Finding Fertile Ground Podcast

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Dr. Ronnie Taylor was born to extremely young parents who divorced after a few years of marriage. His mom converted to Mormonism and moved the family to Salt Lake City to start a new life. Unfortunately, the missionary who converted and recruited her failed to tell the church Ronnie’s family was Black. They weren’t exactly welcomed with open arms.

His mom worked and went to college full time, and eventually she remarried. Growing up in Utah as a Black Mormon was tough. Ronnie moved out when he was 17 and tried to build a life for himself, but he kept getting targeted by police.

“In my life to date, I've been pulled over by the police about 55 times and I've been beaten by the police five times. Also been arrested over a dozen times.”

Ronnie cashed two checks for $300. He didn't have the money in his bank account, but he thought he could just pay the money back and it would be okay. He didn't think the penalty would be that severe…but it was two felonies with zero to five years jail time. He was sentenced to three years, probation, 178 hours of community service, and 6 months house arrest. He also had to pay the restitution and a fine.

Soon he found himself falling into a never-ending series of bad situations that kept getting worse, and he was only 20 years old.

“And if you can't get a job or vote or all these other myriad of consequences that come from a conviction, then you're largely excluded from society as a whole. Being in that situation was much harder because it meant years of job insecurity and financial insecurity…And if you can't make money, you just can't participate in life in many ways.”

The only solution he could find was to move out of state and lie on his job applications. While living in Rhode Island, Ronnie met his wife Kerala and they moved to Washington DC.

“She says I romanticized living in DC, but I remember really enjoying it partially because it's a mostly Black city. We used to call it Chocolate City. It was the first time in my life where I lived in an environment where I was just not special. I was just a normal, everyday person who got to walk around and not have to deal with a lot of the things that I have to deal with. There was also the reverse where, being in a predominantly Black environment that people think I act too white. I don't fit in anywhere."

He went into paramedic school and tried to get his record cleaned up. Eventually he had to pay a lawyer to get his record expunged.

Ronnie realized he didn’t want to be a paramedic his whole life so he went to George Washington University and graduated summa cum laude while also working full-time.

Ronnie’s doctorate program brought the family to Portland, OR. He earned his doctorate in occupational therapy and now he’s on track to become certified as a hand therapist.

Listen to the podcast to hear about growing up as a Black Mormon, how he turned his life around, and what life is like today.

Please drop me a line at marie@fertilegroundcommunications.com or on social media to let us know what you thought about this episode.

I help professional services firms avoid BORING and boost employee engagement, productivity, and readership. I translate technical, complex, and lackluster language into accessible, dynamic, story-driven text. Get known in your industry through outstanding thought leadership content. Walk your talk through outstanding, effective communications with your employees and clients.

As a podcaster for justice, I stand with my sisters from the Women of Color Podcasters Community. We are podcasters united to condemn the tragic murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and many others at the hands of police.

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Dr. Melissa Jenkins Mangili is a neuropsychologist and medical school faculty member who has reinvented herself as a fashion and fitness model.

Her life began with grit and resilience. She and her three siblings were was raised in poverty in rural Maine by a single quadriplegic mother.

“The nice thing about being from a small town is that everybody knows each other…and rallied to help us. (My mother) couldn't drive at first. She had to relearn how to drive and get an adapted car. Eventually we were able to build a wheelchair-accessible home…and she was able to drive independently…as we got older, we were able to help more.”

Melissa had her first job at age 9, with a paper route. By age 12 she was working 50 hours a week babysitting during the summer. She worked at McDonald’s in high school and as a second job during college summers.

In spite of the hardships, she had a happy childhood.

“…the experience made us closer and happier in a lot of ways, because even though things were tough, we were in it together. We all had a common mission of taking care of our mom and taking care of each other and doing everything that we could to contribute to that common mission…we became very close and we learned how to be very self-sufficient. We're all very successful as adults.”

Thanks to her intelligence and hard work, she graduated second in her college class. That’s just the start of her educational journey. She camped across the country to California for graduate school because she heard education was more financially accessible there. Then she worked her way through UCSD.

Fast forward to her academic career and private practice as a neuropsychologist. Until recently, Melissa taught at Brown University medical school. During the “great pause” of COVID, she took a sharp left turn and become a fashion and fitness model.

“I think it is radical to step in front of a camera and do it as yourself, not with artificial enhancements or extreme workout regimens or any of that kind of perfectionism, but just to step in front of the camera or out on a runway and model, as a not-25-year-old model and be visible and represent our generation.”

She loves advocating for more diverse representation in modeling.

Melissa is also enjoying the freedom from not having to fit into the conservative norms of academia. She’s embracing her reinvention as a model!

Melissa is currently featured in Model Billboard magazine and has been on the runway in Rhode Island, New England, and New York fashion weeks. To see her portfolio or hire her for modeling, check out her Instagram page.

Please drop me a line at marie@fertilegroundcommunications.com or on social media to let us know what you thought about this episode.

Fertile Ground Communications LLC is a certified women-owned business enterprise, disadvantaged business enterprise, and emerging small business.

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Vernita L. Bowe is a survivor. As a smaller-than-average child, she experienced bullying in school. When she grew up she married the wrong man and wasn’t able to get out of that marriage for 24 years, three kids later.

Parenting has been about huge loves and losses for Vernita. Her middle son landed in prison, and four years ago her oldest son Byron died in a car accident.

“You really don't wanna bury your children. But what I've learned is all of the promises are gone…all of the things that you and he were gonna do together…and all of the things that he wanted to do with his life. All gone…and let me tell you something. People say that you should get over a loss and I just wanna say this for the listening audience: You never get over a loss. You learn how to live beyond it. But you never really get over it.”

After Byron died, the griefs kept coming. Byron’s godfather and Vernita’s mentor died, and then her mother…next she and her father contracted COVID at the same time and ended up in the hospital, both on ventilators. Unfortunately, Vernita’s dad passed away while she was still on the ventilator.

In spite of the great griefs she has suffered…or because of them…Vernita has embraced life and is living it to its fullest! She recently got a passport and took her very first airplane flight! That’s just the beginning of the living and traveling she has planned for herself.

Please drop me a line at marie@fertilegroundcommunications.com or on social media to let us know what you thought about this episode.

Fertile Ground Communications LLC is a certified women-owned business enterprise, disadvantaged business enterprise, and emerging small business.

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Happy Pride! What better month to launch this fun episode and celebrate a wonderful queer story.

Growing up in Germany, when Nicole moved to the U.S. as a teen she never felt like she fit in. Then she joined the military during Desert Storm, and she ended up playing Taps for 600 funerals of her colleagues. That nearly broke her. She married a man before coming out as gay, and her dad and sisters rejected her.

Around the same time of that rejection, her beloved mom—the only family member who truly embraced Nicole for who she was--suddenly died at the age of 51.

When COVID hit, Nicole and her wife took a wild cross-country trip in an RV. They experienced discrimination and many, many vehicle troubles. (Who knew buying a brand-new RV would turn out to be such a headache?!?)

Then when they returned to Southern California, she landed a job reporting to a toxic boss who had a history of discriminating against queer people. She’s now in a much happier place, working at Toast, where she feels completely affirmed and embraced.

Nicole more grit and resilience than I even expected before I interviewed her! I loved listening to her colorful, varied stories of her life so far. If you want ideas on where to travel in the U.S., I highly recommend Nicole’s Instagram page, @chocoandchaitourtheus.

Please drop me a line at marie@fertilegroundcommunications.com or on social media to let us know what you thought about this episode.

Fertile Ground Communications LLC is a certified women-owned business enterprise, disadvantaged business enterprise, and emerging small business.

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This week on the Finding Fertile Ground podcast, I interview Cheryl Parks, sales and mindset coach. Cheryl works with my business coach, Liz J. Simpson, and has provided me invaluable advice and confidence boosts as I reboot my business.

Cheryl and I immediately connected, and I was especially lucky to meet her in person in early March, since the Big Money Movement coaching program happens all on Zoom and social media. It was a delight to delve into her background and discover how many ways our lives overlap and connect.

I was surprised to discover that Cheryl has not always been a confident, outgoing, and self-assured businesswoman. At one point she was so shy she wouldn’t ring the bell to get off a city bus.

“I became so shy. People they'd say, oh, I know you from, and I would say, no, you don't know me. I know you don't know me. You probably know my cousin. You probably know my sister. There were so many times Marie. I was just shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. I literally stayed in my room.”

After a successful corporate sales career, Cheryl now has a growing sales and mindset coaching and consulting practice. She trains leaders and founders to sell in their own unique voice without being salesy or scripted.

Before she turned 30, she found herself as a shy single mom of two. She realized her shyness was going to derail all of her dreams, goals, and plans for life.

She created a plan and took intentional action steps to march herself out of debilitating shyness and into a successful corporate sales career, which lasted for over 25 years and $25M in sales.

“There's still a shy part of me…but for the most part I'm in control of the shy girl and say, ‘okay, you gotta be quiet for a minute because I have some things I have to handle.’ So the great part is just being in control of that and not having the shy girl overwhelm everything else.”

Cheryl’s greatest passion is helping people who don't feel they have a voice discover their unique style and voice. Every day it amazes her that she stands out front: visible and proud to be her!

Please drop me a line at marie@fertilegroundcommunications.com or on social media to let us know what you thought about this episode.

Fertile Ground Communications LLC is a certified women-owned business enterprise, disadvantaged business enterprise, and emerging small business.

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Michele Heyward is a civil engineer who built the U.S. power grid. Now she's a tech startup founder building the future of work at PositiveHire.

Michele grew up in rural South Carolina in a three-bedroom house full of kids. She had four siblings. She describes herself as the weird kid, really good at math.

Encouraged to pursue science and engineering, she went to engineering camp 30 years ago at 13 years old.

“But what really got me sold on engineering was when I was 12, a Category Five hurricane hit South Carolina and my mom's younger sister and her family live near Charleston where the hurricane hit...They had a newer brick home that was destroyed during the hurricane while they were in it. I couldn't understand: how could a home that new be destroyed by something called a hurricane? And that's how I literally got interested in civil engineering and decided to major in it.”

She learned about people who had designed an indestructible egg-shaped home on the coast, and she thought,

“How do you build a home or structure like that? It really started me into the path of civil engineering.”

After working in the corporate world for many years, Michele got tired of being “the only.”

“Something that is really common, unfortunately, is the ‘only’ experience for a lot of Black, Latinx, and indigenous women in STEM. What I mean is you're the only one, you're the only Black woman. You're the only Latina engineer on your team, group, department, company. For years out in construction, I was the only Black woman engineer. I was only Black woman, period…so many other women quit.”

Michele stayed at her her previous environmental engineering firm for 12 years.

“I told myself somebody else is going to come who doesn't have the wherewithal to do what you've done this amount of time by yourself being the only.”

Then she received a message from God that said, “you're not supposed to be here.”

“I cried. I'd been through so much being the only, but it was time for me to go and build out something else…now it's time to go execute. It was time for me to go put in the work.”

Michele founded a company, PositiveHire, that connects Black, Latinx, and Indigenous women who are experienced scientists, engineers, and technology professionals to management roles.

“As a Black woman engineer I've seen companies complain they can't find diverse talent, when their real issue is retaining Black, Latinx, and Indigenous talent in STEM. The issue isn't a pipeline problem but the lack of responsibility that management teams have in creating workplaces which will retain and attract Black, Latinx, and Indigenous talent.”

Michele and I had a fruitful discussion about what it’s like working in spaces run by white men and how important it is to change the culture of a company before focusing on recruiting people of color. We also talked about how to write inclusive job descriptions and postings that bring in diverse candidates.

Please drop me a line at marie@fertilegroundcommunications.com to let us know what you thought about this episode.

Fertile Ground Communications LLC is a certified women-owned business enterprise, disadvantaged business enterprise, and emerging small business.

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When Gresh was a kid, his military dad worked overseas for a year and this English major/entrepreneur started a family newspaper to keep his whole family up to date on what was going on. His first business was born!

This week on the Finding Fertile Ground podcast, I interview Gresham Harkless, Jr., founder of CEO Blog Nation and Blue 16 Media, and host of the I AM CEO Podcast + CEO Chat Podcast. Gresh graduated from Howard University and Georgetown and has interviewed more than 1,000 CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners, including me!

Life hasn’t always been easy for him, though. He graduated in 2009 during the economic crisis and felt like he did all the things he was supposed to do to position himself for success. But he had to learn it all on his own, because each of the companies he went to, he lacked mentors. With layoffs and tearing his achilles tendon, he felt like a ship lost at sea.

Gresh is a wonderful, warm human being and I enjoyed hearing about his life journey and how he ended up building two successful businesses at such a young age.

Listeners, did this episode inspire you? I’d love to hear from you. If you have any questions or have an idea for a guest or topic I should cover, drop me a line at marie@fertilegroundcommunications.com.

Fertile Ground Communications LLC is a certified women-owned business enterprise, disadvantaged business enterprise, and emerging small business.

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This week on the Finding Fertile Ground podcast, I interview Chantal Cox, a special educator, author, speaker, and Transformation NeuroCoach™.

Chantal lives in Wichita, Kansas, now but she grew up all over the world. Her birth dad is Mexican, but her mom remarried when she was three years old. Her adopted dad was in the army, so the family moved every two years. They lived in several states as well as Panama, Luxembourg, and The Netherlands.

Chantal was born a shy, timid introvert. Being the new kid every two years was traumatizing but forced her to get some coping skills.

Being the only brown-skinned person in her family created some difficult conversations each time the family moved.

“Here's the Cox family. Who are you just standing with this family? When we lived in Panama, people assumed I was Panamanian, but when we lived in Washington, DC, we lived in a high Pakistani, population so people assumed I was Pakistani. And in Wyoming people assumed I was Native American. That caused some different things in my head, some different stories to be created that I latched on to and became part of my identity… that I don't fit in anywhere.”

Chantal struggled with anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem.

“I was very pessimistic, very much the glass is half empty. What's going to go wrong next? Life was not happy. If there was something good that happened, I tried really hard to find the bad in it. I just lived in this space and then the low self-esteem and self-worth led me to be in not great relationships because you attract what you put out.”

Soon after she began working as a special ed teacher, her high stress levels led to her developing an autoimmune disease called alopecia areata, where her immune system was attacking her hair follicles, causing bald spots. Not long after that, she found herself in an abusive marriage.

“I attracted people who treated me the way that I felt I deserve to be treated. And so that led me to being married to a man who was not very nice. It started with some control and then emotional, manipulative abuse, and eventually went into physical abuse towards the end.”

She left on her 30th birthday and moved back to Wichita, where her support system of family and friends supported and loved on her.

“My dad stepped in and took over all communication. I've never seen or spoken to my ex-husband again. And that is a huge blessing. My sister let me stay with her until I got up on my feet.”

Chantal now helps women experiencing life transitions create a new vision for themselves, reconnect with their passion and purpose, and turn their transition into their triumphant transformation. Check out her book, Create a Life You Love: 10 Healthy Habits to Transform Your Life Now, and her podcast.

Next week on the Companies That Care podcast, I interview Kim Malek, cofounder of Portland’s famous Salt & Straw ice cream, which now has 25 locations and growing!

If you enjoyed this podcast, please give us a rating and subscribe to hear our next episode.

Create a Life You Love: 10 Healthy Habits to Transform Your Life Now

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This week on the Finding Fertile Ground podcast, I interview Devin Tomiak, founder of The Biggies Cards.

After losing her youngest brother Grant to suicide 7 years ago, Devin Tomiak became driven to understand resilience--in particular, how to build resilience in kids.

As a mom of two young boys, her preoccupation had a unique urgency. She created The Biggies cards, an innovative, research-based take on conversation cards designed to spark fun discussions about BIG social emotional concepts with elementary-aged kids.

Devin grew up with two loving parents and two younger brothers. She felt close to her brothers and had a happy childhood…which made what would happen later feel even more shocking.

When Grant was 28, he took his own life. He was a highly accomplished chef at such a young age.

“Everything on the surface looked amazing and normal, so when he died it was mind-blowing, not just for our family, but for all who knew him. He was opening his own restaurant with some incredible partners. It was his dream and he was being funded…it’s still hard to digest.”

Grant had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis several months before his death.

“When he died, I had a son who was 2-1/2 and I was pregnant with my second son. So as I'm grieving I was also mummying. So as I'm trying to make sense of Grant's death, it was in the framework of my kids…and how do I prevent something like this from ever happening again? Because when you feel like the world is a certain way and people like Grant don't die by suicide…and then all of a sudden they do…it kind of undermines your sense of security and stability. It’s like an existential blow.”

Devin dove into researching how to prevent suicide and landed on the importance of resilience. Resilience stood out to her because it helps us manage our day-to-day mental health, and it can also be taught to kids.

“During this time it occurred to me that if we could talk to our kids about many of the social emotional concepts that make a person emotionally intelligent and resilient, that was a start. That was something actionable parents and teachers could do to strengthen the resilience of their kids. And so of course, these conversations had to be approached in the right way if they were to resonate.”

Devin enlisted the help of a dear friend and community psychologist Amy Engelman, and they went to work creating a deck of conversation cards called The Biggies Cards. The objective is to help give parents and teachers an easy way to build resilience in kids.

If you enjoyed this podcast, please give us a rating and subscribe to hear our next episode.

Marie Gettel-Gilmartin, founder and principal of Fertile Ground Communications LLC, is a writer and marketing communications consultant who loves to take the pain and stress out of writing for her clients. She specializes in making the complex clear, using dynamic, accessible language to explain and communicate important issues. She positions her clients as experts in their fields and helps them communicate about pressing issues. Writing communications that boost employee engagement and thought leadership, she also coaches leaders and executives on how to strengthen communications and leadership. She loves to connect people and resources or solve seemingly impossible problems.

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This week on the Finding Fertile Ground podcast, I interview Mahlena-Rae Johnson. Mahlena was born in Arkansas but grew up on the island of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Mahlena is a speaker, comedian, author, and communication expert for introverts.

After graduating from the School of Film and Television at Loyola Marymount University, earning her MBA at the University of Southern California, and working a variety of jobs, she felt her potential was being wasted in Los Angeles. She discovered other Black American women were living their best lives outside of the United States. So she and her husband began looking for the best place to relocate, and then the 2016 election happened. Their move plans accelerated dramatically.

In 2018 they shed most of their belongings and moved to Canada with their kids to start their lives over completely. As we discussed on the podcast, racism and sexism of course still exist in Canada…but Mahlena and her family are happier, healthier, and less stressed out and will soon become Canadian citizens. Mahlena actually found living out of a suitcase to be freeing.

We talked about living in Canada, how she serves introverts, her decision to adopt, and dream boards…plus a little Grey’s Anatomy.

Here are some articles she wrote about dream boards:

"How I created my family from scratch: Mahlena's Dream Board story"
"How to Build Your First Dream Board"
"Save Time and Save Money: The Top 5 Ways your Dream Board will help."

If you enjoyed this podcast, please give us a rating and subscribe to hear our next episode.

*Marie Gettel-Gilmartin, founder and principal of Fertile Ground Communications LLC, is a writer and marketing communications consultant who loves to take the pain and stress out of writing for her clients. She specializes in making the complex clear, using dynamic, accessible language to explain and communicate important issues. She positions her clients as experts in their fields and helps them communicate about pressing issues.

Writing communications that boost employee engagement and thought leadership, she also coaches leaders and executives on how to strengthen communications and leadership. She loves to connect people and resources or solve seemingly impossible problems.*

Fertile Ground Communications LLC is a certified women-owned business enterprise, disadvantaged business enterprise, and emerging small business.

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This week on the Finding Fertile Ground podcast, I interviewed Barbie Liss from Toronto, Canada. Barbie is an anti anti-aging coach who guides women as they heal their wounds and shed shame around aging.

Barbie found her own fertile ground through a traumatic incident. Her daughter was raped at age 21. Barbie had to work through her own secondary trauma while supporting her daughter. They both entered into a restorative justice process with her daughter’s attacker.

According to restorativejustice.org, “Restorative justice views crime as more than breaking the law – it also causes harm to people, relationships, and the community…restorative justice is a theory of justice that emphasizes repairing the harm caused by criminal behavior.”

Restorative justice is rooted in traditions from the First Nations people of Canada and the United States and the Maori of New Zealand.

I’d never heard about restorative justice before, so I was fascinated by Barbie’s story and how it helped everyone heal.

If you enjoyed this podcast, please give us a rating and subscribe to hear our next episode.

Fertile Ground Communications LLC is a certified women-owned business enterprise, disadvantaged business enterprise, and emerging small business.

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This week on the Finding Fertile Ground podcast, it was a joy to interview Julie Allen again. I had the honor of interviewing Julie earlier this year for my Companies That Care podcast.

