Creative storytelling for heart-centered, earth-loving brands
Content Writer
I'm a published author, MFA-trained writer, and wellness guide with over a decade of experience in literary storytelling, community building, and mindful living. My work has appeared in acclaimed journals and earned writing awards. I currently share slow-living, nature-based writing with 1,500+ Substack subscribers.
I help conscious brands, healers, artists, non-profits and small businesses find the words that fit—language that feels like home, not like marketing.
Services Offered
Need writing across multiple platforms—like web copy, newsletters, ritual guides, or creative content? I offer custom bundles and monthly retainers starting at $500/month.
Examples
Web Copy: Brand Home Page, All Of Us Stardust
Dear Pilgrim, Dear Seeker, Dear Initiate,
Once upon a time, you were a barefoot, feral child who befriended bugs and talked with trees. Until you were told it was all "make believe," and you stopped trusting yourself and your relationship with the natural world around you.
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When you are disconnected from nature, you are disconnected from yourself. This disconnection can cause you to feel like you are unworthy, unsupported and without a sense of true belonging. You can end up spinning into cycles of self-doubt, looking to others for validation, and pushing yourself harder and harder for a fulfillment that seems out of reach.
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When you are disconnected from nature, you are disconnected from yourself. This disconnection can cause you to feel like you are unworthy, unsupported and without a sense of true belonging. You can end up spinning into cycles of self-doubt, looking to others for validation, and pushing yourself harder and harder for a fulfillment that seems out of reach.
The natural world longs to be in relationship with you again. If you are reading this, the wild within you is calling, all you have to do is answer.
What is the Wild Within?
Do you hear a call from deep within your core for something unnamed, untamed that does not exist in the world of modernity, something much more ancient that you can't quite pinpoint?
Have you searched for it everywhere in therapy, meditation, wellness retreats, on the yoga mat, in the media, but you've only been able to graze its meaning, never able to fully integrate and embody this craving for something more?
Does your yearning feel elusive, only rarely quenched in dreams, in trance, in myth, art and music, and always in nature?
Web Copy: Non-profit About Page, Taos Land Trust
How We Took Root
In the late 1980s, a quiet crisis unfolded in Taos, New Mexico. A beloved stretch of open land was lost when its owners faced steep inheritance taxes. Forced to sell, the family watched as decades of stewardship slipped away. This loss galvanized a group of local visionaries to act, sparking the creation of the Taos Land Trust (TLT) in 1988, the first land trust in New Mexico.
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With a dream to protect Northern New Mexico’s land, water, and cultural heritage through education, advocacy, and conservation, our founders championed voluntary conservation easements, a tool allowing families to retain ownership while safeguarding land from development. In 1991, novelist Frank Waters and his wife Barbara stepped forward, donating TLT’s first easement of 8 acres bordering Taos Pueblo, the first ever conservation easement in New Mexico.
By the 2000s, TLT’s impact grew. We partnered with Trust for Public Land to donate nearly 17,000 acres of public lands for conservation to the Bureau of Land Management. In 2009, TLT acquired the 22-acre Rio Hondo Fishing Park and is playing a pivotal role in establishing the Red Clay Trail Cultural and Traditional Access Easement, ensuring permanent access for Taos Pueblo to ancestral routes.
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Our policy advocacy helped shape state conservation laws and ensured tax incentives reached low-income families. Notably in 2007, we successfully advocated for New Mexico’s transferable conservation tax credit system through legislative reforms aimed to incentivize private landowners to protect ecologically and culturally significant lands by making conservation easements more financially viable.
