Education:

Certified Grief Educator through David Kesseler

Death Doula and End of Life Planning through Alua Arthur of Going with Grace

BA in Medicinal Botany from Evergreen State College

1.5 years studying as a Marriage and Family Therapist

5 years as grower and busines owner of Arize Farm Botanicals, a medicinal wholesale herb company

Educator on native plants and medicinal herbs at True Nature Healing Arts in Carbondale, CO and at Colorado Mountain College and Western Technical College in Grand Junction 2017-2020.

Those that have impacted me deeply:

Ruth Morehouse and David Schnarch, my parents and their business, The Crucible Approach

Sean Jeung (where the veil grows thin)

Resmaa Menakem (Black Ocotpus Society and Education for Racial Equality)

Francis Weller, Pixie Lighthorse, Steve Chandler

Lindsay Gurley

Native and adapted plants in Colorado, Washington and Utah

My Jewish and Scottish ancestors

Sustainable Settings Education Farm

Permaculture Design Course & farm internships in Ecuador, Peru, Colorado and Washington

My life experience and the guidance I have sought and found are the direct reasons that I believe what I believe.

Despite being raised very financially and socially secure, I have felt seperate and alone most of my life. My parents were decent people who were very focused on success. This left me alone, as an only child and with other caretakers for a large portion of my childhood and teenage years. Bulimia, disordered eating and intense body self hatred and deep depression were a dominant part of my middle and highschool years, though I was pretty and popular. Marijuana, drugs and validation from the outside world and men became the ways I tried to fill the holes in my soul. Nature and music and divine intervention were my true life savers here. Herbal medicine and growing food truly saved my life as I started to develop a totally new relationship with food, what it means to be “healthy”, my body and the Earth.

When my mom started showing signs of dementia, I was crushed. I had been playing music very actively in bands and by myself and that part of me closed up. In the midst of making plans of how to “handle” it, studying to be a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and buying a home with my father’s support, my dad died of a sudden heart attack the day before I turned 32 in 2020. My husband and I had been married for just over a year and were planning to start trying for a pregnancy.

My father was a god in my life. And in many around him. He was an educator, a therapist, a writer and larger than life. In one day, my entire life was flipped upside down and mashed into a million pieces with salt pouring in on all my wounds repeatedly. My father’s body was removed from his sudden dying place by the ambulance team. I never saw him deceased and it’s one of my greatest regrets in life. We had talked 3 hours prior to his death. I am so grateful he left me a voice mail where he said I love you. We had been fighting and not physically touching for most of the year with Covid. To have not had the chance to make peace and hug one last time in person has been a deep source of learning on this ride.

From the day my father died, my birthday, my relationship with my mother where I was the child, my marriage and my entire perspective on life and death have been melted and re-cast with a material much more flexible than it was before.

I have experience in dealing with trusts, wills, businesses and financial affairs that are in total dissaray with limits on how to pay bills while all assests are tied up in probate. I understand the stress of having no time and space to grieve because you are the one sending in paperwork and getting stamps and applying for death certificates while being a caretaker, while not eating or sleeping and having someone who was like a limb on your own body ripped away with no warning and still you are expected to function like everyone else.

Once the process of letting the government and instituions know my father had died- not a small feat!- my husband and I had a miscarriage with our first baby. It stirred up every wound I had ever had. We were deeply blessed to get pregnant again and have a living full term baby. And still I was not prepared for the changes that would wash through our relationship and my own body, hormones and sense of independence as a new mother and without parents of my own to guide me.

All of these life tresholds have had immense gifts and beauty in them that have taken me years to see, develop and greet as a friend and not an enemy. All of these life events and caretaking for our elders has been done in community until very recently in human history. I am grateful to be a potential thread in your blanket that may bring you some comfort and help recconect you to the knowing that you are part of the great cycle of life.

How I got here