During this interview, Julie shared her 15-year battle with eating disorders. She was in and out of treatment during her entire teenage years and into her early 20s. Her breaking point was a rape at 18 that took her eating disorder to a whole new level of self-hatred and lack of regard for her own life with an attempted suicide. She has been in recovery for a decade now and is passionate about dismantling diet culture and stigmas around mental illness.

She has found her fertile ground as CEO of a body-positive, self-love promoting, women-empowering clothing boutique, Mary Rose NW Boutique. She also founded the Mary Rose Foundation, a nonprofit that helps fund treatment for people struggling with eating disorders. She speaks openly about her own struggles with eating disorders, PTSD, and mental illness to inspire hope for those who are hurting.

If you enjoyed this podcast, please give us a rating and subscribe to hear our next episode.

Fertile Ground Communications LLC is a certified women-owned business enterprise, disadvantaged business enterprise, and emerging small business.

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This week on the Finding Fertile Ground podcast, I interview Mike Ganino, a storytelling and communication expert, podcaster, and public speaking coach. He’s also husband to Phil and dad to Viviana, who was born at 29 weeks gestation in Mexico during the first stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I loved hearing Mike’s life story, starting with growing up poor and getting diagnosed with diabetes as a kid. He also shared about coming out as gay in college and finding what he was meant to do in the world. And as a preemie mom myself, I was fascinated to hear Mike’s story about being a NICU parent in another country and during a pandemic. We also talked about the challenges and rewards of being entrepreneurs.

Mike hosts the Mike Drop Moment podcast and is a published author. He has been named a Top 10 Public Speaking Coach by Yahoo Finance, a Top 30 Speaker by Global Guru, and California’s Best Speaking and Communication Coach by Corporate Vision. He’s a trained actor and coach from the world-famous Second City, Improv Olympics, and Upright Citizen’s Brigade. In addition to his track record as an executive in the hotel, restaurant, retail, and tech industries, Mike’s worked with organizations like the Disney, American Century Investments, American Marketing Association, and UCLA. Check out Mike’s beautiful new website and his free masterclass.

If you enjoyed this podcast, please give us a rating and subscribe to hear our next episode.

Fertile Ground Communications LLC is a certified women-owned business enterprise, disadvantaged business enterprise, and emerging small business.

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This week on the Finding Fertile Ground podcast, I interview Nura Elmagbari, a Muslim-American mom, wife, scientist, educator, nonprofit leader, activist, and community leader. I met Nura several years ago through my church, Spirit of Grace. Nura was our guest preacher for Mother’s Day, spoke on an interfaith women’s panel, brought her teen daughter to our youth group and talked about Islam, and emceed an immigrant storytelling event.

Nura came to the United States as a child when her family escaped from Libya. They had to adjust to the American way of life with no support, and her mother gave birth to her baby brother shortly after they arrived in Greeley, Colorado.

Now Nura has a master’s degree in human biology and is principal of the Islamic School of Portland. She has founded several nonprofits to aid Muslim children, immigrants, and refugees.

Nura has fought racism and prejudice all her life. She learned nobody was going to give her a chance to succeed so she had to create it for herself. And now she provides support to refugees arriving in the United States, the kind of support her family never received.

She explains why she loves Islam, one thing she wishes Islam didn’t forbid, why she believes Islam supports feminism, and how she has a patent for a drug she helped develop that will change the medical world and addiction to opioids.

Next week on the Companies That Care podcast I interview Veronica Arreola, who is a widely published professional feminist, mom, and writer who has been working to diversify the STEM field for over 20 years. In her work at the University of Illinois-Chicago, Veronica works to ensure a supportive campus environment for Latinx students studying science. We spoke about how companies can attract and support Latinx and other employees of color in the workplace, especially in STEM environments.

If you enjoyed this podcast, please give us a rating and subscribe to hear our next episode.

Fertile Ground Communications LLC is a certified women-owned business enterprise, disadvantaged business enterprise, and emerging small business.

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This week on the Finding Fertile Ground podcast, I interview Paula Dunn, who was born with a bilateral cleft lip and palate. Paula is my first Australian guest, and my first with a cleft lip and palate like me.

On her first day of school, Paula was bullied by her classmates and when she told the teacher, she was called a tattletale. The bullying stunted her academic abilities and self-esteem during primary school and filled her with anxiety, stress, and depression.

As immigrants to Australia, her parents told her the best way to set herself apart was education. Paula’s Greek mom only had one year of education. Paula applied herself to her education, going from the bottom of her classes to landing in the top 10% in the state for biology and music. She went onto graduate with a master’s of science with honours.

Now she has found her fertile ground by applying what she learned in her life by working with teenage girls as a resilience expert, author, and cognitive scientist. She helps them create confidence to conquer life!

Paula lives by this mantra: “It’s not how you start off in life that counts; it’s how you choose to live it.”

Next week on the Companies That Care podcast, I interview Heather Younger, a best-selling author, international speaker, consultant, adjunct organizational leadership professor, and facilitator who has earned her reputation as “The Employee Whisperer.”

If you enjoyed this podcast, please give us a rating and subscribe to hear our next episode.

Fertile Ground Communications LLC is a certified women-owned business enterprise, disadvantaged business enterprise, and emerging small business.

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This week on the Finding Fertile Ground podcast, I interview Lily Shaw, a powerhouse actress, an expert writer, and an award-winning motivational speaker who was rescued and inspired by the make-believe world of cinema at the age of 7.

When Lily was just starting out, her first Hollywood agent told her, “if you only had the right look, you could be Sandra Bullock.”

Despite this subtle racism, Lily had some initial success as an actress of color in Hollywood. But none of her talent and skill and hard work seemed to create lasting success. The #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements woke her up to the ways racial and gender discrimination had stifled her voice and presence.

Lily is demanding to be treated equally, with dignity and respect, and to be valued for her talent. She is choosing roles where women are empowered and where different voices are celebrated.

As a first-generation Indian American and the first woman in her family to step away from tradition to pursue a creative profession, Lily has been a powerful voice for women’s empowerment since childhood. She is using her grit and resilience to find her fertile ground, standing for social justice and equal representation.

As an intuitive and conscious speaker, she leads by example and inspires audiences to use their voice, own their gifts, and become who they were born to be. lives. Lily is on a mission to spread a message of self-empowerment and share her life story in a way that inspires people to turn their pain into their superpower.

Next week on the Companies That Care podcast, I interview Ross Ching of Mama and Haapa’s here in Portland, Oregon, a zero waste shop.

If you enjoyed this podcast, please give us a rating and subscribe to hear our next episode.

Fertile Ground Communications LLC is a certified women-owned business enterprise, disadvantaged business enterprise, and emerging small business.

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This week on the Finding Fertile Ground podcast, I interview Tracey Osborne from Dallas, Georgia. After bouncing around in various locations during her childhood, Tracey got sexually assaulted by her live-in boyfriend the night of her senior prom. It was not her last sexual assault, and soon she found herself in and out of several domestic abuse situations and getting married several times.

Tracey shares how she identified her fear of abandonment and broke the cycle of abuse. She also realized she had an addictive personality, so she gave up alcohol.

Tracey bounced around in a wide variety of jobs while parenting her four daughters. She found her passion to work as a trauma release coach, but she found it extremely difficult to charge women money to help them with their healing. Now she has found her fertile ground by founding the Global Association for Trauma Recovery, guiding survivors on their journey to move past their past and become the empowered women they are supposed to be. The association is dedicated to providing low-to-no-cost trauma support for survivors and their families, aiming to facilitate change by spreading trauma-related awareness to create a trauma-informed world.

Tracey also hosts the Releasing Trauma Podcast, supporting women in their healing and bringing them the tools they need to create lasting self-transformation. She wants to make the world a better place, so her girls never have to go through what she has survived.

Next week on the Companies That Care podcast, I interview Mallorie Dunn of Smart Glamour in New York City, an ethically made, inclusively sized, customizable clothing line that focuses on accessibility (size + price) and accurate representation.

If you enjoyed this podcast, please give us a rating and subscribe to hear our next episode.

With 30 years of experience in the environmental consulting industry, I am passionate about sustainability and corporate citizenship, equity & inclusion, businesses that use their power for good, and doing everything I can to create a kinder, more sustainable, and just world. We help organizations and people discover what makes them special and help them share that with the world.

Fertile Ground Communications LLC is a certified women-owned business enterprise, disadvantaged business enterprise, and emerging small business.

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Trigger warning: This episode contains some racist and adult language

This week on the Finding Fertile Ground podcast, I interview Daniel Sartin. Daniel is just a bit younger than my oldest son, but he’s survived a lifetime of trauma and difficulty. Born into the foster system, he got adopted and raised by a relative. He was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness even though he is queer, which resulted in deep shame about his sexuality. And then there’s just living while Black.

Daniel shared stories about his childhood and upbringing. He also shared vulnerably about his incredibly toxic and narcissistic first romantic relationship. This is not the stereotypical macho white guy with a submissive, terrified wife. In Daniel’s relationship, his ex-boyfriend actually called him the n-word on several occasions. Finally, Daniel could take the abuse no longer and he escaped the situation.

In spite of what he’s faced in his life, he is upbeat and optimistic…and committed to dedicate his life to helping other people. He has founded a nonprofit called Happy Havens, which aims to create a permanent housing situation for houseless people around the Portland area.

Next week on the Companies That Care podcast, I interview Kim Sundy, Kellogg’s director of corporate sustainability, on the Companies That Care podcast. Kim is living proof that you can get paid to change the world. I had no idea Kellogg was such a forward-thinking, innovative, and values-driven company. You won’t want to miss this conversation!

If you enjoyed this podcast, please give us a rating and subscribe to hear our next episode.

Contact us if you can use some help with your writing, editing, communications, or marketing. With 30 years of experience in the environmental consulting industry, I am passionate about sustainability and corporate citizenship, equity & inclusion, businesses that use their power for good, and doing everything I can to create a kinder, more sustainable, and just world. We help organizations and people discover what makes them special and help them share that with the world.

Fertile Ground Communications LLC is a certified women-owned business enterprise, disadvantaged business enterprise, and emerging small business.

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If you like what you hear or read, visit my Fertile Ground Communications website.

This week on the Finding Fertile Ground podcast, I interview Terri Kozlowski. She is a proud Native American warrior of the Athabascan, Tlinglet Tribe and Raven Clan. When she was just 11 years old, her mother sold her for drugs and shut her out on the streets of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

After many years of trying to process what had happened to her through therapy, Terri has learned to transcend her fears. She believes that life experiences or abuse may instill fear and break the connection with our authentic selves. Author of Raven Transcending Fear and host of the Soul Solutions podcast, Terri shares the lessons she has learned from her spiritual journey. Now she inspires and supports others who are struggling with fear.

Next week I interview Lara Smith from Dad’s Garage theater in Atlanta, Georgia, on the Companies That Care podcast.

If you enjoyed this podcast, please give us a rating and subscribe to hear our next episode.

*Contact us if you can use some help with your writing, editing, communications, or marketing. With 30 years of experience in the environmental consulting industry, I am passionate about sustainability and corporate citizenship, equity & inclusion, businesses that use their power for good, and doing everything I can to create a kinder, more sustainable, and just world. We help organizations and people discover what makes them special and help them share that with the world.

Fertile Ground Communications LLC is a certified women-owned business enterprise, disadvantaged business enterprise, and emerging small business.*

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If you like what you hear or read or would like to see photos of Leslie, visit my Fertile Ground Communications website.

This week on the Finding Fertile Ground podcast, I reflect back on the last 13 months. My little podcast is now one year, one month old after starting on July 6, 2020. I’ve interviewed over 70 amazing individuals.

I’m grateful to my guests for letting us have a little glimpse of their lives. As I describe this podcast in a nutshell, it’s about people who have gone through a shit ton in their lives and have survived, resilient, on the other side.

I recently watched the documentary “The Octopus Teacher,” about a man who befriends an octopus in the ocean. Craig Foster is a free diver, who dives without a wetsuit or oxygen. He is able to hold his breath for up to 6 minutes. The movie, and the friendship he develops, is miraculous and exquisite.

At one point the octopus has one of her arms bitten off by a pajama shark. She retreats into her den, traumatized, stunned, and in pain. Eventually she comes back out, with a tiny new arm. Over the course of three months, the arm completely regenerates itself.

Watching this exceptional part of the story, I realized: the people I have interviewed on my podcast are like octopus. (For you word nerds like me, the plural of octopus is not octopi; it is octopus.)

So many of them have been deeply traumatized in one way or another: from political strife, racism, illness, sexual assault, homophobia or transphobia, childhood abuse, xenophobia, body shaming, anti-semitism or Islamophobia, substance abuse, death of a loved one, or sexism.

They have grieved losses and hurts deeply, but found a way to rise up again.

They have regrown their arms and regenerated their hearts. For whatever reason, they have developed backbones and resilient spirits, and they are stronger than ever before. I’m fascinated by this incredible resilience, and I’m aware that it does not come naturally. Some people seem to have higher-than-average levels of resilience, while others need to actively cultivate it.

How can one person experience horrible abuse and hardship as a child, not knowing love and affection, yet emerge as a positive, upbeat, and resilient person? While another person could feel slighted as a child, but overall have a good life, yet they end up feeling cheated and sad?

I’ve discovered that I love interviewing Black women. I find that they are so real, honest, and direct, and in spite of the fact that they have no real reason to trust me, a white woman, they are incredibly open and authentic. I guess it’s because of all they face in life…they simply have no f-bombs left to give. I admire that quality so much.

For more information about the people I mention in this episode, go to my website and look for Finding Fertile Ground podcast tab.

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Note: This episode contains a racist epithet.

This week on the Finding Fertile Ground podcast, I interview Lisa Marie Simmons. Lisa grew up in Boulder, Colorado, but now lives in Lake Garda, Italy. I contacted her when I read her post on the Huffington Post, As A Young Black Girl, I Loved My Grandfather. Then I Found Out He’d Been A KKK Member.

I have interviewed 75+ people since I started podcasting. I’ve made incredible connections and new friendships. But this one feels different. Lisa feels like a soul sister.

Lisa has written extensively, as have I, so that makes it easier to get to know each other. It took multiple tries to get this interview to happen because of technical issues, so when we finally spoke it felt magical in many ways.

Lisa is magical herself. So many times during this interview I felt goosebumps, marveling at her resilience and positive spirit. She draws amazing things into her world.

As a child, Lisa was adopted into two families who abused her. The first was a white family who took her to Malaysia before sending her back on a Pan-Am jet with a note in her pocket. Then she was adopted by a white mom and Black dad in Boulder. Although Lisa fell in love with her adopted siblings, her mother repeated her own pattern of abuse with her children…and she never felt accepted into her mom’s family.

Music saved Lisa’s life. After she began singing at a young age, she became a featured soloist with the Boulder Youth Choir. At 19, she moved to New York City to study theater and music at The American Academy of Dramatic Arts and perform in the Manhattan club circuit at night.

Lisa is now an accomplished singer/songwriter, essayist, and published poet. (Read her blog posts here or check out her Linktree, which also includes links to performances.) Her music (Hippie Tendencies and the poetic/musical project NoteSpeak) can be found wherever you listen online.

She has performed as a musician and speaker all over the world, most recently at the Jaipur Music Stage in India in January 2020. She performs and produces with her partner, arranger, keyboardist, and songwriter Marco Cremaschini. Lisa’s music is deeply informed by the experiences in her life.

Lisa shared about her adoptions, growing up in Colorado as a Black girl in mostly white spaces, what it’s like to live in Italy, and how she found her birth mom.

What I found the most stunning about Lisa is that she endured such trauma in her childhood , yet she positively glows. Lisa believes what happened in her childhood has made her into the strong, creative, and resilient person she is now.

She loves people and this wonderful world in spite of the way she was treated as a child. She uses those difficult experiences as a tool to power her creativity and art. Lisa epitomizes the notion of “post-traumatic growth,” as we discussed on the podcast. She is magic.

Next week I interview Erin Shakespeare from the Macquarie Foundation on Companies That Care.

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If you like what you hear or read or would like to see photos of Leslie, visit my Fertile Ground Communications website.

This week on the Finding Fertile Ground podcast, I interview my friend Leslie Batchelder. We both sing soprano in our local Rock Voices choir. I’ve always loved her spirit and spunk.

Leslie’s life is one of grit and resilience. One of five children, Leslie’s childhood was full of abuse and her parents’ addiction problems. She left home at 17 to go to college. By age 19, she was in a psychiatric hospital when the abuse caught up with her. She went sober in her 20s when she saw what addiction had done to her parents.

Leslie also shared the way men preyed on her when she was young. She was sexually assaulted in the boys’ bathroom, yet she was punished instead of the boys.

Fast forward several decades later, Leslie earned her Ph.D. in German cultural studies and became a professor at Portland State University. She married later in life and got pregnant after two miscarriages.

Her son was born 10 weeks early and landed in the NICU, an experience full of trauma.

Right before she took her son home, Leslie was diagnosed with melanoma. After receiving treatment, the melanoma came back and some of her doctors gave her a death sentence. Leslie wasn’t ready for her life to end, so she found health care providers who gave her hope (and clinical trials).

Her body was not done challenging her. A few years later she battled anal cancer.

The challenges Leslie has faced in her life are stunning. She talks about her mental health challenges and how she’s learned the value of medication. Leslie believes her childhood trauma gave her the resilience she needed to survive.

Her life and resilience are an inspiration.

Next week on the Companies That Care podcast, I interview Naama Barnea-Goraly, who has invented an app called Girltelligence that empowers young women.

If you enjoyed this podcast, please give us a rating and subscribe to hear our next episode.

Contact us if you can use some help with your writing, editing, communications, or marketing. With 30 years of experience in the environmental consulting industry, I am passionate about sustainability and corporate citizenship, equity & inclusion, businesses that use their power for good, and doing everything I can to create a kinder, more sustainable, and just world. We help organizations and people discover what makes them special and help them share that with the world.

Fertile Ground Communications LLC is a certified women-owned business enterprise, disadvantaged business enterprise, and emerging small business.

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Read more about Amira and see photos on this blog post.

Amira Stanley is a mindset & intention coach, end-of-life doula, and anti-racism educator and community activist. She grew up Black and gay in mostly small cities or towns, has lived with pain from hip dysplasia and lost a huge amount of weight so she could have hip replacement, supported her beloved husband through his transition, and has dealt with the emotional trauma of racism all her life, only to discover this one year ago through education and studying. She’s always been an LGBTQIA+ activist, but now she’s also become an anti-racist and community activist.

“It's a mission of mine to help people be okay with sitting in discomfort. We're not going to get to the other side without sitting in discomfort.”

Amira knew she loved women and female energy from the age of seven or eight. She had crushes on all her little white girlfriends. When her mom made her go to church, she started receiving the message that liking the same sex was bad. At age 18 she finally had the nerve to come out as bisexual. Every time she’d bring male friends home, her mom would get her hopes up…so finally Amira decided to make a choice and be with women.

When Amira got older and began volunteering with the Living Room Youth, an organization that celebrates and supports LGBTQIA+ youth in Clackamas County, Oregon, she realized she was pansexual (not limited in sexual choice with regard to biological sex, gender, or gender identity).

Amira shared a phenomenal story about her husband coming out as transgender. I asked her if she has any advice for people whose partners are transitioning.

“Allow them to be who they are, but also take care of you. If it's something you can't handle, follow your own heart, but do it in a way that is loving and supportive to that person. If you can, walk them through this journey, especially if they have no one else. It's not easy, but if you can support them being who they are, that's priceless.”

Amira has been shocked to discover the extreme racism in Salem, Oregon.

“Salem is extremely racist. I've never been in a space where I've been very uncomfortable. I'm used to giving people eye contact and smiling. I don't do that anymore...It makes me sad but at the same time it made me sadder six months ago.”

Living in such a racist town made her into an anti-racist and community activist. Attending a vigil for Breonna Taylor at the state capitol, she was inspired by Julianne Jackson, founder of Black Joy Oregon, to step it up.

Julianne said, "if you're Black and you live in this city, there's basically no excuse. We need you out here. We need you. And I was crying and saying, okay Amira, you're terrified. But this chick is calling you out and you live here and this is what you need to do.”

We talked about the ambitious “End White Supremacy by Way of Black Experience” event Amira and her team put in in April. We also talked about progressive Christianity, after she recently left a position at a local church, and her journey to get to wellness with hip dysplasia and weight loss.

You can reach Amira on her website . Also, listen to her latest video podcast episode with her friend Rayah Dickerson on the topic of “Protesting: What’s the Use of It?”

Meeting and befriending Amira is one of the joys of the last for me. And we need all the joys we can find right now!

Contact us if you can use some help with your writing, editing, communications, or marketing.

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Read more and view photos here.

