The Front Yard Tree

Chris grew up in small-town Iowa, where early connection with nature was the quiet and potent backdrop to his evolving imagination.

Yet it was much later in life, inside the coursing of a real human conversation, that he remembered his deep companionship with the old maple tree just outside his childhood bedroom window — a tree with whom his young boy self was in constant communication and to whom he was fiercely devoted and protective.

This remembrance was a grief filled wonder that burbled forth in a surprising watery moment with a friend. Yet the biggest gift and important lesson wasn’t the memory itself or the insights that came with it, but rather the conditions that allowed the remembrance to arise.

It’s this bigger question of how we come together in ways that might allow for greater remembrances of all kinds that underlies both the inspiration for The Front Yard Tree and the big questions that drove Chris forward through all the fuckery.

Chris weaves together over forty years of experience in the healing and creative arts.

Twenty of those years were spent as a caregiver to people with various physical and cognitive abilities, and another twenty as a therapist and social worker. Alongside these paths, he’s been deeply shaped many other adventures and missteps.

The journey has led him into movement and myth, with a decade of Continuum practice and conscious dance, and a long-standing devotion to the imaginative realms—working with archetypes, energy work, visualization, neuroplasticity, creative play, and embodied ritual. His work is always evolving.

Through The Front Yard Tree, Chris is devoted to helping others build their own living architecture of body, mind, and spirit — and to growing communities where transformation can take root, flourish, and serve life in its many forms.

(A longer, more rambling, and colorful version of Chris’s story lives on The Front Yard Tree site.)