I'm a storyteller, celebrant, and creator of meaningful experiences.
Growing up in a small cowboy town in upcountry Maui, “home” was, and continues to be, made up of a diverse array of cultural traditions and pockets of community. I learned early that gathering was one of the ways people made a place feel like home.
Maybe that’s why, looking back, I can see that I’ve spent much of my life creating reasons for people to come together.
In 2008, I created the Delaware River Food and Wine Festival, twelve boutique events over four days celebrating the local culinary gems and experiences in the towns flanking the upper Delaware River.
The following year, I founded the Bacon & Lox Society, a celebration congregation whose members meet throughout the year to create and perpetuate our favorite traditions around a shared table.
Years later, I created Equal Dignity Pop-up Nuptials, offering free civil wedding ceremonies with particular welcome to LGBTQ+ couples. What began as a way to serve couples became a way for an entire community to participate. Venues, planners, photographers, filmmakers, musicians, graphic designers, other officiants, and nearly twenty florists brought what they had to give and created something beautiful together.
I love creating the container. A reason to gather. A place for people to bring what they have to give and experience something meaningful together.
Before becoming a celebrant, I worked in career development at MIT, helping people tell the story of who they were as we created résumés and prepared for interviews. Choosing which details matter, and understanding what they say when you put them together, is storytelling.
Turns out, storytelling was one of my most transferable skills.
I trained at the Celebrant Institute and Foundation and became an ordained minister. Since then, I’ve had the extraordinary privilege of creating and performing more than 1,000 wedding ceremonies.
My family and I are citizens of the Cherokee Nation, and learning about and practicing Native American ritual, symbolism, culture and ceremony has shaped the way I understand what it means to mark the important moments of our lives.
Probably most of all, motherhood has shaped me. Raising my two children, and continuing to know them as they grow into themselves, has taught me so much about being human, loving people through change, and the many roles we hold within a family.
I love finding the meaning in things, and I’ve learned that I don’t usually need to explain what that meaning is. The right story can do that for us.
Promise Ridge
Promise Ridge is the intimate ceremony space I’ve created at my home in the Pocono Mountains for elopements and small micro-weddings. I’ve cultivated the gardens and shaped the property over the years as a place for ceremony and connection. But one of the things I love most about this place is something I didn’t fully understand until I left it.
Years ago, my children, my father and I set out on a three-week pilgrimage to learn more about our Cherokee ancestry. We drove south to the ancestral lands of the Cherokee in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, then followed the Trail of Tears west to the Cherokee Nation in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.
In the Smokies, I was struck by the landscape. So many of the same plants I knew from home were growing wild there. Clouds rose from the valleys between the mountains. And we saw a Cherokee marker tree, a tree that had been deliberately bent while young so that, as it grew, it continued to point toward something important, such as water or a gathering place.
After nearly 5,000 miles, we came home. And suddenly, I saw my own home differently.
At the entrance to my property was a tree I had walked and driven past countless times. It bends low and nearly horizontal before turning toward the sky, just like the marker tree we’d seen on our journey. My children had spent years playing restaurant on its broad, flat trunk.
Then there was the landscape itself. Promise Ridge sits above McMichaels Creek, with Cherry Creek beyond the next mountain. Clouds rise from the creek valleys below and move across the ridge. Some mornings, I have my coffee sitting in a cloud. Sometimes couples have their first dance in one.
We had spent three weeks and traveled nearly 5,000 miles looking for a connection to home, only to return and recognize echoes of it all around us.
That’s part of what I love about gathering people here. The gardens. The mountain view. The changing light. The clouds moving through. The people you’ve chosen to have beside you.
And at the entrance, that remarkable tree.
Pointing toward something important.
Photographs on this page graciously provided by:
- Cedar Photography
- M2 Photography