Lisa Schroeder is a mother, grandmother, chef, restaurateur and author devoted to providing better-than-authentic renditions of traditional home-cooked dishes at her popular, award-winning restaurant, Mother's Bistro & Bar. Lisa is an incredibly hard worker, as all executive chefs are, and she had to work twice as hard as a woman in the kitchen, to be taken seriously. Tragically, five years ago her beloved daughter died in a hiking accident. Now she’s a mother without a living child, which is especially bittersweet given that she’s built an outstanding brand around being a mother and honoring mothers.

Mother’s was not an overnight success, even though it opened to rave reviews. Back in 1992, while juggling a marketing and catering career and raising her daughter, Lisa realized no restaurants were making comfort food. She dreamed of a place that would serve “Mother Food” – slow-cooked dishes, such as braises and stews, made with love. From that moment on, Lisa was determined to open such a restaurant and spent the next eight years working toward that dream.

A gem on Portland’s restaurant scene (they serve 1,000 people between 8:00 a.m and 2:30 p.m. on Sundays), Mother’s has always been a personal favorite of mine.

Lisa also kept herself fully occupied during the pandemic by homeschooling her grandchildren. Tragically, Lisa’s daughter Stephanie, mother of four, died in a hiking accident in 2016 at the age of 36. Lisa shares guardianship with their father.

“It's hard enough to be a mother the second time around, but then again, to have to be the teacher was brutal, but they are such good boys and such good kids that it couldn't have gone any better, thanks to them and their sweet nature. I'm grateful I had the time to be able to spend with them and get them through this tough time in a positive way…without them I probably wouldn't have a reason to go on.”

The whole city mourned when Lisa, mother of mothers, lost her beloved daughter at such a young age.

“It’s really hard to have a restaurant called Mother’s and I don't even have my daughter…it's especially hard at Mother's Day when everybody is celebrating mothers. My whole raison d'etre is to celebrate mothers, and I have nothing to celebrate on that day. It's a very tough day for me, so when COVID was still here this Mother's Day, I actually was glad I didn't have to go to work and get through that day.”

I asked Lisa what it’s like to be a woman in the food industry.

“Everybody doubts you. They think you're not capable. You won't be able to lift. You won't be able to hang and you always start from a disadvantaged position where people have preconceived notions about your abilities, and then, especially working in four-star kitchens as an older woman in my 30s. I had people expecting me to fail and wanting me to fail and so if there was a pot to carry, I never asked for help. If I had something on the stove, they might turn the burner down for their fellow males, but they'll let mine burn on the stove. I was put to the test a lot and had to be the best, twice as good as the next guy, just to show how good I can be. It's very challenging to be a woman in a kitchen, and that's why anytime a female cook comes to me, I'm eager to give them a chance because I think women are amazing in a kitchen. We were born to juggle many balls, have the baby on our arm, answer the phone, make the dinner and you know, talk to the gardener or something. We're made to multitask.”

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This week on the Finding Fertile Ground podcast, I interview Melissa Pierce, who I met through Rock Voices Portland, a 140-voice strong rock choir led by my friends Mark and Caley Barstow. Rock Voices’ theme is “healing through song,” which Melissa and I discuss on this podcast.

Melissa was faced with a huge crisis in her 40s: she lost her beloved husband unexpectedly and became a single mom in that moment. Now she dedicates her time to supporting other widows, providing the support and guidance she wished she had when she first became a widow.

Melissa grew up not too far from where I did in Tigard, Oregon. She met her husband Dave when they became roommates and then fell in love with each other. After experiencing infertility, they decided to foster children to adopt. They adopted their two sons, Brad and Bryce, and became a family.

When Dave got a great job opportunity to teach music in eastern Oregon, they moved to LaGrande. Melissa was able to work remotely and Dave began teaching in a nearby town. The boys settled in, and the family benefited from a tight-knit community that helped them raise their two sons.

One night after a dinner out with friends, Dave wasn’t feeling well. He went to bed early and suggested Melissa sleep on the couch so she wouldn’t catch whatever he had. In the morning, Melissa found him dead in their bed.

Suddenly thrown into widowhood in her 40s with two young sons to raise, Melissa experienced shock, despair, and depression, eventually finding she was seeking solace in alcohol. Even though their community in eastern Oregon rallied behind them in the aftermath of Dave’s death, Melissa decided to move back to Tigard to be closer to her family.

A year and a half later, she missed having a partner. She wrote down everything she wanted in a partner and sent her intention out into the world. Soon she met Sean, and he fulfilled 83 percent of her list! Listen to the podcast to hear their wonderful love story.

Melissa found great solace and healing in music and other forms of self-care. She sought out a way to sing again, since she and Dave used to sing together, and landed on Rock Voices, where she was delighted to befriend other widows.

Now Melissa’s sons are grown and she’s using what she has learned to help other widows. She is creating the resources she wished she had back in 2011. She has written a book about what she learned, Filled with Gold, and has a subscription box for widows. On her website you’ll also find a self-care guide for widows and another one that teaches you how to support widows in your life.

Next week on the Companies That Care podcast, I interview I’m switching up my schedule a bit and featuring Lisa Schroeder, founder and owner of hometown favorite Mother’s Bistro and Bar here in Portland, Oregon. I’ve long been a huge fan of Mother’s and Lisa, and she has long used her restaurant space for causes she believes in.

The Finding Fertile Ground podcast is brought to you by Fertile Ground Communications. If you enjoyed this podcast, please give us a rating and subscribe to hear our next episode.

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This week on the Finding Fertile Ground podcast, I interview Ruth L. Schwartz, a writer, teacher, and consciousness-shifter. Ruth has published eight books and taught at six universities, and now she runs the Conscious Girlfriend Academy, the leading global program supporting lesbians and queer women to date wisely and love well.

Ruth was born to parents who were only 18 and 20 when she was born. Her mother had never even held a baby before and they didn’t know they had to burp a baby. They all had to learn together how to be parents. When her dad was off at a college class, she and her mom would be sat home, crying together.

Her father was brilliant, but his life was a cautionary tale for Ruth. He changed from a magical figure in her early childhood to mentally unstable, volatile, and addicted to speed when she was 10. As an emergency room physician, he was a thrill seeker until he lost his job and ended up on the streets addicted to heroin. He died earlier this year at the age of 79.

Ruth places a big emphasis on trying to make use of things that have happened to her in life.“You often hear that the wounds become the gifts, but also the gifts become the wounds.”

Ruth came out as a lesbian at the age of 20 when she was in college. “I love the complexity of being with women.”

Perhaps because she’s drawn to complexity, some of her relationships have been complex as well. When Ruth was 28, she fell in love with a Puerto Rican woman named Gladys whose kidneys failed a few years later. “I donated my kidney to her because I loved her. It just seemed like the thing to do. I had two. She needed one.”

Then several years ago a long-time partner transitioned from female to male. They started Conscious Girlfriend together in 2013 to teach other queer women how to be conscious girlfriends. In the past 7-1/2 years, women from 22 countries have taken Ruth’s classes.

Her students who come out later in life are often floored at the degree of intensity that often exists in relationships with other women. Ruth teaches queer women how to navigate the complexities of relationships with women and how to date more wisely.

The Conscious Girlfriend Academy is a worldwide community of women who thought they were the only ones who had experienced these things. What Ruth enjoys the most is helping women find other likeminded, growth-oriented women.

Before Ruth founded Conscious Girlfriend, she wrote poetry, taught creative writing, worked as a health educator, and earned a PhD in transpersonal psychology.

Ruth is inspired by the women she works with every day through the Conscious Girlfriend Academy. She told of a recent conversation with a woman who suppressed her own sexual identity because she lives in a conservative area in the south. Now she is meeting other women with similar stories, and she's getting to talk about her relationships in ways she has never had the chance to before. She describes it as grit and resilience all the time.

“I feel very fortunate that all the ways I've woven all accidents into my purpose have led me to this place.”

Next week I interview Julie Allen with Mary Rose Boutique NW and Mary Rose Foundation on Companies That Care. Julie’s created a clothing boutique where every woman can leave feeling beautiful, and her sister foundation raises money to pay for eating disorder treatment for girls who cannot afford it. The following week I’ll be back to Finding Fertile Ground with Melissa Pierce, who was widowed with two young children at a very young age.

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May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. I hope you’ll join me in signing the AAPI Visibility Pledge to support Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

After launching my second podcast, Companies That Care, I’ve started alternating each week. This week I interview Christine Cariño, a queer nonbinary immigrant from the Philippines. Her grit and resilience story led to her life’s work with underrepresented groups and communities as a transformation coach and consultant.

Born and raised in the Philippines, Christine had to navigate a religious, patriarchal society. Christine became aware of her place as a woman at an early age, having to always give way to her brothers.

She remembers having her first girl crush in fourth grade. “I was attracted to my best friend at that time, and I didn't know what it was because no one explained it to me. There was no representation on TV."

Any curiosity or exploration of this same-sex attraction was shut down, and the comment that made the biggest impact was when a family member told her, “Please do not tell me that you're gay.”

After that, Christine did everything in her power to present femme, or more feminine, trying to make herself straight until she fell in love in college.

She was outed by her conservative Christian aunt and uncle, who sent her to conversion therapy. She felt more shame and guilt about her identity. “I was very spiritual growing up. I've always believed in a higher power that was taking care of me…so hearing that this higher being doesn't love me because of who I am was painful…why would a God that speaks of love be unable to accept someone like me?”

Soon after the conversion therapy and she had graduated from college, Christine moved to New York with her mom and brother. “Moving here as an immigrant and starting from scratch was definitely an experience.”

Moving to the United States felt like starting over. She had only $100 to her name when she moved to New York.

I interviewed Christine before the Atlanta shootings that targeted Asian-Americans, but Asian-American hate crimes were still on the rise. I asked her about what it’s like being a Filipino immigrant. She admits it’s been difficult, but she also has had to unlearn anti-Blackness and colorism that she learned as a child.

“I'm darker skinned, and I was always compared to my sister who was lighter skinned…she's considered the prettier one.”

Christine didn’t understand how systemic colorism was until she came to the United States. She realizes that as an Asian-American, she has certain privileges compared to her Black counterparts. “There are challenges and struggles, but I can acknowledge that there's deeper and more violent struggles and challenges towards the black community.”

I asked Christine about being nonbinary. It is how she transcends beyond gender social constructs. “I don't want to follow any rules...Masculine roles need to look vulnerable, loving, kind, compassionate, and female roles can look courageous and assertive and be fierce and powerful.”

Christine uses the pronouns she, her, and siya (pronounced sha), a gender-neutral pronoun in Tagalog.

As a transformation coach with Conscious Thrive, Christine helps underrepresented executives and leaders to reconnect with their authentic selves so they can live and lead consciously and create impact on their own terms.

Next week I interview Ozzie Gonzalez on the Companies That Care podcast. I used to work with Ozzie at CH2M HILL. Last year he was Portland’s first Latino candidate for mayor. We talked about what he’s doing now, Portland, Mexico, and sustainability.

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This week I interview Nono Osuji, a first-generation American whose parents immigrated from Nigeria. Nono is a writer, producer, and actor. She is living with lupus, which is hard enough. She’s also living with being “Broke, Gifted, and Black,” the title of her podcast. We had a gritty, deep-down conversation about race in this country.

Nono is the youngest in her family, born to her parents after they’d immigrated with their three children to the U.S. She had a huge desire to assimilate, so she adopted an English name, Cynthia, because teachers would botch her name. For much of her childhood, she shunned being Nigerian because it made her different.

When Nono was in grad school, she got diagnosed with lupus. She sought help from eastern medicine and began getting expensive injections and paying for them out of pocket. That could not last long as a grad student living in New York, so after two years when her hair started falling out, she moved home to Texas so her parents could help. “Less than a year later, I was hospitalized for the first time with kidney failure due to lupus.” She was put on high-dose steroids, which caused her to develop severe edema.

“I felt like this thing had robbed me of the life I wanted. I was supposed to be working in film and media...I wasn't supposed to be frequenting doctor’s offices and taking 67 pills a day…that wasn't supposed to be my life and it just put me in a very deep depression.”

Although Nono’s lupus is not currently active, it has ravaged her kidneys, with only 16 percent kidney function. Her best hope is a kidney transplant. She’s found solace in being part of a community of artists and starting her “Broke, Gifted, and Black” podcast. I asked her about generational trauma and the latest trauma facing Black people.

First we talked about the death of Prince Philip and how he was part of the colonization of Nigeria. Because of its oil interests, Britain supplied Nigeria with weapons and military intelligence, used to slaughter a million Igbo people, Nono’s tribe, and created a nation that never should have been a nation.

Nono had some passionate thoughts about policing in America. “There can be no good cops in a system that does not allow it...When your job is literally to protect state property, whether it is a person or a thing, it is not meant to have good cops when the other part of your job is to build revenue, it is all about money and power and systemic racism…the history of policing in America is simply continuing what we see today.”

Nono and I agreed that the system needs to be dug out from its core, completely redone. “We have police living above the law with qualified immunity. We have police that don't face any financial repercussions because the payouts come from the city taxpayers. So how do you have a system where you don't go to jail and you don't pay anything?”

Nono volunteers with an organization called Texas Organizing Project, which works to better the lives of black and Latino communities.

Nono shared her experience of being pulled over because she had Texas license plates. She challenged the cop on why, so he arrested her for outstanding parking tickets.

After discussing racism and policing in America, we moved onto “Lovecraft Country.”

We concluded by talking about Nono’s podcast, “Broke, Gifted, and Black,” about the entertainment industry and interviews with gifted people who turned their art into a living.

“Just think of what it would actually be like if we had equity, just think of how much better our world would be and when you help to lift the least among us, all of us get better. It's our responsibility. There's no other choice.”

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Murielle Fellous bounced back after a depression while raising three teenagers as a single mom and living with Hepatitis B. Originally born and raised in France, she founded the "Single Moms Doing It All" coaching practice and podcast.

Muriel grew up near Paris, raised to be “very proper.” For example, she was trained not to speak too loudly on the subway and to be very polite. When Murielle was 18, she went to college in Israel and experienced freedom for the first time in her life. She met her ex-husband there, and moved to the United States with him.

Murielle learned to be more direct and less proper, preparing her for what she would have to face as a single mom later in life. She got divorced about 15 years ago when her youngest was 2. “I had to be the everything for my kids…the financial support, the emotional support, and it's still like that today.”

Unfortunately things became more difficult when Murielle contracted hepatitis B. When her youngest two became teens, everything went crazy in her life. She dreamt her daughter was going to end up dead in the street. She slowly spiraled into depression. Then one night she woke up in tears, feeling the power within herself that assisted her to heal.

“Suddenly I was able to admit that I don't like my life…it was like almost an abomination, to say something like that. In my head it made me a bad mother.”

She realized that the fact she didn't like her life, yet also loved her kids, didn't negate each other.

“That opened the door to freedom, because I let go of the shame and the self-judgment, and I started healing.”

She doubled down on self-care practices, which are the tools she now gives her clients. Murielle knows the pain and worry of being a single parent and doesn’t want anyone to go through what she experienced.

Self-doubt has been the most challenging thing about being a single parent. She has also struggled in not having a partner to bounce ideas off of in parenting challenges.

The biggest blessing of being a single mom is the freedom to do whatever you want and not have to negotiate. Also, she has developed an incredible bond with her kids.

I asked Murielle what advice she has for single moms with teens. “Don't take things personally. Don't, because you're going to get hurt, and when you get hurt, your stress center is on alert and your body is preparing for fight or flight…you can't find your own inner resources. You're all emotion and you're like fire.”

Murielle suggests having a mantra, telling yourself it’s not personal, they're growing, they're pushing the limits…and love is under all that.

Muriel is proud of herself for going for her dream, even though it’s not easy being a single mom, having a day job, and starting her business on the side.

“ When my one of my daughters had to do a project in high school, and they were talking about the American Dream and success, my daughter picked me. She said, 'you're an immigrant and you were on your own and you inspired me because you still went for it.'”

She has a podcast, provides one-on-one and group coaching, and also has a free “Get Back to Peace Kit for Moms,” which includes a meditation and visualization and a tapping session, an emotional freedom technique to calm yourself down after an argument so you can come back to your senses and to your centered place.

Next week, I launch my new podcast: Companies That Care!

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I’ve turned away several white guys on my podcast. When I started this podcast, I wanted to invite people who do not get a platform to share their stories. I’ve interviewed 50+ people, including 38 women, 24 people of color, 12 immigrants, 12 who identify as LBGTQIA+, and only 7 men.

Dr. Chuck Bergman is the first white man I have interviewed, along with his wife Susan. When I was a 20-year-old junior at PLU, he inspired me to become a writer and taught me an important lesson about resilience.

Chuck has won several awards and published 5 books and 150 articles in prominent magazines. He has led PLU student tours to Ecuador, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Tanzania, and Uganda, and six tours to Antarctica.

Susan is a professional coach and leadership consultant who has worked with Dr. Brené Brown and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She has researched and written about resilience in the workplace and in life.

Every Penguin in the World: A Quest to See Them All is the story of their effort to see each of the world's 18 species of penguins in the wild. It is a story of overcoming challenges and health issues. They believe penguins are creatures of hope and resilience.

Penguins also offer the therapeutic effects of laughter. “You can't watch them without laughing. There's just something about being in their company that is really gratifying and restorative…they will definitely make you laugh.”

Chuck recounted an intimate encounter with a King Penguin on South Georgia Island. He got down on his stomach to take a photo, and a penguin started pecking at his boots and biting his pants. He looked him in the face and made a loud, hoarse call. Each penguin has its own call, and children recognize their parents through their calls. “When the penguin does that call, it's saying, ‘this is who I am’ and asking who are you. Your job is to answer. That really put me on notice. Who am I, really? And who am I in relationship to all these penguins in the earth that we love?”

On Susan and Chuck’s 10th wedding anniversary, they were volunteering to study and conserve African Penguins on Robben Island in South Africa. Susan was holding a penguin chick, and she realized it was their tenth species of penguin. Chuck noted it was their 10th anniversary and they had a “10 for 10” record. “That's when we decided to go for all 18.”

Susan recounted one of the grueling stories in the book involving a life-or-death river crossing in New Zealand. Another memorable story involves their journey to see Emperor Penguins in Antarctica. Chuck almost missed his once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Listen to the podcast or read the book to hear these stories.

“The big threat for climate change for penguins is warming oceans…the cold water current is shifting 200 miles to the south…the penguins have to swim farther to get food for their babies, and it makes it harder for them to catch fish and to get it back to their babies…their babies are malnourished so it's harder for young penguins to grow to adulthood.”

Susan survived Stage 3 breast cancer, and Chuck revealed in the book he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. When Chuck got diagnosed, he describes it as a sobering moment. “All of us are only one doctor's visit away from our mortality… penguins live in such daunting circumstances and can be such delightful creatures…it just became a model for me.”

Chuck views their penguin quest as a spiritual journey. “I began thinking of it as a pilgrimage…for me this became a deepening interest in seeing more deeply into the mystery of things.

Listen to the podcast to hear their memories of low and high points of their quest.

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Shannon Whaley overcame sexual abuse and assault, a toxic childhood, and drug and alcohol abuse.

Shannon had a troubled childhood full of sexual abuse and trauma. She doesn’t remember how old she was when it all started. It was just life.

She had no safe person to tell what was going on, feeling unseen and unheard. Even though she began getting in trouble at a very young age, no one seemed to recognize the symptoms of abuse. When she was around 10, she started to realize something wasn’t right. The friends she asked about it were also being abused by family members, so they told Shannon it was just the way things were. Shannon has gone through many years of EMDR and talk therapy to cope with the trauma.

I feel so sad for little Shannon, just imagining what life must have been like for her. Because she lacked trusted adults in her life, she set out on a path of hyper-independence. Leaving for college at 17, Shannon never returned home.

Shannon began smoking when she was 12, and that escalated into alcohol, marijuana, LSD, mushrooms, meth, and cocaine. By the time she was 33, she realized she needed to get her act together. She decided to shake up her life and move to the Cayman Islands. Unfortunately she brought her drinking problem along with her.

Six months after moving to the Cayman Islands, she became a blackout drinker, even though she was trying to stop. After a few scares when she passed out in public, she finally realized she wasn’t having fun any more.

Fortunately she had moved in with a friend who was sober. With his help and her own white-knuckled commitment, Shannon was able to find recovery by not going out much in public and avoiding the party life of the island. She dove into fitness, including yoga, to distract herself.

I’m amazed by Shannon’s strength and fortitude to find recovery on her own. In 2017 she felt done with island life and decided to pursue her dream to move to Italy. She got a visa to study Italian, and she declared she’d either find her husband or figure something out by the end of the year. Within ten weeks, she had met her husband, Stefano, on the beach.

She enjoys the chill vibe of Italy, especially because they live in a beach town. She does find the language to be challenging, as well as the Italian tendency to push and shove, but COVID has brought its own blessings, such as six-foot bubbles and previously unheard-of Italian queues.

