What I do know is that my Substack has become the place where I make field notes from the thinking that eventually becomes the thesis. These essays are where I follow the threads, wander down the side paths, notice the moss and see what keeps returning, and sometimes discover that something I thought was a small idea is actually connected to a much larger one.

Lately, I have been circling back to prayer flags. This isn’t the first time they have appeared in my work. I have made many over the years, back in my “Peace Traveler” days, when I was thinking a lot about peace, movement, childhood and connection, and what it meant to carry a small gesture of hope into the world. Then I made cyanotype prayer flags. This was before artist books became such an important part of my practice, before shrines, before I had the language of Art that Breathes or Shrine Thinking. Still the flags were already there.

I was first introduced to Tibetan prayer flags, and to khatas, by Sonam, my daughter’s father, when I traveled to India in early 2003. Through him, I encountered these not simply as beautiful objects, but as part of a living cultural and spiritual practice. That distinction has always felt important to me.

Tibetan prayer flags have a long history, reaching back before the arrival of Buddhism in Tibet. Their roots are intertwined with Bon traditions of honoring the forces of the natural world, and the familiar five colors, blue, white, red, green, and yellow, are associated with elements and aspects of the world around us. With the arrival and development of Tibetan Buddhism, prayers, mantras, and sacred images became part of the flags. They are traditionally hung outdoors, where wind and weather become participants in the ritual. The prayers are not meant to remain fixed on the cloth. They are carried outward by the wind, offered to the world.

There is something about that gesture that has stayed with me. Perhaps part of it is the way the prayer flag places the act of making into relationship with the elements. The prayer is written or printed onto cloth, but it is the wind that carries it. The maker begins the gesture, and then releases control.

This is also one of the reasons I think I have always been drawn to cyanotype.

Long before I had language for Art that Breathes, and I was making simple cyanotypes with plants. I loved the way the process asked me to collaborate with things I could not entirely control as well as the completely tactile analog method. The sun makes the image. Water develops and reveals it. The plant leaves leave their traces. Air and wind move across the wet surface. Time becomes part of the exposure. The final image is not simply something I have made; it is something that has happened through a relationship between my hands, the plant, the cloth or paper, light, water, air, and time. This is the heart of Art that Breathes.

The more I think about prayer flags, the more I see this same impulse running through my practice. I am drawn to processes in which I can begin something, but cannot completely determine its outcome.

Perhaps that is what has stayed with me about the prayer flag all these years: not simply the idea of sending a prayer into the world, but the act of making something and then letting the elements take it from there. Perhaps because I am beginning to understand that I have been thinking about shrines in a similar way.

For a long time, I thought of a shrine as a place where things were gathered: plants, photographs, objects, offerings, fragments, memories. A small place made sacred through attention. But the more I work with Shrine Thinking, the more I am interested in what happens when the shrine is not simply a container for attention but a way of releasing it.

A shrine gathers. A prayer flag releases. One asks us to approach. The other asks something to move beyond us. And perhaps this is where prayer flags are beginning to meet Art that Breathes for me. I have been trying to understand art not simply as the making of objects, but as a practice of relationship. A way of noticing. A way of tending. A way of entering into conversation with materials, plants, places, weather, memory, and the more-than-human world.

The prayer flag offers a remarkably simple model for this. I make the flag, but I do not control what happens to it. I place it in the world, and then I let the wind participate.The cloth fades. The edges fray. The image changes. The words become less legible. Eventually, the material disappears. The work is not damaged by this process. The process is the work.

And maybe this is why I keep circling back to prayer flags now, almost twenty-five years after I first encountered them. Was I already making small shrines before I had the word for them. Perhaps the prayer flags were an early form of the same question I am still asking:

What happens when we make something not to keep, but to offer?

I don’t know where this thread will lead yet. That’s what field notes are for!

Field Note:

Making and Letting Go

Three ways of thinking about making, offering, and release:

Andy Goldsworthy
Make something from the materials of a place, knowing that weather, gravity, water, and time will eventually transform it. The work is made with impermanence already inside it.

Megan Webster
Make within a living system. Plants, soil, growth, decay, and ecological processes continue beyond the artist’s hand. The work is not separate from life; it participates in it.

Tibetan Prayer Flags
Make an offering and release it. The wind carries the prayer beyond the maker. The cloth fades, frays, and disappears, while the gesture continues outward.

Three different practices. Three different relationships to control. And perhaps three reminders that making does not always have to mean holding on. Sometimes we make something so that we can let it go.

Which brings me back to impermanence.

Impermanence is one of the foundational ideas of Art that Breathes. Not as an aesthetic of things that disappear, but as an acknowledgment that everything is already in the process of changing. Plants grow and decay. Images appear and fade. Cloth weathers. Books are handled and altered. Shrines are rearranged. Nothing stays exactly as we found it. Perhaps the invitation is not to resist that change, but to make with it.

To notice it and to allow it to become part of the work. And maybe that is what the wind has been carrying all along.

I’m going to end this piece with a Mary Oliver poem as I have been digging deep into her work these past few weeks

On Meditating, Sort Of, by Mary Oliver

Meditation, so I’ve heard, is best accomplished
if you entertain a certain strict posture.
Frankly, I prefer just to lounge under a tree.
So why should I think I could ever be successful?

Some days I fall asleep, or land in that
even better place - half-asleep - where the world, 
spring, summer, autumn, winter - 
flies through my mind in its
hardy ascent and its uncompromising descent.

So I just lie like that, while distance and time
reveal their true attitudes: they never
heard of me, and never will, or ever need to.

Of course I wake up finally
thinking, how wonderful to be who I am,
made out of earth and water, 
my own thoughts, my own fingerprints - 
all that glorious, temporary stuff.

(”On Meditating, Sort of” by Mary Oliver, printed in Devotions 2017)

Upcoming in-person teaching

• August 28-30th 2026 Misty Meadows Women’s Herbal Conference Thetford VT

• Sept 18-20th 2026 BotanicWise Herbal Conference Kimberton PA

• Oct 3-4th 2026 Harvesting Nature’s Colors: Discovering Plant Pigments @Zea Mays Printmaking Florence MA

Share

Leave a comment

As someone who spends a great deal of time in the woods, walking, gathering, harvesting, and paying attention, tick checks are simply part of the ritual. Finding and removing ticks is, unfortunately, a fairly common occurrence. I try to be diligent, and yet somehow one slipped through. A tiny bite, a bacterial infection, and suddenly the week I had planned disappeared into a haze of fatigue, fever, and brain fog.

I suppose I should be grateful it wasn’t a lone star tick leaving me with alpha-gal syndrome or Rocky Mountain spotted fever. There are always worse possibilities.

Being forced to slow down has a way of changing what you notice. Between naps and cups of tea, random thoughts drifted in and out of my foggy brain. New ideas, incomplete thoughts.

I’ve spent much of this year thinking about tending. Tending gardens. Tending plants. Tending communities. Tending an art practice. Tending as an artistic methodology. But this week, while my body was busy healing, I found myself thinking about another word.

Mending.

Not simply as another word for healing, but as something with its own particular practice. What is the relationship between tending, healing, and mending? What does it mean to mend a body, a garment, a friendship, a landscape, or even our attention?

• Repair = fixing a function.

• Healing = restoring relationship.

• Mending = the visible practice of healing?

Why does mending feel like such an important practice in a culture that has forgotten how to repair?

I’ve been wondering how the word mending feels different from healing.

Healing is a word I know well. After twenty-five years of working with herbs in a healing capacity, and many years of studying spiritual healing with a Ecuadorian curandera I’ve thought a great deal about what it means to support the body’s remarkable capacity to heal. But mending feels quieter somehow. More domestic? More humble. More like a practice than a destination.

Thinking about it led me back to Yoko Ono’s Mend Piece. Broken cups, glue, string, tape. Participants patiently repairing what had been shattered before sharing tea together. The cracks aren’t hidden. They’re part of the story.

Which in turn led me back to kintsugi: the art of repairing broken ceramics with lacquer dusted with powdered gold. I've seen photographs of bowls and teacups whose cracks shimmer like rivers across their surfaces. The break is neither hidden nor disguised. It becomes part of the object's history, a reminder that it has been used, broken, cared for, and returned to life. There is something deeply hopeful in that. Not because the bowl becomes more beautiful because it was broken, but because someone believed it was worth mending in the first place.

I began wondering if forests practice their own kind of kintsugi. Trees don't erase the places where branches have broken. They grow around them, slowly sealing the wound with new rings of wood. The break is never undone, but neither is it the end of the story. Walk through any old forest and you'll find trunks split by storms, hollowed by insects, scarred by fire, yet still putting out leaves each spring. The forest seems to understand something we often forget: life is not the absence of damage but the continual practice of mending.

Thinking about trees led me, to Mary Oliver and a scene from the Mary Oliver documentary I just saw “Saved by the Beauty of the World” (catch it if you can). Mary Oliver recounts rescuing an injured black-backed gull on a bitterly cold Christmas morning, an experience she later wrote about in her essay “Bird” in Upstream. She and her beloved Molly Malone Cook brought the bird home, tended to it, and cared for it as it slowly recovered

Subscribe now

What moved me wasn’t simply the rescue. It was the instinct to stop. To interrupt the day. To gather up a suffering creature and make room for its healing. That, too, felt like a form of mending. Not because they could guarantee the gull’s recovery, but because they answered its vulnerability with care.

Mary Oliver writes that “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” a phase that is a keystone in my upcoming thesis. Perhaps mending is attention made visible.

I am beginning to think mending, isn’t always about fixing what is broken. Sometimes it is simply the willingness to stay with another being long enough for healing to become possible. I found myself thinking that this, too, is a form of mending.

Not because they could erase the bird’s injury or guarantee its survival, but because they chose not to look away. They answered vulnerability with attention. Perhaps mending begins there, not with fixing, but with noticing. With allowing another living being’s brokenness to matter to us. Mending accepts scars.

"It is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in this broken world” M.O.

What in your life is asking to be mended?

Begin with one small thing.

Share

Leave a comment

______________________________________________________________

STARTING TOMORROW: A 4 week Online Program sponsored by BotanicWise

Click here for more info “The Living Page”

Subscribe now

I recently bought a little book called 100 Artists’ Manifestos, edited by Alex Danchev. I imagined spending a weekend immersed in bold artistic visions, tracing the history of artists who dared to imagine new worlds through words as much as images.

Instead, I found myself growing increasingly uneasy. As I turned the pages, I noticed how few women were represented. Of the one hundred manifestos included, only five were written by women, representing just three artists, as two contributed more than one text. I kept waiting for the balance to shift, but it never did.

I returned the book.

It wasn’t simply the lack of representation that unsettled me, although that certainly mattered. It was the realization that the history of the artistic manifesto, at least as it was presented here, was overwhelmingly a history of declaration male voices speaking with certainty, authority, and conviction. It made me wonder not only whose voices had been left out, but whether the manifesto itself was still the right form for the practice I had been quietly growing.

That question stayed with me long after I returned the book.

Falling in Love with Manifestos

As a feminist lesbian coming of age in the early 1980s, manifestos were my love language (along with my black Dr. Martens boots).

They were unapologetic. They were urgent. Defiant and rebellious. They named what had been invisible and refused to accept the world as it was. They gave language to anger, hope, and possibility. They taught me that words could change culture.

Manifestos have always emerged in moments that demanded courage. They declare that another world is possible and insist that someone say it out loud.

For many women, queer artists, artists of color, and other marginalized voices, the manifesto became a way to reclaim authority over narratives that had excluded them. Rather than simply adopting the bold, often masculine voice of the historical avant-garde, they transformed the form itself.

I found that spirit in the Guerrilla Girls, whose public interventions exposed the sexism and racism of the art world with humor and precision. In VALIE EXPORT, whose writings reclaimed the manifesto to argue for women’s embodied experience. In Linda Nochlin, whose essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? dismantled the institutional assumptions that had shaped art history. In Faith Ringgold, who refused to separate art from justice. In Judy Chicago, who imagined collaborative feminist practice as a work of art in itself.

These weren’t simply manifestos. They were acts of reclamation. I loved them because they gave me permission to imagine otherwise. Then I encountered another kind of manifesto. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions isn’t written as a proclamation at all. It is a letter to a friend. Rather than issuing commands, she offers suggestions. Instead of certainty, conversation. Instead of doctrine, relationship. The manifesto had become intimate.

Reading Adichie made me realize that perhaps the manifesto itself wasn’t fixed. It could soften. It could become generous. It could become a conversation. I still found myself wondering if another form might be quietly calling me.

Then Something Began to Shift

As I sat with these questions, I slowly realized it wasn’t really the manifesto I was leaving behind. It was a way of knowing.

For more than thirty years I've lived my life close to plants. They have been my teachers, my companions, my livelihood, my solace, and increasingly, my collaborators. Herbalism has never simply been about learning plant names or making medicine. It’s a lifestyle and at its heart, it is a practice of relationship. You return to the same patch of nettles year after year. You walk the same trails. You notice the first coltsfoot, You notice when the elder flowers bloom a week earlier than they did the year before. Much of what I know about plants wasn't learned from books. It was learned by walking. Walking the same paths in different seasons. Seeing what had returned. Noticing what had disappeared. Learning that attention is something we cultivate. You begin to understand that where a plant grows tells you as much as the plant itself. You learn to harvest with gratitude, to leave enough behind, to notice who else depends on that place. Knowledge comes slowly. It accumulates through seasons rather than on a classroom. Through attention rather than expertise.

I began to understand that attention isn't simply a way of looking at the world. It is a way of entering into relationship with it. The longer I practiced herbalism, the more I realized that attention changes both the observer and the observed. It asks for humility rather than certainty, curiosity rather than mastery. Perhaps this is why the manifesto no longer fit. My work was no longer trying to convince. It was trying to cultivate another way of seeing.

Without realizing it, I had stopped trying to write a manifesto. I had begun writing from the same place I had learned herbalism; from relationship, from walking, from observation, from returning.

When Art that Breathes Became a Field Guide

When I first began writing Art that Breathes, calling it a manifesto felt completely natural. I was trying to give shape to a practice that felt urgent, necessary, and different from what I saw around me. Like so many manifestos before it, I wanted to name another possibility.

But over time, something quietly shifted. Without realizing it, I stopped writing declarations and began writing invitations. I discovered that I wasn’t interested in telling people what to believe. I wanted to invite them into a different way of seeing, making, and relating.

The questions became more important than the answers.

How do we meet a plant?

How do we gather with gratitude?

How do materials teach us?

What happens when we make art with plants rather than about them?

What if creativity is another way of listening?

The principles of Art that Breathes were no longer rules to follow. They became practices to return to.

Impermanence.

Reciprocity.

Embodiment.

Ancestral connection.

Collaboration with land.

Art as ritual.

Again and again, I found myself writing less about what art should be and more about how we might pay attention. Looking back, I realize Art that Breathes was never really a manifesto perhaps it was becoming a field guide. Not a guide to identifying plants, but a guide to entering into relationship with plants, with place, with materials, with one another, and with ourselves.

I worried that by leaving the manifesto behind I was somehow becoming less political, less bold, less radical. Then I remembered where the word radical comes from.

Radix.

Root.

What if the most radical thing I can do isn’t to shout louder, but to root more deeply?To slow down in a culture that worships speed. To practice reciprocity in a world shaped by extraction. To cultivate attention in an economy built on distraction.To create beauty in a time of despair. To make with rather than take from.

These may be quiet gestures, but they are not passive ones. They challenge some of the deepest assumptions of todays life. They ask us to reconsider what we value, how we make, and how we belong.

There are moments in history that call for manifestos. Feminism may still need manifestos. Environmental justice movements may need manifestos. Indigenous sovereignty movements may need manifestos.

But Art that Breathes has slowly found another form. Not because it has become less political. But because it has become more relational. I am super grateful for those voices; they helped shape the woman, artist, herbalist, and educator I have become.

A manifesto can begin a revolution.

A field guide can teach us how to live in the world that follows.

