Lacho Dives, Traveler.
In 1924, a book titled Gypsy Fires in America was published about families like mine, Bashaldo Gypsy travelers, moving from the Great Lakes to Southern Ohio into the Appalachians and down into Georgia. It viewed our culture from the outside. This publication exists to reclaim that story from the inside in motion through history, philosophy and practice.
If you have found your way here through a note or letter unraveling the real history behind fortune telling, Romani tradition, or generational resilience—welcome. I offer my journey to the truth behind popular myths, and share a way of survival that needs no permission to remember, play and imagine. That wisdom grows through a precise method of knowing yourself, reading the world and moving through it.
That method is what I call Timedancing.
Where most modern somatic or spiritual practices tell you to sit still, build energy or force outcomes, Timedancing centers the body as an instrument that opens time. It recognizes that impact—the hard, physical strike of a foot or hand—is the exact physical mechanism that can meet crisis, unfreeze the mind and restore fluency through time and space.
Two Ways Into the Practice
Timedancing takes shape through two distinct, connected practices:
Micro-Dance: Full-body neuro-percussion informed by traditional Gypsy dance and PhD research. Designed to snap, slap and stomp your way back to sanity directly at your desk, interrupting corporate fatigue and restoring nervous system agility.
Timespinning: Guided journeys with harp, Romani philosophy and a mobile app. Built to decolonize destiny by restoring fluid movement through memory, intuition and imagination.
The Lineage Behind the Work
I am Dr. Russell Patrick Brown, a Bashaldo Gypsy dancer, harper, embodied engineer, writer and fortune teller whose roads today weave between the East Coast of Turtle Island to Ireland and Spain.
This space is the synthesis of generations of knowledge, a lifetime of practice and two decades of research:
Academic Research: A PhD in Arts Practice from the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick. My dissertation, Intimate Violence: Feeling Impact in Irish Step Dance, examined percussive dance, embodied knowledge and generational resilience.
Code & Architecture: Former Technical Lead and Engineering Manager for global publications (including Fortune Media and People, Inc.). I approach software architecture as another medium for organizing time.
Spiritual Discipline: Mentored directly in the British spiritualist tradition by Mavis Pittilla, and served for over a decade as a visiting medium, harper and teacher of all ages in the historic spiritualist community of Lily Dale, New York.
Performance journeys: NYU Irish and Performance Studies, performance on NYC’s avant-garde stages, and an intergenerational dance practice spanning New York, Ireland and Spain.
As Featured In: RTÉ, BBC, The WB, The New York Times, Gothamist, The Clare Champion, Live95, New York Post, IrishCentral and Time Out New York.
Gathering at the Fire
The Main Fire (Free): Weekly Friday dispatches on narrative history, Romani lore, fortune telling including Tarot, and embodied philosophy applied to daily life, along with temporary preview audio from the lab archive.
Paid Membership (€6/month or €55/year): Full access to the Micro-Dance (desk-side audio, rhythmic tapping tracks and movement frameworks) and the complete Timespinning archive of guided audio journeys, Romani philosophy and intuitive education. Includes subscriber chat and advanced priority enrollment for virtual cohorts.
The Fire Keeper (€115/year): All Paid Tier access, plus a private 30-minute virtual reading with live harp to restore movement in your life.
Sit down. Warm your hands. The fire is ready.
The Verda is a separate space held entirely free for Romani and Sinti readers; admission is by introduction. Please reach out to me directly. To learn more about the tech platform that powers this publication, visit Substack.com.