I found it surprising Shannon describes herself as a hermit because she lives her life out loud on social media with her confidence, purple hair, and tattoos. Shannon’s business, Wild Woman Coaching, helps women share their stories to heal themselves and heal others. She’s committed to give 10 percent of her income to organizations that focus on the liberation of Black and brown people.

I marveled at Shannon’s wonderful spirit of independence and courage to take to the road after what she endured as a child.

I find Shannon’s story to be incredibly inspirational. She’s one more example of how difficult experiences just make you stronger and more resilient. View photos and more details in this blog post.

Next week I have something completely different. Did you know penguins can teach us about resilience? I interviewed my former English professor, Chuck Bergman, an award-winning writer and photographer, and his wife Susan Mann, a resilience expert. Chuck and Susan took on a quest to see each of the world's 18 species of penguins in the wild. Chuck documented their adventures

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If you like what you hear today, visit my Fertile Ground Communications page on Patreon and find out how you can support my work.

Brigitte Ayoub is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants. She grew up experiencing the challenges of finding her place as an American with Arab roots. Right after leaving her corporate job to start her own business in April 2018, her dad died…then her mom was diagnosed with leukemia the following year. Brigitte believes that “we have two choices every day, to sit and lament, or face the adversity with courage and choose to lean into it.” She has chosen the latter option.

Brigitte grew up as the youngest of three in a mostly white, affluent area in the Philadelphia suburbs. She struggled to find her place between Palestinian culture and modern American culture.

In addition to being tall, she had olive skin and felt like the hairy Arab girl. Her parents also were strict, so that made her stand out among her peers even more. She sought her comfort in food.

As a Palestinian, Brigitte often feels misunderstood. Many people assume all Palestinians are Muslim, but her family falls into the 20 percent of Palestinians who are Christian.

Brigitte’s parents fled for safety. Her father carried his little brother on his back while they were fleeing Palestine, and her mom taught in a refugee camp in Lebanon. While Brigitte’s classmates were focused on boys, she felt beyond her years with a completely different world view.

Brigitte left her corporate role in April 2018 to pursue a health coaching practice. The month before, her father had open heart and quadruple bypass surgery. Unfortunately he passed away in August.

She had been taking clients at her dad’s bedside, working hard to make her new business work. Within a few months, she had to grapple with grief. And then her mom was diagnosed with leukemia on Christmas Eve in 2019. Then a few months later, COVID hit.

“I think the biggest thing I've leaned into is believing that everything happens for me and not to me, and I've laid that as my foundation to being an entrepreneur. It's always about trusting yourself and I trust myself. I trust that my higher power has been here for a certain reason and has everything laid out. I can only see this step. But someone or something bigger than me sees the staircase.”

I asked Brigitte what she finds most gratifying about being an entrepreneur.

“Nothing beats seeing a client who literally told me she has stumbled and struggled with a problem for two years in her business, and she gained that clarity within 20 minutes of working together.”

Brigitte and I spoke about the experience of being an entrepreneur and the fact that not everyone is well suited to it. She says it’s 70% mindset and then 30% strategy and execution.

“At the end of the day, it really comes down to being energetically aligned and what's going to set your soul on fire.”

The Finding Fertile Ground podcast is brought to you by Fertile Ground Communications. If you enjoyed this podcast, please give us a rating and subscribe to hear our next episode.

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Read more about Stefanie and view photos here.

Stefanie Michele suffered with eating disorders including bulimia, binge eating, and orthorexia for 20 years. She was born the oldest of three in an Italian family with strongly defined gender roles. Her father was overweight and always dieting. As he got larger, he tried to control his kids’ weight.

She ended up dieting to the point where she became anorexic by age 16. People thought she had just become really lean. She knew she had a problem and asked for help, but no one else seemed to care.

She entered college with bulimia, but her parents were just happy she was putting the weight back on. During her sophomore year of college, she came home from college and demanded help from her parents. That’s when she started receiving therapy.

We talked about the comments people with eating disorders receive when they start losing weight. Our neighbor took one look at me and she said, oh look at you, there's not an ounce of fat on you. And there wasn't…she said it with such longing like, ‘Ah, you're so good.’”

When she was 19, she went into a treatment center and received valuable help from a therapist who helped her work through issues from her upbringing and her sense of self. But the treatment did not improve her symptoms. None of the therapy she received over 20 years helped her symptoms.

“I struggled through age 38. During my pregnancies I was still going to therapy, but I was still bingeing and even purging. I basically just thought I'm broken. No amount of anything seems to fix me.”

We talked about whether Stefanie was predisposed to eating disorders. By nature, she was a creative, intense, and introspective child. She had to suppress her true self, being called out as different.

Later in her 30s, Stefanie became obsessed with clean eating and health and developed a new eating disorder called orthorexia, fueled by the wellness culture.

I asked her what woke her up and helped her shift beyond her eating disorders, since therapy didn’t help. She can’t define one single moment, but rather it was a collection of things when she was around 38.

“I had just had my third daughter, and the fact that they're all daughters did not escape me. I felt this huge sense of responsibility for the fact that I was raising girls and yet I could not accept my own body and had this incredibly disordered relationship with food. My oldest was beginning to notice that there were certain days that I didn't eat anything and that my dinners were always different than hers…it made me really afraid.”

She was also aware of approaching 40 and facing another decade of eating disorders and more shame. At the time she was a sugar detox coach, actually coaching people into orthorexia by fear mongering about GMOs and sugar. She began to feel that what she was doing was wrong.

When she read an article called “Smash the Wellness Industry” by Jessica Knoll, at first she rejected it as ridiculous. But the more she thought about it, she began to see herself as what she was.

On her 40th birthday, she read a book called The Fck-It Diet* , about how dieting increases our weight and destroys our relationship with food…and that the only way out is to allow yourself to eat whatever you want. In all the therapy she’d received, she’d never received this message.

The book changed her life. “My life opened up after I healed…I'm one of my only friends who's excited to be in my 40s. I feel like I have a lot of living to do and I embrace it.”

Now she’s enjoying food like she never did before, especially sushi, pasta, and mint chip ice cream!

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Note: this episode contains adult content.

Leah Carey tried to be a “good girl” for decades before waking up sexually in her early 40s. She had a rough childhood. Her dad was an alcoholic and emotionally abused Leah and her mom. He spoke to Leah sexually about her body and told her she was fat and ugly. Later he said he was going to lock her in her room until she was 30 and break the kneecaps of any boy who showed interest in her. This combination of verbal abuse and protectiveness led her to feel confused.

When her dad died, it sent Leah into a black hole of depression, sinking further until she was nonfunctional. When she started having suicidal ideations, she realized that she was not okay. Because she had very little money, she went to a free health clinic and got the medication that she needed.

By the time her mom passed away from cancer in 2015, they had formed a healing relationship. She sold her mom’s house in New Hampshire and took a solo road trip around the US. During that trip she realized she had never had pleasurable sexual sensations.

She experienced great healing from tantric massage in New York City, which set her on a new path: "you are not broken." Her massage therapist gave her homework to "play with sensation,” so she used the road trip to do that. She didn’t have to be the "good girl" anymore. She had incredible experiences, discovering she is allowed to be sexual.

Leah believes that taking control of our sexuality, speaking up for our needs and talking honestly about what really matters, is the essence of goodness, kindness, and integrity….and that’s the kind of good girl she wants to be.

After Leah shared herstories with her girlfriends, they started telling her their sex stories, too. So she started a podcast a few years ago called “Good Girls Talk about Sex,” in which she interviews women, queer, and nonbinary folx about their sex lives, usually anonymously.

Leah offers sex and intimacy coaching to people who grew up socialized as little girls; hosts “Good Girls Talk About Sex” PJ parties; and leads training. She helps people find their authentic sexual selves and teaches how to communicate with their partners.

Leah shared her own recent challenges with sex in “My Pandemic Sex Life,” in which she “gets raw and real about how her intimate life has weathered the storm of a year-long international crisis, and about how confronting her partner’s depression spiral turned out to be a better strategy than enduring it competently.” We spoke about the damage the pandemic is having on people who lack physical touch.

When I asked Leah which grit and resilience story has been an inspiration for her, she mentioned the stories of Harry Potter. She is still trying to ascertain how to engage with those stories and their meaning while making peace for herself (because of JK Rowling’s transphobia).

Leah and I also geeked out about the Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast. At the end of that podcast, the co-hosts choose a character in the chapter they’re discussing to bless. Leah mentioned that in the first episode, Vanessa chose to bless Harry’s mean, verbally abusive Aunt Petunia.

She tries to see people who have done wrong as people who have been harmed. The vast majority of people who become abusers were hurt themselves as children.

I suggested that our homework, in light of this conversation, should be to bless JK Rowling. She’s our Aunt Petunia.

Next week I interview Stefanie Bonastia, who suffered with eating disorders for over 20 years. After decades of extensive therapy, she created her own formula for healing and made a full recovery. She started her own business to help others do the same.

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Warning: This episode contains adult content.

Madeleine Black survived a gang rape at age 13. Since I was sexually assaulted at 13 as well, we had a tender conversation about how this experience changed our lives.

Madeleine was born to two survivors. Her dad survived the Holocaust and her mum had her neck broken in a childhood surgery and woke up bedridden. Her parents handled their own trauma by just living their lives and carrying on.

When Madeline was 13, a “really cool” friend asked her over because her mom was away from home. They lied about where they were staying. They bought a bottle of vodka and took it to the local café. Since she had never drunk alcohol before, it didn’t take her long to get drunk. Soon she began throwing up, and two young men offered to take them home in a taxi.

“It became obvious very quickly they weren't there to let me sleep off the alcohol…they were there for something else, and the two of them proceeded to rape and torture me over the next four to five hours.”

Madeleine’s body went into shock and she had an out-of-body experience. As a therapist, she knows that this often happens when the trauma is overwhelming.

“Our stories are not uncommon and yet still we struggle to speak out about it. Still not many people will talk openly because of the shame that is so wrapped up in the event…it took me years to realize the shame never belonged to me. It always belonged to them.”

When Madeleine woke up and remembered what happened, she was terrified to tell anyone. They cleaned up the flat and decided not to speak about it. On some subconscious level, she had bought into the rape myths and already thought it was her fault.

Her life spiraled out of control after the experience, and it all came to a head when she stayed out late one night and her mum confronted her. Her parents suggested she go away for a while, so she went to Israel. While living there she met a wonderful Scotsman, the first man she felt safe with. They’ve been together now for 37 years.

Madeleine became a therapist because of her dad’s experience surviving Auschwitz. She also helped survivors of domestic abuse and rape. Only when training as a rape crisis hotline worker did she understand she was living with undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder.

Madeleine decided to go public with her story six years ago when she was invited to share it through an organization called The Forgiveness Project. She published her memoir, Unbroken, about three months before the #metoo movement started up again.

Then she was invited to share her story at TEDx Glasgow. It has taken years of therapy to work through her trauma. It’s been a huge process. She has found a way to forgive her attackers, calling herself an “accidental forgiver.” She views her forgiveness as an act of self-love.

Madeleine started “Unbroken The Podcast with Madeleine Black” to help heal, motivate, inspire, and bring hope to others.

This conversation touched my heart. I wish that my 13-year-old self could have spoken to Madeleine’s 13-year-old self and said, “#metoo.”

Next week I share the story of Leah Carey, who tried to be a “good girl” for decades before waking up sexually in her early 40s. Now she is a sex coach and educator, in addition to host of the “Good Girls Talk About Sex” podcast.

View photos and more details about Madeleine Black on my website.

Fertile Ground Communications LLC is a certified women-owned business enterprise, disadvantaged business enterprise, and emerging small business.

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Trigger warning: This episode contains some mature content. View photos and read more info here.

This week I launch my “Healing Herself” series with four women who have survived body issues, sexual assault, shame, and trauma. Elena Joy Thurston is an LGBTQ speaker, trainer, and founder of the Pride and Joy Foundation, dedicated to reducing the rate of suicide and homelessness in the LGBTQ community. A Mormon mom of four who lost her marriage, church, and community when she came out as a lesbian, Elena’s TEDx talk on surviving conversion therapy has been viewed 40,000+ times.

“By the time I was 16 I was feeling the effects of a chaotic family life of parents who could not figure out how to get along and who could not figure out how to be stable adults.”

When her friend introduced her to a church that promised stability, she jumped at the chance to learn how to have a functional family. She married at 20 and had four kids by age 33.

When her youngest went off to kindergarten, she had six hours to think for herself every day. She realized how unhappy she was, but she was ashamed she wasn’t happy.

She sought out hobbies, but even they didn’t fill up enough time…until she found fly fishing and a friendship that blossomed into love with another woman.

For three weeks she went behind her husband’s back, falling in love while feeling like a total wreck. Because she is a bad liar, her husband figured it out. “It wasn't even an option for me to leave him. I had sinned....I needed to repent.”

The next day she started the “repentance process.” Six weeks later, she couldn’t stop thinking about her new love. Enter conversion therapy. Elena’s therapist believed that if you are attracted to someone of the same sex, it was because something happened to you when you were a kid.

For the first few months Elena got some benefit from the four-days-a-week sessions, healing from chaotic family memories. But it didn’t seem like she was “getting better.” At one point she considered suicide, like many others who have undergone conversion therapy.

One day Elena shared with her therapist that she was gang raped at age 15. Her therapist was “overjoyed,” believing that was the key to her attraction to women. Then the Brett Kavanaugh hearings happened, which was a traumatic period for every survivor.

“I'm getting chills just thinking about that week. To have to hear her own trauma be put on display in front of all of those men and then to be mocked and ridiculed was just horrific. I honestly feel like our entire generation of women is going to need to heal from that experience.”

As she was reading news and hearing her own sons say words like “we can’t actually believe her,” she saw headlines saying that 3/4 of American women have been assaulted at some time in their life. Elena had an epiphany. “I finally put the dots together. If 75% of American women have been assaulted, 75% of women are not gay. I had been deceived so badly.”

Three years later, Elena is at a great place, founder of the Pride and Joy Foundation, which serves the LBGTQIA community.

Three years after leaving her Mormon life, she is healing herself one day at a time.

Next week’s “Healing Herself” guest is Madeleine Black, who survived a gang rape at the tender age of 13. She has a viral TED talk; her own podcast, Unbroken; and a book.

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Cindy Van Arnam has faced a lifetime of mountains…starting when her dad passed away when she was 16 years old. For 23 years, she created a “mountain” in every choice she made about her life. From cocaine addiction and abusive relationships, to travelling to foreign countries without a plan, she was always seeking a way to make life hard for herself. She finally understood she was the mountain that didn’t need to be there. Now she helps entrepreneurs fully discover their own limitless power so they can create sustainable wealth through self-mastery.

Cindy had a happy childhood, growing up on a chicken farm in Alberta, Canada. Cindy’s dad was her biggest cheerleader, a mechanical engineer turned farmer. He always told Cindy she could do, be, or have anything she wanted in life. Then when she was 16, he suddenly passed away. In grief at losing her biggest fan, Cindy reacted by making self-destructive decisions.

Although she had been a straight A student, her grades started failing. After high school she fell in with the wrong crowd, continuing to make bad decisions. She got addicted to cocaine and had a series of abusive relationships.

After she’d gone for a week without food or sleep and she was high as a kite, her mom looked at her and asked her, “are you okay?” When Cindy responded that she was not, her mom sent her to stay at a friend’s house, where she detoxed and recovered for three weeks. She never had formal drug treatment. “From there, I decided that I was going to take control of my life…”

She decided to leave Canada and start over. “I chose to travel to countries where if you do drugs, it's the death penalty….I lived in Indonesia and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.”

She returned home when her mom got sick and almost died. But she fell in with the same crowd again and started making poor decisions again. Cindy then decided to go work on the pipelines in Saskatchewan and get her act together. Moving back to BC, she worked as a bartender until she had to defend herself one night with a baseball bat. She realized she was better than this.

When she got home, at 3:00 a.m., she started researching career options. The next day she applied to college and went back to school to study event promotions. Halfway through college, though, she realized what she really wanted to do was to start her own business. She took her power back.

Now Cindy specializes in quantum numerology and universal laws. Cindy explains that by just looking at our date of birth, numerologists can tell us the foundation of our personality, some of our key sabotages to watch out for, our biggest challenges, and some of the major possibilities available to us…and how to operate within that mathematical code.

I asked Cindy how numerology and universal laws helped her heal her old wounds of drug addiction, emotional abuse, and trauma. “The number one tool I have used is forgiveness and understanding my journey of addiction and poor decisions...I needed to forgive myself.”

Cindy’s journey of self-awareness and understanding has made her realize that the decisions she made in her 20s led her to who she is today, so she looks back at that time of her life with gratitude.

I marveled at how Cindy has created her life through her incredible self-awareness and innate wisdom about what she is meant to do with her life. "I follow the breadcrumbs in my life and I follow my passion."

On Cindy’s podcast, Rebel Radio, she talks with entrepreneurs who want to dive into self-mastery and wealth. She jumped into podcasting almost a year ago, and she’s already in every country except North Korea. Check out Rebel Radio here.

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My final “Writer on Resilience” is Marianne Monson. I discovered her through Frontier Grit: The Unlikely True Stories of Daring Pioneer Women, on my top books list in 2017. She also wrote Women of the Blue and Gray: Civil War Mothers, Medics, Soldiers, and Spies and Her Quiet Revolution: A Novel of Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon. Marianne’s books contain rich stories of diverse women.

Born in Boston, Marianne spent her childhood moving around the country. She relied on books and writing as a way to process her experience and find connection.

I asked Marianne to elaborate on some of the women in Frontier Grit.

Aunt Clara Brown was born into slavery and like so many enslaved peoples, she watched her family be sold at auction. After gaining her freedom she migrated to Colorado, building a laundry business with miners. She accepted payments as mining stakes and claims and became one of the wealthiest women in the west. She used that money to help formerly enslaved people move north. She spent her life looking for her daughter and found her four years before she died.

Abigail Scott Duniway is Oregon’s most famous suffragette. Abigail traveled west as a teenager on the Oregon Trail. By the time they’d reached Oregon, her mother and brother had died and the family was penniless. Abigail married and had six children, and when her husband became disabled, she began supporting the family. For 40 years she advocated for women’s suffrage, and in 1912 Oregon became the seventh state to pass a women's suffrage amendment. She was the first woman to vote in Multnomah County.

Makaopiopio, a Latter Day Saints convert from Hawaii, was the most difficult to research because she was raised in an oral society. She and her husband moved to Utah and founded a Hawaiian colony in the desert of Iosepa.

Donaldina Cameron was an immigrant from New Zealand who worked in San Francisco's Chinatown fighting sex trafficking rings. She had an uncanny ability to find where these girls were hidden.

Martha Hughes Cannon was born in Wales and immigrated to Utah as a young child. Although she entered a polygamous marriage, she was one of the first Mormon feminists. Martha became a frontier doctor, the first female state senator, an advocate for women’s suffrage, and a public health activist.

Marianne’s book, Women of the Blue and Grey: Civil War Mothers, Medic Soldiers and Spies shares diverse stories of women spies, medical workers, writers, and soldiers.

Harriet Tubman's spy activities are often overlooked. Harriet designed and led the Combahee River raid, a remarkable and intricate event. She led 150 black Union soldiers and liberated 700 enslaved people. More than 100 of those freed slaves joined the Union army.

Dr. Mary Walker, asurgeon, fought to receive the recognition she deserved for her dedication, skills, and intelligence. She was captured by the confederacy and ended up having health problems as a result of her time in prison. She was also a pioneer for dress reform. When she married, she wore a skirt with trousers, refused to include "obey" in her vows, and kept her last name, a pioneer after my own heart!

This blog post contains more details about the episode, photos, and links to purchase Marianne's books.

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This week my third “Writer on Resilience” is Julie Lythcott-Haims, writer, speaker, and former corporate lawyer and Stanford dean. Her first book was How to Raise an Adult, an anti-helicopter parenting manifesto. I read her moving and inspiring second book, Real American: A Memoir, which was my top nonfiction read for 2020. She has a third book coming out in April: Your Turn: How to Be an Adult.

What better day to launch this interview with Julie than the first day of Black History Month? Julie was descended from immigrants and an African who was enslaved. She is Black and biracial, daughter of an African-American father and a white, British mother. She grew up mostly in white spaces, which affected her ability to develop a healthy sense of self.

Throughout her childhood, Julie experienced microaggressions like a friend who loved “Gone With the Wind” telling her she thought of Julie as “normal, not Black.” In high school her locker was defaced with the N-word. And when she got into Stanford, the parent of a friend doubted her academic credentials, as if she had only been let in because of her race. She didn’t know then how lonely she felt.

Julie’s book Real American was like a love letter to her parents and their stories. Their marriage was considered illegal in 14 states when they got married, and both of them had incredible childhood and family stories. They both broke a lot of glass ceilings. She wishes her parents had realized she could have benefited from being around other people of color who could mentor and reassure her.

