Jordan Siegel
Founder, Liminary

also known as Josie, if you love me

I have had the good and too-unusual fortune of being able to follow the many scents of my purposeful curiosity through many corridors, labyrinths, and corded hurlings into the beyond. My learnings are on record and off — ecstatic and ongoing discovery of earth and the sacred, revelatory patterns of meaning and power, intimate apertures of communication and the right stewardship of grace, and cooking, lots of cooking.

Here, to lay it straight:

My undergraduate degree from Davidson College in North Carolina was in English literature, where I studied the power of story + the compulsions of meaning and body.

From 2011-2016, I taught at a creative charter school for gifted students in Thornton, Colorado where I developed some radical and enlivening curriculum, like live action role-playing (LARPing) comparative humanities (1984 v. Brave New World). In 2013, I also started studying Permaculture Design, which I undertook with an enthusiasm common to folks who discover it, launching a school-wide animal husbandry project with a flock of chicks, stacking the functions of teaching care, simple construction, community organization, and business acumen selling eggs. I also started making yearly trips into the canyon lands to countenance vastness, a specific beloved creek, and electric blue dragonflies with secrets to keep.

Teaching at the charter school was incredibly enriching in certain ways, and incredibly depleting in others. After five years, it was time for me to move on.

This is a stand-in for more that I will include:

working for One Nation, directing the Academy, becoming a certified Death Doula at the Conscious Dying Institute, studying herbalism at the Colorado School of Clinical Herbalsism, Tom Brown’s Tracker School, starting Central Edge Leadership, the Rootworks, the Mystery Works, Caleb + the lion, grief + seeds. I’m so fucking bored writing about myself.

The living Earth has my whole allegiance, and it is her designs to which I look for mine. Fermented by diverse experience and requisite rest, I am a living culture, a substrate for intimacy with the real. Bless you.

I was born in New York City where I grew up in a sky-scraper apartment lined with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, polished black lacquer cabinets, and walls of woven grass. Every surface confessed my wild touch.

My childhood was two blocks long and oceans wide. Two blocks to the Chapin School, the all-girls private school I attended for 13 years on the same street as the spindly tower I slept in, and as wide as airplanes would take us on every conceivable holiday.

As a child, I begged to sleep outside in the pop tent my grandma gave me as often as I could, to the bemused confusion of my city slicker family. I tried to excavate the god I found in an oak tree, moved by an uninitiated zeal that I could not explain. Since then, I have sought the dirt and heave of the good, dark Earth like a great, complex, disorganized religion. Her musk fragrances my bones.

I spent a couple of months in Peru at the Paititi Institute, became a teacher of Earth Ways Yoga in Colorado, and starved through two weeks in the Utah wilderness with Boulder Outdoor Survival School.

I still could not wrap my head around the distribution of and obedience to power in one of these worlds we share, so I applied to study law at the University of San Diego in 2017. I remember how strange it felt to read cases involving gruesome injuries, horrific abuse, or tragic death, and then come to class for a totally hygienic lesson on issues of improper jurisdiction or judgment-proof plaintiffs or joint and several liability. The dispassionate coolness of the law juxtaposed with the actual suffering of real people, ecosystems, and animals had me doing course readings with prayer beads, invoking compassion for all beings with one hand and highlighting issues and reasonings with the other.

I transferred to the Peace School a USD and graduated with my Masters in the Arts of Peace and Justice, with a secret background in law. I wrote my thesis on ritual, art, and revolution; or, as it is more easily-digested in academia: liminality and structures of meaning and power. This work remains some of the theoretical backbone underlying my practices and professions.