Elsewhere
I grew up in the suburbs outside of Los Angeles, California, on originally Tongva land, just below the foothills of what we now call the San Gabriel Mountains. After studying functional linguistics in Oregon, I moved to West Africa for the rest of my twenties. There, I taught secondary English in northern Sierra Leone with the Peace Corps and first grade at an international school at the edge of the Sahara in Nouakchott, Mauritania. After that, I spent a year traveling and occasionally volunteering my way from Mexico to Peru.
The title of this blog is the translated Landogo toponym of my host village in Sierra Leone. It’s also apt in Galicia.
Here
Home is in the heart of the Ribeira Sacra e Serras do Oribio e Courel Biosphere Reserve in Galicia, a small, historical nation and autonomous community in northwestern Spain. I work remotely doing support and content for Castos, a podcast hosting and analytics platform that also develops a popular WordPress plugin.
Outside work, I spend time with loved ones and neighbors, practice Spanish and Galician, and host a language exchange in various places around town. I also help run a coworking space in town, and for a while I volunteered with an NGO that supports asylum seekers. Every so often I get to explore the area in my camper van with my dog Alqo.
I’m drawn to language in all its forms, from the mechanics of grammar to broader questions about literacy, translation, and culture. My spiritual practice orbits around heterodox Islam (whatever that means) with adjacent interests in meditation, perennialism, and the transcendentalists and Sufi poets. Politically I’m somewhere on the anticapitalist left, between Marx and Kropotkin, closer to mutual aid than to the state, with an eye on degrowth. The rest is journaling, photography, maps, D&D, and falling down Wikipedia rabbit holes.
This site is where it all lives. Check out what I’m doing now.
All opinions, annotations, and photos are mine, unless otherwise indicated. You can also contact me here.