I am a practitioner with experience and training in ritual creation and facilitation, as well as various approaches to death, dying (focused on companion animal support), grief, radical compassion, and ancestral lineage healing. I am most alive and fully myself when supporting others in their own exploration and work within these areas. My ancestors come from the British & Irish Isles, Scandinavia, Prussia, Germany, France, Switzerland, and parts of Southern Europe. More recently, my people were immigrants to Turtle Island (what is called the United States today), and were Quakers who settled in Pennsylvania, German/Polish farmers who settled in the Upper Midwest, Puritans who settled in New England, and others who I am still discovering/being discovered by.

An avid animal and land lover, I grew up and was raised in Joshua Tree for the first 20 years of my life. That land had a profound impact on the person I have become and the way I stand and move in the world today. I credit this land and the diverse, resilient, other-than-human kin there with raising me, co-parenting me alongside my mother, father, and my grandmother. Growing up in a multi-generational household also impacted me in a poignant way and I credit this with my interest in and devotion to family study and ancestral healing. I currently live in Southern California, not far from Joshua Tree, and take heart in still having proximity to this elder that Joshua Tree is to me.

I’ve been immersed in ritual settings for over a decade, both actively participating in and facilitating ritual. I initially experienced ritual work within the Goddess community and eventually shifted into earth-based animist practices and ancestrally reverent approaches to ritual space. My formal education (Bachelors & Masters) focused heavily on social marginalization, social movements, inclusivity, empowerment, and exploring and valuing different ways of knowing and relating. My Bachelors focused primarily on social marginalization, social movements, and impacts of colonialism. My Masters is in Public Policy & Evaluation, and my work in evaluation over the past 10 years has focused heavily on Empowerment Evaluation within behavioral health settings, utilizing qualitative and emergent methodologies to both share power with stakeholders traditionally holding the least amount of power, and to stand in active challenge to the ways evaluation and research have been and continues to be weaponized against the most vulnerable among us. I have volunteered in prisons: facilitating the space and opportunity to cultivate supportive community in meaningful and connective ways through the creation of groups designed to empower individuals within these restrictive settings. I have also spent time in palliative care units, being with veterans who were dying. All these diverse experiences coalesce to inform my work as a practitioner and I remain deeply committed to ensuring that this work supports movements of cultural healing, ancestral re/connection, praising grief and love, liberation, deepening connection with our other-than-human kin, and a return to embodiment.

My experience has been that work done around reclaiming our relationship to love, compassion, death, and our ancestors, is intimately connected to the unfolding of cultural, social, ecological, and personal healing. A cherished principle of all the work I do is that personal & family spiritual healing and both earth & cultural repair work are all intimately connected and inseparable.