Healing Gardens

My educational background is no clean cut thing. My parents own a small import business and shop in Ridgway, Colorado. Their business has always required much traveling and a great deal of their time was spent out of the country. My sister and I were dragged along on buying trips to Mexico, Guatemala, and Asia from an early age (shortly after birth) and our education very much took place ‘along the road’ with what little snatches of conventional schooling we could get in those countries. The rest of the time we relied on our parents to teach us what we needed to know, and I think they did a pretty fine job of it. What little time we did spend in Colorado during the grade school years we attended an alternative school founded by local resident hippies who were distraught over the current public school system. At this school we learned a great deal about yoga, farm animals, play-doh, dinosaurs and basically how to explore the world around us. Eventually the little school wore thin before completely running out and all the kids were forced into the public schools.

Some of us, like my sister, adjusted quite well, while some of us, like myself, did not. The kids, in their fancy blue jeans and with plastic lunch boxes full of indigestible artificial foods were mean, and brutally insensitive to my tipico skirts and the contents of my cloth lunch bag. The teachers were impersonal and embarrassing. I did not know my times tables (except for 5s, 9s, and 10s) and recitation and reading aloud were more like public flogging. So finally we came to realize, my parents and I, after several failed attempts at various other county schools, that we would be better off without public school. Instead we would travel like we used to around the globe, though still continuing to grab whatever snatches of school we came across, a quarter here, a quarter there. Of course I am not at all trying to say that my education was incomplete or inadequate (accept for math which, although I have come to peace with it, has remained my weakness); just unconventional.

Finally it came down to the wire, starting to look ahead into the future. With hardly any high school transcript to speak of and nothing else as far as paper was concerned we had to start making some decisions. Eventually we came across Colorado Rocky Mountain School and after a few visits decided it was the perfect place bring the whole high school experience to a close. I attended for my senior year and did surprisingly well, having very little trouble adjusting to classes and to stationary life in the dorm. I finished in fine form and for senior project set off “solita” to India for a much needed travel fix; working in an hostel for refugee girls in Gangtok, Sikkim for one month and then extending my ticket to squeeze in another month or so for travel. Upon returning to the USA, I worked as an assistant to a deli chef and with my newly acquired obsession with Indian food developed a love for cooking. In September I went off on yet another buying trip with my father to Mexico and our house in Guatemala, leaving just one day before the rains of Hurricane Stan came and washed the town around our home away. I have spent the past winter living in Bermuda, (where my mother is from) working and attending the local community college.

The science of life has always been my passion and diversity of culture my way of life, because of this I am very interested in the area of ethno-botany.