Diverging from the Moon bloodline of South Korea, I come from a father who died while eating ice cream when I was four months old. Post war poverty shaped my maternal line and left me orphaned. One of the first things I was called was illegitimate. Non-conformity, failure magic and learning what to accept/what to resist has been central to my story. As a shapeshifter who doesn’t subscribe to many social constructs, like gender and the nuclear family, I often feel more kinship with trees than people. I also feel blessed to be in flesh form and have devoted this lifetime to learning how to take care of the human bodymind — mine and what is shared — and my relationship to the nonhuman world.

Taken from my native lands and culture, adopted and assimilated into a Polish American family as a Krupa, much of my healing curriculum has been about becoming with-ness to both-ness. I couldn’t say my new English name without making the ‘r’ a ‘w’, but a devout student from the jump, it took a couple years of speech therapy to transform my tongue. This remains one of my biggest griefs, and fuels my commitment to clumsily re-learning Hangugeo.

Naming to reclaim is an important practice I use to honor histories and transformations. Kris Moon, Jeong Hwa emerged from returning to homelands and includes the parts who are rooted in ancestral trauma, wisdom and care, and the parts of the culture in a process of reclamation and repair. A Korean auntie once announced, “Jeong Hwa no sexy diva!” Offered plastic surgery upon reunion with birth family as a way to erase shame, I see the scar on my face as sacred, ritualizing what happened. No matter how impolite and uncomfortable, truth is.

Kris Moon, Jeong Hwa is woven together by similar threads of those who find belonging in not-belonging.  Spending much of my current days with hands, heart and attention enlisted in a variety of projects, I am most myself when oscillating around themes of mutual care, queering family, communal land stewardship, co-creating refuge, collective liberation/practicing embodying dharma, telling the truth, weaving together stories, playing pretend, no longer pretending, experimenting with different pathways, paradigms and languages, in a perpetual process of staying with and becoming, which intersects with what many call recovery and healing. 

A variety of concurrent roles played by Kris Moon, Jeong Hwa include: Co-parent, Writer, Speaker, Host/Presenter, Healing Artist, Firestarter, Conversation & Thought Partner, Co-creator of Refuge, Land Steward, Somatics & Dharma Practitioner, Trauma Educator & Consultant, Spiritual Friend, Relationship Anarchist, Recovery Companion, an Imperfect Human, and forever a Faithful to Interdependence and The Great Mystery.

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