Origin Story: how I became Mystic Sister.

There is a milder, more palatable version of this story I could tell you that sounds clean and intentional, and reads like a Hallmark card: a woman follows her passion from the city to the land, builds a beautiful homestead, and now spends her time frolicking about the land, making medicine from plants and bees. While this version is true, it is not the whole truth. It misses the really good bits: the drama, the mess, the unfolding.. and a damn good story.

I have been in steady motion, like a buzzing bee, for most of my adult life. And for a long time, I thought that motion was a problem: a restlessness I needed to cure, an inability to settle, a pattern I should outgrow. I didn’t understand yet that I wasn’t wandering. I was being forged.

I grew up in South Bend, Indiana. A city of about 150,000 people situated near the state’s border with Michigan, known entirely for being the home of the University of Notre Dame. At sixteen, I won a full scholarship to the Chicago Academy for the Arts for Musical Theatre - voice, acting and dance. Being a performer was everything to me at the time, but I didn’t realize how this training would ripple into the woman I was becoming independent of the performing arts. I was being trained in something I didn’t yet have words for: the art of presence. Of bearing witness. Of using your whole body and voice to tell the truth, the story, of a moment.

I went on to study at Columbia College in Chicago for jazz vocals and acting. I was supporting myself completely — working, performing, surviving — and after one year of studies I could no longer afford the tuition. I had to leave. But in that one year I was there, I took an anthropology course that changed everything. Something cracked open. I transferred to Northeastern Illinois (a school I could afford on the north side of Chi Town), declared anthropology as my major. Looking back, it was a major turning point.

Two years later I moved to San Francisco. I double-majored in anthropology and photography at City College, added a journalism minor, and between semesters I traveled — Central and South America, Europe, Morocco, Southeast Asia — doing documentary and travel photography everywhere I went. I was learning how to see. Not just through the lens of a camera, but with an open mind to cultures and ways of living other than my own. I was learning how to document. Not just with a pen, but with the particular quality of attention that fieldwork requires: showing up fully present to what is in front of you, what’s actually happening, rather than what you expect or hope to find.

San Francisco gave me seven rich, formative years. I made my first botanical skincare line there, Urban Organica, handcrafted in a tiny apartment, more passion project than business but the seed of everything that followed. I kept studying. I kept traveling. I kept pointing my camera at the world and asking it questions.

And then life, as it tends to do, handed me the next plot twist.

I got pregnant. Had a baby. Moved to Rotterdam — and just like that, we were expats. I was writing and photographing for Natural Mother Magazine, filing stories about natural health and food culture from across the Atlantic. And quietly, almost secretly, I enrolled in my first formal herbalism certification through Rosemary Gladstar’s Sage Mountain school.

I didn’t announce it. I didn’t make a plan around it. I just… started. The way you start things that are actually meant for you: without fanfare, without a five-year strategy, just a gut yes so quiet it was almost a whisper.

What I didn’t know then (and only learned years later when I started mapping my astrocartography) is that Rotterdam sits directly on my Jupiter line. In astrocartography, Jupiter lines are where expansion finds you, where doors open without you having to force them, where the cosmos essentially rolls out a carpet and says: here. This is where you grow. I began my formal path as an herbalist standing on my Jupiter line, surrounded by centuries of Dutch biodynamic agricultural heritage, in a country that has been in deep relationship with the land and its medicine. The cosmos, it turns out, had arranged things, as it tends to, if you’re following your heart.

We moved to Toronto after 3 years living and traveling around Europe. Mystic Sister began as an urban beekeeping company here, installing and managing biodynamic hives at homes and businesses across the city. I was featured on Global News. I was running honey production for the largest urban organic farm in Canada: Fresh City Farms. For the first time, I really felt like I was building something. And then, as it does, life asked me to let go of it all, like a tree releasing all its leaves as it does every autumn… and begin again.

The Texas Hill Country welcomed us the way Texas welcomes most things: on its own terms. Rolling limestone hills, juniper cedar as far as you can see, and wild, spiky, sun-scorched things growing in every direction with a kind of defiant tenacity that I came to deeply respect. This is not gentle land. It does not coddle you. The summers are brutal. I’m talking triple digits for weeks, a sun that feels genuinely personal, droughts that test every raised bed and herb garden you’ve poured your heart into. And the culture… let’s just say I was not exactly what central Texas cowboy culture had in mind. I learned to hold my own.

I built raised beds. I raised honeybee hives. I grew herbs in conditions they were never designed for and made medicine anyway. I drove to farmers markets in the heat and set up tables and talked to strangers about tinctures and flower essences they’d never fucking heard of while country music played from a speaker somewhere nearby. I built Mystic Sister, product by product, season by season, largely through sheer grit and determination.

I discovered later that New Braunfels sits on my Mars astrocartography line — the forge. The place where things are built through fire and discipline and effort, where nothing comes easy but everything you make is unquestionably yours. That, in retrospect, explained absolutely everything.

I have been making medicine on a Mars line for almost 5 years now. Every product in the Mystic Sister shop — every tincture, every infused honey, every beeswax candle, every salve and flower essence and jar of fire cider — was made here, in this forge, with my own two hands, in the heat, against the odds. There is no shortcut in that sentence. I earned every single one.

And now, as it always does, life is calling me forward again.

We are moving to Washington State. To the Snohomish area, east of Seattle, in the shadow of the Cascades. I have been feeling the pull of it for a while now, that same cellular certainty that brought me to Texas, that brought me to Rotterdam, that cracked open the anthropology door in Chicago. The kind of knowing that doesn’t argue with you. It just waits.

And then I looked at my astrocartography map and laughed out loud.

The Snohomish area sits on my Moon line, the same Moon line I lived on for seven years in San Francisco, where the photographer and the anthropologist and the first seeds of the botanist in me came quietly, stubbornly alive. I didn’t know it was a Moon line then. I just knew San Francisco felt like being held. Like the city was on my side. Like I could breathe all the way down. Like I could be the real me.

I’m returning to that frequency. But I am not the same person who left it almost thirteen years ago. I am wiser and harder-won and considerably more interesting. I have a body of work. I have four children. I have thirteen years of learning how to make medicine from the earth, the hive, and the turning of the year. I have earned the forge. Now I get to plant.

This move feels different from all the others. Not a leap into the unknown but a homecoming I’ve been earning this whole time. The Pacific Northwest has been in my peripheral vision for years — the green, the rain, the lush and generous land that grows things without being asked. I want to sink roots there. Real ones. The kind that take years to establish and outlast you. The kind my North Node in Taurus has been quietly insisting on my entire adult life.

Every product I make carries the whole of my journey. The land it came from. The season it was made in. The ritual and intention woven into the process. The places I’ve lived, the cultures I’ve witnessed, the thirteen years of study and practice and beautiful, instructive failure that got me here. None of it was wasted. All of it is in the medicine.

This is Mystic Sister. Not a brand I invented, but a life I finally stopped apologizing for.

I’m writing here because I’ve been told for years that I should and because I finally believe it. Not to market something. But because 13 years of learning how to make medicine from the land, the hive, and the season around you is knowledge that belongs to people, not just to me.

So this is where I’ll write about it. The plants and what they’ve meant to people across centuries and cultures. The bees and what they teach. The slow, seasonal rhythm of making things that actually heal. The move to a new land and what medicine grows there. The full, strange, beautiful arc of a life spent bearing witness.

I’m glad you found your way here.

Welcome to Mystic Sister.