Meet Our Family

Hello and welcome. We're the Day family — owners of Turtle Tree, and the people you'll actually see when you come in for care. We've written a little about who we are and the community we're building here. We're glad you found us.

~ Hillary, Jonathan, Esme, & Eamonn

Our Family's Story

by Hillary

Jonathan and I met in Seattle where I was studying eastern medicine and he was a university fellow. We shared many things, including a deep love for the natural world. After a time, we married and set up a life together in the Pacific Northwest while Jonathan took up a university faculty position.

But the pace of Seattle and the demands of academia were quietly taking a toll. We were drifting from the things we loved most. So we let it all go — Jonathan left his position, and we moved to Louisville to set up a slower, more rooted life and raise our new daughter, Esme.

Louisville is a city that feels like a small town. We love that about it. Turtle Tree is our way of giving back to a place that opened its heart to us — and our vehicle for living the kind of sustainable, regenerative, connected life we moved here to find.

Jonathan and Hillary are National Board Certified Acupuncturists and Licensed Acupuncturists in Kentucky. They have taught graduate courses in acupuncture safety and clean needle technique.

Jonathan Day

Jonathan's Experience

Credentials: DAOM, LAc, NCCAOM Dipl. OM

Specialty Areas: Reproductive health & fertility, pain, pediatrics, allergies & autoimmune, family medicine.

Outside the clinic, I'm a writer and reader with a deep appetite for creativity, good food, and tall trees. Hillary and I share a long-standing commitment to planet activism — it runs through everything we do. My favorite thing about Chinese medicine is something I think about often: that it holds the family as the foundation of all society. Harmony within families, I believe, gives us the resources to create harmony everywhere.

Hillary Day

Hillary's Experience

Credentials: MSAOM, LAc, NCCAOM Dipl. OM

Specialty Areas: Women's health, fertility & postpartum, pediatrics, pain, family medicine.

Outside the clinic, I'm most at home in a garden or a forest — drawn to old trees, moving water, and the quiet work of growing things. Cooking, camping, crocheting — I find restoration in making things with my hands. My commitment to sustainability and planet activism isn't separate from my medicine; it runs all the way through it. My favorite thing about Chinese medicine is simple: it always brings me back to nature, and to the joy that comes from living in harmony with the natural world.

Creating a Bale

by Jonathan

When Hillary gave birth to our first child, we were far from family and still finding our footing — with so much to learn.

What we discovered was that the wisdom we needed was already around us — in the knowledge of family, the generosity of friends, the experience of patients and colleagues who gave freely of what they knew. Age-old tricks for calming a newborn. Remedies for teething and diaper rash. The kind of inherited knowledge that used to pass naturally between generations.

We realized that this — the giving and receiving of wisdom within a trusted circle — was its own form of medicine.

A group of turtles = a 'bale'

Human beings need community. It has always been a source of knowledge, support, and belonging — and it is one of the things quietly disappearing from modern life.

At Turtle Tree, we hope to rebuild it. We affectionately call our community the Bale — the name for a group of turtles.

The Bale is not a program or a feature of our practice. It's simply what happens when people who share a commitment to health, nature, and each other keep showing up in the same place.

2019