about me.
As you read this, I am in the midst of a walk from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast of Turtle Island. I’ve been dreaming of this walk since I was 16 and I am starting the walk in my 60th year.
If you are curious about what this means, you can read more here or download the book where I’ve written a lot of words about it. Similarly, I will be posting on the blog on this site as well as through Instagram, although I can’t tell you exactly how often.
When I am not walking - or maybe, what is shaping this walk - is my work as a bodyworker, cultural worker and writer. I am grateful, deeply grateful, for the framework of healing justice and its inclusion of land along with bodies, spirit/culture and work/economies. Everyday is a practice to become the connection between and among these elements, including on this walk.
I have worked as a bodyworker since 2005 with training and practice in multiple forms of craniosacral therapy, Global Somatics, and a range of learning from and with trauma-transformation modalities including NARM, Somatic Practice, and all kinds of one-offs and small series of learning from teachers who have touched me deeply. I am curious how and if I will be able to use this practice with people I encounter as I walk.
The projects that are a deep part of my heart, even as my role in them is shifted during this year, are the Healing Histories Project and REP, or Relationships Evolving Possibilities. Both of these projects focus on different ways of supporting collective care and safety in the most intimate of ways as well as to scale.
My ancestral lineages represent the colonizer and the colonized. I am descended from southern and western european people and from people native to this land. I am a raised white woman who is clear about my whiteness and my white kin, fierce about working towards the end of white supremacy and settler colonialism, and also not letting disappearance erase my grandfather’s native line. I spend a lot of time talking with and learning from all of my ancestors. I am a queer woman on the other side of menopause who uses she/her pronouns. I have experienced early and deep grief and loss and I have experienced different kinds of violence directed towards my body as well as the people around me. I am also loved really, really well.
These are two books I have written: Queerly Classed, which was first published in 1996 and is now open source and Liberated to the Bone, which was published in 2022. I love that the two books tell the story of what I’ve focused on: in the beginning of my adult life, I looked at how we resource ourselves as communities in the most structural way and more recently, how we resource ourselves in the cellular way. Everyday I am listening to how those two come together.