
I realize my creative, intellectual, and spiritual aspirations through a variety of modes and media, including restorative practices, nonviolence, and the arts. I have been weaving the WTR into my work, and personal and community life, since 2013, when I attended a life-changing, three-day training, with Joanna Macy, Anne Symens-Bucher, and other community members at Canticle Farm, in Oakland CA.
Along with the WTR, I find enlivening, transformative, and fruitful "art for life's sake": ethical aesthetics, theopoetics, and art/life, thanks in large part to the influence of such luminaries as Deborah J. Haynes, Linda Mary Montano, and other contemporary visionaries who attempt “to dissolve the boundaries between art and life" (Montano), sacred and secular, personal and political, process and product, and ritual and performance.
I received my M.A. and Ph.D. in theology, with an emphasis in the arts, from the Graduate Theological Union, in Berkeley. I have held positions in nonprofit leadership and as an instructor and director of programs in educational settings - forums that challenge as well as keep real, meaningful, and concrete my training and interests.
My quest is one of meaning: What is the relationship between our experience and our reflections on and expressions of our experience? How does our understanding of this relationship bear on our sense of personal, social, and environmental responsibility?
Foremost, I am committed to formal and informal communities of makers, seekers, and learners as creative agents for transformation, liberation, and flourishing.
Why I am called to facilitate the Work
Since attending a weekend workshop with Joanna Macy, Anne Symens Bucher, and the Canticle Farm team, in Oakland, CA, in November 2013 (in addition to studying Joanna's books, viewing her videos, and attending some of her Dharma talks and other workshops), I have led several workshops in various settings on or based in the Work that Reconnects. I have also participated in a variety of diversity trainings, which include anti-oppression and decolonization workshops, as well as other relevant, informal learning circles on racial justice and white privilege and white supremacy. I am also a practitioner, facilitator, and lifelong learner of nonviolence and restorative practices.
How I see the Work serving the Great Turning
That the Work That Reconnects is grounded in gratitude, hope, attentiveness, vision, and life-giving and life-sustaining practices inspires me to share it with others. More than a format, it provides a way of being, of being in relationship, that emboldens personal and social transformation. As we experience the pain of the impacts of the Great Unraveling - the massive social and ecological crises - this work helps us to move us from apathy and despair into collaborative action, as we shift from the Industrial Growth Society toward a life-giving civilization.
Audiences I work with
I mainly work with international audiences of all ages, but primarily adults in educational and spiritual/religious settings (often times Catholic or interspiritual).

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