robin (at) somethingrobin.com
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I am an artist + writer + educator + explorer in various realms. Before a seven-year illness nearly cost me my life I was an exhibiting artist, a professor of art, a managing editor for an award-winning arts dotcom, a hot air balloon chaser, a pottery painter, a cater waiter, among other things. I've now spent the last decade learning about healing, more healing, and then more. I had to do this in order to survive. I've been both impossibly lucky and dismally unlucky in my life and (mainly!) I've tried to let things soften and fill me instead of the opposite.
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In 2010, I got a serious biohazard exposure in my office at the university. I resigned from my job, too sick to stand and one year away from tenure. I was mostly bedridden for most of those seven years and though I finally recovered, I ended up with intractable CPTSD. I tried therapy, meds, walking two 500-mile caminos and all the other things people generally try to recover themselves. In late 2019 I sold my place and car, put my things in storage to travel for what I thought would be one year. But, it was the start of Covid and I'd only gone to a few countries when I found myself stranded in the Amazon Jungle for 3 months because Peru shut down its internal flights. I was outside of Iquitos, the largest city in the world with no roads at a healing center in the care of a curandero-shaman. I'd heard plant medicine could be a miracle for people when nothing else worked. Let's just say I got a lot more than I bargained for but have the great honor of working with my shaman friend (and others) to this day.
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Other oddball items: I've lived all across the United States and in other countries. I've taught art, theory, and writing to the elderly, university and graduate students, teenagers, adults outside any institution, and developmentally disabled. I ran The Temporary Autonomous Museum between 2004 -2010, staging pop-up exhibitions and events around the country. My favorite class I ever taught was based on a repurposed version of the Situationist psychogeography concept. It was called... "Psychogeographies" and used experiential explorations of various locations, connection + community, consciousness-jolting exercises, and creativity to bring that joy of epiphany and expansiveness to learning. I love seeing what happens when people are truly inspired no matter how it happens.
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After all I've seen and done I'm convinced massive transformation is possible for each of us in ways we've never dreamed; not only that, it's necessary for the well being of the planet. I am currently working on teaching and creative projects that blend my past skills and experience and my expanding knowledge of Amazonian plant medicine/nature, and am on a mission to help.
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Photo: In the Amazon Jungle with Guido, 2020