My Origin Story
I don’t fit in. As much as I have wanted to, this strange experience of living on Earth at this time boggles my mind every single day. As an ultra-sensitive who picks up on other people’s energies and emotions, I have struggled with these feelings for years.
Throughout my life I have had many great (and a few challenging) experiences, lived on two different continents, in two different countries, and two entirely different societal systems. Trying to find myself and how I can best add to and improve my local community, I have done many deep dives into many different topics. I have read countless books, listened to all kinds of speakers, attended a multitude of seminars. I have gathered much knowledge about a variety of different topics and got many super-effective tools, some of which I will share with you on this website.
My Design Story
I was practically born with a pencil in hand — I’m happiest when I create. Add some pragmatism into the mix and voila! You get a designer 🙂
Spending my childhood in a socialist country, my future was practically decided from birth: I’d go to school, learn a trade, and work in that trade for the rest of my life. Simple, right? So, I went to school and then got accepted to apprentice in a prestigious trade, assuming I’d do that until retirement. But life is unpredictable. The wall (which separated East Germany from the west) came down in my first year of apprenticeship, and the socialist country ceased to exist. In a shock of awe I realized: The whole world was now open to be explored!
And exploring I did: during my apprenticeship years I took trips to some gorgeous places in Europe, like Rome, Venice, Paris. After completing my training and with a now useless degree under my belt, I went to university, where I got access to the WWW and Adobe Photoshop 1.0 and took to it like the duck to water. With the rise of the internet I started designing and implementing my first website, and even got hired by a small local business to do theirs. The web was brand new and so exciting!
During my last year at university I applied for an internship with Amazon, not really expecting anything to happen. But yo and behold—only a few hours later I got the ‘ACCEPTED!’ email! What a rush! I had to scramble to button up my life in Dresden in Saxony and relocate within the week to Regensburg in Bavaria, and a few months later I flew off to Seattle for 6 full, fun, gorgeous months, after which I got hired to work at Amazon’s German subsidiary in Munich – as a screen designer.
The next two years really kickstarted my design career. I loved everything about it: the small dynamic teams, the heavy workload, the friendships, designing on a computer all day, and going out with like minded people at night. I felt like I was part of a big family and I was living the dream.
Through my American husband who had joined me at Amazon in Munich I had the opportunity to move to Seattle for good. In 2002 I took the leap over the ocean, to the other side of the world, into an entirely different culture.
These were exciting times, but also hard. The projects I was still doing for Amazon as a freelancer fizzled out before we were able to find other ways to replace that income. So I started my own business, my husband found employment, and life was looking up again.
In 2004 our beautiful baby girl arrived, and now I juggled child rearing with running my own business, which left barely enough time to work on designs, let alone look for new clients. Through a stroke of luck I got contacted by a developer from Florida who was looking for a designer to complete her team. It was a match made in heaven, and over the next 17 years we worked together on many projects.
During the big shift in the early 2020s I got reoriented to really focus on the clients I most cared about: people and businesses with a mission to make this world a better place. Because that’s what I care for deeply myself, and by serving businesses like that I feel that I’m able to make a real difference in the world — while doing what I do best and absolutely love — designing!
My Woo Story
As a child I was often told that I was ‘too sensitive”, so I tried to hide my sensitivity and ignore it as best I could. Even though I grew up atheist in a socialist country with studied parents who wholeheartedly believed in science, my grandmother instilled in me a sense of wonder in nature, which I am so very grateful for.
Every time little me got vaccinations I was praised for being ‘so brave’, and I was extremely proud of it. However, after my baby daughter had a bad vaccine reaction I started questioning and researching vaccines in particular and conventional medicine in general. This rabbit hole was deep, shook up my world, and rearranged it in totally different ways. It also opened up my curiosity about energy healing modalities, and I dabbled in ‘healing hands’ and family constellations—but by not being able to prove the results, filed them under ‘make-believe’.
After coming back to the States from visiting my parents in December 2008 I was in dire need for emotional help. During that visit, my bipolar mother was in a full-blown manic phase, which was very disturbing for everyone around her, and it blew everything I thought I knew about her out the window. To say it was a big shock puts it mildly.
