Brian, Jen, & Theo
Originally from New Jersey, Jen and Brian moved to the Triangle nearly a decade ago and fell in love with the area. They had their son Theo in 2021 (he’s now 2!) and as a family spend lots of time playing, hiking outdoors in Durham's parks, seeing friends and family, and splashing around at the Museum of Life and Science. When Jen and Brian are not taking care of Theo, you can usually find them rock climbing, kayaking, or spending time on their hobbies.
Jen is a Renaissance soul who loves learning and taking on new hobbies. She enjoys reading fiction and non-fiction on a wide variety of topics, from physics to philosophy to pop psychology, and the new library is her favorite place in Durham. Jen is a visual artist who enjoys dabbling in many different mediums and exploring modern art museums. Jen serves on Durham's Environmental Affairs board and leads a local community collaborative working to accelerate towards a circular economy.
Brian is a tinkerer who loves building things and cooking way too much food. He enjoys running, playing guitar and singing, and board games with friends. Brian has a degree in electrical engineering and works as a programmer at an environmental startup that is looking to revolutionize regenerative agriculture.
Theo is a curious, energetic soul who gives lots of snuggles and babbles constantly about his interests, which are shaking things, crawling after our cats Pancake and Flapjack, and flipping through books.
Jen and Brian joined Weaving Water because they wanted to live in the woods with a close community of people who value interconnectedness. They are excited to raise Theo as part of a village in a space where he can run around outside with his friends.
Danielle, Henry, & Alina
Danielle’s early childhood in the natural beauty of the Appalachian Mountains established a deep connection for deciduous forests, meandering streams, and extended sunsets. Danielle, a structural engineer by profession, enjoys experimenting with modern and post-modern dance and photography and has a passion for good architecture.
Henry grew up near the beach in Southern California. Henry, a professor of Electrical Engineering at Duke University, enjoys playing piano and guitar in his spare time.
Alina, born in 2009, enjoys reading adventure and fantasy books, riding horses, performing, and hiking along the Eno River.
Together they spend time hiking and playing board games. What they value as a family is a love of learning, outlets for creativity and building community with individuals who share a respect and appreciation for nature, enjoy interesting conversation and are excited to take on new challenges and adventures.
Susan
Susan was born and raised in Miami, currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, but has lived many places throughout her life, including New England and Northern California. She has held many different jobs and is currently working for a long term care insurance company. But her real work is as a breast cancer advocate where she reviews breast cancer research grants, mentors others with breast cancer and has a special interest in the healing arts for those affected by cancer.
Cohousing feels like the natural next move for Susan, and she looks forward to moving to Weaving Water with her three cats, Roopa, Mina and Mookaite. Susan looks forward to the community and connection that it will bring. The cats look forward to the screened porch.
Susan has a love of the outdoors and enjoys practicing yoga, making jewelry and art journaling.
Kate, Taylor, Elliott, and Esmé
Kate spent most of her childhood in West Africa (Ghana and the Ivory Coast). As a third culture kid, and with her Father’s family in Lebanon, she has spent her life captivated by new places and cultures. She’s traveled to 50+ countries and has lived on 5 continents. When she and Taylor first married, she convinced him to quit his job and go on a year long backpacking trip. After graduating from UNC, she worked for a non-profit as a college advisor with underserved students and since 2020, she’s been a full time mom.
Taylor’s life has been far less exciting than Kate’s (that is - until he met her)! He spent the majority of it in Ohio and moved to the Triangle after graduating from Ohio State in 2010. Since then he’s experimented with a variety of careers - in accounting and audit as CPA, technology sales and management, and now in software engineering. He’s an aspiring amateur birder and will be looking for fellow disc golfers to walk over with to the course at Valley Springs Park.
Elliott (age 3) loves blueberries, dinosaurs, kombucha, and his best friend Hazel. He seems to gain energy throughout the day instead of losing it, and recently has found a love of telling and hearing stories that have the common ending of someone or something being eaten up by a dinosaur or crocodile.
Esmé (age 1) currently enjoys swinging, taking baths, and most of all, practicing her walking. She is gaining new things (like teeth) rapidly, and while still retaining some level of stranger danger has started to share with those around her a friendly wave or finger point.
