My name is María José. I was born in central Mexico, but I have never been particularly good at belonging to one place.

Over the years I have lived in Mexico City, Barcelona, San Francisco, Mendocino, Hawai’i, Montreal, Toronto, Rotterdam, Cannes and Lausanne. At the moment, I am spending two months in Puglia. My heart, as you might imagine, is scattered all over the map.

I suppose this is one of the most fundamental things about me. I am broad. Restless. Free. I like knowing things, especially the things hiding underneath other things: where an ingredient came from, who first fermented it, why a people eats what they eat, what a landscape has to do with a song, where a plant became medicine, how a tradition survived.

I have always had an appetite for the raw material of the world.

Food history. Anthropology. Geography. Folk medicine. Herbalism. Mythology. Music. The strange and beautiful ways human beings make meaning out of what grows around them.

My range is, admittedly, broad and slightly unhinged.

I have always been fascinated by food and musical traditions around the world, but even more by the people carrying them. I love sitting across from someone and hearing about their ancestry, their grandmother's kitchen, the landscape their family came from, and the ways all of that somehow survives inside the contemporary world.

I am equally happy talking about fermentation, primitive skills, homesteading, vinegar or cheese making. In fact, I can become disproportionately excited about vinegar.

For a long time, I was looking at the world largely through a European lens. I have been slowly undoing that.

Coming back to my Indigenous Mexican roots has been one of the great reckonings of my life. Planting corn with my biodynamic teacher Michael and with Martin Prechtel gave me a lived relationship to something that no book could have given me. It has meant questioning a lifetime of Eurocentric programming, learning to see North America with different eyes, and becoming curious about the Indigenous and mystical traditions of Europe at the same time.

The world, I have come to believe, is much too beautiful to reduce to one civilization's version of it.

I care deeply about Indigenous rights and about the restoration of bison across the United States, the country where I have made my permanent home with the person I love.

I always wanted to become a doctor.

Thank God I didn't.

I have enormous respect for the people who spend their lives working inside hospitals, clinics and emergency rooms, saving lives. But I know now that sterile rooms, pharmaceutical corridors and a clinical relationship with the body would have slowly killed something in me.

I found my way instead into holistic care, Ayurveda and the older, messier, more elemental ways of understanding the body.

Today my work lives somewhere between medicine, beauty, food, plants, water and culture. I am interested in helping women and children understand themselves not as machines to be fixed, but as living systems. Rivers, really. Things that circulate. Things that absorb. Things that can become polluted, depleted, restored.

This is also why I care so much about clean beauty.

The things we put on our skin do not simply disappear. They enter our homes, our bodies, our water systems, our rivers. There is something absurd about performing elaborate rituals in the name of beauty while ignoring the living waters downstream.

For me, the body and the earth have never been separate.

I am still learning. Still travelling. Still eating. Still asking too many questions.

But if there is one thread running through all of it, it is water.

Water is the oldest medicine, the first landscape, the thing from which we emerge and to which everything eventually returns.

ॐ