To help me deal with it I was offered energy work by some friends I knew –which I gratefully accepted. I was astounded how much I could feel during that first session they gave me – they didn’t even touch me! When I felt ill the next day, they invited me over again for a quick energy waste removal. I arrived there feeling crappy, it took about five minutes on the table, and by the time I got off I was perfectly fine – completely back to normal. All they did was walk around me, wave their hands in the air, and hold my feet. I couldn’t believe it!
Now I really wanted to be able to do that too! After we talked for several hours that day I was invited to apprentice with them, and for about a year I learned everything I could from them. I practiced my newfound knowledge with people, with horses, with dogs, with places, read every book I could find, and listened to a plethora of audiobooks, podcasts and videos about energy work. I honed my awareness and intuition to an extent that now has become an integral part of my life. Turns out that my sensitivity is not a problem at all, but my greatest asset!
My strong desire for personal development got started by and developed with horses. Many subtleties of energy awareness and how to move energy where taught to me by Charity, my Arab-Trakehner mare and horse partner for 10 years. But more about her a little later.
In 2020 I started daily meditations and energy clearings and have made it a cherished morning routine. Over the years I have added many very effective energy tools that I utilize for myself, my friends, my family, and other people to help them with their lives, their animals, and their spaces.
My Horse Story
I have loved horses as long as I can remember, would read about them, dream about them, see them from afar—but my parents discouraged any active pursuit when I was a child. A soon as I started my apprenticeship—for which I had to move out of my parents house—I didn’t waste any time to find the closest riding barn. It was 45 minutes away, and for the next two years I would bicycle there once a week, exhausted but happy. It was a conventional horse barn where I learned the basics and, being a timid rider, was on the lunge line way longer than most.
During the time of my apprenticeship I met a young teenager who owned horses close by. She invited me over to meet them, which started a beautiful friendship. We often rode out together – into the woods, through the fields, along the little village roads – it was beautiful and fun. Even though my friend was a bit younger than me, we had a lot in common and similar dreams and desires as it related to horses. We would read alternative horse magazines and go to horse expos together. We would discuss classical riding as compared to conventional methods, and try them out with her horses.
When I moved away to work for Amazon, I found an alternative riding barn close to the office. This barn had one of the very first open herd setups — a novelty at that time. The horses were much calmer and seem happier than what I was accustomed to from conventional barns. There I shared a horse with a teenager on a partial lease. It was frustrating, because every time I came over, I had to correct the horse first before I could start doing my own things with him.
When I moved to the States two years later, I didn’t have access to horses for several years, especially with taking care of a small baby. Only when my husband nudged me I connected with someone local who needed help at her barn. She had too many horses and tried selling them off – most of them youngsters that didn’t even have basic training. As a budding equine photographer I took it on to create photos and a sales website for the barn, besides cleaning stalls and training several horses each week. Fun fact: the little horse animation you can see on the bottom of this website I had created for that sales page.
One of the horses I met at that barn was Cats Charity, a grey Arab-Trakehner mare. Her owner was sure I would love her once I’d meet her, so I was excited when we first went to the foster home that cared for her at that time. She was in a big pasture with almost no grass and had a foal by her side. There was no hay, nothing else to eat anywhere. I was not impressed. This mare was scrawny and underweight and looked unhappy. We were able to convince her foster parents to supplement hay so the horses wouldn’t starve, and once the foal was weaned and Charity was back at her owner’s barn, we took her out to the arena. The owner was right. Once I sat on her, I felt like home and never wanted to get off again. Needless to say that I bought her eventually and had her as my riding partner for a decade. Another fun fact: one photo of her recently got chosen to be on a USPS stamp with a print run of 5 million copies!
With this barn and this beautiful mare, my equine photography career took off, and took me to many shows, events, clinics, private farms, twice to the Washington State beach, and eventually to the Northwest Natural Horsemanship Center in Fall City. There I met many truly amazing horse people and celebrities of the horse world, like Anna Twinney, Sylvia Zerbini, Craig Cameron and many more, some of which I even had the honor to host in my home. I photographed many clinics, watched many different horsemen and women, and learned a lot.