As a family, they enjoy being outside, playing board games, eating most anything, and sharing life in community with others. They are excited to be a part of WW and have a place where their kids can grow up connected with the natural world and with their neighbors.
Elaine & Eric
After living in Greenville, NC for 28 years, Elaine and Eric moved to Durham in 2016 to be close to their granddaughter; their daughter and son-in-law happened to come with the deal.
Elaine is a retired physical therapist, and Eric is a retired allergist/clinical immunologist. Elaine is an avid reader and a life-master, duplicate-bridge player, but she has been known to play with commoners. When Eric retired he became an Extension Master Gardener Volunteer. He has a special interest in landscaping with native plants. He also enjoys woodworking projects and cooking.
Jennifer & Violet
Jennifer and her daughter, Violet, are excited to be a part of the Weaving Water community as they have found that sharing experiences, stories, walks, and meals with friends and family make each day a better day.
Jennifer is a health and wellness coach in private practice interested in using natural remedies and behavioral changes to facilitate a more positive and energetic experience of living. She is also a tennis professional, teaching at Duke Faculty Club in Durham.
Violet loves to play, swim and dance, and she enjoys reading historical books.
Together, they are grateful for life, laughter, adventures, and friends!
Jo Ellen
Jo Ellen was raised and lived most of her life in Cleveland, Ohio, and still misses the unfolding of the seasons, the wild plants, deciduous trees, and glacial rock formations of northeastern Ohio. She has walked down many paths: serious student of classical music and dance, activist-writer, explorer of nature and environmentalist, systems analyst, and since 1996, physician.
A fateful encounter at a critical time opened up the opportunity for her to attend medical school in her mid-forties and that, in turn, led to her beginning practice in rural eastern NC, eventually settling in Fayetteville. Over the years, her practice encompassed rural health, serving the military community, indigent care, and addiction medicine.
Now that her energy is no longer directed so intensely into clinical care, she finds the recurrent themes in her life are coming together in new, more fluid ways. In Weaving Water, she has found a new focus on building community in harmony with the natural world. She is also enjoying connecting with others who work within the interface of the performing arts with physical and mental health, and with social justice issues.
This photo was taken after test driving the ELF, a human and solar powered vehicle.
Melissa, Matt & Max
Melissa, Matt, and Max (a.k.a. MX3) moved here from Boston in 2018, unknowingly looking for all the things co-housing promises: interdependent community, a closer connection to nature, and a more coherent relationship with time.
Matt and Melissa are private practice mental health clinicians, focusing on anxiety, stress, trauma, grief and loss, including coping with these experiences during the perinatal period. They also work with professionals across disciplines on enhancing quality of life and reducing the effects of burnout and trauma in the workplace. Matt and Melissa met in 2009 in New Haven, on clinical rotations, and share a love of yoga, an interest in alignment as the foundation for a full and rich life, have taught trauma-informed yoga, and incorporate yoga and mindfulness in their psychotherapy practices.
Melissa has been a Jazzercise instructor for 12 years and used to dance with a hip hop dance company in the pacific northwest. She also is completing her training as an Ayurvedic doula and has a passion for holistic herbalism.
Matt looks fondly back on a bygone past as a competitive squash player. He now uses much of this wisdom to assist athletes with performance.
Max, an 8-year-old student at the Durham Early School, has shown prodigious interest in bugs, monsters, climbing, and building. He is a brave soul with a contagious laugh, incredible zest for life, and huge heart. He helps his parents remember to stay curious and approach the world with more awe, while making time for play and silliness each day.
As a family, they love spending time outdoors and going on adventures and explorations. Max and Melissa share a belief in the all-healing quality of chocolate. They are all extremely excited to be joining Weaving Water.
Diana
Diana moved to Raleigh from Tucson in 1980 when her husband started grad school. She received her Master's in Public Health Nutrition soon after, and worked for 30+ years for a local hospital in chronic disease management. She still works there part-time. Diana’s husband died in 2020.
Though she grew up in Seattle and Tucson, she and her kids are rooted in NC, which has the pervasive green of Seattle and the sunshine of the southwest.
Diana’s happiest time and place is walking in nature for a couple of hours daily with her companion dog. My friends or kids often join them to enjoy greenways, nature preserves and parks. The Eno river has been a most favored place. They began to attend the Eno festival when it first began and have continued that for the years since. Otherwise she is a volunteer with foster kids, her church and as a Democrat.
