Carrie Staller is Drumming and Foraging Her Way Around & Beyond The Bay

For the past many years, I’ve admired Carrie Staller and her drumming at Urban Adamah and Wilderness Torah events. Her sense of rhythm is impeccable, and her passion for Jewish music was clear to me. What I didn’t know was that ‘drummer’ is just one of many hats this multi-talented person wears!  In addition to drumming, Carrie started Fork In the Path, a foraging education program, and also works as a growth consultant helping other entrepreneurs to build their businesses. 

After seeing each other around the community so much, as well as seeing her advertise for her awesome foraging classes, I knew it was time for a longer chat. We spoke on Zoom — this conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Carrie! What brought you to the Bay?

I grew up in Milwaukee, and I lived there for the first 18 years of my life. My parents still live in the house I grew up in, which is really unusual. There’s a pretty strong Jewish community there, but I didn’t always feel like I fit in there. It wasn’t until I moved to Colorado—for college, when I was 18—and then California that I felt like I found my people.

My relationship with nature started in Colorado. In Wisconsin, my family wasn’t really a nature family—I think we went camping one time. But having Colorado as your playground really changes things. I had a lot of friends there who were outdoor enthusiasts, which helped me develop on my path. 

Eventually, it was time to make a transition. I met some people—because of our mutual love of the band Phish—who were from an organization called Common Vision. At the time, they were doing drumming, fruit tree planting, and other sustainability education programming in California schools. The people I met were all pretty nomadic. Like our Jewish lineage, there used to be a nomad in me that longed to travel and adventure.

I did the scary thing in my mid-20s, of putting all my things in storage, put a few essentials in a backpack, and just went. There were a lot of adventures that happened that year in different places, but ultimately I ended up in California that year, working on Common Visions fruit tree tour. We stopped at 50 different schools across California and provided programming. When we got to the Bay Area, I realized I had found my next home. 

And what made you stay? 

In large part, the African drum and dance community was—and still is—very vibrant here. There are world-class classes offered daily. I really wanted to grow as a musician and as a dancer, so that felt really compelling. 

Also, this thread of my life around sustainability was really—and still is—very strong here in the Bay Area. Being a creative, integrated, multifaceted person, I felt like there were so many people here like that. People who were interesting and doing all these cool things—I felt like I wanted to be friends with everyone I met.

That’s so special to have found that. How did you get so into drumming?

As a teenager, I started rock drumming in my parent’s basement, and then I studied West African drumming in college. It turns out there’s a lot of music in my family lineage. My great-uncle, Russ Morgan, was a very famous jazz band leader. There’s a cousin on my dad’s side who is a symphony violinist; my brother is a drummer, and my sister is a singer. My grandmother, Lois, was on the ro

ad to becoming a famous jazz singer, but her career was sadly cut short because her parents didn’t want her to go on tour as a young woman. So she married my grandfather and became a stay-at-home mother instead.

That’s so cool that you dug into your family history. What else keeps you busy these days?

Besides time with friends, music and dance, there are three different things that I do for work. The primary way that I make money is growth consulting. Most of my career has been employed in sales and marketing. I work now as a consultant with other entrepreneurs that want to grow their businesses, mostly in the company culture, leadership, and team-building space, but I have clients outside that space as well.

Foraging education and drumming—those are both side hustles. They’re not how I support myself, but they bring me a lot of joy. 

I play in a few bands: Octopretzel, for kids under 7; Lauren Arrow’s Big Effin’ Sing, and the Urban Adamah Kabbalat Shabbat band, and I get hired to play for other holidays, bat mitzvahs, weddings, etc. But actually most of the time I spend drumming is for West African dance classes, like Naby Bangoura’s class at Brasarte in Berkeley. I’ve had the pleasure of sitting in with some amazing artists over the years like Joan Baez, members of the California Honeydrops, Ayla Nero, MaMuse, a String Cheese Incident Parade and others.

Before the pandemic, I was always a full-time employee. What I do day to day is so much more diverse now. I never could have predicted this unfolding of getting to do all the things I love! 

I’d love to hear more about how you got into foraging!

