I’m Emma, the human behind the computer screen! I’d love to share some of who I am with you. Thanks for being here and journeying with me. I’m truly honored to be on this path of life with you.
The now
I am a ritualist, friend, companion, care-taker, healer, beauty-maker, song-leader, writer, poet, grief-tender, and alchemist. In these roles I say: “Use me, Life, for all the ways you long to weave beauty through me. For all the ways you long to weave healing through me. For all the ways you long to weave love through me. I’m here and I’m willing.”
I live in a way and move at a pace that helps to decompose personal and collective patterns of proving our worth and rushing toward productivity; patterns that exploit and harm each other, the earth, and our wider web of relations. I craft my life and relationships to center simplicity, slowing down, and re-enlivening ways of being that care deeply for all life.
Whatever I do, however tiny or grand, I aim to bring my heart forward in ways that feed love, joy, community, and trust. It is ever apparent to me in these times of ecological and systemic collapse, that earth is imploring us to simplify and return to the most basic of questions as our guides. “How well can we love each other?” is one such question that I live by.
Ancestry and Identities
I am the granddaughter of people who lived in Russia, Ukraine, Germany, Ghana, Sweden, England, and Denmark. My body holds story of colonized and colonizer, oppressor and oppressed. I strive to be one who practices inner-reconciliation and repair within the lineages that are alive within me. I am also the living ancestor of future ones who long to embody and work toward visions of a stunningly beautiful, just, and loving world. I strive to serve them and their visions well. I am a white, queer, able-bodied person. It is important to me to be ongoingly learning how I can embody my identities in ways that serve repair, reconciliation, and regeneration of what has been oppressed, violated, and harmed within our collective body.
Core tenets I strive to walk with:
We are all deserving of love, freedom, and compassion. No being, human or more-than-human, deserves to be treated with violence or cruelty. We have a responsibility as humans to see, understand, and unravel the patterns that compel us toward violence.
We all have an inherent soul aliveness that deserves to be seen, known, nurtured and kindled within us. We can support this in each other through compassionate seeing and honoring the inherent dignity and beauty of each being we relate with.
Earth is a living, vibrant, vital being who deserves our respect and care. Equally, all the life that earth births and nourishes also deserves our respect and care.
My path (short version)
I was a sensitive, empathic and quiet child deeply in love with the earth and her beauty. From a young age I felt deeply companioned by and in awe of the wild beings around me. As often happens, my pure-hearted spirit got quieter and less available as I grew toward early adulthood. I was numb and following a path of “shoulds”. College awoke me again to my heart of care and love for earth, and aligned me with several core people who mirrored to me ways of moving and working that centered love and relationship as core tenets. After college, I spent eight years working at a nature center where I learned much about leadership, collaboration, and mutuality, and also about my own patterns of over-working and hyper-individualism. During this time, I was also called to turn toward my body which was struggling with significant health challenges. I understood quickly, after seeing my first therapist, that the physical symptoms were manifestations of untended emotional energy. The next seven years took me on a deep journey of un-raveling and self-discovery that woke me up to the true gifts and longings of my soul and brought me face to face with all the relationships, systems, and structures of my life that needed to change in order to align with who I was in my depths. Emerging from that time, I found myself with a clear understanding of the core tenets I longed to live from, and alive with deep devotion to love, freedom, and earth. And now, from that place, I find myself ever available to learning how life wants to weave beauty, healing, and love through me.
My path (long version)
I grew up really close to the land with Pine and Maple and Oak and Boxelder as some of my first companions. I climbed these trees and lay beneath them and sat in swings held by their branches. I rested in their company for friendship and solace.
I felt a deep heart of care for bees and beetles and spiders when I was young. Saving them from the pool, admiring their fragile beauty, and somehow knowing and feeling sad that the bees were being impacted by the pesticides sprayed on the mono-culture crop fields surrounding where I lived.
I felt deep awe for the beauty of the earth. Around the time I was 10 or 11, I received a digital camera as a gift and would spend countless hours capturing the beauty that I was seeing all around me. The tiny, impeccably brilliant details were always my favorite. Dew on spider webs. Flower petals opening in a subtle spiral. Frost crystals on branch tips. Looking back now, it feels like my heart was attuning to image as poem. Capturing photos of beauty that felt to me like earth expressing love through detail, and my eyes saying “I see you and love you, too”.
As often happens, somewhere between childhood pure-heartedness and adulthood, the spark of my heart got quieter and farther from the surface. I went from middle school to high school to college, largely numb and following the path of “should”.
In college, parts of me came back online that had been dormant. I arrived having been randomly assigned to a freshman year seminar course about environmental art. It was there that I learned about climate change and woke up to grief and rage and heartbreak for how earth was being treated. That course opened my eyes to paths of “career” that might actually align with what my heart loved most; setting me on a path of studying environmental geology with a minor in biology.
During these years, there were a few key people who mirrored to me a heart that loved the earth deeply. The first was with a dear mentor and friend who spent countless hours walking woods and prairies and roadsides with me, teaching me the names of flowers and trees and birds. He helped me attune my ears and eyes to subtle webs of relationship that could be deepened by my seeing and knowing of the beings around me.
And then there was Scott Russell Sanders, a visiting author whose essays cracked my heart open even further to my love for earth, and whose gentle eyes looked back at me with deep understanding when I went up to him after his reading, wobbly, and tried to ask him a question about how to love this wild earth when my heart was breaking for her.
And lastly, Jane Goodall, who I heard give a keynote speech at an Earth Day conference in Madison sometime around 2013. She had a way of speaking from love that I felt was almost entirely absent in the academic setting where I was studying. She woke my heart up to understanding that love could be a core tenet of my work in whatever path I walked.
Emerging from college, understanding clearly that my heart longed to love the earth, I went to work at a nature center for the next eight years. Here I learned much about leadership, collaboration, and community as well as about my own neuroses and patterns of over-working and hyper-individualism. I learned much about sharing and delegating and co-creating systems of mutuality where everyone could thrive in their gifts.
During this time I was also being invited into awakening threads of my soul. Being deeply impacted by physical health challenges, I began to meet the depths of myself and see what was going on under the surface. Things started to become clear when after seeing my first therapist I had almost immediate reduction in severe skin rashes that had been plaguing me for years. My unprocessed emotional body was manifesting in the physical.
This spurred about seven years of deep spelunking into the depths of self. I traversed and developed quite a map as I went – reaching for tools such as reiki, voicework, journaling, couple’s therapy, enneagram, astrology, fooling workshops, writing classes, shamanic energy work, ancestral healing sessions, akashic record readings, vision quest, earth-based ceremony, community singing, yoni steaming, nervous system tending, ecstatic dance, yoga, contact improv and more. I was all-in for the unraveling and self-discovery that was upon me.
All this unraveling brought me into big reckoning with the relationships, systems and structures of my life that weren’t in attunement with who I was at my depths. Those seven years also held me in divorce, coming out as queer, leaving my job at the nature center, and completely redefining how I was showing up within my relationships and paths of service. I was waking up to the roles that my soul longed to grow into such as healer, writer, poet, and ritualist.
I emerged from that time re-enlivened and re-attuned to what my soul longs to serve in this life, and also deeply committed to a life-long journey of continuing to grow into one who can show-up in my fullest capacities to serve love, freedom and earth. That’s where I find myself now – committed and growing. Thank you for reading my story, and for being on this beautiful journey with me. May we all enliven to our fullest, most beautiful potentials in service to earth and the thriving of all life.
