Meet Zara Rose: the newest addition to my heart and business. Zara means many things including blooming flower, grief, beautiful radiance, and God remembers. In Russian, it means Princess or sovereign ruler, which her breeder, Natasha, of Majesty Meow probably intended.

The Summer of Jade is a video essay of the chapbook of poetry I wrote to commemorate this summer in Marin County, California. As a practitioner and teacher of the Tamalpa Institute Life/Art Process, I created a second self-portrait and long summer ritual for my own growth, healing and inquiry into how to move beyond mirroring and stay centered in my own self for inner healing and wholeness.

If there was a t-shirt that said: “I made it through 4 years of the pandemic without getting Covid, only to get it in 2024 from my MOTHER,” I would buy that shirt because that is exactly what happened.

I work with a new generation of imaginative, compassionate people who have become out of touch with who they are underneath the roles they fulfill for others in their daily life. They struggle with putting themself first, knowing what part is leading their behavior, and some don't even know themselves at all beyond these disconnected parts, feelings and a desire for inner healing and wholeness.

“The Red Birds” is part of a larger body of work called The Red Collection, which I’ve created a space for since many of the beautiful journals that have published my lyrical essays so far are no longer in publication, and as a multimedia project, a website is the best place to share it. This essay was going to be published in the Transformative Power of Art Journal before it went out of funding. It is such an integral part of my project, I have posted it here to get it out in the world.

For me, it’s a refuge, and refuge used to be a serene place in my mind with a bird bath, the sun setting, a pond, and a city in the distance. When I first began to use oil pastels to express what was inside of me wanting to come out, it looked like this, and that was the perfect starting place.

Not a culmination but an expanse. It took fierce hope, compassion, nourishing courage to get to this wilder place within me where I am free to imagine and play in empathic human connection.

“The Red Spine Dance” is part of a larger body of work called The Red Collection, which I’ve created a space for in honor of the beautiful journals that have published them so far. This essay was first published by Megan Febuary in the For Women Who Roar anthology on January 4, 2023. Since those links aren’t permanent, I have re-posted it here.