My story begins with my mother sitting on the edge of our bed reading us the beloved children's book Are You My Mother? She closes the book, sets it down...and disappears for the next nine years.

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I was two years old.

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In the years that followed, I was separated from my siblings and left in the care of an abusive uncle, while my father drifted through a series of reinventions, pulling us into a world shaped by instability, drugs, spiritual searching, and impossible contradictions. Home was never a place. It was something I spent my childhood searching for.

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At thirteen, believing the streets of Denver offered more safety than the life I was leaving behind, I ran away.

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What followed was a desperate search for belonging through homelessness, exploitation, violence, and relationships with men more than twice my age. With only four years of formal education and no roadmap for survival, I learned to navigate a world where trust was dangerous and every decision carried consequences.

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Yet beneath the chaos, another story was quietly unfolding.

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Again and again, unexpected acts of kindness, moments of profound intuition, and encounters I still struggle to explain gently redirected my path. Looking back, I can see an unseen thread running through my life, one that continued leading me forward even when hope seemed impossible. That quiet current eventually brought me to a Native American sweat lodge where, at nineteen years old, I began the lifelong journey of healing, forgiveness, and discovering that our deepest wounds need not define our future.

 

A Rose From the Asphalt is more than a memoir of survival. It is the story of how compassion can emerge from abandonment, how purpose can grow from profound loss, and how even the most fractured beginnings can give rise to a life rooted in love and service.

 

With only a few years of formal education, I went on to found Earth Guardians, an international youth organization that has empowered young people in more than seventy countries to become leaders for a just and sustainable world. Yet this memoir is not the story of those accomplishments. It is the story of the little girl who searched for home until she discovered she could become one for others.

 

This first volume follows my life from ages two to nineteen and is the opening book in a three-part memoir spanning six decades, a story that begins in abandonment, but blossoms into a life devoted to protecting what is most vulnerable, proving that even a rose growing through asphalt can become a shelter for others.