A Little About Me
Born in mid-September in the waning days of the 1970’s, I’m a somewhat older person than I was when I set this page up on my old website. A lot has changed, and there is certainly more to come.
I moved around a lot as a kid; born in Cincinnati, then moving to the suburbs of Chicago, and then moving to Kansas City before spending most of my formative years in western Kentucky, only to move and finish high school back in the same suburb I had left in second grade may seem like a lot, but it was full of friends and family trips, and generally a joyful time.
I played a lot of (second edition) Dungeons & Dragons with my friends, and a bit of (first edition) Werewolf: The Apocalypse. Dragonlance novels got me through a lot of lonely times as we moved, and greatly improved my vocabulary.
It was after we moved to Chicago that I became involved in fencing as a recreational sport; it would be an important part of my life. I learned to fence through the parks district, with foil as my weapon… because that was all they taught.
I was heavily involved in the Boy Scouts of America for much of that time: it provided me some stability and something to do as I bounced around. My time in both Pack/Troop 611 in KY, and my time in Troop 222 in Chicago, kept me very busy. I’d eventually (and finally) manage to attain the Eagle Scout rank, but just by the skin of my teeth, the summer before I left for college. (It was so “skin of my teeth” that I had to return the summer after I left for college to receive the award.)
I got my first real job in downtown Chicago the summer after I graduated; I worked for $8/hour in a mail room for a law firm, delivering mail to men who smoked cigars in fancy, wood-paneled offices. I was able to take my lunch on my own, though, and spent those hot hours lounging on the Picasso in Daley Plaza, or sampling the local restaurants, or attending Mass at St. Peter’s in the Loop. Though thoroughly Pagan from the summer after my sophomore year in high school, I appreciated ritual for what it was, and admired the friars I met there.
College Years (1997-2001)
I was fortunate to get into The Ohio State University; my grades were not great my first two years of high school in Kentucky, but I’d been afforded an opportunity excel when we moved to a different state after my sophomore year. I followed a cute girl into the wrong room during OSU’s orientation session, and somehow accidentally registered for the Ohio State Honors Program… for which I had never applied, and certainly never been admitted to.
Within days of arriving at Ohio State, I was fortunate to have met a (different) cute girl on the Oval who directed me to the local Pagan Student Association (PSA) at OSU, which would lead to both lifetime friendships, and major impacts on other organizations I would connect with down the road.
I caught up with the newly-founded PSA at the Student Involvement Fair that year, and also joined the Buckeye Fencing Club and registered to vote. Thinking back on it now, that Involvement Fair led to virtually everything else I did in my life.
A week or two into my time with the Fencing Club, the Club was approached by the Varsity Fencing team’s coach, looking for anyone with fencing experience. I was one of the few who had fenced in high school, and I was offered a spot on the sabre squad immediately (they had only one sabre fencer, and needed at least three to make a complete squad).
I struggled here and there in my college studies, but eventually got the hang of it. I had come to OSU seeking a dual degree in History and English, but found English to be less interesting after my excellent experiences in high school. It became a minor, and my final History degree focused heavily on ancient Mediterranean military history, specifically the late Roman Republic and Greece.
During this time, though, four things defined my life: the Varsity Fencing Team, which gave me new experiences and helped me grow; the PSA, which introduced me to true life-long friends; my girlfriend, who I’d met late one night in a coffee shop after a PSA meeting; and a return to Scouting.
As a sophomore, I reached back out to Scouting, and got involved in Troop 169. I loved this particular troop, and the folks who ran it, and the boys I worked with; I did so for several years, hopping a bus each week after Fencing practice to help out, going on hiking and canoe trips, and watching the boys become men. Eventually, as the kids I’d started with aged out and when I took a full time job in 2001, I drifted away. As an adult leader, it was a different experience, and watching kids struggle to find belonging was perhaps harder on me than I thought at the time, and I became a bit disillusioned with the program. This would eventually lead me to the Scouts for Equality movement when it was founded in 2012.
