Hello
My name is Megan Jean Kellner-Rode (maiden name French). I am an Oregonian through and through, enjoying all things pine-scented and grown in Oregon soil. I am an organic vegetable farmer, local food and environmental activist and advocate, and a writer.
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My personal mission statement is "to value compassion, community, and connectedness above all else, through respect, inspiration, and care. To celebrate the unseen, the overlooked, and the rhythmic every day."
My Story
A two-acre field of wild daisies was the foundation of my life. Grass stains my medium on a canvas of secondhand denim. The entire mossy, dripping, green world my muse.
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I used to pull each individual petal from the white clover, place it in between pursed lips, and suck the tiniest sweet nectar off each end. To jump from one puff ball to the next playing hopscotch under ancient oaks. To sit for hours with my sister cracking the ends off green beans for my mother to can for winter nourishment.
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I went from a little girl who refused to wear dresses, was too squeamish to hold an earth worm (so I carried them on leaves to neighboring tortoises) and was deemed "Motor Mouth" because of my love to explore the world verbally. To now, a grown ass woman, who loves to wear dresses (but usually wears canvas pants), will field dress a deer or skin a rabbit, and still talks a bit too much, but loves to listen a whole lot more.
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I've kept my head down most of my life. Not metaphorically, but literally. As there is so much to explore within the length of each step. And I've never been one to travel much because there is so much wonder just at the end of my fingertips, begging to be questioned, discovered, observed, sought.
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I was born in the high desert of Oregon, spent my childhood in the lush wet fields and forests of the Willamette Valley, returned to the high desert for my adolescence, back again to the Valley for college, and like a lava rock magnet, was pulled back over the Cascades to my high desert home.
The high desert is the place where my roots tap deeply, as most here must. For if they do not, if one's roots lie shallow and short, one will surely shrivel up and disappear in this harsh land. Blown away in the constant mountain wind. Sucked dry by long drought. Left alone, unentangled in another's roots for the cold harsh winter.
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I think I was put on this earth to pull and lengthen and stretch and grown and tend other's roots. To help them sink with vigor and love into the earth, into their foundation, into their life source. To remember what it is to feel and live deeply.