AbyssDome
AbyssDome is my corner of the world. A place to think clearly, build honestly, and be great in many things.
I made this place for all the work, and everything, that never fit in one box.
I’ve been a lot of things, and I’ve taken each one seriously. A teacher, to small children and grown adults alike. A mother. A builder of businesses. Years in hospitality, where presentation, standards, and reading a room are everything. Trained in law, and wired to think analytically and strategically about whatever lands in front of me. A relentless protector of Bali’s street dogs. And yes, someone who reads tarot and astrology too. Sharp attention, real professionalism, and an honest read on what’s actually going on.
And it isn’t only mine. If you found your way here, chances are you carry more than one world inside you too, and you know how rarely the world makes room for that. Here, you have my full attention and my full professionalism. I understand where you’re coming from, I take what you’re carrying seriously, and when you’re ready to work together, I’ll bring everything I have to it.
What sits behind this
More than two decades of real experience, layered across very different worlds: law and the way disputes actually get resolved, recruitment at the highest end of hospitality, running operations where mistakes cost real money, writing, teaching, and the slow craft of understanding how people think and decide.
Those layers do not compete here. They combine. A legal problem is rarely only legal. A business decision is rarely only commercial. The value is in seeing the whole thing at once.
Most people arrive looking for one specific answer. Often they leave having found the answer to something they had not yet put into words. That is the point. The work is evidence first, plainly reasoned, and free of the padding that wastes your time.
Where to go from here
Read the writing in The Vault. See the consulting work in Sandcastle. Follow the dogs at AbyssPaws, or meet the ones looking for homes at Adopt.
Why 40% (or Even More) of Everything I Earn Goes to the Dogs
I did not build this website to sell things. I built it to fund something.
Abyssdome exists because I needed a way to pay for surgeries. Not metaphorically. Actual surgeries, on actual dogs, at actual veterinary clinics that expect actual money. Every consultation booked here, every reading, every piece of writing commissioned, every collaboration signed, sends a fixed share of its profit into that.
The problem is arithmetic, not sentiment
People imagine street dog work is about rescue. Pulling a suffering animal off the road, treating it, finding it a home. That part is real and I do it, but it is not the work that changes anything.
One unsterilised female produces two litters a year and somewhere between 70 and 90 puppies across her lifetime, and her daughters do the same. I have set out the full arithmetic, generation by generation, in the urgent case for sterilising one female dog. The short version is that you can spend a lifetime rescuing individuals from that cycle and the cycle will not notice.
Culling has already been tested here, at scale. Around 108,000 dogs were killed in Bali between 2008 and 2011 and the rabies outbreak spread anyway. I have written separately about why the existing programmes cannot cope with the gap that leaves behind.
Sterilisation is the only intervention that changes the arithmetic, and female sterilisation specifically. It is unglamorous. A sterilised dog looks exactly like an unsterilised dog. There is no dramatic before and after photograph. But it is the difference between managing a crisis forever and ending one.
So that is where the money goes first. Sterilisation, then vaccination, then medication for the ones already sick.
Where the money goes, and where it does not
There is a pattern in Bali that anyone working at ground level learns quickly.
Funding flows toward visibility. Large organisations with communications teams, English language websites, foreign donor bases and established reputations receive the bulk of it. That is not corruption. It is how giving works everywhere. People fund what they can see, and what they can see is what has been professionally presented to them.
The consequence is geographic. Attention and money concentrate where the tourists are. Canggu, Seminyak, Ubud, Sanur. Places that are photographed, written about, visited. Photographs produce posts, posts produce donations, and the loop closes on itself.
Meanwhile there are villages an hour inland where no programme has ever run. Sub districts in Tabanan, Buleleng and Jembrana where an unsterilised population has been compounding for decades and nobody has counted it, let alone treated it. Roads a van full of equipment will not take. Communities with no one to call and no reason to think calling would help.
I go to those places. Not because I am better resourced, since obviously I am not, but because I am the one who is there and nobody else came.
What this has actually cost me
I have been funding this from my own pocket for years.
Sole provider for my household. No salary from any organisation, no grant, no board, no communications team. There were months I chose between a surgery and something else that also needed paying. There were dogs I could not save because the money was not there that week. There were long drives, refusals, dogs that died anyway after everything, and the particular exhaustion of doing all of it while running a legal practice, studying, and caring for sixteen animals at home, amongst many other countless things I have to do.
None of this is a complaint. I chose it. But it explains why I am not asking for sympathy and am instead proposing a business arrangement. Sympathy has never once paid a vet.
Why I fund it this way
I could have started asking for donations and left it there. Plenty of people do, and there is nothing wrong with it. But donations depend on someone else’s generosity arriving at the right moment, and dogs do not breed according to anyone’s giving schedule.
I wanted something structural. Something that produces money whether or not anyone is feeling charitable this month, and that does not depend on being noticed by the people who hand out grants.
What collaboration actually means here
I am open to working with businesses, and I mean this as a straightforward commercial proposition rather than a request for charity.
If you run a villa, a salon, a cafe, a studio or any other business, you already need some of what I offer. Contracts reviewed. Labour disputes handled. Immigration matters sorted. Staff recruited. Copy written. Or something for your clients: a tarot day, a reading session, an event.
You pay a professional rate for professional work. My profit from it goes to the dogs. You get the work done and something your clients can see the point of. I get to book more surgeries in places no van has reached.
Nobody is doing anybody a favour. That is precisely why it holds.
Documentation is not optional
I publish photographs of the specific dogs treated. I publish what went wrong, and when it went wrong, because sterilisation programmes in the field are not tidy, and pretending otherwise insults anyone who has funded one. And they all go public for everyone to see.
Where this is heading
Sterilisation and treatment are the immediate work. They are not the whole ambition.
The longer goal is a proper rehoming pathway. Right now a healthy, sterilised, vaccinated street dog in Bali is still a street dog. There is no reliable route from the roadside to a household, and the stigma these animals carry is its own obstacle, which I have written about in the reality of dogs in Bali and across Indonesia. Building that route requires vetting adopters, transport, follow up, aftercare and a great deal of unglamorous administration.
That takes reliable funding, which is what this whole structure is for.
Sixteen dogs sleep in my house tonight. Every one of them was a dog nobody wanted. They are not a sad story. They are proof the pathway exists when somebody builds it.
If you want in
Book a consultation. Commission a piece of writing. Bring me a legal matter. Propose a collaboration. Buy something from the store. Or simply share this, which costs nothing and reaches people I cannot reach.
All of it ends up in the same place.