This is the ground I stand on
How I see the world
I want to be honest with you about how I see the world, because it shapes everything I make.
I believe that life doesn't end with a body. I believe that the crow found on the side of the road, the shell picked up from a shoreline, the stone at the bottom of a riverbed — each of these carries something real. Not symbolically. Not metaphorically. Actually. I believe the natural world is alive in ways that most of us were taught to stop noticing. And I believe that when we learn to listen again, something in us remembers.
This way of seeing has a name: animism. It is one of the oldest ways humans have understood their place in the world — the recognition that spirit, or life-force, or whatever word works for you, is not limited to human beings. That it moves through animals, through plants, through water and stone and bone. That we are in relationship with the living world around us, not separate from it. Every human culture, before it was disrupted — often by force — practiced some form of this. Animism isn't exotic or fringe. It is, in many ways, a genuinely human orientation toward the world.
Earth-based spirituality is how I describe my practice — a way of orienting toward the natural world and Spirit as teacher, as guide, as the ground beneath everything else. It doesn't require a specific religion or tradition. It doesn't ask you to believe anything in particular before you begin. It asks, instead, for a willingness to pay attention. To notice what the wind does when you step outside. To sit with the possibility that the world is more responsive than you've been taught to expect.
I use the word spirit because it is the most honest word I have, and I use it in two ways. The first is spirit with a small s — the animating quality of a living thing, and the persistence of that quality after physical form changes or ends. A person who has died still carries spirit. So does a feather left behind by a bird. When I work with these materials, I'm not decorating. I'm weaving.
The second is Spirit with a capital S — what others might call creator, god, universe, source, or something else entirely. The larger animating force that moves through everything, including through me when I make. When I say that a piece arrives through Spirit, or that Spirit leads the work, this is what I mean. Not a religion. Not a doctrine. Just the most honest word I have for something I experience as real.
I also use the term spirit world — the unseen realms that exist alongside and within the physical world we can touch and measure. Not somewhere else, not after death, but here, layered underneath and through everything we can see. The crow on the side of the road, the cedar at the shore, the ancestors whose lives shaped ours — all of these have presence in the spirit world, whether or not we have been taught to perceive it. Much of my work lives at the boundary between these two realities. That boundary is where I feel most at home.
You don't need to use any of these words, or any of the words I use, to work with me or to feel something in what I make. I've made pieces for people who would never describe themselves as spiritual — and they felt it anyway.
These words come from somewhere specific. I've been present at death. I was in the room when my father died, and I felt — not imagined, felt — his spirit. I have slowly, in the years since, been developing a relationship with him. These experiences are part of what grounds my understanding of what happens when we die, and of what it means to work with someone who is grieving. I am not working from theory. I am working from what I have been given.
Part of what I learned in my Shamanic Practitioner training — which I studied through the lineage of Core Shamanism — was a practice called psychopomp: the art of supporting spirits through the process of death and transition, including those who may be stuck between worlds, held there by pain, confusion, or unfinished business. This practice resonated with me deeply, and it is present in the work I do, even when I don't name it explicitly. I want to be clear that I am still learning, still studying, and do not claim credentials I haven't earned. What I offer comes from direct experience, from practice, and from an ongoing commitment to going deeper.
I want to be clear about what this is not. This is not a religion. It's not a system I'll ask you to adopt. I have not been trained or initiated into any specific Indigenous lineage or spirituality, though I have been profoundly shaped by proximity to Anishinaabe teachings and hold those with deep respect. What I practice is something older than any single container — a way of being in relationship with the living world that I believe is available to all of us, regardless of where we come from or what we currently believe.
You don't need to share my worldview to work with me or to feel something in what I make. What I ask is only this: bring something real. A grief, a question, a transition you're moving through. Bring that, and I'll bring everything else.
One more thing worth naming: this work is not always heavy. I hold the full spectrum — the grief and the joy, the ceremony and the silliness, the weight and the unexpected laughter. Walking with Spirit, in my experience, is not solemn by nature. It is alive. And aliveness includes delight, play, and the particular relief of finding something funny in the middle of something hard. If you arrive heavy, there is room for that. If you arrive light, there is room for that too. Bring whatever is true.
Mistakes and what I’ve learned
Leaning into change, rather than bracing against it — this is the lesson I have had to learn more than once, in more than one way. What follows are some of the ways it found me.
On staying too long
I spent eight years working inside a university system that I had quietly outgrown, telling myself I was grateful, that I was lucky, that this made sense. The job was stable. It had a pension. I was very good at not listening to myself.
