Meet Your Guide

I arrived as a tourist. I left as a steward.

As a little girl outside Pittsburgh, I escaped to the woods at the bottom of our hill with a red plastic bucket. I made potions from berries, caught crawfish in the creek, and dreamed of jungles and wild places. The forest was the only place I felt safe.

Then I built the life I was told to build: more than two decades as a commercial leader in corporate healthcare. From the outside, it worked. Inside, I had lost that little girl completely.

When I lost my daughter, my body shut down and doctors found no answers. I found my way back through healers, and through the wild. The first place was a volcanic river valley in Costa Rica, where howler monkeys called from the canopy and the warm water held me. I have returned to that river every year since.

In South Africa, after a trip postponed three times by COVID, I walked into the boma at Care for Wild, the world's largest sanctuary for orphaned rhinos. Six calves who had lost their mothers to poachers were waiting for their morning bottles. When a young white rhino named Yster closed his soft mouth around my hand, something moved through me. I was not there as a tourist. I had been sent there as a steward. Today I serve on Care for Wild's board.

Then came Uganda. In Bwindi I sat with a family of mountain gorillas, and I watched the village beside the forest plant a border of tea along its fields because gorillas won't eat it. No fences, no conflict. I returned three times in one year and began building a healing retreat there.

Conservation changed my life because it gave my love somewhere to go.

1. The ordinary worldCorporate leaderTwo decades in healthcare, far from the girl who talked to the forest.
2. The callLossThe loss of my daughter, and a body that shut down.
3. Crossing the thresholdCosta RicaA volcanic river valley where the wild held me first.
4. The ordealThe rhino orphansBottle-feeding orphaned calves at Care for Wild, South Africa.
5. The revelationNothing survives aloneRhinos, elephants, whales, and gorillas all saying the same thing.
6. The returnThe stewardA seat on Care for Wild's board and a retreat rising beside Bwindi.