About

I am Linds Brown. Welcome.

As I look back on it now, I realize how fortunate I, my brother, sister and my friends were to have experienced the amazing childhoods we had growing up in Tennessee. There I was raised and educated, surrounded by kind and patient people from all walks of life. 

I must say, it took years before I traveled more than fifty miles from my childhood home in any direction other than northerly. Travels were limited to our family’s every-other-year road trips up the Eastern Seaboard to visit relatives in D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia and New Jersey, which also often included impromptu day trips into New York City. 

Those trips north, beginning when I was very young, were made to see our aunts and uncles, cousins and friends. Our travels were filled with happy occasions I will never forget. Nor will I forget my relatives’ good-natured ribbing of me or their making fun of my Southern accent— to which I took no offense. I considered their comments as rites of passage made to toughen me up and indoctrinate me with street smarts; street smarts which later protected me and made for a much easier time in an urban world culturally very different from my cloistered upbringing in the South.

In the tenth grade I did travel west, to Nashville, Tennessee, a distance of 175 miles. Since then, I have seen most every state in the United States. I have visited Canada multiple times, including my first visit there, when, at twenty-one years old, I whitewater-canoed in northern Quebec with two friends down a river we knew nothing about. At the time, any thought of what might go wrong did not cross our minds. We simply knew we had driven for a very long time and had come upon fast moving whitewater, the thing for which we had been looking. Without hesitation we put in. 

Can you say waterfall? No waterfall, but I still have scars on my shin as a testament to my leg being gashed and almost drowning in that river.

I have visited Europe twice, with each country visited unique in its language, sights, food and culture, each country overflowing with antiquity; and the Middle East, where, in Israel, prior to the war in Gaza, we zip-lined into the Jordan River, splashing down next to a large group of South Americans who were in the midst of being baptized where we splashed. I remember the shocked looks on their faces as we came from the sky with unintended interruption. 

In the Middle East, I was taken by how many groups of different peoples from around the world we saw visiting— Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Indians, Europeans, South Americans, Canadians, Americans, Arabs and Israelis and others; and of the many trips to the Caribbean, where on one occasion, a younger (now much wiser) me cliff-dove into the ocean from a height I wouldn’t want to repeat.

Each trip has been fun-filled, fascinating, educational and enlightening. 

We are now in the beginning stages of planning a trip to Africa where my hope is to spend time with endangered gorillas. 

It truly amazes me how filled with incredible beauty our world is, not only natural beauty— snow-capped mountains, deep blue oceans, star filled skies, magnificently tall trees, radiantly colored flowers and dazzling wildlife—but also, the beauty of humankind available to us when bias, politics and asphyxiating dogma are lain to the side and given time to rest, as when we were children, too young to have been taught how we should be but rather just being— free. 

Having seen a portion of the world, I marvel at the incredible architecture we have created, and the feats of engineering conceived and built by those who came long before us without the use of modern tools or equipment. 

I find myself mesmerized by the awe-inspiring art, sculpture, music and literature which have sprung from the minds of talented women and men captivating us for hundreds and even thousands of years—and of our present; and— if we dare to glimpse into the future, imagine what might soon come. And so I write…