When someone asks my wife, Catherine,  what I do for a living she now replies, “he’s a fly fisherman.” If she has more time she might go into the fact that I’m a person who finds spirituality in nature, especially in fly fishing, that I’ve become a minimalist trail running fanatic, that I love Mexico and have been studying Spanish, that I’ve studied Toltec shamanism, and that I am also a painter and part-time consultant. It would take a long conversation to get to the point of bringing up my past life as a mid-level manager for a giant software company.

I grew up in the Midwest and had to leave before they tossed me out for being too liberal to live there. I ended up in the Pacific Northwest where I knew there were mountains, big rivers, saltwater, salmon, and more hiking and skiing than I could ever hope to get to. After spending twenty years in the software industry I decided to leave it for a more sane lifestyle, to spend more time outdoors than in an office, and to really explore my place in the world. Catherine and I started an organization named  DharmaWorks which is a service organization formed to help us practice right livelihood.  DharmaWorks is an umbrella that is more a philosophy of doing business, we have for-profit businesses operating underneath DharmaWorks which funds several local and international non-profit organizations.

In 2013 I came down with a gut illness that was very hard to diagnose and finally turned out to be SIBO, Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth.   My adventure with SIBO over the next few years changed my life forever.   I went from vegetarian/pescatarian to the Paleo diet to help with the condition and soon thereafter took up hunting again, something I hadn’t done in about 35 years.