I’m so glad you are here!
Interests
I am fascinated with the possibility of learning to see one another without our blind spots and baggage, to experience waking up and seeing the one across from us with new eyes and transcendent understanding. I believe we look for alien life in the stars to distract us from seeing the aliens right in front of us in each other and even in our reflection in the mirror.
My passion is to help us find our inherent worth and to see it in others. I dream that there is a tipping point in humanity where we understand ourselves and one another so well, that love wins out and we create a world that as Loretta J. Ross so beautifully puts it, we call in rather than call out.
My favorite stanza from a poem ‘A Great Wagon’ by Rumi,
Out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in the grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make any sense.
These words travel with me like a phantom limb. Part of me I can’t point to, but a place within me I am destined to find. My Isle of Bloom substack and Field Notes are written to uncover the deep mystery Rumi captures in his combination of words. I hear in his words Mercy. I hear, I see You. I hear, You see Me. I hear, And this is everything… I hear, Now that we’ve finally arrived here with one another, what creativity beckons? What real fun can begin?
I wrote this: Come out from under it all. Take your place under the star-filled sky. Remember. At the core of you is the word friend. Spend your life knowing over and over all the ways that this is true.
When I wrote the word friend it felt like it took on new dimensions. It wasn’t the same as the word we throw around online or in our circles of friends. It wasn’t as in your best friends or even family relationships where you get on great. The word friend was pointing to my relationship with my life force and my reverence for it. My openness and reverence to the life force animating everything on this planet. The way this friend wanted to dance with me and show me what I wasn’t seeing with my limited thinking and walls of protection. How it wanted to enliven me and take me on another kind of journey out of the mundane, but very much right in the mundane–something softer, more fluid, yet still tangible, but only when my body was more receptive, like an antennae, spacious as though the light was getting in. When I let go, relaxed, trusted in something bigger than myself and all of us together.
Writing
You can find my writing home here.
I ponder the multi-dimensional experience of the word friend a lot in my writing; for myself, my family, my students, and my clients. I am working with this befriending every moment and what it means for how the life force operates, and how it wants to be refined like beautiful music. I am humbled that so many seem to be working on the same, finding that friend inside who in just the finding of it experiences Mercy, and release; in the working with it find softness, in the harnessing of it find intelligence and integrity. It is powerful because it brings coherence.
In a world that is jagged and rife with conflict, this coherence brings something quenching and nourishing. It stops the fight and weaves together newborn strands for a tapestry we haven’t seen before. So many I cross paths with are being called to bring this tangible coherence into the world, like midwives for a new dispensation of peace, creativity, and prosperity, and collaboration. All of this exploration fuels my writing.
I truly believe there is a port key to Rumi’s Field in us, that becomes more and more apparent when we do the work to flesh out our human experience, to learn to listen to all the parts of us inside that want to commune with us, listen and commune with others instead of pretending we are fine, and together discovering a clarity under the surface much closer and more natural than we had anticipated.
I believe being seen and supported as well as seeing and supporting are ways that we stoke our collective Life Force and bring a natural beingness and clarity to our experience that meets up and expands with others creating beautiful new music and light that births new worlds in us and around us.
It is my honor to amplify this reverence and support others in finding the friend at their core, to create a receptivity where all voices are heard and celebrated, to teach how to take turns, to elevate the whole by developing self and others into their very own soul tree or flower, and into their true nature they were always meant to be.
I invite you to stay a while on my Isle of Bloom. It was born to be a place for you to come to experience friendship, community, creativity. I envision this as an org, so please share your ideas in the comments or email me if you want to guest post.
Coaching
My Life Coaching is for adults and adolescents. I am a certified Wayfinder Life Coach currently working on my ICF credential.
My style of coaching is based on what I have learned through my training in the Martha Beck Wayfinder Life Coaching program, along with many years of teaching and nurturing musicians and artists to remove psychological blocks and open up to their best and freest learning, cultivate their abilities in a safe space, and work through performance anxiety and fears of not being good enough.
I have skills in helping with family, parent-child dynamics, adolescents, relationships, and creating life paths/projects. I bring an honest, curious, open, and non-judgemental approach to meet you where you are. I focus on opening up aspects of creativity and flow to make better decisions and understand yourself better and how you would like to design your life amid what is already taking up your time and energy.
When I first began coaching, I often thought, this is how we should be supporting one another. You come to me with something that deeply matters to you, and I help you hear yourself by asking generative questions that help you understand more fully why something matters so much to you and helping you find connection and resonance to what are the next steps. To know more about my coaching please visit my Coaching page here.
More About Me
I have a master’s degree in music and along with life coaching and writing, I teach a studio of piano students who inspire me. I’m a recovering perfectionist, a forever waking up many-decades-now-ex-Mormon, (who is always surprised at how insidious the good girl persona is), and a wife to a second husband from Germany with 4 new-to-adulting-daughters, including two biological daughters and two stepdaughters. My husband likes to tell everyone that we have two felines and lots of male fish who help balance the male energy in our home. I live in Oregon and love exploring the mountains and Pacific coastline in my beautiful state with my husband whose brain functions as a map of places to explore, who shows me what it is to smile effortlessly all the time, and who reminds me to look up and see the beauty.
