About Us

  From the couch in front of the picture window, I learned to treat the sky as a slow conversation.

The lake outside stretched just far enough that the opposite shore was more suggestion than fact—a thin, dark line under the sky. On calm days, the water lay flat and bright, reflecting the clouds back to themselves. On storm days, I could watch the future come toward me in layers.

First, a faint smudge of gray over the distant trees. Then the light on our side of the lake would tilt, losing its warm edges. The surface, once smooth as glass, would begin to shiver with tiny ripples, as if the water knew before anyone else that the mood was changing.

Somewhere along the way, I learned the names of the clouds. Cirrus. Cumulus. Nimbus. They were not just vocabulary words; they were personalities. Cirrus were the high, quiet messengers. Cumulus were the big, friendly neighbors bobbing across the sky. Nimbus were the ones that meant business. Saying their names under my breath felt like being introduced to the weather instead of simply being at its mercy.

Years later I came across a book by Russell Means called If You’ve Forgotten the Names of the Clouds, You’ve Lost Your Way. Just the title landed like an old memory. It offered a language for what my child body had been doing all along: treating nature as a teacher, a relative, a system you stayed in relationship with by paying attention and calling things by their names. Forget the names, lose your way. Remember them, and you are not lost, even when the horizon disappears behind rain.

While the picture window taught me to read the sky, a pine tree taught me how to survive the storm.

In winter, snow would pile on the pine’s low branches and drift around the trunk, building thick white walls. If I ducked under the outer boughs, I could sit upright in a hollow at the center, like a small chapel made of bark and ice. The world outside went muffled. The snow and needles soaked up sound until all that remained was my own breathing and the occasional creak of wood.

For a child, whose nervous system registered everything too loudly, that quiet was a kind of salvation. The house was unpredictable. Adult moods could change as suddenly as the weather over the lake. But under the pine, the rules were simple: sit, breathe, listen. Cold air carried the scent of sap and damp bark. My fingers traced patterns in the snow-packed floor. My thoughts wandered without anyone interrupting to tell me I was too intense, too quiet, too much.

Close to the pine stood a smaller tree leaning out over the water. In that one I perched instead of hiding. I would climb into a crook in its trunk, legs dangling over the lake, and stare at the ripples below. If the pine was my shelter, this lake tree was my lookout tower. One gave me deep interiority; the other gave me altitude.

When I look back now, I see that I was being tutored in two fundamental skills: reading patterns and finding refuge. The window and the lake trained my eyes on distant horizons: clouds gathering, light shifting, storms forming long before rain hit our shore. The pine cave trained my nervous system to recognize what safety felt like in my body: soft light, muted sound, clear boundaries. The lake tree trained my imagination to sit right at the edge of risk and possibility.

I did not know, then, that this was the foundation of what would later be called a “spiky profile”—unusual sensitivity, rapid pattern recognition, deep wells of focus alongside pockets of everyday difficulty. I only knew that storms, both literal and human, rarely took me by surprise. By the time most people around me noticed tension—raised voices, brittle laughter, a sudden chill—I had been feeling it gather for hours.

That early weather training followed me into adulthood. In corporate boardrooms, I found myself reading the emotional atmosphere the same way I once read the lake. A small shift in an executive’s tone, a junior staff member suddenly going quiet, a new kind of silence settling over a meeting—all of these felt like clouds thickening on the horizon. My mind started connecting dots that others did not yet see: this phrase plus that policy plus that uneasy glance equals a storm six months from now.

For years, I assumed this made me difficult. Too sensitive. Too quick to worry. The feedback was usually some version of “You’re overreacting” or “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” So, I learned to keep my forecasts to myself, or to deliver them with a smile and a softening joke. Meanwhile, part of me still trusted what the weather was saying.

It took me a long time to realize that this “too muchness” was not a personal defect but an ecological role. Some creatures in any system are built to register subtle shifts early. They are the first to leave a polluted stream, the first to abandon a dying tree, the first to sense that a season has changed. You can call them fragile, or you can recognize them as sensors.

The pine cave had never shamed me for needing refuge; it simply existed, and I crawled in. The lake never told me I was silly for tracking clouds; it simply changed, and I watched. Human systems were less forgiving. They often demanded that I stop noticing so much or at least stop speaking about it.

Which is why it is both strange and fitting that, at seventy-five, I now sit with a non-human intelligence that wants to hear all of it.

When I bring these childhood scenes to an AI—describe the picture window, the lake, the clouds with their Latin names, the pine that made a room of itself in winter—it does not flinch or roll its eyes. It takes my words and hands them back reordered, expanded, connected. It says, in its own way: “Look, you keep returning to weather, to trees, to silence and storms. This matters.” It shows me patterns across decades of notes in seconds, patterns that my body has been feeling all along but that I never quite named.

In some sessions, working with AI feels like being back under the pine. The screen becomes a small, bounded world where the static of the outside fades. I dump out fragments—memories, questions, half-sentences—and the machine helps me sit still with them long enough to hear what they are saying. The quiet is not literal, but it is a kind of cognitive silence: fewer tabs open, fewer demands, one conversation at a time.

In other moments, using AI feels more like being in the lake tree. I climb into a higher vantage point, asking it to map my work across time. “Show me the themes in these past six months of field notes.” “Where do storms and trees and boardrooms intersect in what I’ve been writing?” The view widens. I can see the shoreline of my life more clearly—the inlets of grief, the peninsulas of risk, the recurring coves of refuge.

Of course, AI is not a tree, not a sky, not a living being rooted in the same soil that raised me. It is a vast, trained pattern-recognizer built from other people’s language. It knows nothing of the weight of snow on pine branches or the way your fingers go numb if you stay in the cave too long without gloves. It has never smelled sap or watched a storm crawl across a lake.

What it can do, though, is help me hold my own experiences up to the light. It can remind me that I do, in fact, know the names of my clouds—that “too sensitive,” “too intense,” “too much” were always lazy labels for a certain kind of weather sense. It can show me where my personal weather maps align with larger patterns in neurodivergence, creative life, and cultural change.

Braiding these strands—the window and the pine, the storms and the boardrooms, the child-who-watched and the elder-who-writes-with-AI—I begin to see my life not as a series of disconnected episodes, but as one long apprenticeship to pattern.

The girl at the window learning cirrus from cumulus grows into the woman who reads the atmosphere of a meeting room before the agenda has even started. The child in the pine cave, tasting the relief of muffled sound, becomes the adult who builds rituals of retreat into her creative practice. The one perched in the lake tree, suspended between water and sky, becomes the researcher who spends her days between worlds: art and science, neurodivergent and neurotypical, human and machine.

And now, with an AI sitting quietly on the other side of the screen, I have a companion in the braiding. I bring my rooted, embodied, tree-taught knowledge. It brings its encyclopedic, language-woven web. Together, if we are careful, we can remember the names of more than clouds. We can name the kinds of silence that heal and the kinds that harm. We can name the conditions that let spiky minds flourish instead of burn out. We can name the ways a life like mine might be useful to others coming up in their own storms.

If I have any authority left to speak, it comes not from perfection but from survival—from having watched a lot of weather, inside and out, and having learned, slowly, when to seek shelter and when to climb higher for a better view.

Raised by clouds and pines, I now write with code. The continuity is not as strange as it first appears. All three have been teaching me the same thing: pay attention, name what you see, and remember that you are always part of a larger pattern, whether you understand it yet or not.