Stanford was the first place for Julie to be in a healthy population of people of color. She hoped she would find a sense of connection and belonging…but she soon realized that the rest of the Black kids had something in common that she lacked: a lived, conscious committedness to issues that impact Black people.

Julie’s dad told her that white boys would be her friend but would never date her. In Real American, she reflects that she married a white Jewish man as a route to belong in America. Her husband, Dan, is an artist and worked as primary caregiver for their family for much of their marriage. Julie realizes now she was trained to please white people, so of course she would end up with a white person. If she had waited to settle down until she loved the Blackness in her, it’s possible she might have ended up with a person of her color.

When I interviewed Julie, it was shortly after the insurrection in the capital and before we inaugurated our first Black and biracial VP, Kamala Harris. I told her I felt her title Real American seems more important than ever. Julie wrote that Trayvon Martin’s death was her personal Pearl Harbor, the line demarcating before and after she knew Blackness is the core chord in her life, because she is raising a Black son.

While the white nationalists that stormed the capital call themselves patriots and people have been saying this is not what we are as America, Julie can trace her ancestry back to Sylvie, a slave who worked on a plantation in Charleston, SC. You can read Julie’s thoughts about the insurrection here.

“I feel that I'm more a real American than ever. I think we're all real Americans…I don't feel in any way diminished by this. I feel sad, I feel emboldened. I feel I have to do my part to rescue our democracy from the clutches of these sorts of willful lies and conspiracy theories.”

For more details on my conversation with Julie, view photos, learn about her books on helicopter parenting, and purchase her books, visit this fuller-detailed blog post.

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The second “Writer on Resilience” is one of my favorites, Sujata Massey. Born to an Indian father and a German mother, Sujata's family immigrated to the US when she was five. She found it difficult to make friends, experiencing prejudice and xenophobia. She was glad to put high school behind her when she started at Johns Hopkins.

Sujata was lucky to get a job as a features reporter straight out of college. She never would have left her job if she hadn’t fallen in love with her best friend in college and moved to Japan.

After returning home, Sujata published her first Rei Shimura book, The Salaryman’s Wife. People described Sujata’s first book as “sly, sexy, and deftly done.” Rei is an English teacher in Tokyo who goes on a vacation to the Japanese Alps and finds the body of a Japanese executive’s wife in the snow. The Rei Shimura books are my favorite detective series.

Sujata then set out to write about the colonial experience from an Indian woman’s viewpoint. “So many historical novels I’ve read about the colonial period are from a British point of view, and if any Indian characters play a role...it’s never an Indian woman.”

I remembered that her protagonist renames herself Kamala, so I asked Sujata how she felt about our new VP.

“I’m hoping Kamala Harris finds out about my books, because I think they are made for her...I imagine her going through her childhood with a lot of the things said to her that were said to me…and yet she kept on going...She seems like someone who can show us what it means to have different sides to who you are.”

Perveen Mistry Series

Next Sujata decided to combine the two things she loves. “I wanted to tell the story of feminism in India, and I thought this would be a good way to do it through the vehicle of a mystery.”

This is what I wrote after reading The Widows of Malabar Hill:

"An Oxford-educated, multilingual Parsi woman in 1921, Perveen is one of the first female lawyers in India, inspired by the real Cornelia Sorabji. Perveen's parents encourage her education and career, but they still want her to get married. The novel covers the travails of her personal life and professional work. She helps her dad with a case of a rich Muslim man who has died and left three widows behind. The women are in purdah, so Perveen is best suited to speak to them. She becomes concerned because their husband's agent plans to give away their inheritance. When she begins to investigate the situation, a murder occurs and things escalate."

All of Sujata’s characters are fully fleshed, independent women of color. I asked about her inspiration. “When I was young, it was the 1970s feminist movement. I remember knowing who Gloria Steinem was, reading Ms. Magazine. So it was very normal to think about women’s rights. If I was going to write books about women in India, I wanted to show the strength of women in India.”

Library Journal said about Sujata’s second in the series, The Satapur Moonstone: “Edgar finalist Massey’s second whodunit featuring Perveen Mistry is even better than the series’ impressive debut…The winning, self-sufficient Perveen should be able to sustain a long series.”

Her third book in the series, The Bombay Prince, will be published in June.

Interviewing an author I've admired for 20 years was a thrill! You can buy Sujata's books and other books discussed at the Finding Fertile Ground Bookshop link, which supports local bookstores.

Read more about Sujata and other Writers of Resilience.

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“There was no part of me back in high school that ever thought I could be a writer…When I headed off to university, one of the criteria I used for picking my courses was that there was no essay requirement. And I graduated without writing a single essay.”

Cathy Marie Buchanan is the first author in my “Writers on Resilience” series. She has published three historical novels: The Day the Falls Stood Still , The Painted Girls, and Daughter of Black Lake. Cathy grew up in Niagara Falls, Ontario.

The Day the Falls Stood Still

Cathy treasures memories of growing up among the stunning beauty of Niagara falls. She grew up hearing about William Red Hill, who rescued people from the river.

Set during WWI, The Day the Fall Stood Still is an homage to Cathy’s hometown, and it was on my Best Books for 2010 list. It’s a love story between Bess Heath, who comes from an upper-class family, and river man Tom Cole, based on William Red Hill.

Cathy’s novels have spirited, strong women who face great hardships. Her novels are also full of strong sister relationships, influenced by growing up with three sisters.

The Painted Girls

The Painted Girls is about sisters and ballet dancers Marie and Antoinette Van Goethem, models for artist/sculptor Edgar Degas. Their story intertwines with three real-life murders of the day.

“…Where we assume that ballet had always been a high-minded pursuit of privileged young girls, back in 1880s Paris, it was the downtrodden, the poor young girls who were sent to the Paris Opera Ballet School to find a better life.”

Daughter of Black Lake

Daughter of Black Lake was #1 on my Best Books for 2020. Cathy was inspired in 2002, when she saw a photo of a well-preserved 2,000-year-old human body.

It’s the first century A.D. In a misty bog, life is simple–or so it seems. Sow. Reap. Honor Mother Earth, who will provide at harvest. A girl named Devout comes of age, envisioning a future of love and abundance. 17 years later, though, famine has brought struggle, and outsiders with foreign ways and military might have arrived. For Devout’s daughter Hobble, life is more troubled than her mother anticipated. But this girl has an extraordinary gift. As worlds collide and peril threatens, it will be up to her to save them all.

“I got curious about a society that practiced human sacrifice. But more than that, I was curious about the beauty and simplicity of a society that lived and breathed human rituals and was bound to the land in extraordinary ways.”

Readers have described the book as a perfect anecdote to our uncertain times.

“I liked the idea of being in a society that embraced magic. I love the idea of readers reading the book and the book opening a window onto seeing the magic that exists in their daily lives.”

It was a pure pleasure to interview my first writer who I admire and whose books I devour.

You can find photos of Cathy, her research, links to purchase her books, and more details about the interview on my website.

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Photos and more detail on my website

AmiCietta Clarke is a motivational speaker, writer, certified holistic health and empowerment coach, and attorney…plus mom to twins! After overcoming a rare autoimmune disease by changing her diet and lifestyle, AmiCietta founded Clean Body Living, a holistic health coaching practice.

AmiCietta and her family escaped the coup and civil war in Liberia when she was 12. Liberia is the only Black state in Africa never subjected to colonial rule. It was established on land acquired for freed U.S. slaves by the American Colonization Society. AmiCietta can trace her family’s history in Liberia to her great-grandfather, who moved to Liberia from Little Rock, Arkansas, when he was five. “I have roots all over the African diaspora.”

Her family lost everything when they escaped the country, fleeing with just a suitcase each, and eventually settling in New York City. AmiCietta has returned to Liberia a few times since leaving. She got to meet the first woman president of Africa, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

Moving to New York was a rough transition. The class sizes were overwhelming, and AmiCietta encountered discrimination from other kids and school officials, who didn’t think she was an A student. AmiCietta showed them when she got a full scholarship to Cornell.

In her final year of law school, she was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, a rare autoimmune disease. Her first symptom was blurred vision, which she first experienced when driving back to law school. She already had a job lined up at a big New York firm. She worked at a fast pace for eight years while experiencing blurred vision. She didn’t tell anyone at work, because she didn’t want to be treated differently.

She took immunosuppressant drugs for four years until her doctor said he didn’t want her to continue because of the side effects. Then she took steroids for two years. Preparing for surgery to remove her thymus gland, she had to stop taking the steroids…and it got worse. In addition to the blurred vision, she couldn’t move her fingers and she had trouble walking.

The doctor wanted to put her back on the steroid, but AmiCietta worried about the side effects, including diabetes, osteoporosis, and glaucoma. “He told me I didn’t have to worry about them because I was young. I was 31, and I was on a low dose.”

When she went back on the steroid, her symptoms cleared up…but just months later, she was diagnosed with osteoporosis at 32. “For me, that was a real turning point...that set me on the journey I am now.”

A naturopathic physician helped her taking steps to heal. She changed her diet, eliminated dairy, began eating organic, and reduced environmental toxins. Now AmiCietta has been medication and symptom free for ten years. “Traditional medicine definitely has its place, but it doesn’t help the body heal.”

In addition to her full-time job as an attorney, she started Clean Body Living. She’s also writing a book, in her spare time!

“When you’re going through a chronic illness, you don’t think there’s anything you can do. Your doctors tell you, take your medication, come back to me in three months. I want people to know there are so many things you can do that can help you to get better.”

The story of grit and resilience AmiCietta finds inspiring is her mom, Vera, who did everything she could for her kids and family.

“Just imagine, you’re in your 40s, you lose everything, like all your money, all your worldly possessions except a suitcase, and you have to pick up and provide for your family.”

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Carol Gavhane survived secondary infertility and pregnancy loss, ending up with two children from seven pregnancies. Pregnancies were not the only loss she experienced. Her sister died when Carol was just 27 years old. Carol’s son Henry arrived early and small and had a NICU stay. As a Korean-American raised by a single mom who spoke limited English, Carol had a hard time fitting in as a girl. Carol and her husband were inspired by their walk with secondary infertility to found Asha Blooms, a handcrafted purposeful jewelry company.

Carol's parents met in Korea on an air force base, but they divorced when she was young. Growing up in a second-generation immigrant, single-parent family was tough. Carol and her sister had to be responsible for translations. “You have to grow up a little faster than the norm…A part of me felt resentful, because other kids did not have to translate things.”

Carol’s experiences shaped who she is as an adult, and she married a man who is also mixed race.

Carol got pregnant with her first child easily, but had excessive bleeding and a difficult delivery. After the birth, Carol told her husband she didn’t want to have another baby...but 4 months later she was ready to try again. But she had an intuition the next baby would not be as easy. She soon got pregnant and had a miscarriage. It would be the first of five miscarriages.

Her doctor sent her to a fertility clinic, and she received a diagnosis of diminished ovarian reserve. The clinic recommended IVF.

The next time Carol got pregnant, it ended up being an ectopic pregnancy. Unfortunately her husband was out of town, so she went to the ER on her own with her toddler. They gave Carol methotrexate to stop the cells from growing and then she miscarried at home.

The next time she got pregnant, the embryo implanted near her c-section scar, which would jeopardize Carol’s life as the baby grew. “I don’t think people understand that when you go through loss after loss, after you see a heartbeat, it’s such a heavy grief.”

She miscarried again at home but had to have a D&C because not all of the content was removed. After the D&C the bleeding wouldn’t stop. They tried to save her uterus and her life, and she almost had to have a hysterectomy. The whole experience left her traumatized.
“I had a lot of loss, my body was worn down, I was mentally depleted, and I didn’t feel like carrying on. But somehow you find a way and day by day, one foot in front of the next…”

Her pregnancy with Henry was her last hope. At one point in the pregnancy she thought she was going to lose him. At week 33, Carol was put on bedrest. Two days later the baby was in distress, so she had to have an emergency c-section. Henry emerged weighing 3 pounds, 14 ounces and stayed in the NICU for 3 weeks.

After Henry was born, she was hit with the reality that life is fragile, and you only get one shot. Carol had an idea to create jewelry that brings people hope. She pitched her idea to her husband, and Asha Blooms was born. Asha Blooms is handcrafted, purposeful jewelry intended to uplift and inspire, “to acknowledge and empower the wearer, to remind you that you can do hard things, that you are enough, that you are loved, that you are still standing.”

Carol has also gotten involved in lobbying Congress to make fertility treatment and adoption services available to everyone.

I asked Carol whose grit and resilience story inspires her, and she said her mom, who came to this country with her husband and child. Her mom felt like she had to leave her husband, who was an alcoholic. Her mom also experienced the death of her daughter when Carol’s sister died in her 20s from a sudden heart attack. Now Carol’s mom lives about five minutes away. “My mom is living her best life right now.”

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This podcast episode contains some explicit language.

I had a lively conversation with Court Wakefield (they/them), a digital marketing leader and host of the For Folx Sake: Cultivating Inclusive Communities podcast. After surviving life as a queer in the Bible belt, Court and their wife Hollis underwent three rounds of in vitro fertilization followed by 97 days with their baby in the NICU. Hollis was also hospitalized for 25 days. Court nearly lost them both.

Court described themselves as “an obvious queer kid.” When Court was 12 or 13, their mom found some things that made her think Court was questioning their sexuality. “I remember feeling a lot of shame about it, but I also remember feeling that my mom was coming from a place of love and protection….”

Being honest with their Assembly of God church was the most painful part of coming out. The church asked them to step down from their leadership roles. Later, the church told Court that if they were quiet about their sexuality, they could return. “I felt used and abused, and I didn’t return to the church for another 6-7 years.”

Elsewhere, their experiences have been positive. When Court came out as nonbinary, their wife’s reaction was exactly what they needed. Court feels supported by the people who matter most—Hollis and their parents. In addition, Court is fortunate to work in a queer-friendly environment.

I asked Court about their pronouns, and they explained they prefer nonbinary pronouns but don’t bristle at he/him or she/her, but that’s not the case for every nonbinary person.

Court and Hollis' efforts to have a baby were complicated by the fact that Hollis had cancer and had her cervix removed. They went through a couple of rounds of intrauterine insemination and then moved onto IVF, which resulted in a successful pregnancy.

Because of Hollis’ biology, she had to have a cervical cerclage. But 22 weeks in, the cerclage started to cause tearing. Kepley arrived at 24 weeks gestation and did okay until she was three weeks old. In the middle of the night she was transferred to Children’s Health hospital, where Court is the director of digital strategy.

Kepley had to have a PDA ligation, a surgery to close an opening between the two major blood vessels leading from the heart, common in tiny preemies). Kepley also had post-PDA syndrome and a pneumothorax, so she had to be on a really intense ventilator. Eventually she got healthy enough to go home on oxygen. Kepley will turn two in January. She is still small, and they are trying to fatten her up.

Court learned an important lesson as a patient in the hospital where they worked. Court describes the hospital as really inclusive, with the right benefits and employee resource groups. But when Kepley was transferred to that hospital at 2 a.m., Court discovered the intake form had a place for mother and a place for father, but no place for their name.

“It made me realize that...every organization needs to decentralize diversity & inclusion in order to make it effective...You’ve got to have everyone in the organization feel responsible for making sure the experience they create for patient families is inclusive.”

Court decided to create the For Folx Sake: Cultivating Inclusive Communities podcast to examine topics through the lens of diversity and inclusion, so people can become better advocates. Court’s experience, in a crisis, solidified their awareness that it’s the smallest things that can create friction and anxiety.

Court’s answer to whose grit and resilience story inspires them was Kepley. “When I think about her story, I think about how resilient we are as humans...”

I believe preemies have a wisdom about them way beyond their years. Both Kepley and Christopher are resilient beyond our imaginations.

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Madison Ways is a junior in high school, trying to figure out her life after the death of her father. “My friends didn't understand my grief and weren't very nice at a time when I needed them most,” said Madison. “As a result, I lost many of them.”

Madison is my youngest guest yet. As a child, she was very close to her mom and dad and she loved to dance (tap and hip hop). She described her dad, “He was one of the kindest people I ever met, who would laugh at his own jokes or throw himself in front of a train for anyone. He inspired me in so many ways to be a better person.”

Her dad got sick with Stage 4 lung cancer when Madison was 12. After he died, she lost a lot of friends while trying to put her life back together. Introverted and shy, she finds making friends to be hard. “Grief is a time when you need your friends to be there, and when they left, that dumped a whole new pile of grief on me.”

One of the things Madison has used to occupy her time is making Tik Tok videos. Now she has 61,000 followers and 4 million+ likes. She made a poignant TikTok about her 17-year-old self, waking up in her 13-year-old body. Since her dad died, she has come out as a lesbian.

“Coming out was one of the hardest things I had to do. I live in a conservative Christian area. A friend who is Mormon said I was going to go to hell.”

I asked Madison what lessons she would pass on to someone else experiencing loss.

“You’re not crazy…you’re totally normal. Grief is confusing, and I still don’t understand it…Don’t talk badly about your friends during the anger stage…if you don’t know how to handle a stage of grief, talk to somebody and don’t just internalize it. Don’t let people tell you you’re grieving wrong. There’s no way to grieve wrong, and there’s no expiration date on your grief. You’ll be grieving for the rest of your life, and don’t let anyone tell you differently.”

Her mom wrote,

“A leader is someone who takes the sh*t sandwich that life has handed them and finds a way to persevere. They show others what is possible by the way they live their life. This girl has demonstrated leadership skills in her signature quiet gentle way but has had a bold impact. From sharing her grief journey on multiple podcasts to induction into the National Honor Society, she shows her unending courage and how to live a life aligned with values. Her dad would be so proud!”

Madison continues to be inspired by her dad:

“My dad didn’t go to college. He wanted to be an IT guy, so he studied day and night, and he became an IT guy for the IRS. He had a really good head on his shoulders, and he inspired me to be a better person.”

Next I interview Court Wakefield (they/them), a digital marketing leader in the healthcare industry and host of the For Folx Sake: Cultivating Inclusive Communities podcast. After growing up and surviving life as queer in the Bible belt, they and their wife underwent three rounds of IVF followed by 97 days in the NICU. Their wife was hospitalized for 25 days at the same time, and Court nearly lost them both.

The Finding Fertile Ground podcast is brought to you by Fertile Ground Communications. Contact us if you can use some help with your writing, editing, communications, or marketing.

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Lauren DeVera is a positive psychology practitioner, yoga + mindfulness teacher, movement artist, podcaster, and life coach. Daughter to Filipino immigrants, Lauren grew up with six older half-siblings and never felt like she fit in. Now she realizes that feeling manifested in a positive way because she is passionate about creating space for other people to feel like they belong.

When her parents divorced when she was in fifth grade, she went from living in a suburban home to a low-income apartment with her mom.

Starting ballet at an early age, she has thrived in the dance world. But she never felt like she fit in with other Filipinos. She remembers her step-grandmother taking her to the bus stop and complimenting all the white girls. “For the longest time, I wanted to be white.”

When Lauren was a child, ballet was the only dance form available. Eventually she got introduced to hip hop, opening up the opportunity to have more freedom with her body.

Since earning her bachelor’s in dance from Old Dominion University in 2010, she has made incredible strides in her career as a performer, choreographer, and educator. At the same time, she also worked in a variety of jobs. In 2013, she got accepted for a dance program in LA and quit her job with benefits to teach dance full-time. In the small pocket of time she wasn’t insured, she tore her ACL, her mom moved to California, and her relationship ended. That’s when her resilience and grit showed up again.

Forced to find another job, she took a job at a credit union but got fired because of a toxic work environment. But Lauren believes everything happens for a reason. Then she worked at a church for nearly a year.

She realized she wanted to start a class where people who love choreography and street dancers could take classes. In 2016 she quit her job again to create the Lion’s Den and Bahai Base with her then-partner. Unfortunately, he did not take care of the business and they had to close and move out within 3 days. Not only did she lose her space, but she also lost the community and felt shame from the business ending.

That summer she decided to do something for herself. Spending 10 days in New York studying yoga and dance, Lauren committed to bringing back her dance class.

The first night of her new class, 25 people showed up. That lit the match. Lion’s Den got legitimized and became an LLC, and she launched Mind Move Matter to focus on yoga and mindfulness. Once COVID hit, Lauren’s classes went online within a few days. Now her students come from all over the world.

Lauren has rebooted herself over and over again, and she knew what she wanted to do at a much younger age than me. She left corporate America because she values freedom, flexibility, and creativity. Being an entrepreneur gives us the chance to create spaces that are welcoming and supportive...doing business in a respectful, compassionate way.

This fall Lauren launched a podcast, Thrive and Thread, in which she shares meditations, mindfulness, and inspiration.

I asked Lauren about a grit and resilience story that inspires her, and she brought up her parents. “Honoring and respecting what immigrant parents have done to get here and provide for their children, it inspires me to be the best person I can be.”

