my story

Welcome! I’m a teaching artist and mom who continues to stay curious through drawing, mothering, & flamenco.

I am in awe of nature's life giving beauty, medicine, and design. I grow and draw plants to get to know them better.

People, stories, books, & ideas that have changed my life:

BIOGRAPHIES

• Frida, a Biography of FRIDA KAHLO by Hayden Herrera

• The Autobiography of Malcom X: As Told to Alex Haley

• Assatta an Autobiography - ASSATTA SHAKUR

NON-FICTION

• Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee - DEE BROWN

An Indian History of the American West

• The Botany of Desire - MICHAEL POLLAN

A plant's eye view of the world

• Braiding Sweetgrass - ROBIN WALL KIMMERER 

Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants

• Finding The Mother Tree - SUZANNE SIMARD

Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

• Iwigara - ENRIQUE SALMON

The Kinship of Plants and People

• The One-Straw Revolution - MASANOBU FUKUOKA

Fukuoka tells us that truly successful agriculture requires not so much arduous labor as awareness, observation, connection, and persistence.

MENDING TRAUMA

•  My Grandmother's Hands - RESMAA MENAKEM

Racialized Trauma and the Pathways to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies

IDEAS

• "Dispositional Empathy with Nature" -  sciencedirect.com

Females, people who feel connected to nature, and those who consider nature sentient show stronger DEN

FOR KIDS (and me)

• The Curious Garden - PETER BROWN

One boy's quest for a greener world... one garden at a time

• Aunt Chip and the Great Triple Creek Dam Affair - PATRICIA POLACCO

How Much TV is too much TV?

original people acknowledgement: 

HAYU MASI* to the languages, families, and traditions that are original to these lands that I call home. I acknowledge that I am a guest on the traditional land of the Cowlitz, Chinook and Clackamas People. As a guest, I continue to investigate how my whiteness plays a role in the continued oppression of black and brown people. 

*HAYU MASI means "many thanks" in the chinuk wawa language. It is an intertribal hybrid language indigenous to the Pacific Northwest, where it served as a regional lingua franca facilitating communication between speakers of different tribal languages as well as between tribal people and speakers of English and Canadian French.  - grandronde.org