Art that Breathes is still becoming. Perhaps it always will be. And maybe that’s exactly what a field guide allows, a practice that grows alongside the living world, always unfinished, always learning.

Perhaps every practice eventually discovers the literary form it needs.

Manifestos taught me to imagine another world. Plants taught me how to belong to this one.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

____________________________________________________________________________

A few summer classes that still have openings

Check https://www.tonyalemosarts.com. for more details

We pray for the right to exist without needing permission.

We pray that you stop confusing control with care.

We pray for your lawns, that they become less lonely.

We pray that you leave room for what arrives uninvited.

We pray that you become porous to wonder again.

We pray that you allow yourselves to disperse joy more freely.

We pray that you notice who feeds the bees before the fruit trees bloom.

We pray for your cracked places, because that is where new life enters.

We pray that you learn the difference between wildness and disorder.

We pray that you remember medicine often grows closest to your door.

We pray that you slow down long enough to meet the living world directly,
without first naming its usefulness.

We pray that you remember survival is not shameful.

We pray that you remember you belong to the Earth before you attempt to save it.

We pray that you become harder to uproot from one another.

We pray for children who still crouch down to blow seeds into the wind.

We pray that you learn from persistence that does not harden into domination.

We pray that you stop poisoning what attempts to heal disturbed ground.

We pray for your capacity to return again and again after being cut down.

We pray that you understand beauty does not require rarity.

We pray for reciprocal futures.

We pray that you remember the commons.

We pray for those treated as weeds by the systems around them.

We pray that you reclaim what capitalism taught you to overlook.

We pray for tenderness toward ordinary things.

We pray that you rediscover how to gather without conquering.

We pray for your grief, because grief is proof of connection.

We pray that your species remembers humility before collapse forces it upon you.

We pray for pollinators, soil fungi, sidewalk cracks, neglected edges, and all life thriving beyond your systems of management.

We pray not for perfection, but for participation in the living world.

To read part 1 click here

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

I have known dandelion as medicine.I have known dandelion as food.

I have known dandelion as flower essence and pigment. I have known dandelion through tinctures, decoctions, festivals + feasts, through years of teaching herbalism.

But on this spring morning, I wasn’t seeing dandelion the medicine. Or dandelion the rebel.Or even dandelion the art collaborator. I was seeing abundance. For the first time, I was seeing abundance before I was seeing dandelions.

It was such an ordinary question that I almost dismissed it. I have a habit of counting things. It’s what my mind does when I slow down, when I’m resting, when I’m paying attention. But the more I looked, the more impossible it became to ignore the great abundance scattered across the grass. Hundreds of bright suns. Each one feeding pollinators before the fruit trees bloomed. Each one arriving without invitation.

The question carried me back to my years of herbal practice and to Dr. Peter Gail, the ethnobotanist affectionately known as the “King of Dandelions.” His life’s work challenged the stories we tell about this common plant, inviting us to see food where we had been taught to see weeds, medicine where we had been taught to see nuisance.

For many years at Blazing Star Herbal School we celebrated a Dandelion Festival every May. Apprentices gathered blossoms, made honey, wine, fritters, flower essences, honey, muffins,medicines, and laughter. Somewhere along the way the festival quietly disappeared. Perhaps this project calls its return.

As I began to count another question emerged. What if every dandelion became a prayer? Not a metaphor. An actual prayer.

I gathered 333 blossoms and carried them one by one to a red maple tree. Each flower was placed deliberately around the roots. Each blossom becaming an offering.

Each placement became a gesture of reciprocity. By the end, the tree stood within a circle of yellow suns, the roots extending outward through lines of dandelions like a living mandala.

The work lasted only a few hours before I recollected the blossoms and embossed 111 of them into an artist book, an eco-printed scroll. Its impermanence was part of the prayer.

One of the prayers that emerged from the work now accompanies every bottle of dandelion flower essence I make:

“I soften the tension carried in bodies and spirits.”

What began as a land artwork became something much larger in relationship because I listened to the whispering of the dandelion telling me that this project isn’t simply one about dandelion but a relationship between dandelion red maple and human. At this point the project continued to unfold in directions I could never have anticipated. Moving images. A growing collection of participatory scores. Imagined plant prophecies. An illuminated shrine built into the body of a maple tree.

Along the way I found myself thinking more about shrines. How shrines transform. And shrine asks us to enter into relationship; shrine thinking. For me, shrine thinking is not about religion. It is a way of arranging attention. It is the slow accumulation of gestures that say:

This matters.

This is worthy of care.

This overlooked thing deserves reverence.

and in this way once again the dandelion and the maple became my teachers.

Robin Wall Kimmerer often writes of maple as a teacher of reciprocity and generosity. Standing beneath this particular maple over many months, I began to wonder what conversation might exist between these two beings.

Fragments of an imagined interspecies dialogue:

Maple:
I have spent decades learning how to stand still.

Dandelion:
I have spent centuries learning how to move.

Maple:
Humans come to me for sweetness.

Dandelion:
Humans poison me for thriving too freely.

Maple:
My gifts require patience.

Dandelion:
Mine arrive immediately.

Maple:
I teach reciprocity through seasons.

Dandelion:
I teach resilience through disturbance.

Maple:
They admire me.

Dandelion:
They attempt to erase me.

Both:
Yet we both continue feeding the world.

Together they offer different strategies for living ethically within a damaged world.

The maple teaches rootedness.

The dandelion teaches dispersal.

The maple offers shelter.

The dandelion offers abundance.

The maple grows through centuries.

The dandelion through persistence.

One of the surprises of this project has been discovering how deeply the work of Yoko Ono has quietly shaped my thinking. Not just aesthetically but also methodologically. Like Ono’s instruction pieces, 333 Dandelions extends beyond objects into actions. The artwork is not simply the installation.

In honor of Yoko Ono, I made a little zine of scores. If you’d like me to mail you a copy, simply leave your snail mail address in the comments (or send it to me privately), and I’ll happily send one your way.

Like dandelion seeds, I hope these scores continue to disperse. Because the artwork doesn’t end with the installation.

It is also an invitation. And a ritual. The moment someone pauses beneath a tree A flower essence carried home. A prayer tucked into a pocket. A new way of seeing the common. The work continues through participation.

Thank you, Yoko.

Subscribe now

Before you leave, I’d like to offer you one small practice.

Find a common plant growing near your home. Sit beside it for five minutes.

Resist the urge to identify it.

Instead ask: What have I failed to notice?

Then thank it. Nothing more.

Thank you for following this work as it continues to unfold. I have a feeling 333 Dandelions is only the beginning.

Leave a comment

____________________________________________________________________________

A few summer classes that still have openings

Check https://www.tonyalemosarts.com for more details

Subscribe now

She stood in the garden at Fairseat House in Highgate, North London, a tree with a presence all her own. Her branches seemed less like wood than water, dancing and shimmering with every breath of wind. We girls sat in her shade and played for hours. We hid among her trailing boughs, creating secret worlds beneath her canopy, lost until we heard that bell which brought us back to reality.

I remember feeling, perhaps for the first time, that a tree could be more than part of a landscape. It could be a companion, a shelter, a world.

(Although I have no photograph of that willow, her image and energy remains vivid all these years later)

A few years afterwards, I was given a beautifully illustrated copy of The Wind in the Willows, which I still treasure today. Like so many children, I was drawn into its riverbanks and secret paths, its sense that the natural world was alive with character and meaning. The willow became, in my imagination, a threshold tree: a keeper of stories, a place where the ordinary and the enchanted met.

There were other books that captured this magic of nature too, especially Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree series, where trees held entire worlds within them. Looking back, I realise how deeply these stories shaped my understanding of the living world—not as scenery, but as something animate, mysterious, and full of possibility.

Years later, I find myself returning to willow once again, this time with a knife in my hand and blackened fingertips.

As I began cutting and preparing willow branches for charcoal and ink, I found myself thinking about the long history held within this unassuming tree.

For thousands of years, willow has been one of humanity’s most trusted plant allies. Long before labs and big phara, people around the world turned to its bark to ease pain, soothe fevers, and calm inflammation.

There is a long history in Ancient Egypt, willow was valued for its cooling and restorative qualities. Ancient Greek physicians, including Hippocrates, are said to have recommended chewing willow bark to relieve pain and reduce fever. Across Asia, traditional Chinese medicine practitioners used willow to disperse excess heat and ease headaches and aching joints. Indigenous peoples throughout North America prepared willow bark teas and decoctions to support healing, reduce discomfort, and bring down fevers.

The healing power of willow lies in salicin, a naturally occurring compound that the body converts into salicylic acid. In the nineteenth century, chemists isolated salicin, a discovery that eventually led to the development of aspirin.

Yet to see willow only as the ancestor of a pharmaceutical is to miss something essential. For much of human history, willow was not merely a source of medicine but a companion species growing at the water’s edge, offering shade, shelter, flexible branches for weaving, and remedies for pain.

As I strip the bark from a branch or grind charcoal into powder, I find myself reflecting on this continuity. The same tree that once eased headaches and fevers now leaves its mark across paper. Its gifts move from medicine to art, from healing the body to nourishing the imagination.

This spring, I began making artist’s charcoal and ink from willow branches. There is a quiet alchemy in the process. The same tree that has offered medicine for thousands of years can also become a tool for seeing. Cut, dried, burned, ground, mixed with water and binder the branch transforms into a mark on paper.

Across Europe, willow was understood as both protector and enchantress. Twigs were hung above doorways to ward off harmful spirits. Willow and rowan were planted near thresholds for protection. Yet in other traditions, willow itself was known as a witch’s tree—a symbol of intuition, grief, dreams, and the liminal spaces between worlds.

Perhaps these contradictions are what make willow so compelling. It bends without breaking. It thrives at the edges of water, where land gives way to river. It belongs to thresholds.

Making charcoal from willow has changed the way I think about drawing. Each line carries the memory of a living branch. Each wash of ink holds the trace of bark, leaf, rain, and season. The material itself becomes part of the story.

As I grind charcoal into powder and stir ink into being, I think about the willow at Fairseat and the child who stood beneath its branches. I think about the generations of people who turned to this tree for healing, protection, and inspiration. I think about how certain plants accompany us throughout our lives, waiting patiently for us to return to them.

Perhaps we do not choose the plants/ trees that matter most to us. Perhaps they choose us. Willow, for me, has always been waiting for me to remember.

This little essay is also a field note, a small case study in Art that Breathes and Shrine Thinking. It traces how a single plant can become a lifelong companion, carrying memory, medicine, story, and material knowledge across time. In returning to willow through making, I am reminded that art can emerge from relationship: from paying attention, working with seasonal materials, and allowing the living world to shape both process and meaning. The charcoal and ink I make from willow are more than art materials; they are offerings within an ongoing conversation with a tree that has accompanied me since childhood.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Join me for some Summer Fun! at my studio in Conway for

A Summer Cyanotype Weekend Extravaganza

Summer Light, Blue Alchemy & Botanical Prints

Sat July 11th and Sun July 10th, Conway MA

Creativity Retreat in the Garden: Flower Eco-Printing

Friday Sept 4th

Come experience the alchemy of eco-printing, a captivating process that uses the natural pigments found in plants to create direct-contact botanical prints. In this immersive, hands-on workshop, you’ll learn how to transform fresh flowers and leaves into beautiful works of art on watercolor paper.

____________________________________________________________________________

or or back on Cape Cod at Castle Hill Truro for a 5 Day Class

CREATING A COLLECTION OF ARTIST BOOKS: NATURE AS MUSE

July 20 - 24, Castle Hill, Truro MA

A week-long exploration of eco printmaking, book arts, and the living language of the natural world

This five-day workshop invites participants to create a collection of small artist books inspired by the textures, colors, and rhythms of nature. Each book will serve as a vessel for personal reflection and ecological storytelling, a space where art and the natural world meet on the page.

Share Art That Breathes

The word is flâneuse (flahn-EUHZ), the feminine form of the French flâneur; a stroller, observer, wanderer of city streets. But the flâneuse is more than someone who simply walks. She moves through the city as a kind of cultural camera, absorbing textures, overheard conversations, shifting light, architecture, storefronts, gestures, rhythms, and small human situations!

I realized I have been practicing this form of wandering for as long as I can remember. I grew up in North London, first wandering the streets of Hampstead and Highgate, then drifting through Camden Town, Covent Garden, discovering Neal’s Yard, and the used bookstores of Charing Cross Road. Later came Athens, where I loved getting lost in Plaka’s winding streets. Then Boston. Eventually I settled in rural New England, at this point my wanderings continued through shorter travel to places like La Paz, Bolivia, Chile, Prague, Quito. Each trip shaped the way I learned to observe. The flâneuse wanders not necessarily to arrive somewhere, but to notice.

And the moment I encountered the word, I felt recognized by it!

It is difficult now to imagine that one of my simplest pleasures sitting alone at an outdoor café terrace with a notebook and a coffee was once considered socially transgressive for women. In the early 1900s, the streets belonged to the flâneur: the male wanderer who moved freely through the city, observing modern life from café and boulevards. A woman alone in those same public spaces was often treated with suspicion. If she sat unaccompanied at a café, she could be flagged by police as a “public disturbance” or assumed to be a sex worker. Public leisure, observation, and aimless wandering were privileges largely reserved for men.

A woman was expected to justify her presence. She was, in many ways, treated as a guest in a man’s world. Then came the Années Folles — the “Crazy Years” of the 1920s.The flappers, or les garçonnes, did more than cut their hair and shorten their skirts. They reclaimed public space. They sat at cafés alone. They ordered their own drinks. They paid their own tabs. They wandered cities with a new kind of visibility and autonomy.

Paris in the interwar years became a lab for new ways of being a woman: artist, writer, intellectual, traveler, lover, observer. Women began occupying studios, salons, bookstores, cafés, and streets with a freedom that would have scandalized earlier generations. Figures like Kiki de Montparnasse embodied this transformation: artist, singer, muse, performer, and unapologetic participant in public cultural life. Coco Chanel reshaped not only fashion, but the physical freedom of women’s bodies and movement through the world, freeing women from corsets and designing clothing that allowed them to move, work, smoke, dance, travel, and wander more freely. Claude Cahun who I have previously written about wandered the edges of identity itself, using photography and performance to challenge gender norms decades ahead of their time. And in the bookstores and salons of Paris, women like Gertrude Stein created intellectual gathering places where artists, writers, and wanderers could meet, argue, dream, and reinvent culture together.

The café terrace became more than a place to sit. It became a threshold of independence. And perhaps this is part of why the figure of the flâneuse still resonates today. She is not simply a woman who wanders. She carries the history of women claiming the right to observe, linger, move slowly, occupy space, and participate fully in public life without explanation.

There is something deeply feminist about wandering without justification. I think about the women whose work embodied this spirit long before I knew the term.

For years I thought of my habit of drifting through unfamiliar streets, ducking into bookshops, lingering in cafés, collecting visual fragments, and allowing intuition to guide my movement was simply a personal hobby. But perhaps wandering is less aimless than I thought. Perhaps it is actually a creative methodology.

As an artist, I have come to understand that my work begins long before I enter the studio. It begins while walking. While watching steam rise from a cup of coffee in a crowded café. While noticing weeds growing through cracks in pavement. While overhearing a sentence that feels like poetic. While turning down a side street for no reason except curiosity.

Subscribe now

The flâneuse understands that the art of noticing itself is generative. There is another word I recently encountered that feels connected to this way of moving through the world: dérive, a term developed by the mid-century Situationists, meaning roughly “to drift.”

The dérive was a practice of wandering through urban spaces guided not by efficiency or destination, but by curiosity, intuition, atmosphere, and emotional pull. Participants drifted through cities allowing streets, light, architecture, chance encounters, and hidden pathways to shape their movement.

The point was not to arrive. The point was to experience how a place changes your perception. The Situationists called this psychogeography: the study of how environments affect emotion, behavior, and imagination. I realize now that many of my own walks have been a kind of dérive. Following a side street simply because the light looked beautiful. Entering a bookstore without intention to buy anything. Becoming drawn toward alleyways, staircases, overgrown lots, or neighborhoods I cannot entirely explain.

