About

Cael was born in Northern Virginia, and started out on the path to becoming a computer programmer at age 10, when his parents bought him his first computer. Several years of self-teaching, plus several years of Computer Science classes at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology, and then at Virginia Tech, put him in a position to begin a career as a Software Engineer in late 1993.

It wasn't until he was fifteen years into that career that he discovered that it wasn't the "Computers" part of creating software for computers that he loved, it was the "Creating" part...the act of taking a blank screen of infinite potential and building something entirely new. He found that it was just as fascinating to begin with a blank page and find the story that wanted to be written there.

In parallel with his career growth, his journey of spiritual exploration took him down a winding path, from militant atheism through agnosticism to an exploration of the Religions of the Book. A trip to the Holy Land early in his career let him explore what the desert of the Middle East had to tell him about himself. In 2004, he and his wife Elizabeth founded ShadowGrove, a community of nature-path spirituality that meets in rural Manassas, Virginia.

His spiritual path and his journey from engineer to writer came together in 2008, as ShadowGrove was preparing to host its May festival, Fertile Ground Gathering, for the first time. One of the events planned for the festival was a Bardic Circle, where drummers would drum, and dancers would dance, and singers would sing, and storytellers would share new worlds with the listeners. Cael wanted to tell a story around the bonfire...but he found no stories that spoke to him and made him want to tell them. So he wrote his own: The Girl Who Lost the Moon. Then he wrote another. And a third. Three became ten, and ten became more than twenty.

At the same May festival, he was teaching a series of workshops on a technique he had developed, over many years, for maintaining balance while dealing with the energy flows that exist between and among people as we interact with them each day. During the classes that first year, and in the years that followed, people began asking whether Cael would write down the lessons he was teaching in a book, so that they would have it for reference. In 2011, he began doing just that, wrote what became Living a Life in Balance: an Elemental Journey of Self-Discovery.

Today, Cael lives in rural Hartwood, Virginia, with his wonderful wife and a truly absurd number of cats. In between his day job as a software engineer and his role as minister and teacher within his spiritual community, he is working on Return to the Wilder Forest, which will expand the world he has created even further.