FARMER & OWNER-OPERATOR
Ellwood Canyon Ranch
My husband Ron and I live full-time at this 300-acre avocado ranch and citrus farm, located west of Santa Barbara in the rolling hills just before the Gaviota coastline. We’re focused on introducing a wide range of regenerative farming practices that I see as integrally aligned with the spiritual practices of Taoism, focused on values of simplicity, patience, and compassion. So far, we’ve planted cover crops and interspersed our avocados with pomegranate trees to increase biodiversity; introduced sheep that we rotationally graze, moving them around the farm to mimic wild patterns of migration; started cultivating a worm farm; and more.
SPONSOR & CO-CREATOR
GreenLab at Santa Barbara High School
Functioning as an outdoor classroom, this decades-old garden helps teach small-scale food production, biodynamic soil enhancement, and nutrition to the school and greater Santa Barbara community.
FOUNDER
Wisdom of the Fool
I created this 501C3 with the aim to nurture the physical and emotional wholeness of educators and students, encouraging innovative practices to cultivate a collective passion for lifelong learning. We work in collaboration with local schools like Santa Barbara High School’s Multimedia Art & Design (MAD) Academy.
AUTHOR
Listen to the Children
Published by Wise Fool Publishing, Listen to the Children explores the ways our current American educational system is similar to a colonizing power, operating on the unacknowledged belief that children are like savages in need of taming and shaping. Children’s intrinsic resources—including imaginative freedom, curiosity, playfulness, and emotional openness—are perceived as either dangerous and in need of suppression or worthy only insofar as those qualities can be developed to serve the dominant culture. In other words, our educational system’s colonial mindset imposes the dominant culture’s value system, beliefs, and customs onto the less powerful “indigenous” population (children) so that they can be converted to the prevailing mode of thinking and behaving. The book offers an alternative approach, to support wellbeing of both students and teachers, anchored in four primary values: care, connection, community, and choice. Learn more here.
STUDENT & COLLABORATOR
Master Zhou
For years, I’ve practiced Qi Gong, Tai Chi, and Internal Martial Arts under the tutelage of Master Zhou, a world-renowned spiritual master and Daoist priest. In the past, I brought him to Santa Barbara High School to teach young students the valuable lessons that can come from Qi Gong practice.