Some places repel. Others magnetize. Certain streets feel alive with possibility while others seem to flatten the spirit. The dérive asks us to pay attention to these invisible emotional currents. And perhaps this is part of why wandering feels so creatively important. It interrupts the logic of productivity and allows us to become porous to place again.

Among the women who most embody the spirit of the flâneuse is Virginia Woolf.

In her 1930 essay Street Haunting: A London Adventure, Woolf turns a simple errand, buying a pencil, into an exploration of the city’s psychological and imaginative life. The streets of London become more than backdrop; they become portals into other selves, other moods, other ways of inhabiting the world. For Woolf, wandering offered a temporary release from the fixed identity of the self. While walking anonymously through the city, she describes becoming porous, slipping momentarily into the lives of strangers glimpsed through windows, overheard conversations, passing gestures, and illuminated shopfronts. The walk becomes a kind of imaginative drift. (She was a dérive before the word existed)

“The greatest pleasure of town life in winter — rambling the streets of London.” Wolf

What I love most about Woolf’s wandering is that it resists efficiency (today’s productivity culture) entirely. The original reason for leaving home, to buy a pencil, quickly dissolves beneath the pleasures of observation, atmosphere, and speculation. The city itself becomes the destination. She understood something essential: that wandering is not distraction from creative work, but part of the work itself.

Vivian Maier wandered through Chicago and New York with her camera, documenting ordinary moments with astonishing sensitivity: reflections, gestures, workers, children, shadows, fleeting encounters. Her photographs reveal the poetry hidden inside the everyday.

And of course contemporary photographer Sophie Calle turned wandering itself into conceptual art. In projects such as Suite Vénitienne, Calle followed strangers through city streets, shadowing their movements through Venice and documenting the experience through photographs, notes, maps, and fragments of narrative. In another work, she invited people to sleep in her bed while she observed and recorded their presence. Again and again, her art blurred the boundaries between observation, intimacy, surveillance, ritual, and storytelling.

What fascinates me most about Calle is the way she transforms ordinary acts of noticing into charged psychological terrain. The city becomes not merely a backdrop, but a living field of chance encounters, projections, disappearances, and emotional residue. Her wandering is neither passive nor purely observational. It is participatory, Investigative, often unsettling. A kind of emotional dérive?

Calle understood that walking through a city means moving through layers of human longing, secrecy, loneliness, performance, and desire. Her work asks difficult questions: What does it mean to observe another person? When does curiosity become intrusion? Can following become a form of storytelling? Can attention itself become art? To me this is part of why her work remains so compelling. She reveals that wandering is never neutral. To drift through a city attentively is also to enter into relationship with strangers, architecture, memory, absence, and the invisible emotional currents of place.

These women understood that walking can be both artistic practice and philosophical act. And perhaps this is why so many artists, writers, photographers, and thinkers continue to walk cities in search of something they cannot fully name. Not answers exactly, but encounters. Fragments. Openings. Moments of unexpected recognition.

I sometimes think artists need “third places” as much as studios. For me, inspiration rarely arrives at a desk on command. It arrives while moving through a city with no strict agenda except openness. A good café. A long walk. A notebook. Time enough to notice things.Cities become living archives. And wandering becomes a way of reading them.

I love the small rituals of it: searching for the right coffee shop, sitting by a window, watching strangers pass, scribbling observations that may later become artwork, essays, installations, or simply ways of understanding the world more deeply.

The flâneuse collects atmosphere. The flâneuse drifts through atmospheres as much as streets. She practices receptivity. She trusts that what appears incidental may later reveal itself as essential.

But What Happens When the Flâneuse lives Rurally

My love of wandering does not end at architecture and cafés. It extends into goldenrod growing through chain-link fences, milkweed beside parking lots, river paths behind industrial buildings, seed heads in vacant lots, and silent conversations with maples and dandelions.

I love am observing culture and ecology simultaneously. How humans and nature interact, hidden conversations between human and non human beings. And perhaps this is where my relationship to the flâneuse begins to evolve.

The classic figure of the flâneuse is deeply urban. The city is central to the tradition: boulevards, cafés, crowds, shop windows, anonymity, modernity. But many contemporary artists, naturalists, walkers, herbalists, and ecological thinkers have begun stretching the idea beyond the metropolis.

What is the word for a rural flâneuse?

For someone equally nourished by alleyways and meadows, bookstores and hedgerows, café terraces and roadside ditches? I am equally county mouse and city mouse.

My wandering is not confined to city streets. It continues through trails, abandoned lots, forests, small towns, field edges, and forgotten industrial margins where nature quietly re-enters the human world.

Perhaps the closest companion is the saunterer.

Henry David Thoreau, in his essay Walking, described sauntering as a kind of sacred wandering: slow, attentive movement through landscape without strict destination. If the flâneuse wanders the boulevard, perhaps the saunterer wanders riverbanks, abandoned orchards, hedgerows, and roadside edges.

But even that does not feel entirely right. Perhaps a wayfarer? a peripatetic? a hedgerow wanderer? A shrine walker.

None fully capture the particular joy of drifting between the human and more-than-human worlds, collecting fragments of atmosphere, memory, plant life, overheard conversations, and small revelations. Perhaps what I am searching for is a kind of ecological dérive: wandering attentively through the shifting threshold between culture and landscape, following not only streets but weeds, weather, waterways, birdsong, ruins, and desire paths.

Perhaps the point is not finding the perfect word. Perhaps the wandering itself is the practice.

In contemporary culture, wandering can almost feel subversive. We are encouraged to optimize, track, monetize, and justify every movement. Even walking becomes quantified. But the flâneuse resists efficiency. She follows intuition over productivity. She understands that getting lost is sometimes the point. It’s hard to get lost these days with GPS in our back pockets.

And perhaps this is why the idea resonates so deeply with artists, writers, herbalists, photographers, and seekers of all kinds: wandering reawakens permeability. It softens the boundary between self and world. You begin to notice again. And noticing changes everything.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Further reading:

The Flaneur and the Flaneuse: the culture of women who wander cities By Gabby Tuzzeo

Radical Flâneuserie The Paris Review

Virginia Wolf’s “Street Haunting”

Subscribe now

Share Art That Breathes

Last chance to meet me in Provincetown!

June 2–5 | Provincetown Art Association and Museum

What if your time in Provincetown became a book?

In this hands-on workshop, we gather, print, and assemble transforming fleeting moments into deep blue impressions. Working with cyanotype we’ll create images using sunlight, water, found materials, botanicals, and personal imagery.

We’ll then transform these prints into a handmade artist book using a drum-leaf binding, developed by Timothy Ely. This elegant structure opens completely flat, allowing your images to flow seamlessly across spreads creating a visual narrative held in sequence.

Won’t you meet me in Provincetown? more info here

Not shrine as object.

Not shrine as religion.

But shrine as a mode of attention. A way of arranging the world through care rather than classification.

Shrine thinking is the practice of arranging attention.

I think this practice first emerged for me last year when I began working with gridded pieces—small accumulations of thread, pigments, botanical fragments, and found materials. I became interested in what happened when objects were placed in relation rather than simply displayed. Arrangement itself began to feel like a form of meaning-making.

The act of gridding—of compartmentalizing, ordering, and arranging—became a way of processing chaos, both personal and collective. At a time when the world, and my place within it, often felt destabilized and uncertain, this practice evolved into a quieting ritual: a meditation in reordering disarray into temporary structure.

I think of shrine thinking as an alternative to the logic of the archive. Where archives often stabilize, categorize, and preserve; shrines remain relational, unstable, and alive. They gather objects not as specimens, but as participants in a field of reciprocity and presence.

A feather on a windowsill.
A bowl of rainwater.
Bundles of drying herbs.
A stone carried home in a pocket.
Thread tied around a handwritten note.

None of these things are valuable in the traditional sense. Yet through placement, repetition, and attention, they begin to hold meaning. At its core, shrine thinking asks:

What happens when we treat the overlooked as worthy of ceremony?

This practice emerges from years of being drawn to the aesthetics of the apothecary, the cabinet of curiosities, and the archive; the mysterious beauty of collections, fragments, specimens, and carefully arranged objects. As someone coming from herbalism and naturalist traditions, I have long been fascinated by spaces of gathering and observation. Yet over time, I began to recognize how deeply these historical models are entangled with colonialism, extraction, and patriarchal systems of knowledge. Cabinets of curiosity and natural history archives often relied upon the accumulation, categorization, and possession of the world and with that transforming living relationships into objects of study and control.

I find myself increasingly interested in forms of knowledge and relation that precede, resist, or exceed systems of classification and control, ways of understanding that have often been obscured or displaced by dominant structures of knowledge.

What would it mean to gather without possessing?
To arrange without classifying?
To create archives rooted not in authority, but in reciprocity, care, and attention?

Perhaps this is where shrine thinking begins.

Subscribe now

I remain drawn to the cabinet: its intimacy, its density, its quiet invitation to look closely. But I am increasingly interested in what happens when its logic is transformed/ when collecting becomes tending, when classification gives way to relation, when the archive becomes unstable, porous, and alive. My practice is interested in forms of entangled knowledge, ways of understanding that emerge not through separation and classification, but through relationships, reciprocity, and embodied attention.

Perhaps the question is not how to escape these inherited structures entirely, but how to inhabit them differently. I remain drawn to the archive, the cabinet, the botanical collection, and even the grid, not despite their histories, but because they hold the tensions and contradictions of how we have come to know the natural world.

Historically, the grid has often functioned as a structure of control linked to mapping, classification, and modernist systems of order. Yet in my own practice, I find myself inhabiting the grid differently. Rather than using it to stabilize meaning, I use it as a temporary structure for holding fragmentation, uncertainty, and relation. The grid becomes less a system of mastery than a breathing framework: a way of processing chaos through repetition, attention, and ritual arrangement.

The challenge becomes: how do we inherit these histories responsibly?

For me, this means remaining in conversation with them rather than erasing them, acknowledging their entanglements with colonialism, extraction, and systems of control while also transforming their logic through practices of relation, reciprocity, and care.

In this sense, shrine thinking becomes a form of feminist revisioning and ecological reorientation: a way of softening inherited structures from within, allowing them to hold uncertainty, multiplicity, and living connection rather than mastery alone.

Perhaps shrine thinking is not about leaving these structures behind, but learning how to breathe differently within them.

Subscribe now

Summer Class Highlight:

Telling Stories in Blue: Cyanotype Artist Books with Drum-Leaf Binding

June 2–5 | Provincetown Art Association and Museum

What if your time in Provincetown became a book?

In this hands-on workshop, we gather, print, and assemble transforming fleeting moments into deep blue impressions. Working with cyanotype we’ll create images using sunlight, water, found materials, botanicals, and personal imagery.

We’ll then transform these prints into a handmade artist book using a drum-leaf binding, developed by Timothy Ely. This elegant structure opens completely flat, allowing your images to flow seamlessly across spreads creating a visual narrative held in sequence.

Won’t you meet me in Provincetown? more info here

Leave a comment

Share Art That Breathes

There is something that happens when we slow our pace enough for the world to begin speaking back.

A shift occurs.

The nervous system relaxes. The senses widen. What was once background begins to emerge: the flicker of sunlight through the leaves, the smell of damp earth, the small plant leaning toward a path, the sound of my own breath.

In a culture shaped by urgency, walking slowly can feel almost radical. We are conditioned to move efficiently, to optimize, to arrive. But the living world does not reveal itself through speed. Relationship asks something different of us.

What if walking was not about reaching a destination, but about entering into conversation? The Buddhist teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh (Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life (1991)) wrote:

“Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.”

I return to this often as it speaks to a quality of care and reciprocity that feels increasingly necessary in our time, a way of moving through the world rooted not in domination or urgency, but in reverence. Writer Rebecca Solnit, in her beautiful book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, reminds us that:

“Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned.”

Perhaps this is part of what so many of us are longing for: not simply exercise or escape, but reunion. A way back into relationship with our bodies, with place, and with the living world itself.

Many traditions throughout history have understood walking this way. For some, walking has been a spiritual practice. Pilgrims walked sacred routes not simply to arrive at holy places, but to be transformed by the journey itself. Buddhist walking meditation treats each step as an act of awareness and presence.

Subscribe now

For others, walking became an act of resistance and collective change. In 1930, Mahatma Gandhi led the Salt March across India, transforming walking into a form of political and spiritual action. The march unfolded slowly through villages and communities, step by step, embodying simplicity, discipline, and solidarity. Walking itself became the message.

There are also those who devoted their entire lives to walking as spiritual path. Peace Pilgrim, an American peace activist and mystic, walked more than 25,000 miles across the United States carrying only the clothes she wore and a commitment to peace. She described walking as a practice of inner transformation, simplicity, and trust.

Walking has also long been tied to philosophy, creativity, and perception. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle taught while walking. Writers like Henry David Thoreau and Matsuo Bashō wandered as a way of thinking, observing, and encountering the world more deeply.

I also find myself drawn to the ancient practice of walking the labyrinth. Unlike a maze, a labyrinth does not ask us to solve anything. There is no trick, no dead end, no need to perform intelligence or efficiency. Instead, it offers a single winding path inward and outward again — a journey of presence, reflection, and return.

As someone shaped by Greek ancestry and Mediterranean ways of understanding land, ritual, and embodiment, I feel a deep resonance with these ancient pathways. The labyrinth carries echoes of myth, pilgrimage, initiation, and cyclical time. Walking it becomes less about arriving somewhere external and more about entering into dialogue with oneself, the body, and the unseen.

Perhaps this is part of why walking continues to matter so deeply to me. Beneath all the different forms: pilgrimage, protest, meditation, artistic practice, wandering there remains a shared understanding that walking can alter consciousness. That rhythm and repetition can soften the mind enough for something quieter and older to emerge.

Artists, too, have used walking as both medium and methodology. Pilgrims walked sacred routes not simply to arrive at holy places, but to be transformed by the journey itself. Buddhist walking meditation treats each step as an act of awareness. Artists like Hamish Fulton describe walking itself as the artwork. Indigenous traditions around the world have long held walking as a form of relationship, memory, and reciprocity with land.

I keep returning to a quote by the walking artist Hamish Fulton:

“No walk, no work.”

For Fulton, the walk itself is the art. Not the photograph afterward. Not the object. Not the documentation. The lived encounter. The body moving through landscape. The attention given.

This resonates deeply with my own evolving practice.

When I was in my early twenties, I became obsessed with the journals and story of Everett Ruess — the young wanderer, writer, printmaker, and nomad who disappeared in the American Southwest in 1934 at the age of twenty. I carried his words with me for years.

There was something about his devotion to wandering, solitude, beauty, and direct encounter with landscape that deeply shaped me. Long before I had language for practices like ecological art, relational awareness, or attentive presence, I recognized in his writings a longing I also carried: the desire to live closely with the land and to allow movement through place to become a form of inner transformation.

Ruess once wrote:

“I have been thinking, dreaming, wandering outdoors. Here is the core of my life.”

As a young artist, herbalist, and seeker, those words felt like permission.

Looking back now, I can see how many threads of my current work were already forming there , the relationship between walking and perception, wandering and creativity, solitude and belonging, image-making and lived experience.

Over time, I began to understand that walking was nourishing something even deeper. Not only my creative and spiritual life, but my body and nervous system as well. As an herbalist, I’ve come to see walking as one of the oldest, simplest, and most accessible forms of medicine available to us.

Long before walking became branded as fitness or self-improvement, humans walked as part of daily life: through forests, across fields, between villages, alongside seasonal rhythms. Our bodies evolved in relationship to movement through landscape.

Modern research continues to affirm what many traditions have long understood intuitively: walking supports cardiovascular health, circulation, digestion, nervous system regulation, mood, sleep, and cognitive clarity. Even brief periods of walking outdoors have been shown to reduce stress hormones and support emotional well-being. Contemporary practices like Japanese forest bathing (shinrin-yoku) echo older understandings that slow, attentive time in nature can be deeply restorative to both body and mind.

