Meet Kristine

Most people spend their lives following a script they didn’t write. I was no different—until the day I stood in my backyard at age seven, shaking my fist at the universe, demanding answers. And wouldn’t you know it, the universe answered.

What followed was a brief but life-altering moment of what I now call “Unity Consciousness”—a profound sense that everything was connected, and that the world was far more complex—and more alive—than I had been taught. I didn’t have language for it then. I only knew that something fundamental had shifted.

Once you glimpse that the story you’ve been handed isn’t the whole story, curiosity becomes unavoidable.

That curiosity has shaped my life ever since.

Crossing Borders Inner & Outer

I’ve spent much of my adult life stepping into unfamiliar worlds—sometimes by choice, sometimes by circumstance.

• An exchange student in Australia.
• Teaching English in Japan.
• Solo backpacking through China and Russia as the Soviet Union was unraveling.
• Peace Corps Volunteer in Papua New Guinea.
• Volunteering at Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying in Calcutta during an 8-month backpacking trip through India, Sri Lanka & Nepal.

These experiences didn’t teach me how to feel comfortable everywhere. They taught me how to pay attention when I wasn’t.

Travel became my most rigorous education not because it was glamorous, but because it demanded humility. It stripped away inherited assumptions, exposed the limits of good intentions, and forced me to confront who I was when certainty dissolved. Again and again, I learned that real growth doesn’t come from collecting experiences—it comes from being changed by them.

Crossing borders—geographic, cultural, and internal—became less about movement and more about orientation.

Education, Work, and Curiosity About Consciousness

Along the way, I earned a bachelor’s degree in International Business and Japanese, followed by a master’s degree in Intercultural Relations. I was also drawn to the inner landscape—how people make meaning, how perception shapes reality—which led me to work for a time as a clinical hypnotherapist.

But my deepest education has never come from credentials alone.

It’s come from navigating cultural dissonance, sitting with discomfort, listening more than speaking, and learning to trust intuition when familiar frameworks fall apart. Those moments—when expertise fails, and attention becomes essential—have shaped both my worldview and my work.

Writing as Integration

Writing is where I integrate these experiences.

My fiction and nonfiction explore what happens when people cross boundaries—geographic, psychological, spiritual—and are forced to reckon with what remains when old identities no longer hold. I’m interested in moral complexity, presence, and the quiet transformations that occur when we stop trying to control outcomes and start paying attention.

My novel God in Drag was inspired by my time volunteering in Calcutta and grapples with embodiment, mortality, and spiritual disorientation in a cross-cultural context.  Read the first Chapter of God in Drag HERE

My upcoming novel, The Snakeman’s Wife, sparked to life when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Papua New Guinea. Discover more HERE

What You’ll Find Here 

This site brings together my writing, travel-oriented guides, and curated resources around thoughtful travel, international exchange, and study abroad—not as lifestyle aspiration, but as serious, formative education.

I believe that ethical travel and exchange, approached with humility and care, can deepen empathy, expand moral imagination, and help us become more responsible global citizens—not as an identity to claim, but as an ongoing practice.

This website exists to support that practice through stories, reflection, and orientation for those willing to engage the world thoughtfully—both beyond borders and at home.

It’s always expanding to offer more to those curious about travel as a way of seeing yourself more clearly by exploring the glorious variation in people and cultures, and coming home to our shared humanity. So keep checking back!