About me

Hi!

I’m Anya (they/them or per/person)

I’m a lifelong researcher driven by curiosity and a sense of life as an adventure. I want to meet all of the peoples and learn all of the things. Please teach me 😀

My family escaped from Russia when I was a toddler, so I got to grow up in New York City (Flushing, Queens) where I interacted with all sorts of people from all sorts of places and learned that there are probably as many different versions of reality as there are beings inhabiting it. I try my best to use person pronouns for all living beings. We’re all just beings living our purposes however we figure those out.

I’ve moved around a bunch trying to find the truest form of my life that brings me into closer alignment with my purpose for being. I am a manifestation of a universe curious about itself. I believe humans are fundamentally decent and we have to really go out of our own ways to be unkind or cruel. I’m not fond of the sort of highly complex hierarchical structures that are currently shaping how humans interact with each other and with other beings. As much as I loved growing up in Queens (a wild land full of immigrants, small businesses, and dozens of spoken languages), the pace of life there felt exhausting. Des Moines, IA felt like a lovely balance between nature and artifice, with plenty of parks, little forests, and bike paths all around the city. Whitefish, MT was really pretty and mountainous and forested but felt like a place where people might go to avoid other people. Denver, CO, has a lot going on, a booming art scene, wonderful humans doing kind things for each other, and growing pains from growing too fast and not supporting the people who were marginalized or pushed out in the process.

I met Taos, NM on a brief visit with my partner and his doggy best friend. The pace felt right, and the energy felt amazing. It is by no means free from the tendrils of commodification (converting the time/energy of living beings into resources to be bought and sold according to rules set by a far-away government), but it’s wild enough and far enough from major airports that it feels more humane – more human sure but also more everyone. Tarantulas, coyotes, big horn sheep, mouses, elks, cows, dogs, cats, horses, anoles, owls, ravens, magpies, crows, sage brush, peppers, aspens, ponderosa pines, Russian thistle (tumbleweeds :D), prickly pears, sunflowers, maize, summer squash, just all of the beings!

I’d like to stay in Taos for as long as it’ll have me, and for me that means finding a way to live in harmony with place and with other living beings who inhabit place. Working full time remotely pulled me out of place and consumed my energies, so now I’m trying to slow my mindchatter, deploy my ability to think quickly and make all sorts of connections at will rather than constantly, and propagate all of the good vibes that I can muster.

Thank you for visiting my site!

If you’d like to reach out, my
Email: anyaslavina@icloud.com
Instagram: Anya_ADPhD