Diana lives in a great neighborhood in Raleigh currently, and has become close to several neighbors. Community is very important to her! Family, friends, travel, reading, plays, film and art bring her joy.
Ray & Stanley
Stanley and Ray, and their family of four paw pets, are looking forward to being an active part of the Weaving Water Community. We talked about the idea of Cohousing long before we knew its name. Lots of research, visits and Zoom time have led us to Weaving Water.
Having lived for more than 20 years in Worcester MA, but originally from Rumson NJ (Stanley) and Pittsburgh PA (Ray), we like many Weaving Water folks have walked a circuitous path to Durham NC.
Stanley is a trained opera singer who is teaching voice at two colleges. He also has a background in Arts Administration, having run a performing arts non-profit in Worcester, VOX New England, for eight years. He missed live events during COVID, but is starting to return to in-person performances working with TUNDI Productions in Brattleboro, VT this summer. Most recently, he just completed his RYT-200 hour yoga teacher training and looks forward to teaching yoga in Durham!
Ray retired almost two years ago from the practice of anesthesiology, after the shocking realization that he’d been in and out of operating rooms for 41 years made it impossible to put the MD genie back into the bottle. Free at last, Ray, who loves looking after young Dolly (pictured with us on Cape Cod), cooking up yummy dinners for family and friends, and getting back into oil painting, has also taken up with the Worcester Chorus, the oldest continuously active choral society in the US. Like the hat says, “Life Is Good."
The move to Durham will definitely be a big step, but considering our previous leap from Pittsburgh to owning and running a gay B&B in Provincetown MA, it should be smooth sailing! They are looking forward to living in community, walking Dolly in Eno River State Park and many dinners in the Common House at Weaving Water.
Neal
Neal has lived in the Triangle area since 1990, so he considers himself a native. He has one daughter, Morah, in her second year at UNC-Greensboro, an English/Women’s Studies major with a minor in Creative Writing. Neal works for the non-profit Linux Foundation as a Program Manager overseeing several Open Source projects and has been involved in Open Source since the early 2000’s and as a full time job in some capacity since 2012. Not everyone knows what Open Source is, so don’t be embarrassed to ask.
Neal was one of the original members of Eno Commons Cohousing from 1996 - 2005, moving into his “House A” in 1998. Neal and his family moved out of the community in 2005 to meet needs of his then-spouse, who did not connect well with the community-idea. Neal is excited to rejoin intentional community. He keeps noticing the theme of community echoing in his life, and the energy he gets from it.
Neal’s passions include Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and Spolin Theater Games. Neal was co-artistic director and a player with Fatmouth Improv around 2008 - 2011.
Neal looks forward to learning and growing with the Weaving Water Community.
Nick
Nick was born and raised in New Jersey and lived the last couple of decades in Northern New England, mostly Maine. Nick moved to the Triangle Area to begin his career in healthcare, in the City of Medicine.
During his time in Midcoast Maine he had a chance to witness the development of a cohousing community. He wants to help create something similar through Weaving Water. Nick looks forward to developing a close-knit relationship in cohousing having seen the value of community in other cohousing projects.
In his free time Nick likes to attend live dance and music performances. He is an experienced contra dancer and looks forward to the shop at Weaving Water so he can further hone his woodworking skills. Nick is especially keen on enjoying the wonderful weather that blesses North Carolina by being outdoors as much as possible.
Anne
A world-wide traveler who’s visited 44 countries, Anne is excited to put down roots in Durham and build intentional community with other folks at Weaving Water. Living sustainably and touching the earth gently are among Anne’s priorities. Weaving Water’s proximity to Eno State Park is part of the appeal. After spending most of her adult life in or near the cities of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia (with sidebars in Seattle, Pittsburgh, and Melbourne, Australia), Anne is looking forward to daily life at Weaving Water having a different physical and spiritual calculus than she’s lived before. A meditation practitioner, Anne has studied with Thich Nhat Hahn, Tara Brach, Hugh Byrne, and Sharon Salzburg (among others) and been fortunate to spend time in retreat at places such as the Omega Institute, Magnolia Grove, and Gampo Abbey, the monastery that is Pema Chodron’s base in Nova Scotia. She hopes Weaving Water will be a place to grow and share her practice.