(Great interview w/ Maira Kalman)

But beyond all the measurable benefits, I’ve come to recognize walking as essential to my own mental and creative balance.

As someone with a highly ADHD mind, walking helps me focus in a way few other things can. When thoughts feel scattered or overstimulated, walking creates rhythm and priorities settle. Ideas untangle themselves. The body begins to metabolize excess energy and mental noise. Often, what feels impossible indoors becomes workable once I begin moving.

I suspect this is part of why walking has accompanied so many artists, philosophers, mystics, and wanderers throughout history. Movement seems to organize thought differently than stillness. The mind loosens. Attention widens. Something begins to flow again.

And perhaps this is another quiet form of devotion: trusting that clarity does not always arrive through force, but sometimes simply through putting one foot in front of the other.

Over the years, both my herbal work and my art practice have slowly shifted away from extraction and toward relationship. I am less interested in mastering the natural world than in learning how to encounter it differently. As herbalists, artists, and plant lovers, we are often taught to identify, categorize, harvest, and understand. These things matter. But I also wonder:

What happens before naming? What happens when we simply stay awhile? What becomes possible when attention itself is the practice?

Walking has become one of the ways I return myself to this question. Noticing how pace shapes perception. How certain plants seem to appear repeatedly when I slow down. How the body begins to remember that it belongs to a larger living system.

Sometimes I think of walking as a kind of threshold practice. A way of crossing from the highly managed world of schedules, screens, and productivity into something older, slower, and more reciprocal.

Subscribe now

In this way, walking becomes less about movement and more about listening.

Leave a comment

Share

This is the spirit behind my upcoming class:

Walking as Devotion: A Practice of Attentive Presence

Western Ma Herbal Symposium May 9th Montague MA

In this experiential gathering, we will explore walking not as a way to get somewhere, but as a practice of relationship with the living world. Through slow, intentional movement and guided sensory invitations, we’ll shift from simply identifying plants to encountering them: listening with the body, noticing subtle invitations, and attuning to the quiet forms of communication unfolding around us.

Together we’ll explore how pace shapes perception, how attention ripples through the nervous system, and how simple rituals of presence can deepen connection with place.

This class is open to plant lovers, artists, and the simply curious.

No special knowledge is needed. Only a willingness to slow down enough to notice.

Two more upcoming weekend workshops with space:

Ancestral Folds: Storytelling through Chinese Thread Book

Shepherd and Maudsleigh Studio, Newton

on May 16 and 17th

A book made of folds.
A container for memories

In this workshop, we learn the art of the Zhen Xian Bao, a traditional Chinese thread book once used by women to carry the intimate tools of daily life. These intricate folded books were historically used to store sewing tools and small treasures and we’ll reimagine them as personal keepsakes.

Telling Stories in Blue: Cyanotype Artist Books with Drum-Leaf Binding

June 2–5 | Provincetown Art Association and Museum

What if your time in Provincetown became a book?

In this hands-on workshop, we gather, print, and assemble transforming fleeting moments into deep blue impressions. Working with cyanotype we’ll create images using sunlight, water, found materials, botanicals, and personal imagery.

We’ll then transform these prints into a handmade artist book using a drum-leaf binding, developed by Timothy Ely. This elegant structure opens completely flat, allowing your images to flow seamlessly across spreads creating a visual narrative held in sequence.

Won’t you meet me in Provincetown

“Footnotes for Wanderers”

• Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit

• A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

• A Winter Walk by Henry David Thoreau

• How to Walk by Thich Nhat Hanh

• Joy of Walking edited by Suzy Cripps.

• The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, and Literature of Pedestrianism by Geoff Nicholson

• Walking Art Practice : Reflections on Socially Engaged Paths - Ernesto Pujol

• Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London Lauren Elkin (Author),

• Book of Walks by Deb Todd Wheeler

• The Old Ways – Robert Macfarlane

• Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work In Her Own Words

• Walking as Embodied Worldmaking Bodies, borders and knowledgescapes by Lea Maria Spahn

• A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros

• A couple of extra reads!

  https://www.newyorker.com/recommends/read/wanderlust-by-rebecca-solnit

  https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/06/03/wanderlust-rebecca-solnit-walking/

A recent conversation with this semesters artist mentor of Hilmas Ghost (check out this amazing article on Hyperallergic) led to a new artist book on walking to add to my collection “Wanderlust: Actions, Traces, Journeys 1967--2017 by Rachel Adams

Share Art That Breathes

That’s been happening to me a lot lately.

As I near the end of my MFA journey, I’ve been immersed in looking at art, speaking with artists, listening to talks, giving talks, learning a language I didn’t even know existed. And somehow, through all of it, I’ve been returned to the beginning.

But this time, with a deeper understanding of the why and the how.

In the past few weeks, I’ve been moving through a kind of immersion. I went to the New Museum’s newly expanded opening show (not for me, though the space is impressive), spent a day on a gallery tour through TriBeCa (so many strong shows), and visited the Museum of Modern Art for the Marcel Duchamp retrospective—his Boîte-en-valise pieces were incredibly inspiring

—as well as Frida and Diego: The Last Dream.

I’ve listened to artist talks by Jean Shin and Dannielle Tegeder (of Hilmas Ghost),

(check out ’s substack The Conjurors Studio)

and most recently spent time with the retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. A lot has already been said about that show—you can read about it elsewhere (here and here)

But for me, this was where I encountered (or perhaps re-encountered) the work of Agosto Machado, who sadly passed away last month.

My academic advisor recently tasked me with narrowing down my artistic lineage (a future post on this coming soon), the artists who feel like immediate family to my work. Enter Agosto.

Agosto Machado was a Chinese–Spanish–Filipino American performance artist, activist, and archivist, who was a vital presence in downtown New York’s queer and avant-garde art scenes from the 1960s onward. A participant in the Stonewall riots and a member of the Gay Activists Alliance, his life and work were deeply embedded in the histories he helped shape. A performer, writer, and keeper of memory whose work moved fluidly between life and art. Deeply embedded in queer cultural communities, he gathered the traces of lived experience such as objects, photographs, fragments, and transformed them into intimate installations that felt both like shrines and acts of remembrance.

(Don’t you want him at a family dinner!)

I’ve been thinking about the altar not just as a site of devotion, but as a form of archive.

Not the institutional kind (catalogued, fixed, preserved behind glass)
But something closer to a living record. A place where memory is held through attention, through material, through care.

A quick note on terminology: While the terms are often used interchangeably, an altar and a shrine carry slightly different energies. An altar is a site of action where offerings are made, relationships are tended, and something is actively in process. A shrine, by contrast, is a site of holding where memory, presence, and reverence gather and remain. In practice, most spaces move between the two. My work lives in that threshold: beginning as an altar rooted in exchange and becoming, and over time, quietly shifting into a shrine that holds the traces of what has passed through it.

In the work of Agosto the altar becomes a cultural archive, one that gathers the traces of queer life in downtown New York: photographs, objects, fragments of performance, the residue of presence. His altars hold what might otherwise disappear, ephemeral histories, chosen families, lives lived intensely and often outside official record.

They are acts of refusal.
They say: this mattered. These lives mattered. This will not be forgotten.

Enter another “family member” Amalia Mesa-Bains

Amalia Mesa-Bains is a pioneering Chicana artist, curator, and cultural theorist whose work centers on altar-making as a form of cultural memory and feminist practice. Drawing from the traditions of the ofrenda, she creates immersive installations that weave together domestic space, spirituality, and identity. Her work reclaims and rearticulates histories that have been marginalized or erased, positioning the altar as both a site of remembrance and a space of critical reflection.

Subscribe now

In a different but deeply resonant way, Amalia Mesa-Bains also works with the altar as archive deeply rooted in Chicana feminist practice, domestic space, and ancestral memory. Her installations draw from the visual language of the ofrenda, but expand it into complex environments where identity, spirituality, and cultural history converge.

In her In New World Wunderkammer (2013–2014), Amalia Mesa-Bains reimagines the early cabinets of curiosity—those dense, collected displays through which European collectors once tried to contain and make sense of the world. But instead of reinforcing that impulse to possess, she unravels it.

The installation returns us to the moment of collision in 1492—the convergence of Indigenous, African, and European worlds—and traces how that history lives on in the objects held within museum collections, including those from the Fowler Museum at UCLA. Through a deeply intentional, feminist, and decolonial approach, Mesa-Bains shifts the narrative: she invokes Lucumí spiritual practice, not as reference but as living presence, and creates a space where viewers are not just observers but participants—drawn into processes of reckoning, relation, and, potentially, healing.

Her altars are not only commemorative but they are restorative.
They reclaim what has been fragmented or erased, especially within diasporic and colonial histories. The domestic becomes sacred space. The personal becomes political. The altar becomes a site where memory is both held and re-authored.

Both Machado and Mesa-Bains understand the altar as a structure that can carry what dominant systems cannot (or will not) hold.

And this is where I begin to locate my own work in relation to theirs.

If Machado’s altars function as cultural archives of queer life, and Mesa-Bains’ altars hold ancestral, feminist, and cultural memory, my work proposes the altar as an ecological archive one that does not fix memory in place, but keeps relationships with the more-than-human world in motion through materials that breathe, decay, and transform.

I am not preserving objects.
I am tending relationships.

The materials I work with plants, natural pigments, ephemeral forms refuse permanence. They shift, dry, fade, return to soil. They do not stabilize memory; they enact it. They ask: what does it mean to remember something that is still alive, still changing?

In this way, the altar becomes less a container and more a field.

A place where:

attention becomes a form of care
gathering becomes a form of listening
making becomes a form of reciprocity

If Machado’s work resists cultural erasure, and Mesa-Bains restores ancestral continuity, then my work asks:

What is being lost in our relationship to the living world?
And how might the act of making; slowly, attentively , and in relations with the green world become a way of remembering how to be in relation again?

This is not an archive of the past maybe It is an archive of possibility? one that is always in the process of becoming.

Share

Leave a comment

____________________________________________________________________

A couple of “Art that Breath” classes starting soon with last minute openings:

* ** JUST ONE OPENING LEFT ***

The fully revamped 🌿Botanical Art Apprenticeship 2026🌿- where plants become pigment, paper, and prayer. This program begins on Sat April 25th

A slow, earth-rooted program for those wanting to work with plants on paper or fabric—dyeing, ink and pigment making, plant-based paper making, and exploring alternative photo methods like cyanotype, lumen prints, and anthotypes. A long term journey through botanical craft from plant to page.

And here is a short weekend program;

click here for more info

Also coming up soon:

____________________________________________________________________________

And one for a friend

If you are in easy access of PA I highly recommend this unique offering from my dear friend Jen Frey Author of Communicating with Plants; Heart-Based Practices for Connecting with Plant Spirits

HEARTransformation apprenticeship. Making Plant communication and advanced healing techniques accessible for anyone who wants to work intimately with Nature for healing - for themselves, for their clients, and the collective.

HEARTransformation 2026 is a combination of live online classes and ceremonies as well as three in-person weekends. This format enables you to have deep, profound experiences with Plant Spirits and Shamanic energies directly while strengthening your foundational understanding and expanding your ability to work with healing energy as you go on your own journey of discovery.

____________________________________________________________________________

Subscribe now

For those of us who live close to plants, who listen for their timing, this season begins long before the landscape turns green. It begins in noticing. The first coltsfoot pushing through the thawed edges of the gravel road. The brief, luminous appearance of spring ephemerals (bloodroot is my favorite! also tritium, lady slipper if you are lucky! trout lily all here and gone before the canopy fills in. Then, closer to home, the familiar joy of crocuses and daffodils returning in the garden, small but insistent declarations that the season has shifted.

This is a threshold time.

In the world of herbalism and in practices like Art that Breathes, spring carries a particular kind of excitement. Summer gatherings begin to take shape, conferences, classes, workshops; names and places appearing on calendars. There is the quiet thrill of knowing we will find each other again. That conversations will pick up where they left off. That knowledge will be shared not just in words, but in walking, harvesting, making.

The body feels it too, this turning outward. Time for those spring tonics and bitter greens. More time spent outside. Hands in soil. Eyes adjusting again to the subtle differences in green.

And alongside all of this: planning. Projects begin as small sparks this time of year. Ideas held through winter start to stretch toward form. What wants to be made? What wants to be tended? What is ready to emerge, and what still needs time beneath the surface?

And with this turning, a reminder.

As the first wild foods appear, especially ramps; we are called to move with care. To gather in ways that ensure continuity, not depletion. To leave enough for the generations that follow, human and more-than-human alike. To remember that we are not the only ones in relationship with these plants. You can read more about ethical wildcrafting here.

Spring abundance can give the illusion of endlessness. It is not. Reciprocity asks something of us: restraint, attention, gratitude, and the willingness to leave what we could take.

Spring does not rush, even when it feels urgent. It unfolds in sequence, in relationship, in response.

Coltsfoot. Then ephemerals. Then the garden.

A reminder, perhaps, of how to begin.

And perhaps this too: to remain in relationship with the living world, to notice, to tend, to refuse indifference; is not neutral. It is a quiet refusal of the systems that depend on our disconnection.

We are living within economies that treat land as commodity, plants as product, and attention as something to be captured and sold. In that context, choosing to slow down, to learn the names of plants, to harvest with restraint, to leave enough, is not just personal, it is political.

It interrupts the logic of extraction.

It insists on interdependence over ownership, continuity over profit, care over convenience.

To kneel beside a patch of ramps and decide to take less, or not at all, is a small act, but it pushes against a much larger pattern. It says: not everything is here for me. Not everything must be taken. Not everything can be replaced.

This kind of attention reshapes us. It asks us to be accountable to place, to season, to the more-than-human world not as an idea, but as a lived practice.

This, too, is part of the work.

Underlying all of this is something many of us who work with plants already know, even if we don’t always name it: our thinking is not separate from the living world around us.

What we notice, what we feel, what we come to understand these do not arise in isolation. They are shaped in relationship. With place. With season. With the plants themselves.

To spend time with coltsfoot at the edge of the road, to kneel among spring ephemerals, to taste the first bitterness of the season are not passive acts. They are participatory. They shape perception. They shift awareness.

In this way, connection to the natural world is not just restorative and it is formative. It changes how we think, what we value, and how we move through the world.

Which is precisely why it matters.

There is a way of understanding this spoken about by thinkers like Gregory Bateson and James Gibson that suggests mind and perception do not live solely inside us, but arise through relationship with the world around us. Not as abstraction, but as lived exchange.

Many herbalists have always known this in practice: that what we perceive, and even how we think, is shaped through our encounters with plants, with place, with season.

Because when systems depend on disconnection, on speed, on abstraction, on the idea that we are separate from the sources of life, then choosing relationship becomes more than personal preference. It becomes a quiet, ongoing refusal.

A refusal to be severed from context. A refusal to see the living world as inert. A refusal to forget that we are shaped, constantly, by what we are in relationship with.

And from that remembering, different choices become possible.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

As a special thank you to anyone who upgrades to a paid subscription from this post (and all my already paying patrons will receive a PDF with my 30 days of Nettle program! (a Spring Nettles Challenge) Why Nettles? read all about Nettles (here) You will also receive “the Art and Revolution of self care” which begins tomorrow April 1st!

** IMPORTANT **Please can all paid subscribers new and old send me their email address!

Art That Breathes is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Become a paid subscriber and receive Art and Revolution of Self Care course for free

Self-care is crucial during challenging times because it allows us to effectively manage stress, maintain mental resilience, and better cope with challenging situations. By prioritizing our health, physical, emotional as well as spiritual and creative well-being we are giving ourselves greater capacity to handle adversity and support each other around you. Neglecting self-care can lead to burnout and further exacerbate existing problems. During times like when so many people are feeling so vulnerable this it may seem counterintuitive to focus within on self care but as Audre Lorde so famously said “self-care was a political act of self-preservation” Which she outlined in her 1988 book “A burst of Light”

• Self-care is a political act of self-preservation, not self-indulgence

• Self-care is a defense against a hostile culture

• Self-care is especially important for marginalized groups

• Self-care can help people survive adversity

• Self-care can help people confront systems that cause harm

Transform your daily routine with “The Art and Revolution of Self Care (revised edition) a 30-day journey designed to help you craft a personal self-care toolkit that fits seamlessly into your busy life. Dive into daily prompts, recipes, and inspiration delivered straight to your inbox, inviting you to rest, reset, and grow in a community of like-minded folks.

