I've been reading stories since before I could name what I was doing with them: fairy tales as a girl in Brazil, then novels, history, myth, and birth charts, which found me in my teens and never left.

My own story has a corporate detour, a master's in counseling psychology with an emphasis in depth psychology, and a long season of grief and burnout, healed by a cave year immersed in romance novels. That's the year I saw the thread plainly.

It was one act all along: reading for the pattern, and helping the person in front of me see what they've stopped seeing in their own story.

The act has an old name.

Storyteller.

Not the kind who only spins tales, but the one who reads first, the world, the chart, the book, the person, and then tells you what she found.

The reading is what makes the telling worth anything.

I write, teach, read charts, and sit with people at their crossings from a house in Portland, surrounded by forested hills and wetlands, embraced by farmland, with my husband, two talkative cats, and more books than shelves.