I grew up barefoot in the forests of upstate New York — climbing trees, collecting stones, listening to something I didn't yet have words for. There was a stillness in the woods that felt like truth. I didn't know it then, but I was already learning to sense what the eye can't see.

Life carried me from that small-town quiet into the noise of Austin, Texas through career chapters in urban forestry and conservation education, through family upheaval and reinvention. I kept moving. I kept adapting. But underneath the resilience was a hunger — for meaning, for rootedness, for a home my neshama recognized even before I did.

That hunger led me to Torah. After years of study and deep inner work, I embraced Judaism — not as an intellectual exercise, but as a homecoming. Everything I had sensed in those forests — the interconnection, the hidden light, the quiet pulse beneath the surface — suddenly had a framework. Judaism gave language to what I'd always felt: that we carry divine attributes within us, and that when they fall out of alignment, we feel it in our bodies, our homes, our relationships.

In 2020, at 37½ weeks pregnant during a global pandemic, I delivered my fourth child in Israel — a country I had chosen but that hadn't yet chosen me back. No family nearby. No familiar hands. Just emunah and the raw, ancient knowing that a woman's body holds more wisdom than fear. That birth broke me open in the best possible way. It showed me that the ohr — the light we carry — doesn't dim under pressure. It clarifies.

Today I live in Beit Shemesh with my husband and four children. Through Sticks and Stones Healing, I support Jewish women who carry everyone else's energy and have lost access to their own. I help them clear what doesn't belong, restore what does, and reconnect to the radiance that was always theirs — the beautiful ohr that no amount of caregiving or crisis can extinguish.

Because I've lived it. The displacement. The transformation. The moment you stop surviving and start remembering who you actually are.

That's the work. And it's sacred.