Subscribe now

Spring/Summer Events :: Herbal Edition::

This is such a unique event:

As I am sure many of you know any class with Guido Mase is enlightening - he is such a generous teacher! Wise and entertaining. He will address the question, why we need to connect with nature at this moment in time?

Guest teachers include Kate Gilday, Krista Nelson, Naila Francis and myself

Sign up here Botanicwise

And here is a link to a free webinar with Guido to get you excited about the upcoming course. I personally cannot wait to attend all the sessions

Other fun events:

🌿 Western MA Herbal Symposium May 9th

🌿Wild Indigo Herb Fest in Kentucky in June

🌿Misty Meadows Women’s Herbal Conference in VT in August

🌿 BotanicWise Herbal Gathering Sept 18-20 Kempton PA

And if this topic is your jam let me also recommend Pam Montgomerys latest offering. Pam is the author of some of my favorite books about plant and beyond human connection. I’ve known Pam a long time and her work never fails to inspire me.

You will find a link to her books here

Gateway Herbs Are Guiding Us in Our Next Evolution
Free webinar with Pam Montgomery
Saturday, April 11th, 2026 @ 9:00am PT/ 12:00pm ET

Gateway herbs Link for more info

Four of these Gateway Herbs are:

• Hawthorn: Opens the heart to both joy and grief

• Angelica: Provides divine guidance and celestial light

• Motherwort: Offers courage and protection through change

• Lavender: Brings peace and nervous system restoration

In an upcoming free webinar, Pam will share how these plants are actively helping us move into “the New Earth story of Interbeing,” where we remember ourselves as kin within the great web of life.

Gateway herbs Link for more info

Subscribe now

Share Art That Breathes

Share

One phrase appears in art critiques with almost ritual certainty: go bigger. Bigger canvas. Bigger gesture. Bigger presence. Monumentality is often taken as a signal of seriousness. If the work is small, it must be tentative and perhaps not yet fully realized.

But what if going bigger is exactly the wrong advice?

Art culture often equates scale with significance: large canvases, sweeping gestures, monumental installations. Yet the living world; the very system that sustains us suggests a very different philosophy.

A seed contains an entire forest.

A hummingbird, barely heavier than a coin, crosses continents on migration routes longer than many human journeys. Its wings beat so quickly they blur into invisibility, yet in that invisible motion entire ecologies depend. Hummingbirds pollinate hundreds of plant species, stitching forests together through the quiet labor of nectar and flight.

Smallness, in other words, is not weakness. It is density.

The more time I spend working with plants; printing with leaves, making pigment from petals, making paper from seaweed, listening to the slow intelligence of the herbs the more I recognize that ecological systems operate through intricacy rather than scale. The most powerful forces are often the least visible: fungal threads beneath the soil, pollen drifting on the wind, seeds waiting patiently for the right conditions to open.

In the cloud forests of the Andes, where I recently spent time learning from local healers, hummingbirds are not simply admired as beautiful creatures. They are understood as medicine. Their hovering presence is associated with healing, protection, and the subtle exchange between plants and the beings who depend on them. Watching them move through orchids and bromeliads, I was struck by how precisely they navigate the world, each movement measured, exact, necessary.

In the Andean world, hummingbirds are far more than beautiful creatures moving through the forest. They are understood as messengers between realms, capable of traveling between the human world and the spiritual domain, carrying prayers and whispers to ancestors and deities. Their astonishing vitality, wings beating faster than the eye can follow made them symbols of endurance and determination despite their tiny size. At night, when a hummingbird enters a state of deep dormancy, its body becoming almost still and lifeless, Andean peoples saw another mystery: the bird’s apparent return from stillness each morning linked it to cycles of resurrection, renewal, and the persistence of life itself. Its iridescent feathers, flashing with shifting light, were often associated with the brilliance of the sun and the divine energy of Inti.

Moving constantly among flowers, the hummingbird also carries meanings of love, fertility, and joy making them a living bridge between blossoms, sunlight, and the invisible forces that sustain the world.

Their power lies in precision.

The same might be said of seeds. A seed is a masterpiece of compression: root, stem, leaf, and future flower folded into a structure so small it can slip unnoticed through the fingers. Within that small body lives both patience and explosive potential. Given water, soil, and light, it becomes a field.

Subscribe now

Another teacher who profoundly shaped my understanding of smallness was Vandana Shiva, whom I had the good fortune to study with in 2003 on her farm near Dehradun in India. From her I learned to see seeds not simply as agricultural beginnings but as sacred vessels of memory and transformation. A seed carries within it an entire lineage, the intelligence of past seasons, soils, and human care. It is a tiny archive of life’s resilience, holding the past while quietly preparing a more fertile future.

Seeds are time travelers. They remember landscapes that once were and carry the potential to restore them again. Humans have lived in intimate relationship with seeds for millennia; our ability to save them, steward them, and sow them carefully has allowed both our cultures and ecosystems to thrive.

Shiva often spoke of seeds with a reverence usually reserved for spiritual objects. Seeds, she taught, are talismans of abundance and renewal. They remind us that life’s fundamental impulse is generosity, not scarcity. In their small bodies they carry stories of adaptation, celebration, loss, and survival, tiny time capsules of the earth’s ongoing creativity. Seed stewardship, she suggested, is a form of midwifery: an act of care that helps bring the next generation into being.

Just as hummingbirds move between flowers carrying life from blossom to blossom, seeds move through time carrying the possibility of future forests, gardens, and cultures. Both reveal the same quiet truth: the smallest things often hold the greatest power.

The more I think about seeds and hummingbirds, the more I realize that smallness itself carries a quiet form of resistance. Western art traditions have long favored the monumental, big gestures, big canvases, big institutions, big visibility. Scale becomes a proxy for seriousness. Yet many ecological and Indigenous cosmologies suggest something quite different: power is often concentrated in the smallest forms.

The seed.
The feather.
The medicinal leaf.
The hummingbird’s heart beating more than a thousand times a minute.

To work small, in this context, becomes more than an aesthetic choice. It is a refusal of the extractive logic that equates value with scale.

Delicacy, too, becomes a teacher. Fragile forms reveal how deeply life depends on relationship. A hummingbird cannot exist without the particular flowers whose nectar it evolved to drink. A medicinal leaf begins to wilt within moments of being harvested. Lichens flourish only where the air is clean enough to sustain them. Materials such as thin fibers, translucent papers, and ephemeral botanicals carry this same lesson into the studio. They remind us that life survives not through domination but through reciprocity. In this way, delicacy becomes a quiet expression of ecological interdependence, an idea deeply rooted in relational herbalism and the Wise Woman traditions that have shaped my own practice.

Precision is another aspect of this smallness. Working with fragile materials slows the body down. It asks for breath, attention, and presence. Placing a single petal on sensitized paper, stitching a small reliquary, or printing the faint impression of a leaf’s veins becomes an act of devotion rather than production. In a culture defined by speed and excess, this kind of attention can feel quietly radical. Precision becomes a form of care, an insistence that the smallest gestures deserve patience and respect.

Small works also change the relationship between viewer and object. When an artwork is intimate in scale, it asks us to come closer. We lean in. We lower our voices. Often we bow our heads slightly without even realizing it. The body adjusts itself to meet the work. This shift is subtle but profound: instead of dominating the space, the artwork invites reverence. In the cloud forest shrines dedicated to the Madonna of the Hummingbird, devotion is never monumental. It is intimate, quiet, almost hidden among moss and flowers yet it carries immense spiritual power.

Perhaps this is because the miniature itself is a kind of portal. Small objects often contain entire worlds: reliquaries, nests, folded books, seed packets, incantations written in tiny script. Like the hummingbird itself, they demonstrate how a small form can hold vast movement and meaning. A hummingbird’s body may be small, yet its migrations span continents. Its delicate nest contains intricate architectures of moss, lichen, and spider silk. Each tiny flight between blossoms supports entire systems of pollination. In this sense, the miniature operates almost like a fractal: the part reflecting the whole.

Seen through this lens, smallness, delicacy, and precision begin to look less like limitations and more like a radical ecological aesthetic—one that mirrors the ways life actually organizes itself in the natural world.

What if our aesthetics learned from this?

What if smallness were not a limitation but a deliberate stance; a way of working that honors the scale at which ecological relationships actually occur?

In my studio practice, this has meant moving toward intimate forms: small shrines, folded books, reliquaries that hold botanical fragments, papers printed with a single leaf. These works require the viewer to come close to lean in, to slow down, to adjust their breathing and attention.

The work does not dominate the room. Instead, it invites a different gesture, one closer to reverence than spectacle.

In an era defined by extraction and excess, these qualities feel quietly radical.

The monumental gestures of industrial culture, clear-cut forests, open-pit mines, sprawling infrastructure—operate through expansion and domination. They treat land as something to scale up, enlarge, and maximize. Ecological systems work differently. They thrive through networks, subtleties, and careful balances.

Smallness, delicacy, and precision mirror this logic. They slow the maker down. They encourage materials to be used sparingly. They ask the viewer to approach gently rather than consume quickly. They remind us that attention itself is a form of care.

Perhaps the hummingbird offers the most eloquent metaphor. It moves so fast that stillness appears impossible, yet when it hovers beside a flower the entire world seems to pause around it. Wings beating hundreds of times per second, it remains suspended in a moment of perfect balance—motion and stillness at once.

In that fragile equilibrium we glimpse a different model of power: not the power of scale, but the power of attunement.

Seeds know it.
Hummingbirds embody it.

And perhaps our art practices can learn to trust it as well.

Share

Leave a comment

So many classes coming up:

Art and Revolution of Self Care 2026

My free course to all paid members will take place in April this year, and as an additional perk all paid members will receive a small set of ecological scores in the mail that relate to self care! Paid members you don’t have to do anything to sign up.

Art That Breathes is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Become a paid subscriber and receive Art and Revolution of Self Care course for free

Spring 2026 Workshop Dates

The fully revamped 🌿Botanical Art Apprenticeship 2026🌿- where plants become pigment, paper, and prayer. This program begins on Sat April 25th

A slow, earth-rooted program for those wanting to work with plants on paper or fabric—dyeing, ink and pigment making, plant-based paper making, and exploring alternative photo methods like cyanotype, lumen prints, and anthotypes. A six-month journey through botanical craft from plant to page.

In person day long workshops:

🎨Creative Explorations in Cyanotype Sat March 14th 10-4pm Conway MA

🎨End Paper Extravaganza (Paste paper /Suminagashi marbling) Sat April 4th 10-4pm Conway MA

🎨The annual Eco Printing with Flowers this class will sell out ASAP so dont snooze on it! Friday, August 21, 2026, 10:30 AM 4:00 PM ****(just 1 more spot in this class!!)*****

* Early registration for all classes is super helpful!

Out and about!

So far i can announce that I will be teaching at at (several more herbal announcements coming soon!!)

🌿 Western MA Herbal Symposium May 9th

🌿Wild Indigo Herb Fest in Kentucky in June

🌿Misty Meadows Women’s Herbal Conference in VT in August

🌿 BotanicWise Herbal Gathering Sept 18-20 Kempton PA

Art that Breathes and Book Making Classes

🎨MARLBORO STUDIO SCHOOL The Living Page: Artist Books Inspired by Art that Breathes (May 2 & 3)

🎨Shepherd and Maudsleigh Printmaking Studio, Newton MA

• May 16-17 “Ancestral Folds: Storytelling Through creating a Chinese Thread Book”

• August 8-9 The Handmade Herbarium

🎨Provincetown Art Museum June 2-5th Telling Stories in Blue: Cyanotype Artist Books with Drum-Leaf Binding

🎨Truro Center for Arts July 20 - 24th Creating a Collection of Artist Books: Nature as Muse

Share Art That Breathes

Share

When I first encountered Grapefruit by Yoko Ono, I felt as though I was holding something completely magical and mysterious in my hands. I didn’t quite know what to make of it, but I sensed it was something groundbreaking.

(Of course, I was not holding a rare first edition in my hands, just a mass-produced edition.)

I read

“Listen to a heartbeat.”

“Watch the sky.”

These brief instructions were not artworks in the traditional sense. They felt more like invitations, small openings in perception that asked the reader to participate in the making of the work.

In the early 1960s a loose international network of artists began experimenting with a different idea of what art could be. Known as Fluxus, the movement challenged the notion that art had to exist as a permanent object. Instead, artists created events, gestures, and simple actions that unfolded in everyday life.

Fluxus artists were interested in dissolving the boundaries between art and ordinary experience. They emphasized process and participation over finished objects, often working with humor, chance, and small everyday actions.

Many Fluxus works took the form of event scores—short written instructions for actions or moments of attention. A score might invite someone to listen to a sound, watch the sky, or perform a simple gesture. The artwork was not the instruction itself, but the awareness it opened in the person who encountered it.

Returning to Fluxus scores again recently, I began to wonder what a similar gesture might look like if it emerged not from a performance space or the city, but from the field, from the slow work of gathering plants, grinding pigment, and listening to the land.

Herbalism is full of small instructions learned through experience: when to gather, how to dry, how to wait. These are not recipes so much as ways of paying attention. The field scores I have begun writing grow from these moments, short lines that hold the encounter between a person, a plant, and a place.

My work relational herbalism grows from a long relationship with plants.

For more than two decades I have studied and practiced herbalism, learning to gather, dry, grind, and transform plants into medicine. In the studio these same plants become pigment, stain, and paper impressions.

The artwork is rarely the beginning of this the process. It is the residue of walking, gathering, waiting, pressing, grinding. It is what remains from the experience. Recently I began to wonder whether these gestures themselves might take another form, not as documentation, but as small poetic instructions.

I have begun calling them herbal field scores.

Fluxus artists used the word score the way musicians do: a set of instructions that allows a work to unfold in time. In Grapefruit, Yoko Ono wrote short texts describing simple actions, watching clouds, listening to a sound, imagining a gesture.

The score did not explain the artwork. The score was the artwork. What I am exploring now is a similar structure rooted in plant relationships. A field score does not document the making of an artwork. It records a moment of attention between the human body and the living world.

here are some examples:

Gather only what has already bent toward the earth.

Let the pigment settle overnight.
Do not hurry the color.

Return to the place where you gathered.
Leave something small behind.

Hold the root in your palm.
Thank the darkness it came from.

After rain
touch the soil
until your fingers remember its color.

Working with plants also means learning what not to reveal. Many traditions of plant medicine, particularly those rooted in Indigenous or ancestral cultures, carry knowledge that should not be translated casually into contemporary art.

The field score, for me, offers a way to share the spirit of the practice without exposing its deeper rituals. It holds the gesture of reciprocity rather than the method.

When I reread Grapefruit now, I see it less as a conceptual artwork and more as a quiet training of attention, a reminder that art can begin with something as small as a gesture.

In my own practice, those gestures often begin with plants.

Walking a hillside.
Noticing what has fallen.
Grinding a color slowly in a stone bowl.

The artwork that eventually appears on paper is only one moment in a much longer process. The rest lives in the field. Perhaps that is what a score really is:
a way of remembering how to listen.

Within Art that Breathes, the artwork is only one moment in a much longer relationship with plants and place. Herbal field scores have become a way to acknowledge that wider field of practice, the walking, gathering, drying, grinding, and waiting that happens before an image appears. They do not reveal the deeper rituals of the work, but they point gently toward them, holding the spirit of reciprocity that guides the practice.