Lauren is committed to empowering, educating, and equipping humans to flourish through mindfulness, movement, and mentorship. She helps folks banish burnout and live a life on purpose.

Check out Lauren’s podcast, which includes guided meditations, in addition to her YouTube channel containing yoga and barre workouts.

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Mx. Harris Eddie Hill (they/them) is host of the Transection Podcast. A seasoned LGBTQ+ advocate, Harris is an incredible resource for learning how to support transgender and nonbinary loved ones.

If someone comes out to you as trans or nonbinary, you’ll want to be prepared so you don’t risk damaging your relationship or contribute to their mental health challenges.

Before Harris knew they were transgender, something felt wrong. They would ask themselves, “am I a boy?” They never knew they could be queer.

We talked about what it’s like to be trans in the UK vs. the US. The UK has laws that say you can’t discriminate against people. The NHS pays for transition services. In the US, many trans people have to save money to pay for transition surgery. Janet Mock had to do sex work to pay for her surgery.

Even after you have your hormones, transitioning can take 2 to 5 years depending on what you need. But Harris finds that too much of the conversation is about what’s difficult. "We should be focusing more on what feels good and how we can support each other.”

It’s imperative that parents and other adults try to understand. “Just having one supportive parent or adult...can minimize the risk of suicide by 90 percent.”

I asked Harris what to do if you goof up on pronouns. They advise apologizing, correcting yourself, and moving on. Getting pronouns right shows you are an ally.

2020 has been the deadliest year in history for trans people in the U.S., especially Black trans women. We talked about Laverne Cox and her documentary “Disclosure." Just 10 days ago, Cox and a friend were attacked while out on a walk.

People often forget that trans people have reproductive health, and they shouldn’t have to misgender themselves to discuss it or get treatment.

On Harris' Transection Podcast, topics range from nonbinary and trans 101, euphoria and dysphoria, trauma and PTSD, spirituality, sex, intersectional movies, and empowering Black women.

That led us to trans-inclusive and transphobic films and J.K. Rowling. It’s disappointing someone who wrote amazing stories about oppression and prejudice could become a TERF.

Harris has created the incredible Trans+Gender Identity: A Guide for Beginners. The free guide offers a glossary, five things to know when someone comes out, three key questions to ask, and dos and don'ts.

Harris finds joy when they are able to help others find clarity or comfort. It’s gratifying to hear they are actually making a difference.

Resources:

Janet Mock, Redefining Realness and Surprising Certainty
Juno Roche, Gender Explorers
Laverne Cox, “Disclosure”
Harry Potter and the Sacred Text and Potterotica podcasts
Judith Orloff, Positive Energy Practices

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This week I interviewed Jasnam Daya Singh, born in Brazil and a Latin Grammy-nominated concert and jazz pianist and brilliant composer. He is Sikh, after growing up Catholic. Jasnam is one of the kindest, most gentle people I know.

Earlier this year, Jasnam led a 12-piece band in playing his composition, Ekta: The Unity Project. The piece embodies Jasnam’s musical interests but also expresses personal truths drawn from his journey as an immigrant and his conversion to Sikhism. You can listen to the composition on YouTube or on Spotify, or purchase it on BandCamp.

Jasnam was born in a suburb of Rio De Janeiro to loving parents, and he lived there until he was 25. He began studying piano at seven. He always thought he might move to Europe. But in 1987, when a friend told him about life in Los Angeles, Jasnam decided to move there.

He arrived in California with two pieces of luggage and $1,000, but on the second he had only $400 when the person hosting him rent free announced he had to pay rent and a deposit.

Living in LA for 2-1/2 years, Jasnam worked all kinds of day jobs while gigging at night. In 1990, he landed a gig near Monterey, and when it became a full-time gig, he decided to move there. Living there for 20 years, he was able to do music full-time. He had a daughter with his first wife, and then he met his second wife in Monterey and they had a son together.

When his son was a year and a half, his wife moved to Vancouver, WA, to get help from her parents. Jasnam joined them a few years later in 2008.

Born as Weber Ribeiro Drummond, Jasnam has changed his name twice. In 1998, he adopted the last name Iago as an homage to the Roma people. Twenty years later, he changed his name to Jasnam Daya Singh with his initiation into the Sikh religion in 2009.

“When I came across the teachings of Sikhi, they resonated with me...how universal the teachings are, the acceptance of all spiritual paths, and there’s one practice in Sikhi called Naam Simran, which is a constant remembrance of God...that idea of thinking of God with each breath really spoke to me...”

Jasnam is drawn to the core beliefs of Sikhism: remembering God through all times of day, standing up for anyone who needs you; and selflessly sharing your wealth and resources.

I asked Jasnam how people treat him in his turban. Unfortunately, people perceive turban-wearing Sikhs as threatening, foreign, and even as terrorists.

“I wish they understood what a turban stands for. That very person who might be bullying us...could count on us if he or she needed something....we are the opposite of the threat they think we are...the turban represents social justice and equality.”

In addition to wearing a turban, Sikhs carry five Ks, or kakars, on their body:

Kachhera—a loose undergarment
Kanga—a wooden comb, to take care of their hair (which they do not cut)
Kara—an iron or steel bangle
Kes—uncut hair, honoring hair growth as the intent of the creator
Kirpan—a ceremonial short sword or dagger

“If you read about Sikh history, (you’ll see that) they have gone through persecution, injustice, violence against them, and they did not allow that to change who they are....Their hardship and resolve is part of what inspired me to become one as well.”

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Last week, Ash Prasad and I discussed the need for safe workspaces. This week I covered similar themes with Joy Fowler, diversity & inclusion program manager at the Port of Portland. I met Joy 20+ years ago after we both gave birth to 24-weeker preemies. We volunteered together on Legacy Emanuel’s NICU Family Advisory Board. After Amir passed away in 2012, Joy and her husband Allen founded A MIRacle Foundation, Inc. to help special needs children.

A native New Yorker, Joy moved to Portland and got married after college. She had her son James after that. When she got divorced, her mom tried to lure her back to New York, but Joy had made friends and connected with the Zeta Sigma Omega Chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority.

Joy met Allen in a group of Portland transplants. When James was seven, Joy got pregnant. She started spotting and got put on bedrest. By 24 weeks, she knew something was not right. On September 14, 1998, Amir was born weighing 786 grams. One word to describe Amir during his NICU stay of 105 days: FEISTY!

Unfortunately, at a year and a half, Amir had his first seizure. Six months later, it happened again. The next one lasted for six hours. As he grew, the seizures kept coming. Amir wasn’t learning how to walk or talk as well as he should and he was in a wheelchair by kindergarten. Before Amir passed away, they learned he had a rare degenerative disorder. “We couldn’t have asked for a better, more determined, more driven little person than him.”

Caring for a special needs child is expensive. That’s partially why they started the foundation, to help other families. “...The day he passed away, it hit me. I just knew I had to help other children.”

They chose to honor Amir’s memory by starting A MIRacle Foundation, Inc., one of the most healing experiences Joy has ever had. They support 2,500 medically fragile children with home hospital beds, adaptive seating, wheelchairs, walkers, and supplies.

We switched gears to talk about Black Lives Matter. Joy has to be mindful that some people are coming to work traumatized, while others are trying to learn. She was glad the Port of Portland police asked to start having conversations. Working with the Alliance of Black Employees, they started weekly “conscious conversations” and have had 100-200 people participate.

Joy decided to leave banking after 34 years. She feels lucky to have found a place that feels like home. She feels a complete freedom at the Port of Portland. “It’s been one of the most liberating, eye-opening experiences.”

She gets to be her authentic self every day. She feels supported, and that has improved her health because this kind of work is hard, especially as a woman of color.

We talked about what it was like when she first started in banking. The sexism and racism took her aback. She’d make excuses, thinking, “they didn’t really mean it like that.” She overlooked a lot to get ahead. “I will not cover any more, because it can affect your health...it’s too much to bear.”

“Joy just shows up as Joy. I will never go back now that I’ve had a taste of how it makes me feel.”

"Amir taught me about love, compassion, understanding, meeting people where they’re at, leading with love, and allowing me to speak to people at multiple ends of the DEI spectrum...raising him and losing him taught me so much.”

Next week I interview my friend Jasnam Daya Singh, a concert and jazz pianist and brilliant composer. He is also a Sikh. Jasnam is one of the kindest, most gentle people I know.

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Ash Prasad is a South Asian Indian immigrant, author of How to Write Inclusively: An Analysis & How To Guide.

Ash's life and world view changed during college when she took a class called “Ethics of Diversity,” which addressed the philosophical harms of injustice. It made her realize she wasn’t as privileged as she thought she was and it made her view the world in a different way.

Building her career as a senior consultant, her heart has always been in anti-racism work. When she felt stifled, she started researching Oregon's history and learned South Asian Indians had settled here 100+ years ago. Realizing that she didn’t know this history upset her.

“I also learned about the Sepoys, 1.3 million South Asian Indian soldiers who fought for the allied forces...But what do you see, when you see a war movie today? We only see one perspective.”

Learning this history set her path to becoming a screenwriter. When she saw there weren’t any books about how to write inclusively, Ash decided to write How to Write Inclusively: An Analysis and How-To Guide.

Ash notes it’s more than hiring a chief diversity officer—it’s about hiring people in all roles, cast and crew.

We talked about examples of shows that got it right—“Sense 8," about radical empathy, includes a diverse cast and is written by trans women. Of course there’s “Black Panther” and Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” and “Us.” Others are “The Half of It,” with a Chinese woman as the lead and a lesbian love story; “Money Heist,” and “Dark.

“I never saw myself until ‘Never Have I Ever’ on Netflix. It was comedic, representative, and I could see myself at 16.”

I raved over the “One Day at a Time” reboot with Latinx characters.

Hollywood has plenty of examples of problematic movies and TV shows, such as the transphobia in “The Silence of the Lambs” and “The Crying Game.” Although Bollywood is more diverse, there’s a lot of colorism. The leads are usually light skinned, while dark-skinned people play one-dimensional villains.

“It’s fine to have a villain or antagonist on our screen. But how are you writing that person?...are you telling the human story?"

We talked about the need for all organizations to create atmospheres of belonging.

“Are we creating safe spaces? Are you allowing that if someone has a complaint, something will be done about it? Unsafe environments create continued trauma.”

“I have never felt like I belonged in any of my roles, whether I was a full-time contract or external consultant. I’ve never felt like I’ve belonged in an organization, and that needs to change.”

The story of grit and resilience inspiring Ash is about her ancestors. “I think about what they went through...I can’t imagine getting on a boat as a pregnant woman. That’s where I come from. But a lot of my family history was lost in servitude and colonization.”

“I have three master’s degrees, and my sister is a Ph.D. The world we’ve been able to create just two generations later is really amazing. It’s my homage to thank my ancestors.”

You can find more information about Ash, including her e-book about inclusivity and her coaching and facilitation services, on her website.

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In my last episode, Katrina Nilsson-Gorman shared her experience in southern India, and this week’s story from Annette Stixrud is partly based in Tamil Nadu as well. Annette spent much of her life working overseas as an educator and public health nurse. I call her Saint Annette.

Annette's father was a Lutheran pastor who earned a meager salary and had six children. She went to Pacific Lutheran University, where she met her husband Neal. After they got married, she began her career as a teacher in Bellevue, WA. “They gave me children with health risks, and I decided I needed to learn more because I was scared to death the whole time something would happen to them.”

After teaching children with medical needs, Annette began nursing school. Their first daughter, Lindsey, was born 44 hours after Annette graduated. “We call that planned parenthood,” Annette jokes.

Annette comes from a family of missionaries, which inspired both her and her brother to pursue public health and work in developing countries. Annette and Neal became missionaries. They were sent to Tanzania to teach.

I asked Annette about working outside the home for most of her life. She worked a lot as a volunteer in the mission school, but she was able to spend a lot of time with her children.

After they came back to the states, they moved to Eugene, OR. For the next few years she worked with young mothers, helping them be mothers to their babies.

I asked Annette if she got push-back from others, going back to work when her children were young. When they were first married, she told Neal she wanted eight children ad he responded, “Really? You’re not going to work?” His mother had been a working mom, so he has always supported Annette’s life of work and service.

Then the mission board called and asked if they would go to Kodaikanal, India, where they taught at Kodaikanal International School in Tamil Nadu. They formed strong bonds at the school and had many wonderful adventures there. Now their son Corleigh, who met his wife Nandita there, is principal, and their grandson Tarun is a student.

Their last mission experience was in Egypt, where Annette worked with the Coptic Orthodox church, finding programs for women. Annette has a different outlook on what it means to be a missionary. The people in the villages taught her a lot about listening.

Annette shared stories about working with the Tamil repatriates in Tamil Nadu. About 30,000 Tamils were living in the hills in horrific conditions behind where they lived. Annette was appalled and could not believe how they were living. She recruited 10 girls and 10 boys to go to school. When people told her she should be educating all boys, she shut them up: “If you say one more word to me that I should have all boys, I will find all girls.”

Annette has always been brave in speaking truth to power and speaking out if she sees injustice. She was one of the first people who shared the plight of the Palestinians, which is similar to the way the Tamils have been treated. “It makes me ache that people have to be subjugated to such horrible living conditions and hunger and watch their children grow up like that. It’s such a huge problem when the Israelis cannot see the harm they are doing to another group of people.”

We also spoke of the parallels with Black Lives Matter. At the time the interview was conducted, federal troops had been sent into Portland to quell the demonstrations here and they were brutally oppressing the peaceful protests.

I admire her huge heart, and I believe if anyone deserves canonization, it’s this Lutheran pastor’s kid who thinks nothing of standing up to the powers that be to help someone who does not have a voice.

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Trigger warning: sexual assault, trauma, mental health, and suicide

Born in Vail, CO, Katrina spent her first five years living on the side of a mountain. Raised by her mom and grandma, she comes from a family of strong women.

From 2013 to 2017, Katrina experienced a perfect storm of events that nearly ended her life. After college, she saved as much money as she could to fund six months of travel. She began in Ubud, Bali, where she had an intimate experience with a healer there. Bali captured her heart, just as it did mine. She did an internship to learn Reiki, which opened up a new door. A great follower of intuition, she said, “I think India’s next.”

It was incredibly challenging to travel alone in India. After the open atmosphere in Bali, Katrina had to learn how to put up boundaries traveling as a single woman.

She was drawn to a town called Tiruvannamalai, a pilgrimage site for Shiva worshippers. Katrina thought it would be a ripe place to begin exploring what it means to be a person on earth. She did a lot of meditation and had deep soul conversations. But first she was sexually assaulted.

India is rife with sexual assault problems. The police, doctors, and judges are insensitive towards victims, and 80 percent of victims never tell anyone about it. Terrified, she called a friend who jumped into action, connecting Katrina with an underground network of women who support sexual assault survivors. Even though what happened was horrific, Katrina found an amazing circle of new friends in this group. She stayed in India for another few months to work through her trauma.

When she returned to the US, she found the experience had changed her and disrupted who she was. She found it difficult to reintegrate into life with PTSD. Then in 2015, she survived a stroke. The stroke caused random panic attacks, depression, and personality changes.

A year later, she was diagnosed with a serious case of PCOS and doctors recommended a hysterectomy. She also was in an emotionally abusive relationship. It wasn’t until she figured out she’d rather be homeless than in that relationship that she finally found the courage to walk out the door.

Still experiencing migraines, depression, and PTSD, Katrina felt too ashamed to talk to her friends about her anxiety. Soon she began contemplating suicide so she checked into the hospital. They put her into a room with only a bed in complete darkness, and no one came to check on her for 12 hours. It was horrible and retraumatizing. After they finally came in to inform her they had found a bed, she called her mom, who flew from Colorado to help. On anti-anxiety meds, Katrina felt like a zombie. She knew the drugs weren’t helping, so her mom had to fight to get her out. Once you sign yourself in, it’s hard to get out, and that too was traumatic.

Katrina’s hospitalization lit a spark inside her. For the first time since she began experiencing depression and anxiety, she felt angry. After taking a ride through the mental health care system, she discovered how traumatizing it can be for people who are struggling.

Then Katrina started to reclaim herself. A few days after she left the hospital, she went into nature. She hiked into the woods, found an old growth cedar tree, and sat with the tree for five to six hours. Something shifted in her. Katrina found herself making frequent trips to the woods. She discovered that nature was a far better therapist (at least in her case).

Now Katrina is a certified nature and forest therapy guide, soulful mentor, and intuitive healer. Her business, The Nature in You, helps people navigate anxiety, depression, and stress. She still suffers from depression and anxiety, but they no longer control her life. Now she uses them as fuel to help others in a unique way that is effective and restorative.

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Trigger warning: This episode contains discussion of childhood sexual abuse and trauma.

Stephanie Coren is one of the most resilient people I know. She recalls some wonderful things about her childhood, but her parents were raging alcoholics and physically abused her. Then she was sexually abused at age four by a priest and nuns.

Stephanie had no safe adults in her life. She suppressed much of her trauma until she came out as a lesbian and her parents kicked her out.

Then she started using drugs and alcohol to cope. After her girlfriend started hitting her, therapy saved her life, as did her first hospitalization and recovery. “I craved being seen and being in contact with someone...my abandonment issues are massive.”

After she began her recovery from drugs and alcohol, she started dating her ex-wife Rebecca, beginning a relationship that would last for 30 years. “Of course, having children was a hugely wonderful experience.”

We met Stephanie and Rebecca when our oldest sons attended Multnomah Playschool and Rebecca was pregnant with their twins.

At age 40, Steph developed Stage 4 endometriosis and her health took a nosedive. Endometriosis glued her organs together, and she developed a painful bladder condition. She started going to a pain clinic and was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and IBS. “It was traumatic to have all of those surgeries, all of that attention in that area...extremely difficult for me.”

Then at age 49, Stage 3 breast cancer struck. After her treatment, she had a few scares that prompted a brain scan, bone scan, and PET scan. While waiting for the results, Rebecca told her she wanted a divorce. I remember the phone call when she told us that she didn’t have cancer, but she was getting a divorce.

She felt blindsided. “I lost the family I had created...it had everything to do with being rejected by my parents. I had these incredible kids, who were my life...”

A few days later, she landed in the psychiatric hospital because she felt suicidal. Over the next year, she was hospitalized twice and experienced her first relapse in decades.

Steph kept doing the work. She graduated from the pain clinic and re-entered the workforce. I asked her how she did that.

“Contact and connection is super important. When I’m in PTSD, I forget my friends love me so much, so I feel very alone."

After her divorce, Steph joined our Lutheran-Catholic church, Spirit of Grace. We talked about following the radical inclusive Jesus.

“The teachings of Jesus challenge me at a level I can’t live up to, and I kind of like that about Christianity. If I can take some of the guilt out of it, and appreciate the striving, it becomes a powerful force.”

I asked Stephanie how she became such a rock star mom after not experiencing loving parenting herself. She credits Rebecca as a great parenting partner.

Their kids were proud of the fact they had two moms. It felt natural. We are both grateful for the inclusive atmospheres of Multnomah Playschool, which has an anti-bias curriculum.

I asked Steph what would she tell her 18-year-old self. “You’re going to have all the love you need. You will build a real life.”

“I was so afraid of losing what I had, but I’ve learned it’s okay to have lost what I have lost, and there’s so much I didn’t actually lose.”

Next week I interview nature and forest therapy guide Katrina Nilsson-Gorman, who also experienced trauma and health problems as a result of being raped while traveling in India. She didn’t share the positive experience Steph had in being hospitalized for mental health. Instead she found her healing in the forest.

The Finding Fertile Ground podcast is brought to you by Fertile Ground Communications. Contact us if you can use some help with your writing, editing, communications, or marketing.

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This episode contains explicit conversation.

Dr. Kris Gowen is a sexuality educator and researcher. Kris is cofounder of Beyond the Talk, the sex ed you wish you had. They provide presentations, workshops, and interactive games all aimed at increasing access to sexuality information.

After her best friend Molly died, Kris decided to travel around to all 50 states, a 17,774-mile road trip, and sing karaoke in each state! She even wrote a book about it: One Nation Under Song: My Karaoke Journey through Grief, Joy, and America.

In addition to soaking into the empty spaces of her journey and allowing herself to grieve, she came to appreciate the diversity of the country. One of her favorite places was Detroit, when she found herself as one of the few white people behind a barbecue joint. She wasn’t sure if it was a space for her, but the other singers were fantastic and the environment was magical. In Georgia she sang to a church organist, and the organist/KJ gave a welcoming speech about letting go and being a part of the community.

With the pandemic, karaoke has gone online. She recently entered the North American Open of the World Karaoke Championships and got second place, so she’s now on the North American team for the world championships.

Molly’s death was just the latest in a series of deaths in her life Kris has had to grieve. She has written and led workshops around the intersection of grief and joy.

I shared my experience of getting to know other families who had lost their babies in the NICU and learning from them how to continue to honor their children...in particular our friends who graciously volunteered after their own son lived for just a week, helping other parents dealing with the NICU experience.

