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I believe we are shaped by land.
That as we listen, we come into a communion, a consciousness that awakens our inherent gifts and identity to restore right relationship.
What I know is that this life is mysterious and wild. To walk a path of this life is to unfold the sacred responsibility of who we inherently are in a transforming world.
What I know is that we are born with gifts. Gifts the world needs. Sometimes the world is a global movement, sometimes it is a community, sometimes it is the precious relationship with another, human or more than human.
Sometimes, our gifts present themselves immediately; they become known to us in our fledgling years. And sometimes, our gifts are like seeds- hidden but waiting to bloom in the right conditions. The right warmth, water and song that calls them into form.
Sometimes our gifts arrive after the painful journey of healing; we experience hard and traumatic conditions that catalyze us to reach within to unearth and hone a special medicine we didn't know we carried.
If you're receptive and brave, you'll experience all three and come to walk a beauty path.
This is a glimpse into my story. . .
seed.
INTO A CULTURE WITHOUT REMEMBRANCE
I grew up in coastal chaparral with morning marine blanketed skies, dry ravines, and brackish lagoons. But more so, I grew up in the endangerment of these wild places, as concrete encroached almost every space, dams disrupted water flow, and only the sea and sky felt wild and untamed. So as reflected the values of the culture.
I was woven into a narrative that didn't yet revere the true gifts of land, nor the people whose ancestors and lifeways were and are irrevocably interrelated to the wellbeing of all. I grew up in a cultural ideology that to find belonging, I had to disconnect from who I inherently am, and abandon the ways of being and reverent interconnection I felt with life.
The mystery of my journey would inspire the exploration of identity, cultural belonging, earth connection, internalized values of colonization, and the modalities of art, storytelling, and Indigenous cultural wisdom and rights in order to understanding how to reimagine, live, and share in more relational intelligence of belonging.
bud.
HEIGHT OF ART SOCIETY:
UNDERSTANDING INTERSECTION OF DOMINANT CULTURE, ART, + SPIRITUALITY.
I was moved to study art history and world religions in Paris. Immersing myself in museums, mosques, churches, and temples, I began exploring and understanding the various narratives and embedded values that compelled expressions of human nature into cultural belonging and meaning.
I learned the power of art throughout the ages in influencing culture, and the power of culture in encouraging or inhibiting our inner, communal, environmental and spiritual journeys of wellbeing.
But, something was dramatically missing in these ontological studies. Where were the voices and cultures of Indigenous peoples? Where was the land, untamed?
Leaving the city to return to coastal chaparral, I followed a self determined quest for what was missing. To shake the city off, I got in my old Datsun and headed north. Far north into the Yukon and Alaskan territories, following a scent of communion with the wild and readiness to learn different ways of being human.
bloom.
LIVING IN THE WILD, LEARNING WISDOM CULTURES & THE VAST INTERCONNECTED SELF
This path led me to explore less mental and privileged ways of learning within academia, and therefore unlearn, in order to study and build relationships with those who are way-showers to a consciousness and way of life needing to be remembered during this time; Indigenous wisdomkeepers and Mother Earth, directly.
It became not enough to explore these wisdom ways of being through storytelling, I was being compelled to live them out more intimately. So, for the next five years I committed to living in the wild; to carry water from springs, live by firelight, and explore somatically, direct ways of sensing, relating, knowing, that only come with deep immersion.
I became sensitized to the undercurrents of intelligences all around me. Over the years, I have experienced transformative initiations from the beings of mountain lion, bear, mountains, and water. I have lived among the community of great elders of fir, pine, juniper, and sage, as well as coyote, bobcat, deer, raven, and fox, and many others that are not named here. I have received teachings from blizzards, thunderstorms, and the quietest of star filled nights.
I have come to know how to listen and be shaped by the sentience of the land. And, I continue to apprentice in these ways, for that learning and remembrance never finds an end.
pollinate.
THE WORK BREWS AS THE CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING BLOOMS
In my mentorship with Mother Earth, she began revealing that my solo journey and discovery needed to be shared and shaped with others; to bring my particular medicine through my gifts and talents to the greater community.
In listening and living deeply with land, I saw how our contemporary overculture normalizes a disconnected identity from the wisdom-sentience of all, of Mother Earth. I understood deeper how this loss of Indigenous, pagan, folk traditions and earth-revering identity enables the perpetuation of harm to ourselves, each other, the world.
Therefore, I also understood how profound and significant it is to reclaim our ancestral identity in which we remember our extraordinary interconnection, in order to make significant changes.
When we don't know, feel, and experience that our inherent identity is connected to the wellbeing of Water, for example, we will continue to pollute and extract it.
A culture is a living collective being that carries the cosmologies, identity, traditions, structures, ways of interrelating, instructions for purpose; it is a supportive embryonic constellation to encourage our rooted growth as a community that is more-than-human. We both give it life and we receive life from a culture.
We must shift and regenerate our overculture to its right relationship with valuing the diverse ecosystem of life, so we may feel supported in our interrelational becoming.
My work is ever emergent through my gifts as an artist, creative placemaking curator, community facilitator, and wilderness communion guide through art and inner journeying, and functions to regenerate interrelational wisdom within our culture through interpersonal, community, and public concentric circles.
ecosystem.
RECONCILING PAST TO ACCESS INTERRELATING CULTURAL ECOSYSTEMS OF OUR SHARED FUTURES
I HAVE LIVED AND COMMUNED WITH ANCESTRAL HOMELANDS OF LUISEÑO & KUMEYAAY, UTE, WASHOE, NÜÜMÜ, NEWE, & KUTZADIKA'A, TAKELMA, SHASTA, & LATGAWA
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