Kelli Sanger is a 4th generation Pacific Northwesterner. Her great grandparents on all four sides of her family homesteaded in Washington and Idaho. Her grandparents were raised in rural Eastern Washington (in the mountains and the prairies) and when they each married, they raised their families there as well. Her mom and dad were both born near Spokane. They met in high school and were married in Elk, Washington. She was born January 18, 1980, as the last of four children. She was raised in a wheat farming community 60 miles south of Spokane, in Ritzville, WA, population 2,000. (That is ALL the folks that live there, not just population of the school J), and went to high school in Cheney, WA, home of Eastern Washington University.
Kelli came to Olympia in 1998 to go to Evergreen, and graduated with a Bachelors of Arts with a concentration in ecological agriculture and community development. She studied natural ecosystems, farming systems, and human systems while here and graduated in 2002. Once graduated, she accepted a position with the Washington State Department of Agriculture in the Small Farm and Direct Marketing program, and stayed here in Olympia. She had a job related to her degree! In the program, she helped to educate farmers and others about local food systems in Washington state, direct marketing opportunities for farmers, and state and federal policy issues that could help or hinder these local food economies. After 5 years, she quit in August 2006 to pursue other interests in plant horticulture and native plants. She began to work at a local native plant nursery on their installation crew and wants to continue this kind of work. That desire brings her to this class, where we learn all things “native” and “gardening”. She sees this as an opportunity to further her education, and may lead to future work in horticultural science or environmental sciences in the future.
Kelli is all Western European, 100%. She is a mix of German, English, Irish, Swedish, Dutch. She is a Capricorn and likes to approach the world in a very practical, earthy manner. Her personality and interests reflect that. She likes to knit and crochet, make things with her hands (sew, make candles, whatever!), bake and cook in the kitchen, garden, go on long runs and hiking adventures, and discover the world around her on foot.
There you have it. That is all she wrote.
Creation Story:
Earth was once a living, breathing being. The inside and entire part of this being was warm, made up of nutrient rich liquids and gases. Earth being pulsated with her own spirit and life. She did her own things, and thought with others of her kind. Soon, small beings started living inside of her. They lived in her liquid being, and got all their food and oxygen from inside the aqueous solution they were surrounded, much like a baby lives in a mother’s womb.
The earth being grew older and older, and colder and colder. As earth grew colder, parts of her solidified. Her being solidified much like water turns to ice, or lava turns to rock. One day she died. Slowly her being changed into the earth that we know today. Her nutrient rich body separated into water, air and rock.
Through these changes in earth body, the beings that lived inside her also changed. Some grew bodies to hold in the liquid life they needed and lungs to hold air. They no longer lived in an aqueous nutrient rich solution, (like the womb) so they started growing up, into the humans that we see today. The creation of each child, from womb to birth shows the evolutionary path that humans have followed as living beings adapting to life inside of earth being as she has changed. And that is how we came to live inside the bodies that we are today.
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I chose to write a creation story that I learned from the lectures of Rudolph Steiner, mystic in the early 1900’s. Ever since I read this story I have been intrigued with it. It seems similar to other modern day creation theories such as the “Gaia Theory”, where the earth is a living being, from what I know of it. Since my late childhood, I have always sensed that the world that we live “on” was or is a living being. The way that this story describes our “evolution” into modern humans strikes a cord. It suggests that the birth path and development of us as humans is a shortened version of the very evolution that our species has traveled over the span of time. What a cool idea huh?