Subscribe now

In 1965 Yoko Ono placed a small classified advertisement in The Village Voice announcing a “One Woman Show” at the Museum of Modern Art. The museum had not organized such an exhibition. Curious visitors who arrived discovered that the work existed only as a gesture—an invitation to look, imagine, and participate.

Like many of Ono’s scores, the piece shifted the role of the audience. The artwork was not something to stand in front of, but something to enter into through attention.

I particularly love this story because it shows her radical rethinking of what an exhibition could be. The spirit of the piece was similar to her instruction works: the artwork happened through the viewer’s participation, imagination, and willingness to follow the invitation.

Fluxus artists didn’t only write scores, they sometimes gathered them into small portable boxes known as Fluxkits. Organized in the 1960s by George Maciunas (the person who coined the term Fluxus and wrote the Fluxus manifesto), these kits looked a bit like toolboxes or specimen cases. Inside were compartments filled with tiny objects, printed instructions, and event scores by different artists.

Opening the box was like opening a cabinet of possibilities: each small piece invited a gesture, an action, or a shift in perception. Some Fluxus artists even played with the idea of a “medicine kit,” suggesting that art might function as a remedy for dull habits of seeing.

I find myself thinking about these boxes as I write herbal field scores. In a way, Art that Breathes already contains its own kind of field kit, plants gathered on a hillside, pigments ground from roots and bark, fragments of dyed paper, and small instructions for attention. The artwork is not confined to the finished image; it lives in the quiet practices that make the image possible.

I suspect these small field kits may begin to appear in the work as well.

Interestingly, Grapefruit itself almost functions like a Fluxkit in book form. The book contains hundreds of instruction pieces that the reader can activate anywhere. In that sense, Ono created something even more radical: a kit made entirely of ideas.

Share

Leave a comment

_________________________________________________________________________

Art and Revolution of Self Care 2026

My free course to all paid members will take place in April this year, and as an additional perk all paid members will receive a small set of ecological scores in the mail that relate to self care! Paid members you don’t have to do anything to sign up.

Spring 2026 Workshop Dates

The fully revamped 🌿Botanical Art Apprenticeship 2026🌿- where plants become pigment, paper, and prayer. This program begins on Sat April 25th

A slow, earth-rooted program for those wanting to work with plants on paper or fabric—dyeing, ink and pigment making, plant-based paper making, and exploring alternative photo methods like cyanotype, lumen prints, and anthotypes. A six-month journey through botanical craft from plant to page.

In person day long workshops:

🎨Creative Explorations in Cyanotype Sat March 14th 10-4pm Conway MA

🎨End Paper Extravaganza (Paste paper /Suminagashi marbling) Sat April 4th 10-4pm Conway MA

🎨The annual Eco Printing with Flowers this class will sell out ASAP so dont snooze on it! Friday, August 21, 2026, 10:30 AM 4:00 PM ****(just 1 more spot in this class!!)*****

* Early registration for all classes is super helpful!

Out and about!

So far i can announce that I will be teaching at at (several more herbal announcements coming soon!!)

🌿Wild Indigo Herb Fest in Kentucky in June

🌿Misty Meadows Women’s Herbal Conference in VT in August

Art that Breathes and Book Making Classes

🎨MARLBORO STUDIO SCHOOL The Living Page: Artist Books Inspired by Art that Breathes (May 2 & 3)

🎨Shepherd and Maudsleigh Printmaking Studio, Newton MA

• May 16-17 “Ancestral Folds: Storytelling Through creating a Chinese Thread Book”

• August 8-9 The Handmade Herbarium

🎨Provincetown Art Museum June 2-5th Telling Stories in Blue: Cyanotype Artist Books with Drum-Leaf Binding

🎨Truro Center for Arts July 20 - 24th Creating a Collection of Artist Books: Nature as Muse

Share Art That Breathes

Lichen Logic

There is a kind of intelligence that does not announce itself. It does not rise above the landscape. It does not demand fertile ground. It doesn’t hurry. It spreads quietly across time and stone.

Lichens have been living this way for hundreds of millions of years, composing themselves on bare rock, on wind-worn fence posts, on the bark of old trees. They are often mistaken for moss, for stains, for accidents. But they are neither plant nor blemish. They are a collaboration.

A lichen is a fungus in intimate relationship with a photosynthesizing partner either an alga or cyanobacterium , often accompanied by bacteria and other microorganisms. The fungus offers structure, shelter, protection from desiccation. The alga offers sugars born of light. Together they form something that behaves like a single organism. But it is not singular. It’s a composite being.

To kneel before lichen is to encounter a body made of negotiations.

This is what I mean by lichen logic.

We are trained, culturally, economically, even artistically, to think in terms of individuality. Organisms are separate. Authorship is singular. Identity is owned. Success is self-made. Even ourlanguage reinforces it: one body, one maker, and even (many believe) one origin story

Lichen quietly dismantles that myth not as a metaphor for collaboration. It is collaboration embodied.

The fungus cannot photosynthesize. The alga cannot withstand prolonged exposure alone. Together, they inhabit what neither could survive independently They create soil from stone. They prepare the way for mosses and grasses and forests yet to come. They are pioneer species, not through conquest, but through entanglement.

In our dominant cultural narratives, survival is framed as competition. Growth is framed as expansion. Strength is framed as independence. Lichen offers another model entirely: survival through interdependence. Growth through mutual adjustment. Strength through intimacy.

This is not simply an over romantic harmony. The fungal partner regulates the alga. The alga resists in subtle ways. The relationship is dynamic, negotiated, sometimes tense. And yet, out of that tension, a stable form emerges.

Not purity; but persistence.

Lichen destabilizes the idea of the bounded individual. Is it one organism or many? Biologically, it is both. Evolutionarily, it is layered. Functionally, it is inseparable.

In critical theory, there is a long-standing challenge to the idea of the sovereign subject, the notion that we are autonomous, self-originating beings operating in isolation. Lichen makes that critique ecological rather than abstract. It shows us, materially, that what appears singular is often composite. That what looks like one life may be many lives woven together.

It suggests that individuality may be less a fixed condition and more a temporary stabilization within a web of relationships.

And this matters. Because the myth of autonomy is not just philosophical it its economic. It underwrites extractive systems while justifying domination. It frames land as resource and creativity as property. If we believe ourselves to be separate, we are more likely to treat everything else as object becoming less relational.

Lichen refuses that separation.

It grows where others cannot, on gravestones, abandoned walls, exposed stone. It does not compete for height or visibility. It definitely doesn’t rush. In a culture obsessed with scale and spectacle, lichen practices smallness In a system that prizes individual achievement, lichen models distributed survival.

Its refusal is quiet but radical.

It refuses purity, biologically and conceptually.
It refuses hierarchy as a prerequisite for form.
It refuses the fantasy of the self-made organism. Instead, it offers composite life as norm rather than exception.

When I think about my own practice, Art that Breathes, I recognize this logic immediately. That work has always been rooted in the understanding that relationship precedes representation. That I am not depicting “nature” from a distance but entering into material conversation with plant, pigment, moisture, fiber, time.

Paper is plant body transformed. Pigment carries mineral and vegetal histories. Ink is binder, plant or soot, oil, weather. My hands are shaped by ancestry, geography, memory. A print is never singular. It is a negotiated form materials, microbes, atmosphere, pressure , All agreeing, however temporarily, to hold together.

Lichen makes this visible.

It reminds me that authorship is rarely solitary. That creative work is symbiotic. That endurance comes not from control but from collaboration. That form arises through mutual constraint and generosity.

There is also something deeply humble/ humbling about lichen.

They are among the first to arrive after ecological disturbance , glacial retreat, volcanic eruption, exposed rock. They begin the long process of soil formation. Without them, forests would not follow. They are infrastructure disguised as ornament. What we dismiss as marginal may in fact be foundational.

To practice lichen logic is to lower oneself , physically and ideologically. To question the scale at which we measure value. To reconsider what counts as strength. To notice that the smallest presences may be quietly building the conditions for future life. It is to loosen our attachment to purity , in ecology, in identity, in art-making.

There is something devotional in this attention. Not sentimental reverence, but disciplined noticing. A willingness to let the world rearrange our assumptions. Lichen does not perform for us. It does not require belief. But if we stay with it long enough, it may unsettle the stories we have inherited about independence and success.

It may remind us that we have never been singular.That nothing we make is untouched by others. That survival has always been collaborative.

Below, I’m sharing a poem from my Interbeing project, written in conversation with lichen — followed by a small field practice for those who would like to explore lichen logic in their own bodies and places.

I hope it slows you, and complicates you.May it steady you in the knowledge that even on stone, life is always becoming something shared.

Subscribe now

From Interbeing: Four Studies in Connection

a boxed set of artist books by myself

On Interbeing

Interbeing is a term popularized by Zen master and poet Thich Nhat Hanh, but its roots echo across Indigenous cosmologies, ecological science, and ancestral ways of knowing. It names a truth that is older than language:

nothing exists alone.

To inter-be is to recognize that every form of life is made of, shaped by, and continually

nourished through its relationship with everything else.

A seed inter-is with soil, sunlight, mycelium, pollinators, rainfall, ancestral hands.

Mycelium inter-is with trees, stone, memory, decomposition, nourishment.

Lichen inter-is with algae, fungi, air, rock, chaos, time.

Seaweed inter-is with tides, moon cycles, salt, currents, carbon, breath.

Interbeing rejects the illusion of separateness.

It reminds us that identity is not individual — it is relational.

It is not static — it is emergent.

It is not solitary — it is collective.

In ecological terms, interbeing affirms that life thrives through networks, exchanges,

mutualisms, and shared vulnerability.

In spiritual terms, it whispers that we live inside one breathing body.

In cultural terms, it is a practice of remembering — a return to the old teachings of reciprocity, kinship, and belonging.

Interbeing is an ethics, a cosmology, a way of moving through the world.

It invites us to ask:

What becomes possible when nothing is separate?

Share

LICHEN / THE ART OF BEING MANY

Born of many, living as one,

She dissolves the myth of separation.

She is a union of worlds;

algae, fungi, bacteria,

three kingdoms living as one.

Lichen thrives where others cannot

in the cracks, the ruins, the hard places;

stone, bone, bark, ruins

turning desolation into possibility.

Teaching resilience without conquest,

belonging without possession.

She whispers:

Survival is shared.

Resilience is relational.

Thriving is a collective act.

She reminds us

that survival is collaborative,

that belonging can take new shapes,

that interdependence

is its own quiet strength.

A symbiosis of patience.

A hymn to adaptability.

A small, steadfast reminder

that we thrive

By holding each other lightly

and growing

A Lichen Practice

(for slow attention and composite being)

Go to Where Stone Meets Air

Find lichen where it actually lives:

• on a rock

• on old wood

• on a fencepost

• on the quiet side of a tree

Let this be small. No pilgrimage required.
This is about proximity, not spectacle.

Practice Low Posture

Physically lower yourself.

Crouch. Sit. Kneel.
Let your body change scale.

Lichens are teachers of humility because they require you to shrink your narrative. They are not dramatic. They are persistent.

Stay for at least five minutes.

Notice:

• Texture (crust, leaf, branching thread)

• Color (sage, ash, sulfur, rust)

• Edges (where one body meets another)

Remember It Is More Than One

Remember

“They are not one.”

Let that echo back toward yourself.

A lichen is fungus and alga and often bacteria —
distinct lineages living as a shared body.

Where in your life are you composite?
Where do you depend on unseen partners?
What parts of you are held together by collaboration?

Refusal Practice

Lichens refuse:

• fertile soil

• speed

• spectacle

• singularity

Ask:
What might I refuse today?
What purity myth am I ready to lay down?
Where can collaboration replace

Close with Gratitude

Before you leave, thank the place.

Lichens build soil.
They make life possible for others.

They are infrastructure disguised as ornament.

Subscribe now

All of the photographs in this post were taken here in Ecuador, around the Quito area, where I am presently spending time.

Yesterday I learned something that feels perfectly lichen-adjacent: hummingbirds ; creatures of astonishing intelligence and memory , often gather lichen to wrap around their nests, camouflaging them against bark and branch.

Even here, lichen is not solitary.

It becomes shelter.
It becomes protection.
It becomes part of another species’ architecture.

Lichen logic, again — composite life holding composite life.

Today, I am on a mission to find one….

Leave a comment

Share Art That Breathes

About ten years ago, when I let go of New Year’s resolutions, this practice evolved. I began pairing my plant ally with a single word for the year—not as a goal to strive toward, but as a quiet compass, gently guiding my actions, attention, and creative practice as the seasons unfold

.

This year,
I will meet possibility
without apology.

I am practicing belief
the way one practices attention;
daily, imperfectly, and with care.
Like tending goldenrod,
rising where it will,
bright without permission.

I believe in process.

I believe I am ready

for what is meeting me.

I believe that my work belongs

where it longs to be seen,

the way fields turn gold

because it is their time.

Believe is my word for staying.
Staying with the work.
Staying with the yes that arrives quietly,

and must stand upright,

even where the groundvis rough

and like mugwort at the edge of the path,
teaching me to trust what I sense
before I know where it leads.

Staying long enough to be chosen
by what I have already
devoted my life to.

This year I choose believe

This year goldenrod choses me

(you can read more about Goldenrod here)

I have a ebook for sale on “The Art of Connecting with your plant ally” on my website a visual guide (in PDF form) covering the process of connecting and communicating with your Plant/Herb/Green Ally. Walking you through Sensory Immersions, Plant Spirits/Devas introductions, Practical exercises, Protocols, Worksheets, examples, and personal anecdotes'

I’ve come to understand these small rituals; choosing a word, walking with a plant ally, as practices of relationship. They don’t promise transformation; they invite participation. They give shape to attention, offering something to return to on ordinary days.

A word held gently can become a touchstone. A plant noticed again and again can sharpen perception, anchor intention, and remind us that growth is seasonal, uneven, and often goes unnoticed if not paying attention. Like goldenrod standing tall along roadsides, radiant and uninvited, these gestures teach us to claim our own space, to rise toward light even when the field is not yet ours.Though these gestures ask very little of us, yet over time they shift how we move through the world, slowing us down, opening our senses, making room for meaning.

Subscribe now

This is the kind of magic I trust: not spectacle, but presence. Small, repeatable acts that bring a little more aliveness into daily life, and help us remember that we are already in conversation with the living world.

I want to know. Do you keep New Years Resolutions? How to you stay accountable? Do you pick a work to guide your year? A plant ally perhaps? What little rituals guide your year and prevent the stagnation from forming.

Leave a comment

g

Share Art That Breathes

Share

I’ve always loved the days between Christmas and New Year’s.

The quiet, liminal stretch when the calendar loosens its grip and time feels softer around the edges. I try to clear my schedule and let the days blur, dreamy hours lost in thought, wandering between what has been and what might still be possible. It’s a time for gentle reckoning: reflecting on what went well, what needs tending, and what I want to carry forward. Each year in these quiet days, I pause to do two things:
take stock of what has been, and set the table for what’s to come.

This isn’t a productivity exercise or a resolution list. It’s a ritual of attention, one that asks what sustained me, what asked for care, and what wants to grow slowly in the year ahead this practice is part of my annual rhythm.

This year, that pause feels especially needed. It’s been a particularly full and immersive year, one shaped by deep focus and sustained attention, as I’ve been engrossed in all things MFA: studio work, research, writing, and learning how to live inside questions rather than rush toward answers. I’m now halfway through the program, standing on a threshold again, about to head to Mass MoCA with new work and, if past residencies are any guide, return home with hundreds of ideas scribbled on Post-its, each one a small spark.

Before turning toward what’s next, I want to pause and mark what this year held.

What the year held

Learning as a Practice

My biggest highlight this year was time spent learning, slowly, rigorously, and sometimes full of frustration but often joyfully. Learning how to stay with a process a little longer than comfortable. Learning how to trust not-knowing. Learning how research, making, and reflection can braid together into something alive.

Exhibitions

I began 2025 with a small but meaningful show at the UMass Seed Library, a space that beautifully mirrors my ongoing interests in plants, care, and knowledge held in commons.