After talking about Kris’ unique sojourn across the country singing in every state, as well as her favorite songs to sing, we talked about her work in sex education.

Kris is passionate about incorporating social justice and inclusion into sex education, especially because many young people are rejected or thrown out of their homes because of who they love.

In this focused time on Black Lives Matter, she’s particularly interested in exploring how we can be anti-racist and intersectional in sex education, recognizing where we can do better in honoring all cultures, races, and backgrounds. Kris mentioned that talking about the history of forced sterilization, power dynamics, access to contraception, and access to health care is extremely important if we are to have sexually healthy people. She also noted the reinforcement of racist stereotypes in pornography and the question of whether young people of different races are being punished disproportionately for things like sexting.

We spoke about how kids are much more open-minded about different genders and sexual orientations. Kris has worked with kids at the Rock and Roll Camp for Girls, where she’s found the kids to be really open and evolved in discussing these issues.

Kris has done a great deal of research around how technology can affect sexual pleasure...for example, pornography, Internet dating, and sex toys and sex robots. We also talked about sex in the time of COVID.

Beyond The Talk is offering a discussion-based group for parents and caregivers to learn, process, and get support with their teens and tweens' online relationships, sexting, and pornography. They will also address how Covid-19 is affecting young people. This group will run for 6 weeks starting November 9-December 14 with a November 2 registration deadline.

One Nation Under Song: My Karaoke Journey Through Grief, Joy, and America

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I interviewed April Brenden-Locke and Miguel Ochoa Castellanos about a wonderful children’s home in Chiapas, Mexico, called Hogar Infantil. April is the president of the American board of Hogar, and Miguel grew up there and runs a language school...he’s a great success story. They share how Hogar Infantil changed both of their lives, “cambiando vidas a través de la educación,” or “changing lives through education.”

Miguel spoke to us from a small town in Chiapas, Mexico, the southernmost Mexican state. Miguel’s father passed away when he was six years old, and he didn’t have a happy childhood. After attending school, he would help his mom selling candy in the streets. They lived with relatives and didn’t have much money. His mom used to cry a lot, but she was a strong, hard-working woman. She made the heart-breaking decision to take Miguel to Hogar Infantil when he was just nine years old. Now that he’s older, Miguel recognizes how difficult that must have been.

April grew up in a farm in Oregon. She struggled in high school, trying to figure out who she was, until she saw an opportunity to volunteer at Hogar. She went to Mexico thinking that the people at Hogar needed their help, but she quickly learned it was about becoming part of the community. She immediately felt welcomed into a big family at Hogar Infantil. The experience had a profound impact on her. “It was a place that has stayed in my heart my whole life.”

Miguel told April that her decision had a big impact on him and the other Hogar residents.

“Not many people decide to go to another country to help. It’s difficult to find people to share part of their time, to share part of their lives, to come to your country and your community, to help you."

April was surprised when she saw how well the children took care of each other at Hogar. They didn’t have a lot of stuff, but what they had was shared with each other. They had this spontaneous sense of care and taking care of each other. When April went back to Hogar as an adult, she found that same spirit of community.

Miguel believes that part of Hogar’s community spirit is the fact it’s situated in Chiapas, a part of Mexico that is very poor but also extremely generous and caring. Sharing is innate.

Hogar Infantil was founded in 1963 by Nicholas Anderson, an American expat who was living in Chiapas. With just a handful of U.S. donors, Don Nich began taking in children who were living on the street. After Nich’s death in 1977, others, such as David “Capitán” Guinn, stepped in to ensure that Hogar Infantil would survive and carry on its mission to break the cycle of poverty through education.

Miguel believes Hogar changed his life. After leaving Hogar, Miguel went on to study in the U.S. and to college. Then he opened up a language school in his living room, just raising enough money to buy chairs. Now he has a family, a language school, and another business. Now he has up to 200 students and employs 5 teachers.

If you’ve been inspired by Miguel’s and April’s stories, you can find many ways to support Hogar Infantil and the children and staff there by visiting their website.

Next week I interview Dr. Kris Gowen. After her best friend died, Kris decided to travel around to all 50 states and sign karaoke in each state! We talked about friendship, grief, and sex! Kris is cofounder of Beyond the Talk, the sex ed you wish you had.

The Finding Fertile Ground podcast is brought to you by Fertile Ground Communications. If you enjoyed this podcast, please give us a rating and subscribe to hear our next episode. Contact us if you can use some help with your writing, editing, communications, or marketing.

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Today I share my own life’s grit and resilience story, for it is my birthday. Resilience is my life’s motto, and that’s the reason for this podcast subtitle. Read more here.

It’s also one of my superpowers and one day, when the pandemic finally ends, it will be my next tattoo.

It started when I was born. My mom had German measles when she was pregnant, and I was born with a cleft lip, cleft palate, and club foot. My childhood was full of doctor visits and surgeries.

I was the victim of bullying in junior high. Then I experienced a deeply traumatic event at age 13 when I was sexually assaulted.

After graduating from college, I wanted an adventure. I applied for a job in Japan and told myself, “If I get hired, I’m going.”

Best of all about Japan was meeting my husband Mike. After leaving Japan, we embarked on a three-month journey through Asia. And in the exotic city of Udaipur, Mike asked me to marry him.

Mike wanted to be a writer, so I told him I’d support him for a year. I realized I liked going out to work, and Mike liked staying home...a true extrovert and introvert. Our marriage has only grown stronger through the storms we have faced together.

My life changed completely when I gave birth to my first child at just 24 weeks.
Listen to the podcast to learn the details of his premature birth, 117 difficult days in the NICU, and the most terrifying moments. I still have some trauma about our NICU experience, evident because I got emotional as I was telling this story on the podcast!

Even though I would never wish the NICU experience on ANYONE, through the experience we learned to value life and miracles and we also made some of the best friends of our lives in other NICU parents. We were invited to join the hospital’s NICU Family Advisory Board to advise the NICU on how to be more family centered. In 2000, we cofounded a nonprofit, Precious Beginnings: Parents Supporting Parents of Critically Ill Newborns.

I never found it easy to get pregnant or stay pregnant, even though I liked being pregnant. I experienced four miscarriages before we had another son, Kieran. Then we were shocked to discover I was pregnant at age 41. I tell all three of our boys that each one of them was a miracle.

In 2012, I discovered that I had a rare ear tumor called a cholesteatoma. Over the next 5 years I had to have four ear surgeries, one of those also being a brain surgery. Ear surgeries are incredibly painful to recover from, and the brain surgery was the worst. On the podcast I share how I discovered my natural resilience.

I share on the podcast what happened and how I started Fertile Ground Communications. I wanted to create a company where I could find my fertile ground, after working in toxic work environments.

We know that sharing our vulnerability strengthens our resilience. And sharing our flaws and foibles helps us to show up as our true selves. That's what I tried to do in this episode.

I’m building the kind of company I’ve always wanted to work for, centered in strong values of justice, respect, and authenticity.

I ended this episode with a message to all who have endured difficult journeys in their own lives.

Hearing my own resilience story will help you understand why I am so fascinated by grit and resilience stories! If you have a grit and resilience story you’d like to share, please drop me a line!

Next week I interview my friend April Brenden-Locke and Miguel Ochoa Castellanos about a wonderful school in Chiapas, Mexico, called Hogar Infantil. They will share how Hogar Infantil changed both of their lives.

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This week I interviewed Farheen Raza, host of Authentic + Unfiltered with Farheen. Farheen is a Muslim-American community activist, radio personality, and mom of three from Texas. She is a fearless communicator, loud on social media, and active on multiple fronts.

Farheen grew up in the Boston area. She clearly remembers 9/11, when all three of the planes taken over by terrorists flew out of Logan Airport. Farheen described that feeling as “surreal." In Farheen's first year at a small Catholic college, the dean assigned a police officer to protect her when the anti-Muslim frenzy began. We talked about the way Islamophobia has further grown since the 2016 election.

“It’s bad already,” Farheen commented. “How much worse can it get?”

I asked Farheen what she likes about being Muslim. She said that a lot of the restrictions in Islam make sense...for example, refraining from pork and alcohol can make you healthier. The most challenging thing is being around people who see themselves as authority figures.

The most recent obstacle Farheen has overcome is surviving COVID. It took three attempts to get a correct diagnosis after she had back pain and what felt like a fever. She felt in pain all over her body and had no energy. Her husband was convinced she had COVID, but it wasn’t until he conducted the test that she got the positive diagnosis. After surviving COVID, she gets frustrated when people don’t take the pandemic seriously. As Farheen said, “It’s a time for us to be selfless. Unfortunately most people are being selfish.”

I was keen to ask Farheen about the movie “Cuties." When we saw people had condemned it as misogynistic, sexualizing children, and Islamophobic, we both had to see for ourselves. What critics do not understand is that Maïmouna Doucouré wrote this film in response to her shock at seeing a similar dance performance by young girls at a park in Paris. Farheen pointed out that while people want to censor this movie, Cardi B’s “WAP” is the top video in the country. Not only that, but we’ve normalized sexualization for young kids by supporting “Toddlers and Tiaras” and “Dance Moms.”

I highly encourage you to listen to Farheen’s podcast episode, when she delves deep into “Cuties” with author Soniah Kamal and Sumana Syed.

I enjoyed my conversation with Farheen and I'm glad she survived COVID-19 and is done with apologizing for being a Muslim! Read more about our conversation here.

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If you’re a feminist like me, you’re reeling from the news of liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg passing away on Friday. This episode with Marie Cecile Anderson and Katy Frame, Reformed Whores, will be a balm to your soul.

If Dolly Parton & Flight of the Conchords got drunk and had a baby, you'd get the hilariously irreverent musical comedy duo Reformed Whores! They’re on a mission to empower, normalize the female experience, and bust a few guts in the process! Not only do they have beautiful harmonies and a country twang, but they also are hilarious as well as educational.

They are cohosts of the Difficult Women podcast, which is a fantastic combination of current affairs, feminism, social justice, and funny, irreverent conversation—plus a lovely blend of women’s friendship.

The first time I saw Reformed Whores was in 2012, after Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a slut and a prostitute, merely for advocating for contraception. Their song, “Rush Limbaugh Calls Sandra Fluke a Slut,” will have you singing along, “I’m a slut, slut, slut, I’m an S-L-U-T, S-L-U-T, slut!” I immediately became a fan and have followed their irreverent, bawdy, harmonious form of comedy and music ever since.

Fate brought Marie and Katy together when they “fell ass backwards” into forming Reformed Whores. Ten years ago they randomly met at a mutual friend’s birthday party in Brooklyn when they talked the whole evening. And they started the band one week later! Working together for 10 years, they consider themselves as soulmates. That’s evident when you listen to them together in this podcast episode, onstage, in their videos, or on their podcast.

Marie was trying to prove to her overprotective father that she could be a full woman without having a boyfriend or be horny like a man, pushing against the stereotype of what a southern woman is supposed to look like. She never fit into the category of a typical southern woman, even though she didn’t realize she was actually a feminist until about 10-15 years ago. Now she’s very proud to call herself a feminist.

When they started a bawdy band singing about sex and body positivity, they had to adjust to upsetting their parents. It’s been hard for their parents to hear their daughters talk about sex in such a brazen, open way. When Marie’s mom first saw one of her videos, about giving hand jobs for Lent, her mom told her she was disappointed in her. However, Marie also shared a story about her parents coming to see Reformed Whores in concert. When they sang their song “Mama,” Marie’s mom proudly claimed the title of Mama.

We talked about straddling traditional country venues and feminist, sex-positive messaging; their favorite songs; the future of theater; performing in Sturgis, SD; their podcast and important conversations; working in the male-dominated fields of comedy and music; being labeled as "difficult women"; the new Netflix movie "Cutie"; Storm Large; The Guilty Feminist; and Black Lives Matter.

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Sankar Raman immigrated to the U.S. from India to attend graduate school. After a successful career in high tech, he now applies his technical knowledge, managerial skills, and pragmatic mind to founding and leading The Immigrant Story, a nonprofit organization that fosters empathy and builds a more inclusive community by sharing immigrant stories. You can reach Sankar at sankar@theimmigrantstory.org.I’ve been volunteering this year with The Immigrant Story, working on a storytelling event featuring people from Mexico and Guatemala who entered the United States undocumented, and we just launched that event on Saturday. You can view that event on YouTube. Volunteering with The Immigrant Story has given me a wonderful opportunity to work with Sankar and see his incredible vision for the organization he founded in response to the heightened xenophobia after the 2016 election.

Sankar grew up in a four-street village in deep southeast India, about 150 miles south of Chennai, and attended the only school in the village, which happened to be operated by his father. He describes it as India’s version of Kyoto, with thousands of temples and surrounded by silk weavers and rice paddies.

His father was determined to make education accessible to all, including the Dalit community, which became a bit of a scandal. "He really wanted everyone in that village to go to his school, irrespective of which caste they belonged to," said Sankar. "He truly believed that if you get your education, you can get out of your poverty."

Sankar and his friends could walk through the open door of any house and know they would be welcomed and fed. His parents didn’t worry about him returning until 8 or 9 at night because they knew the community would feed him and take care of him.

The xenophobia after the 2016 election prompted him to start The Immigrant Story. After retiring from Intel, he’d been focusing on photography, traveling through India, Japan, and the East Coast, and capturing his travels digitally. He would write captions for his photos, and the captions became longer and longer until they became stories.

Sankar decided to start telling the stories of immigrants, especially immigrants of color, by expanding his photography and captions. He officially opened the nonprofit in April 2017 with seven stories. Then in May, the MAX attack happened in Portland, devastating our city and exposing white nationalist hatred.

Now The Immigrant Story has about 50 volunteers. To date, they have interviewed 170 people and published 150+ stories. In the last few years, the organization has begun delving into other initiatives (live storytelling events, photography exhibitions, videos, podcasts, and educational curriculum), but the core to the nonprofit is stories and photography. In 2019, The Immigrant Story was named as Portland's Best New Nonprofit at the Portland Monthly Light a Fire Awards.

Read more about Sankar in this longer blog post. Next week we feature The Reformed Whores, a NYC-based feminist comedy musical duo.

The Finding Fertile Ground podcast is brought to you by Fertile Ground Communications. Contact us if you can use some help with your writing, editing, communications, or marketing.

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Raina Casey is my final of four "Badass Black Women.” Raina is a true survivor and has a calling to help people at the end of their lives through her witness and presence. You can reach her on Facebook here. This episode discussed the use of cannabis, which is legal in Oregon and some other states.Raina has an extensive grit story, but we were barely able to scratch the surface because I wanted to learn about her experience as a death doula. These are some of the obstacles she has faced:

Child of alcoholic whose father passed away from AIDS when she was 11; her mom made the grieving process difficult and strained their relationship
Worked at Ground Zero site as a member of the U.S. Army Reserve (a mind-searing experience, but still not enough to prepare her for when Katrina hit)
Washed out of New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina
Raised a son with autism (who she says is way more dope than she can ever be)
CNS lymphoma patient, which allows her to connect to her patients on a deeper level
Survived a stroke, abdominal aneurysm, and brain surgery by the age of 33
Survived a financially abusive ex
Still grieving the transition of her father, grandparents, siblings, aunts, and uncles
Still lives with a seizure disorder and residual damage in her left hand from her stroke

The term “death doula” is relatively new. The first known death doula movement arose in New York in 2000, as a volunteer program that paired so-called "doulas" with terminally ill people. Death doulas assist with the dying process, like a midwife or doula does during the labor and birth process. Their services might include creating death plans; providing spiritual, psychological, and social support before and after death; and assisting with logistical activities such as funerals and memorial services. In Raina’s case, she helps her clients with pain and comfort care using cannabis.

Always fascinated by the concept of death and dying, Raina got into the mortuary business in the U.S. Army. She shares a story on the podcast about her dad taking her to a funeral home and literally introducing Raina to her first dead person at the age of nine. Later on she was working for the medical examiner when she suffered from a devastating stroke and had to have brain surgery. She was using cannabis for medical needs and then started doing more research about the benefits of cannabis. That led her to start fusing cannabis with death and dying and noticing that cannabis can be very beneficial in quality-of-life care.

Raina’s experience with her own medical problems, including a few near-death times, gives her a special insight into what her clients are experiencing. She’s seen amazing relief in her clients when she treats them with cannabis. We talked about the importance for Black people, especially, to have culturally sensitive end-of-life care.

We also spoke about her amazing son Mason, a track star at the University of Oregon, and his connection to Olympic gold medalist Tommie Smith. Raina also gave huge kudos to the people in her life who have been part of her parenting village.

You can learn more about Raina’s work as a death doula by using the hashtag #DeathDoulaDialog on Facebook. She is working on revamping her death doula business by training doula on cannabis usage to improve the quality of their clients’ lives.

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Jackie Capers-Brown is the third of "Four Badass Black Women.” Jackie has endured unimaginable grief yet she has found a way to take that grief and transform it into something great. You can reach her at her website.I met Jackie when she interviewed me for her “Level Up Your Life” podcast. When she asked me about my theme song, I answered, “Rise Up” by Andra Day. Jackie told me it was her theme song too.

If anyone has risen up “in spite of the ache” to “move mountains,” it’s Jackie. Learning of Jackie’s incredible story of grit and resilience planted the seed in me to start the Finding Fertile Ground podcast.

Jackie started the Level Up Your Life Podcast to help her coaching clients advance their vision, voice, and value and empower others, especially women of color.

Jackie was born in Columbia, SC, to working-class parents who inspired her to believe that any work she does should represent her best. When Jackie was just 13, she heard a thump upstairs. She ran up to find her mom collapsed. Willie Mae insisted that Jackie call her sister to take her to the hospital, and tragically, Jackie never saw her again.

After her mom died, Jackie began to experience anger, sadness, and depression. She felt like she was no longer standing on solid ground. Fortunately, through writing she recognized she was becoming an angry teen. Instead of focusing on the loss of her mother, she realized she needed to focus on what her mom had provided her.

“She was strong, she was tenacious, she spoke her truth to power even when Black women were not heard much or respected, and she had faith in God,” said Jackie. “I realized that my mom was strong, so I am strong because I have her DNA in me.”

Even though she was sad and mad at God, the process of writing down her thoughts and becoming self-aware placed her on a lifelong journey of self-discovery and leadership.

Six years later her beloved father died from cancer when Jackie was 19. Losing both her parents tore her up. By that time Jackie was a single mom in college, and she realized she couldn’t keep up with it all. Then six months after her dad died, Jackie found out she was pregnant with her second child, son Blease. At that point she felt she could no longer work without having anyone to take care of her children.

She decided to go on government assistance and move into Section 8 housing. The next year and a half she felt defeated. Then she had a spiritual awakening and she began to see herself the way God sees her. The love, mercy, and grace from God, combined with the spirit of strength she called on from her mom, dad, and ancestors, helped her to keep going. She was able to start a minimum wage job at Marriott Hotels, and within 10 years she had become an executive leader. Six months after that, Jackie was back on the roller coaster of grief once again, when her son died at age 14 from a cardiac arrest.

This time she numbed her emotions, suffering in silence, while building a successful and award-winning team. She became a workaholic, working 60 hours/week. Finally, she prayed a simple prayer: “God help me to help myself.”

Through this constant experience of grief, grit, and resilience, Jackie became committed to helping others actually realize the power of the stories they tell themselves, “because it was the fear-based story I was telling myself about not being strong enough to handle my grief that caused me to suffer needlessly,” Jackie said. “So that’s a big piece of the work I do today, helping people transform the narrative, redefine what’s possible in their life, and step into their greatness.”

Jackie and I talked about George Floyd, Martin Luther King Jr., and other inspiring figures.

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Jewels was born in Harlem Hospital as an only child to a single mom. Her mom was diagnosed with breast cancer when Jewels was ten, so they moved to Georgia to be closer to family. Her mom wasn’t working while she was undergoing chemo, so they were couch surfers without their own home...not the first time in her life that Jewels would find herself houseless. From that experience, Jewels developed a resilience that has lasted her well.

I asked her if she had problems adjusting to Georgia, and she said the biggest difficulty was adapting because of colorism. When she came home speaking in Ebonics or AAVE, she was beaten because her family raised her to speak “properly” to fit in.

At a mostly white boarding high school, she remembers a three-year-old calling her the n-word and a white woman complimenting her for how she used utensils.

Although she married in her ‘20s and had three children, she always had this lingering feeling that something was not quite right in her life. Her family had been run by women, and she’d been attracted to girls as a young age. She suppressed her attraction to women until she was 30 years old, when she started reading books to explore the idea. Then one night a close gay friend said to her, “You know, you’re gay!”

