About me <3
I have always been a question-asker. As a child, this got me into a lot of trouble. I asked too many questions and I questioned things I was apparently supposed to simply accept. I wanted to know why, and then I wanted to know why the answer was that.Eventually, I learned to make myself quieter. But the questions didn't disappear, they became a kind of fire, curiosity with nowhere to go. I remember feeling angry about it, there was so much I wanted to understand, and so little room to explore it.Then, in my final year of high school, I had my first Philosophy classes: ethics and argumentation. For the first time, I encountered teachers who didn't flinch when I questioned things. They were delighted! They encouraged me to keep going! And something clicked: perhaps this was a vocation.A few years later, I received a scholarship to study Philosophy at university, and my academic life began.
I specialized in Ethics, focusing on Environmental Ethics, because the questions that had always fascinated me seemed impossible to separate from the living world around me: How should we live? What do we owe one another? What makes something worthy of care? Who gets to decide what is valuable? What happens when we forget that we are part of an ecosystem rather than standing outside of one?Meanwhile, I was also working. I had been finding ways to work since I was thirteen, out of real necessity and then partly because I had already internalized the question that follows philosophers (and not just philosophers of course) everywhere: "but what are you actually going to do with that?!"So at nineteen, I entered the corporate world. And I moved quickly. I became a consultant, then a director, working with organizations on sustainability, regeneration, and impact. I learned how institutions make decisions and how complicated it is to translate good intentions into meaningful action. It was valuable work. I learned an enormous amount.But underneath every title I held, I was still a philosopher. And teaching, learning with other people, kept calling me back. Because I know now that thinking is not an abstract activity we perform somewhere above our lives.Thinking is an ecological practice.
The way we understand the world shapes the way we move through it. What we believe is possible shapes what we attempt. What we consider valuable determines what we protect. The questions we ask determine what we are capable of seeing. And nothing exists in isolation. Not us, our ideas, bodies, politics, work…Not the forests, animals, creatures, rivers, histories, and communities with whom we share this world.This is why I created Rooted Impact.I wanted to build the kind of school I had always been looking for: a place where knowledge could be rigorous without becoming sterile; where philosophy could be alive rather than ornamental; where mystery could sit beside critical thinking, and activism beside wonder, and intellectual seriousness beside joy, and personal transformation beside collective action. And most importantly:A PLACE WHERE WE COULD TAKE OUR QUESTIONS SERIOUSLY!
Because I don't think philosophy is supposed to be stiff, boring, inaccessible, or detached from lived experience. It can become those things. Institutions have a remarkable ability to turn living questions into dead answers. But at its heart, philosophy is something much more exciting: the joy of inquiry. The willingness to look again. To notice what you have stopped noticing. To question the stories you've inherited. To follow an idea far enough that it changes the shape of your world. To become more capable of perceiving and therefore more capable of living.I think of philosophy as a root system. It goes down before it grows up. It draws nutrients from the dark: from history, from uncertainty, from difficult questions, from everything we don't yet understand. And what eventually grows from those roots will be different for each of us. A life. A practice. A way of seeing. A form of resistance. A way of caring.Rooted Impact is an invitation to grow those roots.Obviously I am still growing mine. I'm still reading (yes Philosophy but also A LOT of fantasy). Still asking inconvenient questions. Still getting completely absorbed by an idea. Still learning how much I don't know (and enjoying the unknown). Still practicing the patience to listen when the world, or another person, reveals something I hadn't yet learned how to see.I also make excellent vegan chilaquiles (the best in the world, to be completely honest); I love animals fiercely; my current Letterboxd top 4 are A Ghost Story Story, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, I Saw the TV Glow, and I Am Frankelda; I have an enduring fascination with gothic horror and anything that feels a little strange, ancient, mysterious, or haunted; my favorite color changes yearly, currently it’s this one: #ba9cc7 especially when the sky turns that color.I don't think these things are separate either.A life with depth is a life that makes room for the whole strange abundance of being human. And perhaps that is the thing I love most about teaching, and what over a thousand students have taught me: teaching is never finished. You can study something for years, and can think you understand it intimately, but then you place the idea in a room with other people…and suddenly it becomes alive again! Someone asks a question you never considered. Someone sees a connection you missed. Someone disagrees with you. Someone tells you what the idea feels like in their body. And the thinking begins again. And again, and again, and again, and again…That is the kind of education I believe in: the cultivation of a mind alive enough to keep asking.Today, I live near the mountains, in the forests of Mexico City, always surrounded by trees and beauty.