There is little to say about old girlfriends in something like this, so I’ll leave it like this: I retain an appreciation for our seven years together, and I am glad for the good times we had. She encouraged me to apply for a job at ResNet, helping to hook people up to the residential ethernet service in the dorms, and this would later become a key experience in launching my professional life, and create connections with friends I wouldn’t have otherwise had.
On the Fencing front, I remember a lot of joy in the relationships I maintained at the time. Fencing the Italian Junior National Champ, taking on NCAA champions, and studying for two years under the greatest fencing master in the world are highlights of this experience. My father’s face when I came home with an Ohio State letter jacket (and when he tried it on and threatened to not take it off) was a moment of pride for both of us. He had dreamed of a varsity career at Ohio State in his college days, but wasn’t able to make it happen. But his son living that dream? It might have been better for him than it was for me.
The Pagan Student Association at Ohio State was a different animal than all of these, though. Through it I found stability, connections, ritual, and an opportunity to lead. It provided me with my first taste of what it might be like to be a priest, and what it was like to hold a small organization together. For 11 years (well past my time as a student) I remained active in this little college club.
From the PSA at OSU, the impact on modern Paganism (and broader religion) cannot be understated. As I write this, the Archdruid of ADF is an alum of the PSA, and alums or those they brought into the Org make up an outsized portion of our priests and initiates. Folks who write extensively on magic, both academically and practically, are alums. Some of our alums are ministers in various faiths that aren’t even Pagan, and bring their sensibilities to their work today. For such a small community (perhaps 150 total people came for more than a handful of meetings over 11 years), it remains close-knit and outsized in influence. Plus, I met my wife there.
Post-College (2001 -2006)
I spent 6 months looking for a job after I graduated from OSU in 3.5 years, and finally got one the week before Sept. 11, 2001. I parleyed that ResNet experience into work in the OSU central IT department, in customer service. There, I distributed software from behind a desk and specialized in the dual roles of “distributor” and “troubleshooter,” which would lead to filling into a role negotiating software contracts when a person retired five years later. Now I have decades of experience with software, contracts, and negotiations, and no one knows what to do if I get hit by a bus.
During this time, I joined ADF and founded Three Cranes Grove, ADF, which quickly became one of the largest Groves in ADF. We worked through a lot of growing pains in those early days (and still have, and likely always will, some of those pains), but we’ve become a strong, reliable Grove, and I’m proud of who we are in Central Ohio.
The PSA continued to be a part of my life; I attended after work and got to know the new generations coming in. There was a fair overlap between the PSA and the Grove in those early days, as 3CG was just about the only reliable ritual outlet in town for much of the first 20 years of this century. After a breakup with that long-term girlfriend (who I had met through PSA), I met my next long-term girlfriend (and eventually my wife) through PSA as well in 2005.
Much of this time was spent studying and learning in ADF’s Dedicant Path and Clergy Training Program. That work also took me back to school, where I would eventually enroll (as a graduate non-degree student) in a variety of Religious Studies classes. Had I still been an undergraduate, it would have been enough for another major, or had I managed the application process for graduate school would have likely been close to a Masters, but I enjoyed studying on my own path, rather than in a program.
I made deeper connections within ADF, and more broadly in the Pagan community, and my transparent journaling (via LiveJournal) provided me with a wealth of archived information to refer back to, along with showing others that this path was rigorous, honest, and doable. I attended many Pagan festivals starting in 2003, and just never really stopped going to them. I’ve been to festivals as close to home as the Grove’s Pagan Fire Seminars, and as far afield as the Sonoran desert, Greece, and Austria. It was a wonderful time to be young and dumb, but also focused on what I wanted.
In 2006, I became the ADF Priest I wanted to be for so long at the Summerland Festival. I was, as the time, the youngest person to be ordained in ADF’s history, at just 26.
2006-2010
After my ordination, things progressed somewhat rapidly, as a lot of my time was pushed into ADF work. You see, while there was a path to becoming what we called “First Circle Priests” in ADF, there wasn’t a program to get to Second or Third Circle. So, I set about creating one.
The next four years were all about writing (and re-writing) the Clergy Training Program for ADF, and the ADF Initiate Path. In so doing, I helped to establish the ADF Initiatory Current at Wellspring in 2009 (by which I mean, I was there, in the ritual; it was the women of ADF who did the work for this), and I was one of the first two individuals Initiated into the current, along with Rev. Kirk Thomas.