I ended the year with a show at Wicked Good Café at Elmer’s, a place close to my heart in proximity and memories, bringing the work into an everyday, relational space—where art meets coffee, conversation, and daily ritual.

Artist talks & sharing the work

I had the honor of presenting my artist talk several times this year, each iteration deepening the work through dialogue and listening:

• Earth Day, where ecology, art, and care felt especially intertwined. Thanks to the I3C artists out of Boston for hosting me

• Books in the Woods, a setting that perfectly echoed my love of slow, tactile knowledge

• The North Suburban Needle Arts Guild in Chicago, where generous questions and cross-disciplinary exchange opened new ways of thinking about material, labor, and tradition

Each talk reminded me that the work doesn’t end in the studio, it completes itself in relationship.

Looking, wandering, being in conversation

Another quiet highlight of the year was the sheer volume of art seen—galleries, museums, small project spaces, and unexpected encounters with work that shifted how I think and feel. So much of my learning this year happened through looking: standing in front of work, noticing scale, material decisions, restraint, excess. I’ve gathered some of these moments together [here and here[ as a visual breadcrumb trail of what moved me.

Just as important was time spent with people, old friends who know the long arc of my work, and new friends met through classrooms, studios, and shared meals (See here). These conversations, often informal and unplanned, reminded me that art is sustained not just by ideas and labor, but by relationship.

This year also marked the beginning of a small but meaningful tradition: trips to New York City museums with my city-based kiddo. Not a museum lover (at least not yet) but slowly, something is shifting. We wander at our own pace, linger briefly, get silly and leave early if needed.

It feels more like planting seeds, trusting that attention, given gently, eventually takes root. So far her favorite, I believe was the Ruth Asawa Retrospective at Moma.

Feeding, gathering, tending

Another meaningful highlight this year was The Surreal Times Dinner Project. Over the course of the year, I hosted 41 dinners and 4 potlucks, each one an invitation to slow down, gather, and share nourishment in uncertain times. What I didn’t fully anticipate was how grounding this practice would become for me. Cooking nourishing food—chopping, simmering, seasoning—had a distinctly calming effect, a way of settling my nervous system and bringing me back into my body.

The dinners reminded me that care is not abstract. It is practiced, repetitive, and relational. In 2026, I plan to keep feeding people, choosing nourishment, hospitality, and care as both a personal practice and a quiet form of resistance

Studio Days

Subscribe now

What I’m Practicing Next

• Learn Turkish marbling, with an eye toward creating higher-quality end papers

• Establish a consistent drawing and sketching practice

Practice & Experimentation

• Experiment more deeply with encaustic as a way of finishing and sealing papers

• Spend more time practicing on the letterpress, building both confidence and fluency

• Learn to use the Zeiss Ikon medium format camera.

• Make more plant paper, allowing material knowledge to lead the work. Along the same lines, continue experiments with plant and lichen color, lakes, pigments, inks, paper dye.

• More experiements with plants as toners and developers in the Alternative Photo realm. Practice Salt Prints.

What I’m Wishing For

• Deeper engagement with artist books and archives

• More field time and travelling gigs: gathering, observing, listening, connecting

• Opportunities to show the work in spaces that value process, care, and community

• Continue to research artist residencies in Greece and specific to Book Arts

• Get a table at a Book Arts Festival/show (find my people)

A (short & pricy)Studio Wish List for 2026

• A Canon Pixma iX6820

• A table top exposure unit

• A super 8 camera

How I’m Choosing Care in 2026

The non-negotiables: nourishment, hospitality, time with people, walking and practices that steady the nervous system, like creating, cooking and feeding others.

In 2026, that means continuing The Surreal Times Dinner Project: keeping the pot on, the table open, and choosing nourishment and care as a way of living alongside the work.

and finally, A Substack Snapshot- 19 posts in 2025.

Below, I’m linking the 19 posts from this past year—a living record of ideas in motion. I’d love to check in with you: which post was your favorite? What would you like to see more of in the coming year? Your thoughts help me shape what comes next

.

Thank you for reading, for following along, and for being part of this ongoing conversation. May these last quiet days of the year offer you a little spaciousness too.

Thanks again, I could not have done it without you all. Wishing you all health, peace, community and lots of laughter in the New Year. I appreciate all of your support and look forward to(I think) to 2026!

Leave a comment

Share Art That Breathes

My answer is yes, absolutely yes, definitely yes, though not in the way we often expect politics to announce itself. No with slogans or memes or grand declarations, not with outrage or spectacle. For me it politics of attention. A politics of care. A politics rooted in beauty, usefulness, and the radical act of helping people fall in love with the world again.

We already know what is broken.
We already know what is devastating, heartbreaking, and unjust.

This week alone the news has rattled us again! The accumulation of it lives in the nervous system. (we can talk remedies another time!) Lucinda Williams’ “So Much Trouble in the World” says it plainly. There is so much trouble.

But I am not interested in only naming what is wrong. I am interested in what helps us stay. What helps us tend to the earth and to one another and what helps us imagine lives worth living inside this damaged world.

This is where I feel myself walking alongside the words and ideas of William Morris. I keep returning to his philosophy to transform the world with beauty. Morris believed that the conditions of our daily lives, our homes, our tools, our work, our relationship to land and labor, shape who we become. He saw ugliness not as a matter of taste, but as a social failure. Mass production, extraction, and alienated labor did more than exhaust bodies; they impoverished the spirit. This feels unmistakably evident in our present moment, where efficiency is prized over care and speed replaces intimacy. For Morris, beauty was not decorative. It was ethical.

“Art is the expression of man’s pleasure in labour,”

He wrote in a statement that feels almost subversive now, now, in a culture where productivity has eclipsed joy, and value is measured by output rather than meaning. Morris believed that when work is stripped of meaning and delight, something essential is lost, not only for the worker, but for society as a whole.

Morris insisted that art and life were inseparable. That beauty did not belong to an elite few, but to everyone. Art, for Morris, was not a luxury object or a marker of status, it was a shared social good, woven into the fabric of everyday life. This vision stands in stark contrast to much of today’s art world, where value is often tethered to scarcity, spectacle, and market validation rather than lived experience. Art is frequently abstracted from daily life, sequestered behind institutional language and economic barriers that determine who belongs and who does not. Morris offers another way; one in which art is not a commodity to be consumed by the few, but a shared practice that restores meaning, dignity, and connection to everyday living.

“What business have we with art at all unless all can share it?”

This question still rings.

Morris imagined a world where ordinary people lived surrounded by beauty. Where objects were made slowly, locally, with attention to materials and the natural world. Where usefulness and beauty were not opposites, but companions. His oft-quoted line still feels like a quiet manifesto:

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”

This was never about minimalism or aesthetics alone. It was about refusing excess born of exploitation. About choosing relationship over accumulation.

In the 1880s, Morris threw himself into political organizing, public speaking, and writing, often at great personal cost. News from Nowhere his utopian novel depicting an idyllic, decentralized socialist future England (around 2102) after a revolution, where private property, cities, and class structures are gone, replaced by communal living, handicrafts, a deep connection with nature, and work done joyfully for its own sake, contrasting sharply with Victorian industrial society and offering a vision of a beautiful, egalitarian life was not escapism but was an act of imagination as resistance. He understood that if we cannot envision a different way of living, we will remain captive to the present one.

I feel that urgency now. We need to begin to see to imagine the future we want, one that is not dictated by a crazy man.

At this present moment in history as disillusionment runs deep and trust in politics and politicians feels fragile at best, a figure like William Morris offers something rare: renewal without cynicism. Reminding us that politics does not only live in institutions or elections, but in how we choose to shape daily life. When faith in systems erodes, Morris points us back to the ground beneath our feet:

to making,

to tending,

to beauty as a shared social good.

His vision insists that transformation begins with lived values,embodied in work, in care, and in the worlds we create together.

To teach someone to notice the curve of a leaf, the intelligence of plants, the way light moves across a wall at dusk, this is not apolitical. Morris understood the power of attention. He knew that when people are invited into intimacy with the everyday world, their desires begin to shift.

“The true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.”

Attention becomes devotion.

Devotion becomes care. A

nd care changes what we are willing to accept.

Morris believed that we protect what we cherish, and that beauty trains us in cherishing. When people experience dignity, pleasure, and care in their surroundings, they begin to demand those qualities everywhere;in labor, in governance, and in relationship with the land.

This is the lineage I claim.

My work through teaching workshops in herbalism and art, moves slowly and deliberately. It resists extraction. It values process over product, intimacy over scale, reciprocity over mastery. Like Morris, I am less interested in grand gestures than in how we live, how we make, tend, notice, and belong.

This does not mean turning away from grief or injustice. Morris did not avert his gaze; neither do I. But he also refused despair as an endpoint.

“Fellowship is life, and the lack of fellowship is death,” he wrote. reminding us that connection, not isolation, is the ground of any livable future.

To choose beauty in a time of collapse is not naïve. It is a refusal to surrender our humanity.

If my art is political, it is because it asks us to slow down.
To notice.
To fall back in love with the living world.

And to practice, through small, ordinary, devoted acts, the future we long for.

The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in the details of daily life

___________________________________________________________________________

On Interbeing- a recent project

Interbeing: Four Studies in Connection
a boxed set of artist books by Tony(a) Lemos, (Edition of 10)

Interbeing is a term popularized by Zen master and poet Thich Nhat Hanh, but its roots echo across Indigenous cosmologies, ecological science, and ancestral ways of knowing. It names a truth that is older than language:

nothing exists alone

To inter-be is to recognize that every form of life is made of, shaped by, and continually nourished through its relationship with everything else.

A seed inter-is with soil, sunlight, mycelium, pollinators, rainfall, ancestral hands.

Mycelium inter-is with trees, stone, memory, decomposition, nourishment.

Lichen inter-is with algae, fungi, air, rock, chaos, time.

Seaweed inter-is with tides, moon cycles, salt, currents, carbon, breath.

Interbeing rejects the illusion of separateness.
It reminds us that identity is not individual ; it is relational.
It is not static; it is emergent.
It is not solitary; it is collective.

In ecological terms, interbeing affirms that life thrives through networks, exchanges, mutualisms, and shared vulnerability.
In spiritual terms, it whispers that we live inside one breathing body.
In cultural terms, it is a practice of remembering — a return to the old teachings of reciprocity, kinship, and belonging.

Interbeing is an ethics, a cosmology, a way of moving through the world.

It invites us to ask:
What becomes possible when nothing is separate?

And it offers this answer:
Everything.

If you are interested in purchasing Interbeing Artist Book please contact me.

(Each individual volume seeds, lichen, mycelium, seaweed each costs $50 and one of the 10 numbered boxed set $300)

Leave a comment

Thank you, Thank You, Thank You!

I don’t know exactly when I began whispering “thank you” three times throughout the day as a gesture of gratitude whenever something goes my way or whenever I wish for something but recently I was delighted to hear (in Yoko Ono’s biography by David Sheff) that this is a practice she also keeps. Another small thread of connection I hadn’t known was there.

I’ve been drawn to Yoko Ono for as long as I can remember. As a child, before I had the words for cultural displacement or outsiderhood, I sensed something in her, a vulnerability, a refusal to shrink, that felt like home. Growing up away from my native country, I understood, even dimly, what it means to live at the edge of belonging. Ono’s presence in the world so often misread, mocked, or simply violently dismissed carried the resonance of someone who had also navigated the borders of identity, language, and place. I didn’t know the extent of the tidal wave of misogyny she was enduring, but I felt something: the way people spoke about her, the way she was blamed or minimized. My instinct, even as a child, was to lean in toward her, to ally with her, become an outspoken critic that it was NOT her who split up The Beatles. Outsiderhood, for both of us, was not merely a wound but a vantage point a place from which to see differently, to create differently.

For decades, Ono carried the weight of being misunderstood. Her work was minimized not for its content, but for who she was: a Japanese woman in a white, male art world, relentlessly subjected to misogyny and xenophobia. I felt for her (still do) because I know the quiet cost of being misread, of having one’s intentions distorted simply for being outside the dominant story. But like so many of the women I have profiled in these pages Yōko Ono was a pioneer in conceptual art, performance art, Interdisciplinary collaboration and social action art as well as avant-garde music. Let alone the fact that on the 12 March 2011 her song “Move On Fast” became the 78-year-old’s eight charttopper and sixth successive No. 1 on the US Hot Dance Club Songs chart!!

Sometime in the mid-1980s I got my hands on a cassette tape “Double Fantasy” by Yoko Ono and John Lennon, released just a month before he was murdered. I listened to it obsessively on my Walkman, rewinding it with a pencil every time the tape got caught. Her voice captivated me. At that time Yōko Ono, Boy George, and Bob Geldof were the unlikely constellation of heroes who held me during those early teen years.

I was thrilled that, at 33 (my lucky number Yoko is a huge believer in numerology ) my only daughter was born on October 9th, the birthday of Yoko and John’s son Sean, which also happens to be John Lennon’s birthday.

Recently, a bit of synchronicity placed me in Chicago at just the right moment, an invitation from the amazing women of the North Suburban Needle Arts Guild to present my artist talk and teach a multi-day book arts workshop happened to coincide with Yoko Ono’s retrospective at the MCA Chicago.

Standing inside Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, that early, intuitive connection felt freshly illuminated. The exhibition’s participatory pieces, Painting to Hammer a Nail,

In Add Colour (Refugee Boat), visitors write on the walls, the floor, the boat, marking fears, wishes, and hopes in blue. The act of making a mark becomes an act of solidarity.

and My Mommy Is Beautiful reveal the radical tenderness at the core of her practice and invite reflection on tenderness, memory, and origin.

Grapefruit (1964) is Yoko Ono’s seminal collection of instruction pieces; short, poetic scores that invite readers to imagine or enact simple gestures, everyday acts, or impossible scenarios. Blurring the line between art and life, the book transforms the viewer into a participant, asking them to complete the work through attention, imagination, and presence. It became a foundational text for Conceptual and Fluxus art, redefining what an artwork could be: not an object, but an experience, an invitation, a shared moment. Her instruction works refuse the authority of the artist-genius; they distribute agency, ask for collaboration, and trust the audience to complete the work. They create spaces where the marginalized, the soft-voiced, the wanderers, and the unrooted can step fully into the act of making.

The retrospective show at MCA spans seven decades and more than 200 works; film, music, performance, archival materials, participatory scores, installations. What’s striking is how much the exhibition centers her instruction-based, participatory art. Painting to Hammer a Nail and Bag Piece are reactivated, letting museum goers touch, do, build, break, and mend.

In one of my personal favorites “mend piece” she invites participants to collectively mend shattered cups and saucers using household items like twine, glue, and tape. It is about communal healing, with the act of repair symbolizing the potential to heal societal and personal fractures. The work embraces the idea that “mending the earth” can happen through these small, individual, and collective actions, highlighting resilience and the beauty of imperfection. She asks us to slow down and care enough to mend, to imagine, this is a profoundly radical invitation.”

In Half-A-Room, furniture is literally split in two perhaps a visual metaphor for fragmentation and yet the piece still asks for engagement, not simply observation.

Yoko Ono’s Half-A-Room (1967) was significant for exploring themes of incompleteness, loss, and the viewer’s perception of a room as either “half-empty” or “half-full”. The installation, which featured everyday objects cut in half, was directly inspired by the emotional pain of her separation from her then-husband, Anthony Cox, which left her feeling as if there was a “half-empty space in her life”. The work uses the destruction of objects to provoke thought on how emotional voids and the absence of connection render material things meaningless. “In those days, I still didn’t have a life of just being alone. And then I thought, “This is a great one for a work of art to show to people that we’re just half.” Anyway, everything that I see here, the other half is invisible. And that other half may be something that we might see one day, but now we don’t see it.

Yoko Ono feels, to me, like a foremother to Art that Breathes. Her art is porous. It breathes. It relies on relationship, between artist and audience, body and environment, private thought and collective action. What she began in the 1960s, quietly and insistently, is what I now recognize as a lineage: art as a living gesture, a shared act of attention, a collaboration with the world as it is.

