For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a storyteller.  I whispered stories at night to my older sister.  I traded tales with my father, big fat luminous lies, all inside the glue of make believe.  Telling stories was my doorway into connection with others, and into the most wild and alive parts of my little girl self.

Many years later, after finishing an MA in Writing, I began to work on a novella about the canyon lands of the Southwest.  While writing and researching this land that I love so much, I bumped up against my own internal landscape and all the ways of hiding I’d created to protect myself and feel safe.  

At the same time, I tried to make sense of the images coming through my work. I studied the history of indigenous peoples and dreamed about how their land was stolen.  I followed the inchoate longing of my narrator and found my own buried grief.  I tracked an underground river and landed on the shores of longing held in the body of earth. 

Giving voice to longing and to loss while following a deep inner impulse opened a portal in me to the mythic level of life – this place where image speaks, where the archetypal roars or sings to us, where the personal meets the divine. 

One night, while driving alone through southern Utah, I saw the feminine shape of a canyon wall and imagined the earth speaking to me, inviting me into my own body and experience.  Soon after, I responded to earth’s invitation and began to study movement.  Connection to my body reconnected me to early trauma that was stopping me from becoming who I most wanted to become.

Connection to my psyche reawakened something deeply wild and alive in me, and I became voracious. 

One kind of movement led to the study of another kind of movement and another.  One art form led to the study of another art form and another.  Writing.  Movement.  Storytelling.  Until finally, the expressive arts and performance. This is the place where all the dimensions of who I was, who we are, could be seen, held, healed, and transform.     

The deeper we go into relationship with our body/psyche, the more we find Ourselves, the Earth, the Cosmos, and the support we need to unfold new stories for our lives.

Between Movement, Memoir and the Mythic is a laboratory and an invitation to ground in the crucible of story, the imagination, and the body/psyche.  Through writing, movement, drawing, improvisational storytelling, and shamanic practices, we will embody our most alive and wild selves in service to our own healing, growth, and transformation. 

In the tradition of the bard, we will shape our own performance piece as culminating ritual, as healing rite, as declaration to life of our intention to participate in the unfolding of our world.

Our stories feed us.  They feed life.  And, they’re meant to be shared.