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Growing Through Collaboration
Rio Fernando Park was purchased in late 2015, encompassing 20 acres adjacent to Fred Baca Park. The park’s 7 acres of wetlands and adjacent Rio Fernando River were severely degraded and our restoration efforts, including replanting native vegetation and reestablishing natural river channels, have revived habitats for beavers, migratory birds, and fish. Additionally, we restored 13 acres of fallow farmland, reintroducing traditional irrigation via the Vigil y Romo Acequia (reopened in 2019 after 40 years of disuse). Today, Rio Fernando Park is a vital part of our community and mission.​
Blogs or Articles: Our Uncertain Future, Substack
Discover the Joy of Slow Living: How to Simplify Your Life and Reduce Stress
There are many reasons to live off the grid, but one that is most important to me is Slow Living. Slow living (SL) means that no matter what is happening in the world, I am able to stay connected to what is most important. I stay centered within myself, fully resourced, connected to the land around me, and loved by friends and family. It means that I only need to handle what is right in front of me right now: the dishes in the sink, my recent blog post, my daughter returning from her day, the spider crawling across the wall, or the ache in my left hip. SL is about living a slower life, with intention and mindfulness.
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What is Slow Living?
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SL invites us to focus on what is most essential to our lives, authenticity, values and joy.
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This means reducing distractions, setting boundaries, reducing commitments and prioritizing our fulfillment.
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There is a bit of anti-materialism thrown in there as this ethos necessarily asks us to consume less.
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It is often equated with sustainability, emphasizing quality over quantity, as well as buying local and ecofriendly or secondhand products.
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SL allows you to connect more deeply with your local community and your immediate surroundings as you stay more focused on the present moment, appreciating what you have instead of seeking more outside yourself.
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All this leads to a more meaningful life of purpose and contentment.
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SL is also about choosing rest over stress.
Is Slow Living for you?
We all have a primordial longing to slow down and savor life without stress or trauma though many of us feed off our modern world of busyness and stimulation, afraid of what we might discover if we slow down for too long. And though it isn’t out of reach for anyone, it’s certainly not an easy task.
For one, we live in a hyper-masculine/yang society that values traits such as speed, efficiency, productivity, ambition, action, working hard, movement, determination, pushing forward, decisiveness, accomplishments, competition, etc. There is nothing wrong with these characteristics, except that they are over-emphasized and out of balance.
The quieter feminine/yin traits of receptivity, flow, openness, stillness, imagination, rest, community, deliberateness, nuance, etc. are often perceived negatively in our society as too weak, passive, irrational, submissive, ineffective or unpredictable. Interests traditionally seen as feminine—such as beauty, romance, or nurturing—are often dismissed as trivial or shallow.
When you read these two sets of traits side by side, yin and yang, what reaction do you have? Do you believe one is more important than the other?
Newsletter: Letters from the Slow Lane
Dear friends,
It rained this afternoon, a rare thunder that circled just above our casita. I opened all the windows and let in the scent of petrichor and wet sage. Water is such a treasure in the desert, manna, nourishment. I knew this was the moment I was waiting for. The rain loosened the soil. It was time to do what I had been resisting, to pull the growing tumbleweeds from my backyard.
I dressed in long pants and long sleeves to protect myself. Outside the clouds hung low and the air was refreshingly cool. Still, I sweated as I yanked and dug up shallow roots of the thorny invasive weed, so pervasive on land where sagebrush has been removed.
An hour in, I had completed a single patch near my back gate. I saw the horehound in the side yard and the dry grasses in the front all calling me to complete the job. A loud part of me demanded I keep weeding; I had already geared up, I was already started, might as well finish.
But a quieter part asked me to put down my shovel, remove my work gloves and stroll into the sunset. I listened to the whispers.
The sun balanced between horizon line and the grey cumulus burned through the sky like an eyeball gazing on the world. Three nighthawks circled and cried overhead. I breathed deep in the evening air.
Just a short walk. My house beckoned me back to settle into evening, to cook dinner and finish my book. But I was grateful for the momentary lapse in achieving. A time out of time to simply be effortless in the world.
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When was the last time you did something for no good reason, did nothing for the sake of nothing? Are you glad you did? Comment below and let me know. I’d love some fresh inspo.
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Take it easy,
Johanna
