The JourneY

I am one of those “life is a journey” types. Colleagues have affectionately, I think, called me a jack-of-all-trades. My resume is a dead giveaway: management accountant, human resources manager, project manager, business columnist and writer, conference planner and manager, minister, operations manager, school counselor, mental health counselor, class instructor. In my ‘spare’ time, I love to swing a hammer, fix something, work with wood, turn a wrench on a car, hike a trail, or go just about anywhere.

I feel most content when I am moving. I earned the name Michael ‘Go’ Nuckolls from my mother at an early age when I would wake her every Saturday asking, “Where we gonna go today, Mama?” My deepest thoughts, most emotional moments, best thinking, most detailed writing, and major life revelations have come at the wheel of a car or handlebars of a motorcycle. I have learned a few Russian words by assimilation from an impoverished five year old in a small village in Ukraine, witnessed infants left on hot sidewalks as instruments of solicitation in Macedonia, heard stories of long-time neighbors burning each other’s homes during the religious purge in Kosovo, removed tsunami debris and sludge from peoples’ wells in Sri Lanka, fed families scrounging at a village dump in Guatemala, eaten soup of which I knew better than to ask the ingredients in Malaysia, and witnessed excited cheers from adults and children alike when the last destructive whack of a birthday piñata released a baby chicken falling to certain death in the hills of Honduras.

Ultimately all of this is tied together with scenes, thoughts, and words. I cannot claim to be a trained wordsmith nor even an avid reader of books, though I do quite a lot of reading. In my own writing, I am influenced by song lyrics, life stories, and experiences as much as I am by what I read. I write what I experience in the biographies around me, the stories written in my own life, and the musings that rattle around in my head. What you read and hear on this site are all the ways I try to put into words those experiences and thoughts.