creative practice for unsteady times

How do we keep our hearts soft so we can feel aliveness and steady so we can face a world that will break our hearts open over and over again?

Nature and art have a way of helping us come back to parts of ourselves that get burnt-out, hurt or hardened. Images and creativity often get us to the heart of the matter much quicker than our minds alone can.

After years of working in community health clinics, public schools and a domestic violence shelter, I was burnt-out, numb and my light had grown dim . My anger at the violence of the world reeling in me.  When I took a temporary job teaching at a nature school, I didn’t know the course of my path would change. Connecting with the outdoors, oral storytelling, learning to birth and tend fires, and making craft with natural materials, brought something in me back to life.  Most of all, doing it with other people was collectively healing. Then, postpartum, old wounds were  suddenly re-opened. Books and online parenting guides didn’t have the maps I needed. I was hungry for myths, craved a circle of elders, older, wiser ways for this rite of passage. And so began my own journey apprenticing tools with the hopes of sharing them with others.

Modernity offers so little for us in times of transition. Living, parenting, and caregiving through our times of great change and grief requires more than talking to cope and confront our worlds. We need our ancient tools of meaning-making: creative expression through storytelling, ritual, myth, movement, music, art, attuning to the natural world and perhaps most importantly, we need each other, we need intergenerational circles to hold us as we make our way through the dark.

more about me