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.

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.

Revisiting the red frame after 12 years in California, five apartments and a house. What connections come and go, what lessons remain, and how the connection to my spine allows me to feel and grieve it all.