Jewels did some soul searching and realized her friend was right. She asked her mom if she could take care of her three daughters so she could restart her life. Her mom suggested Jewels wait until her 3-year-old reached the age of 18. Jewels responded,

“No. I have waited roughly 30-some-odd years...if I don’t find out who I am, I will not be an effective parent..I will not live to my full potential, so I have to do this.”

She quit her job, got on a bus with $500, and moved to Portland. The first shock was not all the white people...it was the cold. She also began to experience the subversive racism and microaggressions experienced by people of color in the predominantly white Northwest.

Her kids joined her, but it took her 10 years to feel fully settled after more couch surfing and moving around in careers and homes. Jewels earned a degree in social work, but she realized she was not cut out for being a case manager...it didn’t help that she didn’t earn much more than the clients she was trying to help.

Jewels met her wife Amy in 2014...they were dating other people but in the same Facebook group with Pacific Northwest Lesbians. They met at a picnic, hit it off, and six to eight weeks later, they committed to monogamy. Amy later proposed, surprising Jewels with her mom’s engagement ring.

When I asked what it’s like to be a Black queer woman in Vancouver, she said, “I’m completely invisible. I rarely see other queer people, much less Black queer people outside of my own house..."

When I met Jewels last summer, she said that when people fondly recall Little House on the Prairie, she thinks about her people being enslaved around that time. This statement helped me put new lenses on everything I view now...it makes me question how Black people, indigenous people, and other people of color are represented. We talked about the racism in these books, which she reread a few years ago after loving them as a child. "This is the disconnect I feel we have as a nation...that Harriet Tubman’s time was also Laura Ingalls’ time.” I am grateful to Jewels for the insights she shared with me and how she helped me to look at things in a completely new light.

Jewels loves talking in front of people, and she shared news about her current projects.

I asked her what book or story that had inspired her. Her immediate response was Sofia in The Color Purple, and we discovered it is our shared favorite novel.

You can reach Jewels on Facebook or Instagram.

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Badass Lotus Flower Libra Forde is my first installment of my "Four Badass Black Women" series. You can reach her here: https://www.facebook.com/librabetall or https://www.instagram.com/be.tall/.

Libra's mom named her Libra because her pregnancy brought balance to her life. At 6 feet, five inches, Libra continues that balance in her own life.

Born in Harlem, NYC, Libra is single mom to three daughters. After living in Hawaii for many years, she decided to move to Oregon to finish her daughters’ education. Now in her sixth year here, Libra said she ended up living in Damascas without knowing much about the area...or that they would end up being the only Black family for miles around them.

When she worked with special needs kids in Vermont, she found her calling to advocate for and support young people. Now she is the chief operations officer for Self-Enhancement, Inc, and chair of the North Clackamas School District. Self-Enhancement Inc. is a multi-service organization, guiding underserved youth to realize their full potential.

Libra first learned about race when she was five or six. Her parents were both activists. Libra’s life was built around stories of “firsts,” and her parents told her this was what they expected from her and nothing less.

She loved living in the brown state of Hawaii...it was the first time in her life that being Black was not the issue. When she settled into Hawaii, she called her family and said, “I’m never coming back.”

She’s glad that her daughters grew up in a place where they could appreciate their brownness, immersed in beaches, blue sky, and joy. When she moved back to the mainland, she realized she had not talked to her daughters about race.

Libra does profound Facebook Lives on a regular basis. I asked her about a recent one when she talked about Oregon’s physical beauty underlain by its ugly history. She shared a story of vacationing in Coos Bay with her kids, and activist friends shared that there had been a racist incident not far from where was vacationing.

The problem she sees in Oregon’s rural areas is that Oregon had laws that upheld discrimination, but some white people don’t seem to realize that these laws don’t exist anymore. As a result of the racism, Black people don’t want to go to these places. “We have to stop upholding these outdated laws,” she says. “You need to uphold Black voices in rural areas.”

In response to the #BlackLivesMatter protests, Libra started an activist movement that could be done in cars. The first Death of Racism event had great support—at least 96 cars showed up. The event was particularly powerful for Libra because they gathered on a stretch of highway where her daughter had been chased. Counter-protesters showed up, but she loved the opportunity to go against such a group in a way that was positive and peaceful.

As a domestic violence survivor, she’s always conscious of the fact that she’s made some difficult choices that have not been easy for her kids. When they arrived in Oregon, they experienced a tragedy that took them from a full family to being homeless in 24 hours. The healing came through her telling her story. Libra's favorite flower is the lotus, because it grows in the mud and the worst conditions.

I asked her what she would say to her 21-year-old self, and again, without skipping a beat, she said, “Never dim your light. Stay bright...in dimming my light, I realized how damaging that is for an individual, and I don’t want that for anybody...if someone thinks you’re too bright, give them some sunglasses.”

Next week I interview Jewels Pedersen, a writer, performer, and activist...another badass Black woman with three daughters.

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In my final "Three Men of Color, Reinventing Fatherhood" series, I interviewed Ken Harge, who grew up with a father who was a bully. He says writing saved his life.

Ken (or KLH to his friends) was born and raised in Waterbury, Connecticut, “a big city with a knucklehead mindset,” as he puts it. Although his childhood lacked love and nurturing, he has transformed himself into becoming a highly creative, grounded, and self-aware person who believes his difficult childhood had a reason. Ken knows he is here for something great.

With a book, one-person play, blog, and other creative projects in his back pocket, he is creating a symphony during COVID called “The Healing.” He describes himself as a guy with a lot of opinions about what’s going on in the world today and he’s not afraid to share them.

As a Black man, he has found it heartbreaking to see Black people dying at the hands of police. He is offended when people say or imply that there is no systemic racism.

“All lives matter is almost profane because with very little exception, that tells people to shut up, forget what you’re seeing, and move on.”

He views “all lives matter” as a cowardly way to say that what Black people feel doesn’t matter.

When I interviewed him, Ken was working on an article called “The Notion of Superiority” based on the work of Walter Rodney, a prominent historian with a Ph.D. in African history. Rodney wrote, “The simple fact is that no people can enslave another for four centuries without coming out with a notion of superiority...” Ken elaborates on this concept, making some profound points:

“Some white people complain about protesters rioting and looting, but don’t recognize the reasons why they protest. They say it’s inappropriate and violent. But when Colin Kaepernick peacefully protested police brutality against Black folk, many white people complained about that too. They presumed to be in a position to tell Black folk how they can and cannot express their grievances. Why? There is a ‘notion of superiority.’

Just like a stench that has floated in the air long enough to get used to it, the ‘notion of superiority’ continues to waft in American air...There have been riots, laws passed and enacted, and there has been some positive change. But we still haven’t addressed the stink drifting in the air all around us and so we collectively breathe in the ‘notion of superiority’ of white folk over Black folk..."

He’s used the difficult experiences in his life (including the difficult relationship with his father) to write a one-man play, “You Are Here for Something Great,” and then he wrote a full-length novel based on the play. Right now he’s creating a course to help men develop their self-esteem.

“I think men having self-esteem can literally change the face of the planet,” says Ken. “If men have self-esteem, they don’t smack their wives. They don’t abuse their children. They don’t go out into the street and do violence. I think they don’t even do terrorism. I think it’s only broken men who do those things...It’s never been safe in this world for men to have feelings. We’re taught to suppress them.”

He firmly believes that everything happens for a reason. “If I’d had a lovely supportive mother and father, I would not have turned out to be the creative person I am...I can speak to hurt people, and they know I understand,” he says. “I can speak to lonely people, and they know I know what it is. So it’s all been for a reason.”

Although Ken always wanted to have children, it wasn’t in the cards. So about 10 years ago, he felt called to volunteer with Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. He mentored a young man named Prince. Many years later, Prince turned his life around, is gainfully employed, and recently paid Ken a visit in his new car. Helping this young man create a better life for himself is Ken’s proudest moment.

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“I grew up in a way where I was determined that I would not allow myself to be judged by my skin color,” said Charles Jackson II about seeing George Floyd’s murder. “I wanted to present myself as a positive contributor to society, and I went out of my way to do that. And a lot of stuff that was going on in the Black community and even around me, I tried to black out.

:When I saw George Floyd and the manner in which he was killed, that was the first time in a long time that I had cried and felt such a wave of emotions, seeing somebody killed...I sat there and I cried, literally...because of everything I tried to suppress and block out, and all of the striving I had done just to make people see a Black man in a different light and hopefully spark change...it just came down on me...I cannot step out of my Black skin.”

..."I cannot escape all the negative associations with being a Black man regardless of how much I tried and all the effort I put in. And as I sat there and watched George Floyd’s incident, all of that just came out...and all the pressure and the weight I’ve been carrying...trying to be a positive contributor to society, but feeling like I had failed...hit me... I sat there as a 37-year-old man, sad for him and his family. But there was a lot of pain and regret and anguish that came out as I watched it.”

Charles grew up in Daytona Beach, in a rough part of town. He spent a lot of time outdoors, playing basketball. Charles was the first person in his family to graduate from high school and college.

After getting married, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps. After 10 years of active duty, he earned his bachelor’s degree in social and criminal justice. As a child, Charles wanted to become a police detective. He wanted to bridge the gap between the community and the police. Now he is eight classes away from earning his master’s in divinity.

Charles has ideas about police reform. When he was contemplating a career as a police officer, friends in law enforcement shared with him in confidence that some cops take the badge just so they can continue to oppress Black people.

“I would like to be one who could go in and challenge and teach...and then reform from that aspect...we all have that same heart beating in our bodies, that will allow us to have empathy for someone who doesn’t look like us and act like us,” said Charles. “We just need to break down some of those walls and some of that ignorance...so that we can actually start the change and see people differently.”

“Leadership is near and dear to me,” said Charles. He created the Relational Leadership Network to share tips for leaders, built on the premise that healthy relationships increase work productivity and boost the bottom line.

I had a wonderful time interviewing Charles, who I first met when he interviewed me about my article, “The Weapons of White Women’s Tears.”

I asked why he didn’t give one of his sons the name he shared with his father. As a child, he wanted to be just like his father, but when his dad cheated on his mom, he lost all respect for him. They reconciled before his dad passed away, but he regrets he didn’t do it earlier.

“The more we go through things, our resiliency level begins to rise,” Charles said. “As hard things come our way, we might take a stumble but we don’t get knocked down as far as we would have had we not continually gone through stuff and overcome it.”

On the last “Three Men of Color, Redefining Fatherhood” episode I interview Ken Harge, a Black man in Connecticut who is writing a symphony! After a falling-out with his parents, he has become a father figure to a young man through the Big Brothers Big Sisters of America.

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Ruben was born in Texas into a dysfunctional family with ten children. When he was nine, his family moved to a migrant labor camp in Oregon, where he had to work hard picking produce.

As a young brown person, he felt great shame. He dropped out of school at 16. But he turned his shame into persistence, fathering four and eventually earning a master’s degree.

Here is a glimpse of his story:

“The year was 1967. I was six years old...I woke up a few times a week in the middle of the night to the sounds of a screaming mother being thrown up against the wall by a drunk father...my oldest brother would say ‘Hurry, get your shoes on so when Dad passes out we will just have a few seconds to run to the car before he wakes up.’ We parked in old, dirt driveways and waited out Dad’s drunken, violent episodes...

As a 9-year-old living in a migrant camp, I had to watch my back...I knew the kids on the bus were going to ask if we lived in the dirty, run-down camp. ‘Lazy Mexicans that pick berries live at that camp,’ I heard one kid say as we boarded the bus. I turned around and yelled, ‘I work every day from six in the morning until five in the evening...You have no right to call us lazy.’

The school secretary said, ‘The deadline for signing up for free lunch is over so you will have to work the food line to get a free lunch.’ I was starting school late that year, because I had to work until we finished picking the season’s berries. She told me I’d need to bring coffee containers for collecting leftover food. The kids pointed and whispered. ‘Look, he’s taking our leftovers home to feed his beaner siblings." I began to realize that I had two strikes against me: one was being poor. The second was having brown skin.

When I was 16, my hope for a future was fading. I realized school was not for me. I felt alone, desperate, and misrepresented as a young Mexican teen with no family support. I understood that between shame, white hatred, and being poor, I had nothing to win if I stayed in school. I developed anxiety and shame.

As I grew older, I realized I could help others through my work. I was a Latino advocate and a grief counselor, working with communities of color and advocating for kids who grew up like me. I managed to eliminate the first strike against me--growing up poor. But in spite of my accomplishments, people still judge me by my skin color."

You can reach Ruben at Man With a Heart on Facebook.

On the next “Three Men of Color, Redefining Fatherhood” episode I interview Charles Jackson II, a Black man who had a conflicted relationship with his father. We talk about racism and #BlackLivesMatter, his career, marriage, and fathering two young Black sons.

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Rabbi Debra (D’vorah) Kolodny (they/them) is a social justice veteran, bringing a spiritual perspective and activist passion to racial and economic, women’s, environmental, peace, and LGBTQIA causes.

Rabbi Debra serves as the spiritual leader of Portland’s UnShul, and as executive director of Portland United Against Hate.

After the murder of George Floyd, they started going into the streets. Rabbi Debra said they felt very safe with the other protesters, speaking out for Black Lives Matter and against police brutality. (We spoke before the presence of federal agents and the escalation against the protesters.)

Rabbi Debra found it much more comfortable to live in DC and NY with their large and empowered Black and Latinx populations. The systemic racism in Oregon has created a difficult environment to do anti-racist work. There’s been a flourishing of white nationalist groups in Oregon. “I don’t feel safe here as a queer person,” they said. “I don’t feel safe here as a Jewish person.”

Raised in a secular household, Rabbi Debra had a mystical experience as a teenager on a trip to Israel. Many years later, they had another deep experience and felt called to become a rabbi. Rabbi Debra’s form of being Jewish is “highly politicized, mystical, radical, and in the streets.” They have discovered that most Jews don’t come to Portland to be Jewish. They founded the Portland UnShul to serve the “spiritual but not religious” Jews here.

On Juneteenth, they joined 13 other clergy who went to the Justice Center to be witness. These radical faith leaders have a yearning for the public messaging to lift up the voices that are prophetic and truthful.

I asked Rabbi Debra what simple tips they could give people to “interrupt hate in public spaces.” They said that in a public situation, the best thing to do is get out of there so you won’t provoke or escalate. The class they teach is about how to ally with the targeted and how to attune yourself to what’s happening, move from cluelessness to awareness, and empower the target. Rabbi Debra has trained over 1,400 people so far in these important skills.

Discussing how can faith communities can move beyond inclusivity, Rabbi Debra said we should move from a disability model (e.g., thinking people can’t help it because they were born that way) into celebration.

When I asked Rabbi Debra what mistakes they have made, they responded: “If white people are not making mistakes, we are not doing our work.” They work hard to be up with antiracism analysis and language, but part of why white people make mistakes is that the rate of anti-racism understanding, awareness, and insight move so quickly.

Rabbi Debra cautioned that “Resilience is used in contexts that are spiritual bypassing, meaning let’s focus on the good stuff and not on the hard stuff.” They elaborated,
“Resilience and grit go together...We need to consider what it takes to be able to care for ourselves while being in the fight?"

"As white people, we need to show the f*ck up. We need to expose ourselves to greater risks.”

“This is not a time for unity. This is a time for truth telling. This is a time to say NO to state-sponsored abuse and genocide...and it’s a time for righteous anger and for being relentless.”

Contact Rabbi Debra at rabbidebra@asthespiritmovesus.com or on the Portland United Against Hate Facebook page or website.

Next up is my series on "Three Men of Color, Redefining Fatherhood." First is Ruben Garcia, who worked in a migrant labor camp for several years. Experiencing racism, bullying, and xenophobia, and lack of role models, Ruben transcended his family patterns of alcoholism, shame, and abuse to raise children of his own.

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Today's episode of the Finding Fertile Ground Podcast: Stories of Grit, Resilience, and Connection features Dr. Daivati Bharadvaj, who overcame bullying in her teen years to reclaim her power and her Indian heritage.

Daivati’s parents arrived in the United States with $24 and four-year-old Daivati. Daivati missed her family in India but has fond memories of her childhood, helping her dad in the garden and her mom in the kitchen. Even though her parents both were professionals and highly educated, they had to start at the bottom when they moved to the United States. Her dad was a mechanical engineer, but he had to start as a draftsman...and her mom had a master’s in economics but had to work at McDonald’s in spite of being a vegetarian.

Daivati’s family moved to the Jersey Shore, in a much less diverse community. At the tender age of 13, Daivati experienced bullying, name calling, and a racist attack by a gang of boys. It made her question her value and beauty, and it also made her feel embarrassed of her family and brown skin.

Somehow Daivati found the grit and strength to sign up for her school talent show and perform an Indian dance before the whole school. She reclaimed her Indian identity and became proud of her heritage. She recalls, “This is for me, and this is for my people, and for my culture...I danced for both countries that I had so much love for.”

Daivati explains, “To belong in this country, you have to create your own sense of belonging and prove your right to be here...so I was saying, ‘Here I am, get used to it.’”

In high school she fell in love with jazz, and Daivati says John Coltrane saved her life. She threw herself into music and dance, and she declared to the band director that he must teach her how to play the sax!

Daivati became a naturopathic physician, and she shares her thoughts on COVID-19 and the way it’s affecting the world and her own patients. She met her husband online, and now they are expecting their first child in August.

I asked her what it was like to be pregnant during COVID-19, and she said it can be a little bit lonely. She can’t get together with friends for belly rubs, for example. But at the same time she is thrilled to be pregnant after being told it would probably not happen. She wants to sing out from the top of a mountain in her own “Sound of Music” moment!

She’s deeply inspired by her parents, who taught her and her brother to spend time with people who can teach them something and show them how to be better human beings. Daivati says her parents are “so full of love and joy and a deep sense of connection with others,” and they make other people feel like they part of the family. She admires “the courage it took to come here because they thought it would be a better life for themselves and their kids...nothing they experienced has ever made them bitter or resentful or dark. They kept that shine...that’s the spark that inspires me every day.”

I got the honor of meeting Daivati’s parents last fall, and I agree with her sentiments. I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know Daivati better during this interview, and I’m excited to welcome her little one.

You can reach Daivati through her website, Alive and Well Healing Arts, or on LinkedIn or Facebook. Listen to my interview with her here.

On the next episode I interview Rabbi Debra Kolodny, a veteran of social justice movements and a bisexual rights activist who brings a spiritual perspective to their work. They currently serve as the spiritual leader of Portland’s UnShul and executive director of Portland United Against Hate. They have been out on the streets many nights recently. They also launched the Portland Spirit Led Justice Alliance to support, expand, and amplify the contribution of spiritual leaders and communities in justice campaigns.

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Dennett dropped out of high school and completed her GED by the age of 16. A New Yorker at heart, she lacked access to many opportunities as a child, and her parents divorced when she was young. Thanks to a few people who believed in her potential, she now has nearly three master’s degrees.

She is driven by her passion to help people...affecting other people’s lives for the better. Just a few months after starting her online network, Corona Daze Professional Development (CDPD), her group now has over 600 members. She facilitates weekly training and networking to help people increase their professional and job-hunting skills.

“In a perfect world, you wouldn’t need CDPD. We support marginalized groups all over the world...people who don’t have the connections and don’t know what to do,” Dennett said. “I was fortunate enough to have people help me...They saw something in me...I don’t even care why they helped me...At CDPD, we are creating a place where marginalized groups can network.”

You can contact Dennett at coronadazepd@gmail.com or LinkedIn, or find CDPD on Facebook. And on Friday, July 17, check out CDPD's new website!

I’m deeply inspired by Dennett’s drive to help other people and pay forward the advice she received in her career.

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Meet Skye Leybold, who tells our latest story of grit, resilience, and connection on the Finding Fertile Ground podcast.

Skye was diagnosed with Stage 4 metastatic cancer a few years ago, and her doctors gave up on her. She was determined to live for her children, and with the help of her husband and a new medical team, her tumors are gone. She knows they will come back eventually, but she's prepared for the next fight.

I loved this conversation with Skye and found myself appreciating the little things in life that we all take for granted. She is an inspiring, fierce fighter, and I know you too will be inspired by how Skye has found her fertile ground.

You can find Skye on Facebook at or on Instagram at @sickpunkskye. Next week, we'll talk to Dennett Edwards, who has started Corona Daze Professional Development, an online network that helps people from marginalized communities get back to work

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In the first episode of the Finding Fertile Ground Podcast, Marie Gettel-Gilmartin interviews Olive Bukuru Kabura, whose family fled from war-torn Burundi when Olive was just 6 months old. She grew up in a refugee camp in Tanzania until she was 10, when her family moved to Oregon.

We talked about her experiences in Africa, assimilating to the United States, going back to Tanzania and Burundi a few years ago, Black Lives Matter and racism here, Black Panther, and the incredible resilience of immigrants. Don't miss this moving conversation. Olive is amazing. You can find her on Instagram at olive_bukuru.

Finding Fertile Ground Podcast: Recent Episodes

Marie Gettel-Gilmartin