On what doesn't fix the longing
I thought moving to a small town and buying my first house would fix the longing. It did not fix the longing. It did give me a backyard with trees where I could finally unravel. Close enough.
On rebuilding smaller
I set up a market tent with canvas walls, hung large prints and wall hangings on all three sides, and felt very proud of it — until the wind picked it up and carried it away. I rebuilt it. Smaller. Sturdier. More humble.
On being fully in the room
I tried for a long time to explain my work in ways that would make sense to most people. I used careful, neutral words. I softened the parts that felt true. The pieces I made during that time were fine. The conversations I had about them were very polite. But neither the art nor I were fully in the room.
On listening to the body
I have a chronic illness I am still learning to understand. I spent a long time trying to manage it rather than listen to it. My body had been trying to tell me something for years before it finally made itself impossible to ignore. I'm grateful it was patient with me. I'm working on returning the favour.
On how the best things tend to arrive
The work I do now came through a door I didn't open on purpose. I didn't plan it. I didn't credential for it. It arrived in the aftermath of several things falling apart at once, which is, I've come to understand, exactly how the best things tend to arrive.
On knowing when to leave
I signed up for a Shamanic Practitioner course having barely heard of shamanism. I dove in, heart first, and was profoundly changed by the experience. Then, months later, I decided not to finish the course. It was a healer who helped me see that I was forcing myself toward completion out of the fear of being someone who quits — not because finishing felt right. My body and my inner child were asking me to create. To stop studying someone else's framework and start building my own. It broke my heart to leave. It was the right decision.
On Spirit sending the lesson until you're ready
When I was still working my office job, I had flashes of myself driving around with a cooler in my trunk, picking up roadkill. It seemed ridiculous at the time.
Years later, on my way to the in-person portion of the shamanic course, the feeling became a need. I saw something white and feathered on the side of the road. I turned around. It was an owl. I was not prepared — I did what I could, hastily, knowing it wasn't how it was meant to be done. Days later, my new teacher walked us through the whole thing: how to ask if it's for you, how to honour it, how to be ready. I wrote everything down. Everything I had needed to know.
For another year, I grappled with my fear of being seen. I drove past birds multiple times, trying to psyche myself up. Then one day, on a busy road in town, I watched someone else pull over, cross the street, and move a dead mallard off the pavement. They just wanted it out of the way. I wanted to work with its spirit and its feathers. I knew Spirit was done waiting for me. I went straight to the store, bought gloves and a bag, drove back, and brought the duck home.
Spirit will keep sending the lesson until you're ready to receive it. And sometimes it sends someone else to show you how simple the first step actually is.
Influences
There are people whose work has fundamentally shaped how I see the world and my place in it. I name them here not as an exhaustive list, but as an act of gratitude and recognition — for the gift of what they have offered, and for the ways it has helped me unlearn what I was taught.
They have shaped me in two distinct and related ways. Some have deepened my relationship with Spirit, with the natural world, and with the ancient practices of ceremony, ritual, and earth-based knowing — helping me find my way toward something older and truer than what I was raised to believe.
Others have helped me to see clearly the shape of things as they are — the systems of harm, exploitation and erasure that structure so much of modern life, and the particular ways those systems have been built on the bodies, lands, and knowledge of Black, Indigenous, and other oppressed peoples. Both kinds of seeing are necessary. You cannot do this work honestly without both.
What many of their teachings share — across different traditions, disciplines, and forms — is an invitation. Away from the systems that prioritize the comfort of the few over the well-being of the whole. Toward right relationship. Toward reciprocity. Toward accountability. Toward a way of living in humble reverence to Spirit, to ancestors past and future, and to all we share this earth with.
Those who taught me to walk with Spirit — and from whom the shape of this work has grown:
Anishnaabe voices that have shaped how I understand and relate to this land:
Gidigaa Migizi (Elder Doug Williams) - Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg: This is our Territory
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson - As We Have Always Done, Islands of Decolonial Love, Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back
Writers, leaders, feelers and thinkers that changed how I see:
Malidomo Patrice Somé - Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman - Ritual: Power, Healing and Community
Sandra Ingerman - Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self
Vanessa Andreotti - Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism
Robin Wall Kimmerer - Braiding Sweetgrass
Winona Laduke - All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life
Asha Frost - You are the Medicine
bell hooks - All About Love
Adrienne Maree Brown - Emergent Strategy, Holding Change, Pleasure Activism
Ruth Wilson Gilmore - Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation
Saidiya Hartman - Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
Desmond Cole - The Skin We’re In
Cash Ahenakew - Towards Scarring our Collective Soul Wound
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang - Toward What Justice?
Alexis Shotwell - Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times