Who is Nancy?

Who is Nancy Wesson?

Well that’s a good question. I’ve been working on figuring that out for more decades than I’d like to admit!

A decade ago, I’d have rattled off something about my professional life and all those different identifiers:

Audiologist, Feng Shui Expert, intuition-trainer, weaver, RE-investor, consultant, writer. But needing a shift in 2011, weary of keeping all those plates in the air and wanting to live the work, not sell it, I walked away from a perfectly good life. I sold my car, leased my newly remodeled home that wouldn’t sell, packed a couple of 40-pound bags, and headed for Uganda, where—for the next two plus years—I would serve as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Our small group was the first sent north of the Nile River after Kony’s brutal 20-year war.

It wasn’t the first time I’d shut everything down and gone adventuring, but this was like cliff jumping and resulted in a total paradigm shift.

When I returned, I wasn’t who I’d been when I left. I was both more – and less. Less, in that I’d jettisoned a lot of the veneer I’d accumulated along the path of trying to become the person society convinced me I should be. As a Southern Girl, raised by a Depression Era mother, trust me, there was a lot of debris.

I was more, in that way that the Skin Horse in the Velveteen Rabbit describes as being real: with a lot of fur and sharp edges worn off, a little loose in the joints, and worse-for-wear, but knowing I mattered. Filled with an intense sense of gratitude, and a new appreciation not only for life, but my self-worth, I encountered a different wilderness. Stumbling down the rabbit-hole of my own psyche, I saw my mother’s face looking back at me from the looking glass. Within a few short years I’d become mother-in-law, grandmother, and the aging parent—all in one fell-swoop. It was soul bending. Having written the award-winning Moving Your Aging Parents in 2008, I can tell you it was quite a shock to discover myself in the title role.

That entire experience became the award winning, I Miss the Rain in Africa: Peace Corps as a Third Act.

Life has been an interesting mix: not easy, of challenges and adventures, graced with two sons, two divorces, and decent accomplishments and contributions. Life in Louisiana, where childhood was characterized by a parade of things that go bump-in-the-night, anchored within me the realization that both the seen and the unseen worlds hold equal sway. At that time in South Louisiana, religion, voodoo and spirituality mingled were so entangled it was hard to say where one ended and the others began. Frenzied tent revivals, the KKK and Long Shoreman strikes were also regular players in an ongoing litany of what now seems like my own, personal Twilight Zone.  Growing up in such an environment spawned a tendency to question everything and to search for answers in unconventional ways.

Although I’ve ventured far from my roots, they deeply inform my writing and show up as stories and subtexts. Some are bizarre and stretch credulity, but I write from what I know, and what became foundational for life moving forward

Travels far and wide have ranged in style from that of near-pennilessness, to first-class, to paid speaker, and finally back to spartan as Peace Corps Volunteer. I’ve lived a short stint on Food Stamps and a longer one with money but have settled—mostly by choice— into minimalism. I’ve enjoyed several careers, written two award winning books, conversed with and cleared ghosts, and am an ET-experiencer, but with all that weirdness, have managed to hold on to a credibility that resulted in my being a speaker at the US Department of Justice and the Department of Labor.

Certainly, I have lived life with one foot in the linear world and the other firmly planted in the ethereal and sometimes magical, periodically abandoning both just for the sake of adventure, i.e. cruising on and living aboard a 29-foot sailboat, taking off for Africa before PC was ever on the horizon. I’ve saved the lives of two toddlers: one mine and the other I pulled out of heavy traffic.  Somehow that sticks with a person. That’s the short list. I’ve finally accepted that I am a sampler in life and a traveler, and need to be periodically immersed in a radically different experience to be re-energized. The current immersion is that of grandmother to a spectacular five-year-old, in whose life I have figured large since two months.

Currently, the whole famdamly lives in a couple tiny frontier towns near the Deschutes River in Oregon, learning to be a conscious-family unit after living scattered around the globe for a couple of decades. I admit to being barely tolerated by a Tuxedo cat named Matokee and having a potty-mouth honed by sailing. I’m learning to embrace aging, inasmuch as the alternative is—well—deadly.

I hope you enjoy the books, and if you do – a good review is more helpful that you know.

CONSULTING:

If you would like to know more about my consulting services or determine how to navigate your own paradigm shift and developing a different lens through which to view life, please visit:  NancyWesson.com