Professionally, Anne has worked in many domains of communications, from being a TV producer to a campaign strategist to a long stint at the University of Pennsylvania as a project manager at the Annenberg School and the Prevention Research Center. She also served in several public capacities in her previous community including the Radnor Township School Board and Open Space Commission. Pennsylvania is where Anne raised her three sons: Colin, a Physician Assistant in Emergency Medicine, Peter a critical care nurse (and skilled kayaker and backcountry skier), and Alexander, a solar energy developer.
Today, Anne’s most compelling service commitment is the SEGA School in Morogoro, Tanzania, a secondary boarding school for girls who come from abject poverty. Watching the school grow over the last 15 years, supporting its students and staff, and returning often as a volunteer teacher has filled her heart with joy. Jordan, Mongolia, and Mozambique are other countries where Anne has done service work. Her favorite place to visit (3 times!) is New Zealand. This photo was taken at the Tiritiri Matangi Bird Sanctuary off the North Island. Here’s to Weaving Water being a welcoming habitat for birds and other living things.
Alicia & Alex
Alicia and Alex grew up in PA and MA respectively, met at college in upstate NY, lived in a few different states along the way, and have been very happy to call the mild climate & beautiful nature of NC home for the last 10+ years! They love to hike and visit parks, so the Weaving Water trail access into Eno River State Park is a huge draw for them. They + their 2 cats recently traveled full-time in an RV for over 2 years while working remotely and visiting 35 national parks (pictured: Canyonlands in Utah).
Alicia is an introvert who enjoys reading books of all types, playing board and video games, and spending time outdoors in nature, whether that's lazing around on the beach, biking (especially on the American Tobacco Trail!), or kayaking around a lake. Though her family is made up of lots of educators and librarians, inspiring her to get her English degree, she's taken a different path so far by serving as an artillery officer in the Army, opening up and managing a couple of small retail businesses, and then transitioning into software engineering. She's currently working at a healthcare finance startup. Alicia enjoys creative work of many kinds and is always up to learn something new or to tackle a hands-on project.
Alex likes to stay busy by constantly over-extending her social calendar, curling up with a good book or 12, enjoying nature, volunteering with the disaster response organization Team Rubicon, and plotting some new adventure. She's gone back and forth between tech & business roles for her career: cyber operations in the Air Force, software engineering, business operations, tech consulting, she opened & sold a virtual reality arcade with Alicia, and she currently works at a nonprofit that builds technology to improve government safety net benefits distribution.
Alicia & Alex are looking forward to diving into this new adventure of cohousing together and are excited to share many meals, hangouts, and conversations with the community soon.
Gregg & Susan
Susan and Gregg met near Carson City, Nevada on a Sierra Club hike. Together they enjoy travel, hiking and generally just spending time in nature.
Their interest in collaborative living started many years ago, after observing and sharing life in tight-knit communities through travel and work experiences (for example, in a Thai village, on the Navajo reservation, and on a kibbutz in Israel, all places where Susan has lived and worked). At some point they became specifically aware that co-housing is the intentional community model that attracts them most. In college, Gregg also enjoyed sharing large rented houses with other students (which included shared cooking and meals, an appealing part of community living still).
Susan retired from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as a Public Health Consultant, focusing mostly on cancer control programs, domestically (in the U.S.), and in the U.S. Affiliated Pacific Islands. Susan also worked for a number of years, as a nurse for the Indian Health Service, on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico and Arizona. Susan grew up in Virginia, but school and work took her to the West, Midwest, South and Southwest U.S. over the course of her career. She has done extensive travel throughout Asia and the Pacific Islands. In addition to hiking and travel, she enjoys exploring different cultural communities, reading, meditation and life-long learning.
Gregg is a retired National Park Service hydrologist who enjoys backpacking, fishing and the biological and physical sciences. He grew up exploring Michigan, but moved west as a young man, living in several western states before returning east, first to Florida, and now North Carolina. He also enjoys designing and sewing his own camping gear. At one time he was an avid cyclist, and is starting to rekindle that passion now in North Carolina. Gregg is the "head chef" for their household, and enjoys trying new recipes.