Even though I had immersed myself deeply in the alternative horse world for years, reading Red Hurst’s book “Riding on the power of others” changed my world view completely, and I had to step away from riding horses. Instead I started focusing on relationship building, working at liberty, and contemplated the greater consequences of having animals in my life. To say it blew my world apart would put it mildly.
After my move to Southern Oregon it took a while to find my way into the local horse community. In 2019 I started volunteering for Riding Beyond, a non-profit working with horses and cancer survivors, but with the Big Change in 2020, it didn’t fit anymore and I left. Even though I have found a few horse friends here, nothing regular has come of it yet.
But I wasn’t finished with the four-leggeds. Prior to our move to Southern Oregon, we had reserved a puppy from a woman we knew. When we picked our puppy girl up from the breeder in October 2018 she was just a couple months old. This small (8 pound) black Pomeranian poodle mix with a big personality has since brought much joy into our daily lives, and taught me a lot — about love, living in the moment, simplicity, boundaries, play, and having fun.
My Garden Story
I grew up with access to a garden my parents owned, a little piece of land we would drive to on weekends. There we would grow fruit and veggies, berries that were otherwise hard to get, herbs, and flowers. I remember snacking on peas right from the plant, picking strawberries, raspberries and currants to prepare as dessert, and putting apples into crates to store them in our root cellar. I remember my grandmother cutting seedpods to store for next year, and my father cutting the lawn with a very noisy push lawnmower. Growing plants was natural and part of our lives.
My grandmother had bought this piece of land with her husband in the early 1930s to build a house. The apple tree they planted together in those early times still stands today, but WW2 thwarted their plans to have a house there. In the war, Grandma lost her husband and was left to raise 5 kids on her own. So she dug up the land to grow food. It was heavy rocky clay soil that she managed to make into a decent garden in a very short amount of time.
I loved to listen to the stories and fairytales my grandmother would tell, and when I was old enough I would read about nature, the sciences and science fiction, and later more challenging articles and books about chaos theory, mysticism, predictions of the future, things that weren’t easily explainable and didn’t add up. I was fascinated by stories about how my grandmother’s grandma knew about her husband’s challenges in WW1, or that her nephew would have nightmares about his own death in WW2.
Each autumn we would go into the woods to hunt for mushrooms. At first we’d go together as a group, but once we were old enough each of us got their own basket and little knife, and off we went all in different directions. Looking for mushrooms this way was always a treat for me! Being in the woods I never felt alone. I loved the trees, the mosses, the smells of fir and decaying wood, the bird song, and the occasional track or rustle of a nearby deer or other animal. The mushrooms were always so pretty and inspired in me a desire to draw, paint or photograph them.
After growing up I created a garden in every place I lived in. First, it was just to have some herbs and vegetables — as a pragmatic person I found it frivolous to grow flowers, especially when spaces where tight. I also bought into someone else’s idea that cut flowers were just a display of decay and death, and believed that myself for years. Once I started opening up to my energetic awareness, more aligned knowledge came my way, and insights of truth became more frequent. I realized that flowers are Nature’s exuberance which she loves to share with Man, that a bouquet of flowers brings the loveliness of Nature into a home, and that a bigger variety of plants in the garden not only serves the pollinators, the land and other insects — flowers also brighten the life of each gardener.
Growing plants was easy in Germany and the Seattle area, but is an entirely different story in the high desert of Southern Oregon I find myself today. Doing things like I always had simply didn’t work here, and I am very grateful to have had this experience — although it frustrated me to no end! Even with lots of care one or two plants would manage to do well, but the rest would get stunted and — if they made it at all to the end of the growing season — eventually just die.
