Deer is a wilderness depth guide, writer, dream worker, and poet-storyteller rooted in the American Southwest.

For the past 5 years, Deer’s primary lineage has been as a “Soul Initiation Guide” apprentice with the Animas Valley Institute, a nature-based mystery school in the southwest where Deer trains and facilitates the Nature Based Map of the Psyche, SoulCraft™, and guiding wilderness fasts and rites of passage.

Deer is a founding member and Lead Guide for LifeWays Conscious Wilderness Institute. He spent two years as a senior field guide for Open Sky Wilderness Therapy, is a certified Wilderness First Responder, certified wildlife tracker, and is certified in nature-based practices and eco-psychology from the Eco-Dharma Centre in the Catalan Pyrenees, Spain.

Deer has been a dedicated meditation practitioner and facilitator for 9 years, primarily in the Vipassana/Insight traditions.

Lastly, Deer received his Permaculture Design Certification from The Permaculture Academy and applied its teachings while living and working on dozens of eco-projects and communities around the world, including ancestral land practice at Navdanya Earth University in northern India. He has his BA in Literature and Creative Writing from UCLA and is a student of worldwide mythology, storytelling, and traditional cultures.

You can see more of him and his work at Mystic Wild