I started becoming curious about mushrooms in my 20s. There’s something mysterious, fascinating and beautiful about them. For my 30th birthday, 14 of my friends went mushroom hunting in Mendocino. We found all these gorgeous mushrooms, but we didn’t know what any of them were. 

I also heard Paul Stamets talk—he’s one of the mycology thought leaders and I later learned he’s actually a very controversial figure in the mycology field because not all of his claims have substantial scientific backing. But if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t know as much about mushrooms. Then, nearly a decade ago, I took a weekend-long class on mushrooms, and my whole life started to change.

I started spending a lot of my free time mushroom hunting, making friends with foragers, and eventually even my work changed. On my 40th birthday, I asked my friends to create a ritual for me and they spontaneously covered me in mushrooms and started chanting “let the mushrooms do the work!” It was very cathartic!  I also spent most of my pandemic in the woods. 

I eventually started Fork In The Path. We offer guided wild mushroom and plant foraging experiences in California for the adventurous of all ages. The name “Fork In the Path” speaks to finding edible treats to enjoy in the woods, the transformation and neural pathways that form as a result, and also speaks to the shift I experienced in my own life. 

I have a class coming up on August 18 called “Harvesting Aliveness.” It bridges mindfulness and biomimicry. The class looks through the lens of mindfulness and biomimicry principles to explore: what can we learn from nature to design  our inner world? One of the people I met when I was working for Google’s mindfulness program is going to be leading it—Lori Schwanbeck, she’s amazing.

It’s so fascinating to me, how we get into things that we end up really pursuing! What do you love about teaching?

I’ve always been a recreational forager, and then I discovered that I love teaching people how to do it.  We’ve really lost our knowledge as human beings around seasonal cycles and what we can use to nourish our bodies that is growing abundantly all around us. 

I love teaching people how to approach eating wild food—how to take something out of the ground, appreciate its beauty, prepare it, and then eat it. It completes a cycle, forms a pathway, and helps calibrate our sense of wholeness. It’s miraculous to me that there’s just all of this food that arrives every year to sustain ourselves with, and most people have no idea. 

A lot of the classes I took were more extractive in mindset, and there wasn’t a focus on community-building. It’s important to me to teach through the lens of reciprocity, sustainability, and our relationship to the whole and each other. 

We didn’t talk so much about Jewish community, but I see you at SO many Jewish events. What brought you into Jewish life in the East Bay?

I was pretty estranged from Judaism for a long time. I had a bat mitzvah, but after that, it wasn’t until I happened to be at a Moishe House Hanukkah party in Oakland when I was 28, which was the first Jewish thing I had done in probably close to a decade, that I met [local musician and teacher] Ben Kramarz. He said, “You’re a good drummer. You should come drum with me at Beth Sholom for Shabbat.”

Then suddenly, because of my African drum, I’m spending time in a synagogue again. That was my pathway—I went away from Judaism, and then via Africa, came back. I don’t know that I ever would have come back to Judaism if I hadn’t studied African drumming.

I really love the Jewish community we have here. I love that it’s so earth-based. The way that we do things here is the most connected to Judaism I’ve ever felt in my life. And I think a lot of people here feel the same way. 

That’s so moving. Thank you for sharing that. Onto our in-house Proust Questionnaire. Tell me a poem, book, movie, play, piece of art, or media that you love!

I love fantasy—so I love Jim Henson’s Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal. The analog process for making every movement and detail of the puppets, and the stories, are so thoughtful and creative and expansive. They inspire creativity.

What’s the best-kept secret of the Bay?

Lauren Arrow’s Big Effin’ Sing! It’s an ecstatic sing-along where you get to participate in almost every song, but you’re backed by a professional band. Lauren [Arrow], who’s guiding the whole experience, creates this really beautiful space for people to be embodied and feel themselves and feel each other, and feel very much a part of something musical and beautiful and soulful. 

It’s very dynamic—we do a range of folk, rock, and originals. I’m really enjoying being a part of it, and it seems to be growing pretty fast. We just sold out a 150-person show.

And when was a recent time that you felt some kind of spiritual connection? 

I’ll say the place where I feel the most spiritual connection—all throughout my life—is dancing to the band Phish. I know there’s other people in the Jewish community who would definitely agree with me. I’m going to Colorado to see them for Labor Day—it’s an annual pilgrimage I always look forward to!