Among many more conventional places, my path to “scholartivist” ministry wound
through a pool deck, two dumpsters, 1,000 paper cranes, a reptile funeral, a burning house, and an actual modern American labyrinth: a corn maze. It began when my public high school swim coach measured everyone’s body fat with calipers in swimsuits on the pool deck and forced us to pray before team meetings. After encountering peaceful resistance during my captaincy, he quit. On discovering hundreds of discarded books in my high school’s dumpster, I climbed in with my best friend, only to find they were just spines. This led me to confront the librarian and learn about the environmental impact of “weeding” libraries, which inspired me to make a sculpture with them (and write an op ed). In college, I dumpster-dived again, that time for boxes to hold 1,000 paper cranes for an art therapy project I initiated after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, uniting students in shared grief and healing. When I got pink eye from a cat while laying floors with the Diné in Four Corners, I instinctively encouraged a coworker with sawdust in his eye to come with me to seek medical help; it turned out he had scratched his cornea, and the visit saved his vision. I later visited another coworker in the ICU after double bypass surgery, becoming the last person they spoke to before dying in their sleep two hours later. I’ve held a child’s hand as we jumped out of a burning building, performed a funeral for a lizard, and pioneered multiage religious curriculum at a sunsetting church. I’ve piloted new tech for C-level executives at a  publicly traded company and taught tai chi classes that improved mood and mobility in hospice. I’ve also built and facilitated short-term communal living spaces, exercised my responsibility as a mandated reporter, and accompanied patients to cancer and osotomy treatments. I’ve protested forced outing policies at school board meetings and participated in marches, especially with the LGBTQIA+ community and California’s Farmworkers. I’ve accompanied people through near death experiences, and been with them as they died, walked their bodies to the undertakers, and comforted the CNAs who cared for them. {On different days I remind other nurses how much they used to love or hate the Harlem Shake.} I have married and buried. I have sat vigil with a dying Great Pacific Octopus, guarding her unfertilized eggs - what devotion. And yes, I’ve even taught a verklempt teenager how to box breathe so they could get up from the ground during a panic attack in the world’s largest corn maze. By embracing my authenticity wherever life finds me, I have come to recognize my call to ministry as a peaceful threshold guardian: someone who holds space for all living beings as they navigate intense periods of change and discover their own truths in the Anthropocene.