven in, about the unpredictable adventure of life on the road, finding the courage to look at the hardest parts of our experiences and dive into our trauma so that healing can be found, pressing into mystery and wonder, and asking hard questions about the “one-right-way” systems we are handed, even when there are not always clear answers.

I am ecstatic about this project and can’t wait for you to read it! The Courage to Go is now available for purchase in both print and ebook forms wherever books are sold. Order yours here!

Another tab on this site is my blog, titled Creating Space For Wonder. My blog is a space for me to write freely and openly about anything and everything from travel to spirituality to sustainability to psychology to social justice to whatever random musings I have day to day in this overwhelmingly vast, beautifully complex, exhilarating abyss we call human consciousness. Feel free to follow along. 

I believe that we all want to know and be known, to value and be valued, to love and be loved.

I believe that there is light to be found in darkness, meaning to be found suffering, freedom to be found in ambiguity.

I believe that everything is spiritual and that there is power in acknowledging the reverence that hums within us, even when language falls short. 

I am perpetually surprised by the simple fact that I am breathing and being, and I’m just trying to throw myself into work that I care about while I’m here, which is mostly centered around increasing authentic human connection and community on the basis of shared humanity, because nothing’s going to change without that being the root from which we grow.

Grace and peace, friends.

-Em

Cheers to the Journey, and may your Spirit always reside in a state of wonder.