About Me
Hi! I'm Lauren!
I grew up in the mountains of Western North Carolina and did a lot of hanging out with my sister. We spent much of our time "dressing up" (you know the type: mardi gras beads, princess gowns, etc.), producing living-room-dance-shows, "living" in rhododendron "houses," and meeting salamanders in the stream behind our childhood home.
In college, I became a bit of a policy-wonk. I was convinced I needed to save the world, and knew that good research, good policy, and a touch of charisma and persuasion was all I needed to make that happen.
After school, I did the policy thing for a while, but through that work (and through many conversations with friends, reading many books, and listening to many podcasts), I learned my policy path wasn't going to have the impact I had hoped. I realized instead that we are probably living through a fall-of-Rome-style-event-except-bigger-because-this-time-the-empire-is-global-and-relies-on-one-limited-fuel-source-and-has-also-so-deeply-harmed-so-much-of-the-living-world-that-we-are-in-for-a-very-different-future-than-what-most-of-us-grew-up-in-and-despite-all-that-I-think-there-are-still-beautiful-useful-important-things-to-do-with-our-lives-and-in-our-communities. That hyphenated mess of a description is actually an oversimplification of what I think the whole picture is, but it transmits the vibe. To make that mess easier to talk about in day-to-day conversations, my friends and I just call it "collapse."
These days, I'm experimenting with ways of being and living that seem directionally helpful (for me, for other people, for our more-than-human kin). Many of my experiments don't work, or don't work as well as I thought they would. For instance, my husband and I turned a school bus into a tiny home, which was soooo cooool, very hard, and more expensive than we thought. And while we own our home now, we don't own the land we park it on. And so while we probably save some money living in the bus, we don't save as much as we thought we would. But experimenting in bold ways feels better to me than accepting the defaults right now, and I feel really lucky and grateful to be in a situation where this experimentation feels possible. I feel lucky and grateful to have driven the bus around the country to see so many beautiful, awesome people and places. And I feel lucky and grateful to be back home in Western NC now, close to family, friends, and land that I love. Thank you to all the people and places that make all this possible. All that said, we are now trying to buy a conventional house (with lots of projects planned to make it feel more resilient, funky, and experimental). Stay tuned for when I eventually write a piece about our housing journey: bus to mortage and everything in between.
A few things I get up to these days: I have a strong background in the performing arts and am in the early phases of hatching a few pieces at the intersection of the arts and collapse. I've been making a lot of new friends, and deepening a lot of important relationships. The past few years, the plants have been calling me, and I've finally started to do something about it. Most recently this has meant that I've been working / volunteering on several local farms, and am a few months into a year(ish)-long Foundations of Community Herbalism course. I have also been introducing myself to some new-to-me weeds this spring!