ABOUT Life Giving Spring
D. Stall
Currently, I live on family acreage, mostly wooded land in southeast Central Texas, after having spent most of my life in urban environments of Houston, Austin and San Francisco. From here, I freelance as a webdesigner-developer, and design and maintain the website of The Orthodox Fellowship of the Transfiguration (OFT) among others. Previously, I worked as a registered landscape architect (20+ years) in Houston, Austin and the San Francisco Bay area.
A Texas A&M University cum laude alum (BS Landscape Architecture & BS Horticulture), I am third in the first generation of my family to earn a university degree, son of high school graduates and grandson of 7th grade graduates. I can also be described as the great-grandson of Texas pioneers, grandson of Texas subsistence farmers, and (ashamedly) a “city-slicker” (as my recently departed, dear ’ole dad would say), seeing how I was born and reared in Houston, post-war (WWII - the “big” one) on the “lower” class (poor), polluted, blue-collar, industrial, east side.
Baptized and confirmed a Lutheran (LCMS), I first wondered about Ancient Faith in the 70s when I came upon a National Geographic photo of a young girl lighting a candle before an icon in “Great Religions of the World”, a book I had purchased for extra reading in my architectural history class. A classmate informed me of The Greek Festival in Houston, but I never managed to attend. The first time I experienced Ancient Faith liturgy was in the Holy Virgin Cathedral, Joy of All Who Sorrow on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco, in 1992 (possibly during Nativity Lent), wherein the basement lay the relics of St. John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai & San Franciso, who must surely have adopted me and watches over me still. It took eight more years of spiritual seeking for me to “find” (or be found by) Ancient Faith and to realize the significance of the experience after learning of godly sorrow, having suffered from depression for many years.
Interest in genealogy and my family’s cultural heritage has deepened my appreciation of Christianity. While the apostle St. Pavlos is my personal patron, my family patron is St. Boniface of Crediton, gifting me with indebtedness to Orthodox England, spiritually as well as linguistically. An avid reader and practitioner of the prayer of the heart (I don't go out much - nearest Liturgy is 85-100 miles away), my favorite books include the “Prologue From Ohrid” by Bishop Nikolai Velimirovic, and “The Southern Landscape Tradition in Texas” by J. B. (John Brinkerhoff) Jackson, which describes how cultural adaptions of English settlers to tropical climates were utilized by them in the American southern colony of Virginia, and transported from there to Texas.
Other interests include: history, historical preservation, cultural geography, cooperatives, intentional community, sustainable living, co-housing, voluntary simplicity, fair trade, agrarianism, alternative energy, off-grid homesteading, homeschooling, nature study, hiking, gardening, ethno-botany, whole food, and animal husbandry (especially goats). But my greatest interest is in synthesizing all these interests toward transfiguration of modern living through development of a distinctly contemporary Christian lifestyle and culture for sacramental living rooted in Ancient Faith, as inspired by “sobornopravanist” – the local agrarian community at the center of Church life as manifestated on The Holy Mountain (Athos), in Old Russia and during the middle ages in Western Europe.
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