This finally changed once I started on a design project for a seasoned local farmer — together we created a beginner’s course for gardeners (I took care of the design and website, and he supplied video content). As a pupil of Alan Chadwick and [who is this author of the woo garden books again], Scott McGuire’s teachings not only created a well-rounded garden course, it also filled my knowledge gaps and helped me connect bits and pieces of gardening wisdom together. Instead of throwing some seeds on the ground and hoping for the best, I learned to lovingly prepare and grow the soil, so plants would get what they needed to thrive. I also learned how to invoke the nature spirits and use intuition in specific ways in my garden, to be able to create a magical sanctuary that would not only provide food for the body but also for the mind and soul, where I would be able to observe what worked and what didn’t — and see why. My blog has several articles where I go into detail about it.
As with everything, learning never stops. Thank goodness that whatever I botch this growing season, I can try again next year. As I grow better gardens each year and learn from my mistakes, hopefully I grow wiser too.
My Photo Story
As a creative, I LOVE drawing, painting, and working with clay, and have done so all my life. Taking a photograph however is much quicker than creating a painting, so of course I got curious and had to try it out! My first camera — I was a young teenager — was a basic point and shoot with only two options, none of which was automatic. Since I didn’t bother to get a light meter, most photos were bad. But that changed when my grandmother gifted me her old SLR camera with integrated light meter, which made photographing much less of a guessing game.
In good old Karen fashion, I took a deep dive into photography by getting books from the library (the only way then of passive knowledge transfer, since the internet didn’t yet exist). I learned about the interconnectedness of aperture, ISO and shutter speed, about the rule of threes, foreground – middle ground – background, and medium grey. My camera would go everywhere I went. I experimented. I took photos of landscapes, buildings, flowers, cars, moving water. During my apprenticeship I joined a photo club, were we would develop the film ourselves, so we used black and white only. This helped me to recognize and appreciate patterns and the wonderful gamut between the darkest darks and brightest whites.
My camera was my faithful companion and came with me wherever I went. My goal was to get that perfect shot, and horses were my favorite subject. Successful horse photographers like Robert Vavra and Gabrielle Boiselle inspired me. So when I volunteered at that barn near Seattle, I jumped at the opportunity to create sales photos for all the horses, which jumpstarted my equine photography career.
Over the next decade I would photograph horse shows, horse-human portraits, horse sales photos, horse clinics, horse vacations on the beach, horse dance events, horse fashion shows, liberty with horses, jousting, costumes, muzzles, eyes, ears…
I have found that horse people dearly love their four-legged companions and are awed by any halfway decent photo of them, but are very critical and terribly self-conscious when the photo showed them as well. But when I got them interacting with their horses and telling me about them, they would forget the camera was there and I’d get much better, fresher, beautifully connected photos.
That’s what I am looking for nowadays. Shows are no longer a focus of mine — but horse-human connections are. Many horse people have come back to their WHY, leaving behind the ones that are focused on winning at all costs. When ribbons are won by force, the horses ultimately lose. This is not the world I want to live in, and I’m not the only one thinking this way.
So yes, the majority of my photos are of horses and horse people. But not all. People are a close second. And plants, flowers and gardens are important for me too.
My Self-responsibility Journey
In 2020 with the big worldwide change I felt inspired to look more deeply into self-reliance, societal options, and how we could get humanity back on a better trajectory – to live in a way that nurtures our beautiful earth, honors people and their gifts, and unites local communities in a way that every decision made serves the highest good of all.
During the time of covid I learned – like many have – that sometimes saying NO is the kindest thing to do to stay true to myself, even in the face of tyranny. I learned – like many have – what was truly important and what needed to let go of, even if this meant less convenience. I also learned – like many have – that no man is better or ‘above’ another unless they are given permission, and that this permission in our society is often achieved through coercion and deceit, but that it can be revoked with awareness and bravery.
Being thoroughly fed up with the ‘way things are’ — like many others are — I have been researching, thinking, and dreaming about rebuilding society from the bottom up. Many great ideas have been popping up all over the place, many of which have merit. The ‘eco village movement’ has been around since the 70, although with not much success (for reasons I will be exploring in my blog as well). As the dinosaur of our broken society is barreling straight towards its doom, it is time to start grassroots initiatives with like-minded people, addressing the basics of daily life, self-reliance, and the intricacies of living together peacefully.
I know this is possible, and I know we can do this! Connect with me if you are interested to talk about it.