2010-2020
So much happened in this decade; it seems both too long to make one section, and just right.
Around the time we got married, we opened a store, The Magical Druid, with my friend and business partner Seamus. We’ve upgraded locations twice now, and it’s provided an amazing creative outlet for me.
The Grove entered a new phase, as well: we became a regular fixture at the Dublin Irish Festival, the second largest Irish festival in the nation, doing a Sunday Morning Druid Service; most years, we’re doing ritual in front of 250-350 people.
One day in 2012, I got an email from Scouts for Equality, seeking to lift the ban on gay men and boys being a part of the Boy Scouts of America. I became lightly involved in the organization, but resistance and the slow march of progress in the BSA led me to a bit of souring on the organization over time. I was not certain I could put my own kids in, if only one could participate based on gender.
In 2013, my wife and I had twins, a girl and a boy. This led to my first break in festival attendance since I had started doing ADF festivals back in 2002.
My father passed in 2017, and I took a trip with my mother that was supposed to be their trip, a river tour up the Seine in France. Both my brother and I were able to be there for her on that trip, which was a bittersweet joy. Later that year, I’d release my Patreon, which helped me return to longer-form journaling, and gave me a safe space to do that.
In 2018, my son was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. At four years old, he was giving himself shots of insulin without our help, and I was in awe of how well we can adapt to new realities as humans.
I became interested in videography, and a lot of interesting project launched during this time… and at the same time I became more and more focused on ensuring that the items I put out into the wild were as fully accessible as I could make them. I started taking classes on digital accessibility, bridging a gap I didn’t even know existed between my work life and my religious life.
Just before the pandemic, my children both started Scouting; the Boy Scouts of America had become Scouts BSA, and were well on their way to becoming Scouting America, so both my children could participate. I spoke to the pack leaders about their stances on gender, welcoming transgender scouts, and what happens if our kids turn out to be gay. On hearing their answers, I quickly became a Lion Leader for the Cub Scout Pack. When I updated my Uniform, I set the Inclusive Scouting Award to the left of my Eagle Scout knot on my uniform (closer to my heart), and came fully back to Scouting.
2020 and Beyond
This is always where things get muddy; at the time of writing this, I don’t have the benefit of real hindsight to tell what’s important or useful. As a result, I don’t know how often I’ll return.
In 2020, I took our Lion Cub Scouts online, and gained a new, deep respect for the teachers of my children having to wrangle them via teleconference for an entire day. I learned with them and started developing online tools and videos for them to get over the hump of the pandemic, and eventually, as they grew older, took over the role of Cubmaster for the Pack.
Three Cranes Grove, ADF, also got in on Cub Scouts: we became perhaps the first (or perhaps just the only still-active) Pagan organization to charter a Cub Scout Pack. When the Pack’s old chartering organization stopped responding to the leadership team, our Grove stepped up, and brought my scouting journey full circle, providing a space for new Scouts to learn and grow, just like I had done when I was their age. Though my kids are now Scouts, I have remained with the Pack as the Chartered Organization Representative.
During and after the pandemic, I found new ways to care for others. My mother moved in with us, and with her came much of the kipple of my childhood. Among these were things from my deep past, and I found new experiences in many old memories, while slowly letting some go, and deciding how to preserve others. One of the biggest things I found were old photographs and old cameras, and I once again entered a world of analog photography, which I had not experienced in roughly two decades.
Now, I find interest in the way photography connects light and earth in physical form, and also a strange ancestral connection; almost all these cameras were my father’s, and the care and maintenance of them has become special as well.
In 2022, I took my wife to Europe, and we traveled the Rhine and just had as much fun as we could. It was a good trip away, and travel has become part of our joy together. The current project, which I don’t know if we’ll manage, is to try and hit all the National Parks. We’re doing pretty well so far, with Death Valley, Cuyahoga Valley, and Great Smokey Mountains in 2025 alone. Connecting this travel with my photography has been a joy, as well.
There is, of course, more to see, always. I can’t wait to share it with you all.