That ethos, the belief that art is something we enter, something we activate together—has shaped my own work more than I ever realized. I see it clearly in the Surreal Times dinner project, where a meal became more than a meal only when participants stepped into the surreal: answering prompts, swapping seats, participating in art games, tasting with eyes closed, following playful instructions that slowly shifted the room from social to alchemical. Like Ono, I wasn’t offering a finished artwork; I was creating the conditions for something unpredictable, relational, and alive to emerge. The art happened in the spaces between us—in shared laughter, in hesitation, in the willingness to lean into the unknown.

At our first public-facing Surreal Times Dinner last month, I handed each participant a single butterfly puzzle piece with the simple instruction: “hold onto this—maybe one day we’ll put the puzzle together again”. It felt like a small act of trust, a quiet reminder that we are each part of something larger, even if the full picture hasn’t yet revealed itself. When I came across Yoko Ono’s Pieces of Sky at the MCA, I was startled by the resonance. Her installation, old military helmets suspended from the ceiling, each brimming with sky-printed jigsaw pieces, inviting visitors to take one with them. The gesture is so unmistakably Yoko: tender in its simplicity, radical in its implications. Each piece is a fragment of hope, a reminder that we share one sky, and a call to mend what violence has broken. Standing there, holding my own puzzle piece from the dinner, I felt the quiet lineage thread through the room, an affirmation that these communal acts of care, imagination, and participatory creation have deep roots, and that the work we’re doing now echoes hers in ways I hadn’t even realized.

Ono has taught us that the score is just the beginning. The work breathes when others take it up and improvise, when meaning is made collaboratively. Art that Breathes grows out of that same lineage: art as invitation, art as ecology, art as a temporary, tender world we build together. Where she writes scores for the mind, I write scores with plants, pigments, leaves, waters, each inviting the participant into another kind of presence.”

And perhaps this is why her work feels so necessary now. In these tumultuous times when everything around us feels accelerated, fractured, and increasingly mediated Ono’s instructions, and the participatory worlds they open, remind us of our capacity to make meaning together. They offer a counter-practice to isolation and urgency: a return to presence, to attentiveness, to co-creation. Art that Breathes insists that art can be a site of repair, a temporary community, a breathing space where we remember our interconnectedness. At a moment when the world is asking us to numb out or armor up, Ono’s lineage and these small, relational, living works invite us back into touch, into curiosity, into the fragile, necessary act of being human with one another. Let the work be unfinished. Let it be alive.

In the end, my love for Yoko Ono comes down to this: she has always shown us that art is not the object but an opening. Her work remains profoundly relevant, not only for its conceptual brilliance, but for the radical tenderness it models, the way it trusts strangers to complete it with their own hands and hearts. In projects like the Surreal Times dinner project and every communal act of making, sharing, and imagining together, I see her influence still rippling outward: art as invitation, art as care, art as the quiet miracle of participation. In a world so fractured, this feels more necessary than ever. So tonight, as we continue to breathe life into the work she helped make possible, I raise a glass to Yoko while she is still with us, foremother, outsider, beacon, and the artist who first taught me that creation is something we do together.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Author’s Note:
I grew up between cultures and landscapes, and much of my work—book arts, herbalism, plant-based pigments, and the community rituals I create arises from navigating the edges of belonging. As a multidisciplinary artist and herbalist, I’m shaped by the belief that art is something we enter, not something we simply observe. Through Art that Breathes, my workshops, and projects like the Surreal Times dinners, I explore how simple invitations, gestures, and small acts of care can build temporary communities. This essay on Yoko Ono is both an homage and an acknowledgment of the lineage that helped shape my own creative life: art as relationship, reciprocity, and the shared presence we make together. It is also part of an ongoing inquiry into participatory art, communal ritual, and the surprising ways we create meaning together.

_______________________________________________________________________

An invitation to those of you who are local to Western MA

My solo art show at the Wicked Good Cafe, Elmers in Ashfield MA is coming soon…

rural rituals: tending table & land

Show will be up Dec 2 into the New Year.

Reception date TBD.

Rural Rituals: Tending Table & Land

This exhibition invites visitors into two intertwined worlds of care, presence, and imagination.

In one room, intimate portraits celebrate a few of the local women who have participated in the Surreal Times Dinner Project, celebrating the humor, vulnerability, and unexpected beauty of sharing a meal with strangers. These works explore the table as a site of care, connection, conversation, and ritual.

In the second room, gridded photopolymer prints gather close-up photographs from my morning walks, moss, lichen, seaweed, bark, sky, some familiar, others edging toward abstraction. Each square is a microcosm, a fragment of the living world held gently in place. These grids are meditations-in-progress rather than finished works.

Gridding becomes a way of creating stillness amid uncertainty: a ritual of making order, noticing deeply, and honoring the quiet complexity of the land. The process itself is the piece.

Together, the exhibition traces a dialogue between domestic life and the natural world, inviting viewers to witness the rituals that sustain both and to consider the quiet alchemy of attention, care, and creativity.

Share

Leave a comment

Using their skills in writing, photography, and disguise, they created a clandestine anti-Nazi campaign they called “Der Soldat ohne Namen” (“The Soldier with No Name”).

They typed and handwrote hundreds of subversive leaflets in German, posing as disillusioned Wehrmacht soldiers or secret anti-Nazi Germans. These notes were left in soldiers’ pockets, slipped into cigarette packs, placed in cars, or pinned to noticeboards—acts of psychological warfare aimed to sow doubt, confusion, and dissent within the occupying forces.

The tone was intimate and persuasive rather than accusatory, often appealing to soldiers’ humanity, exhaustion, and moral conscience—an emotional strategy completely in line with Cahun’s belief in art as transformation of perception.

Eventually, in 1944, they were arrested by the Gestapo, imprisoned, and sentenced to death, though the island was liberated before the sentence could be carried out. Cahun’s health never fully recovered from the imprisonment.

Today I want to profile Rose Cecil O’Neill

Born in Pennsylvania in 1874, O’Neill relocated with her family by covered wagon to rural Nebraska. She began drawing in childhood and, at age 13, won a newspaper drawing contest in her adopted hometown of Omaha. At just 18, and with no formal art education, had her drawings published in newspapers and magazines throughout the Midwest. Within the year, she moved to New York with hopes of launching a career as an artist.

Settled in Manhattan, O’Neill quickly made a name for herself as a commercial illustrator, publishing in national magazines such as Life, Ladies’ Home Journal and Harper’s Monthly. At 23, she became the first woman artist on staff at the leading humor magazine Puck. She was now earning top dollar for her work, making her one of the highest paid illustrators in New York.

In 1907, she began developing short illustrated stories featuring cherubic characters, who “did good deeds in a humorous way.” The comic strip “The Kewpies” premiered in Ladies’ Home Journal in 1909 and was an instant hit. The strip’s spectacular popularity inspired her to envision the Kewpie as a doll. Kewpie dolls hit the shelves in 1913 and immediately became a phenomenon—it took factories in six different countries to fill orders. The Kewpie became the first novelty toy distributed worldwide and earned O’Neill a fortune.

Wealthy beyond her dreams, O’Neill retreated to Castle Carabas, a lavish villa in rural Connecticut, where she entertained artists and other exotic visitors. Over time, O’Neill’s generosity and extravagant living depleted her funds. In 1941, she moved into a family home in Missouri to work on her memoirs and died in 1944 penniless.

O’Neill’s Kewpie cartoon character served as a vehicle from which she could comment on social issues of import such as women’s rights, discrimination, and wealth inequality. Through her art and public service, O’Neill championed the down-trodden, which she was all too familiar with having suffered the indignity of poverty as a child.

Known to the National Women’s Suffrage Association in New York City as a “Suffrage Artist,” O’Neill lent her creative abilities to the cause of advancing women’s rights. As a philanthropist, she focused on work meant to lift children out of poverty. In 1914, she made a bold and imaginative contribution to the women’s suffrage movement when she arranged for dozens of her beloved Kewpie dolls to be dropped from an airplane during a rally in Nashville, Tennessee. Each doll was adorned with a “Votes for Women” sash, transforming O’Neill’s whimsical creations into tiny airborne activists. The event captured public attention and symbolized the suffragists’ innovative use of popular culture to spread their message. Beyond this memorable act, O’Neill and her supporters continued to enlist the Kewpies in the fight for women’s rights, appearing on postcards, parade floats, and in shop displays, using charm, humor, and mass appeal to carry a radical political message into the everyday lives of Americans.

Wealthy beyond her dreams, O’Neill retreated to Castle Carabas, a lavish villa in rural Connecticut, where she entertained artists and other exotic visitors. Over time, O’Neill’s generosity and extravagant living depleted her funds. In 1941, she moved into a family home in Missouri to work on her memoirs and died in 1944, penniless.

While Rose O’Neill used her art and public voice to champion women’s suffrage, pacifism, and creative independence, Claude Cahun enacted her resistance in secrecy and disguise. Like O’Neill, whose Kewpies carried messages of kindness and equality beneath their playful exterior, Cahun believed in the transformative power of the image and the word. Both women turned creativity into a form of resistance: O’Neill through joy, empathy, and public enchantment; Cahun through secrecy, ambiguity, and the art of disguise.

In the contemporary sphere, Cuban artist Tania Bruguera continues this lineage of creative resistance through what she calls arte útil—art that is not symbolic, but useful. Her performances blur the boundaries between art, activism, and civic action, turning the body itself into a site of political confrontation. In The Burden of Guilt (1997), she ate earth mixed with saltwater tears, evoking a Cuban legend of indigenous resistance and transforming grief into endurance. Later, in Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (2009), she offered citizens in Havana one minute of uncensored speech, a radical gesture that led to her repeated arrests. For Bruguera, art is not representation but rehearsal, a living experiment in freedom. Like O’Neill’s joyful feminist imagery and Cahun’s clandestine leaflets of defiance, her work reveals how imagination, when embodied and risked, can become a profound form of resistance.

Across a century of shifting political and cultural landscapes, Rose O’Neill, Claude Cahun, and Tania Bruguera each illuminate how art can serve as a living act of resistance. O’Neill wielded whimsy and tenderness as tools of social change, embedding feminist ideals and pacifist values within her drawings and stories. Cahun transformed disguise and ambiguity into weapons against fascism, turning language and imagination into forms of rebellion. Bruguera brings that lineage into the present, making art inseparable from civic action and personal risk. Together they reveal that resistance need not always roar—it can whisper, enchant, seduce, or quietly transform. Whether through the playful figure of a Kewpie, a secret note slipped into a soldier’s pocket, or a body trembling onstage in defiance, each artist reminds us that creativity is not a retreat from the world, but a way to remake it.

From these stories, we can begin to map the many ways art becomes activism—how imagination, visibility, and care become forms of resistance.

Eight Ways Art Becomes Activism

Art as Visibility

Art can make the unseen visible, bringing marginalized stories, bodies, and ecologies into public consciousness.

• Zanele Muholi’s portraits reclaim Black queer visibility.

• Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits make the private body political.
  Art here functions as witness and amplification, insisting on presence where silence or erasure once stood.

Art as Imagination and Myth-Making

Activist art often reclaims imagination as a tool of liberation. It creates alternate futures, myths, or cosmologies that defy dominant narratives.

• Hilma af Klint, Remedios Varo, and Rose O’Neill herself used imagination to invent worlds where the feminine, spiritual, or natural were powerful and generative. This kind of art whispers: “Another way of seeing—and being—is possible.”

Art as Direct Action

Sometimes, art steps into the field of overt resistance.

• Claude Cahun’s wartime propaganda, Tania Bruguera’s political performances, or the Guerrilla Girls’ feminist posters use creative tactics to disrupt oppressive systems. Here, art becomes a form of protest, intervention, or strategic subversion—its aesthetic power amplifying its political impact.

Art as Healing and Restoration

Art can resist by mending what violence and capitalism sever.

• Ecological artists, community muralists, and indigenous creators often engage in art as healing ceremony or repair work—restoring relationships between people and place. This is where I believe my Art that Breathes practice fits in: the studio as sanctuary, pigment as prayer, making as reciprocal act.

Art as Embodiment and Presence

Performance and body-based practices turn living, breathing presence into resistance, especially for those whose bodies have been objectified or erased.

• Ana Mendieta, Marina Abramović, and many queer and feminist artists use the body as both medium and manifesto. Here, the art is not representation but being itself, to exist, to perform, to persist becomes activism.

6. Art as Everyday Revolution

Small gestures, illustrations, zines, crafts, rituals, gardens, can be quiet acts of resistance to consumerism and disposability.

• This is the realm of slow art, folk art, and domestic practices reclaimed as radical care. I think of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, or the revival of herbal, textile, and print traditions as feminist, ecological rebellion.

Art as Community and Collaboration

Art builds networks of care and shared meaning.

• Social practice artists, community printmakers, or collaborative book arts create spaces where making together becomes an act of solidarity. In this form, the process itself; the circle, the workshop, the shared table (the surreal times dinners project) is the activism.

Art as Refusal

Sometimes, to withdraw, to be opaque, to refuse legibility is itself a radical act.

• Carrie Mae Weems, Howardena Pindell, or Tracy Chapman’s quiet revolution show that choosing silence, mystery, or slowness can reject extractive systems of attention. Refusal becomes a form of resistance to commodification.

Their lives and works ask us, as artists, to consider our own responsibilities in times of fracture and possibility. If O’Neill could seed tenderness as activism, if Cahun could risk her life for the subversive power of imagination, if Bruguera can still make courage her medium—then what will we do with our own creative freedom? What are we making that resists, that restores, that reimagines? In a world hungry for beauty that also tells the truth, art remains one of the few languages still capable of awakening empathy and courage. The challenge, then, is not only to make art that is beautiful, but art that matters; art that breathes, agitates, and insists on the possibility of a more just and tender world.

May our studios, our gatherings, our gestures become small acts of courage, lets create art that breathes, that listens, that refuses to look away.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

____________________________________________________________________________

If you are in New England come study with me in person

Art Of Grimoire 2025-2026

A year long adventure in Book Making and the Botanical Arts

No books have been more feared, revered, or treasured than grimoires. Emerging in the 17th century, the witch’s grimoire was a living collection of herbal recipes, magical spells, and familial ceremonies—a book of power and memory.

In this intimate year-long workshop—part bookmaking, part botanical art, part ceremony—you will create a singular artist book that celebrates you. This grimoire will be your life-book: a physical record of your place in the universe, filled with recipes, rituals, memories, and family traditions.

Many of us have forgotten how to tend and preserve our own stories. This is where your book begins. Through guided exercises, journaling, and creative exploration, you will craft a book that is both deeply personal and visually cohesive. Every page will carry a sense of wonder, with Nature as our muse as we explore ancestral relationships with plants and magic.

Along the way, you will learn a variety of bookbinding methods and structures—ranging from whimsical and playful to historic traditions.

For more info click here Art of Grimoire

Share

Share Art That Breathes

Welcome everyone and thanks for being here.

Let’s begin with a simple question.

When was the last time you felt truly alive?

Close your eyes for a moment. Breathe. Notice what comes. Maybe it was a walk in the woods, the sound of your grandaughters giggle, the scent of lilacs in spring, or a moment when your hands were in the earth.

That feeling, that aliveness is what brings us together today. It is what plants awaken in us. And it is also what creativity invites us back to.”

This class is the blossoming of something new, though it’s been 30 years in the making. After decades of teaching and practicing herbalism, I’ve come to see that while we herbalists often emphasize lifestyle, nutrition, movement, home environment—there’s one vital thread that’s been missing in many of these conversations and that is creativity.

In this session, we’ll explore how creative practice can be just as essential to health and healing as food or herbal medicine and that making art with plants; whether through printmaking, pigment, poetry, or ritual can nourish us on physical, emotional, and spiritual levels. Creativity offers another way of knowing plants, one that’s embodied, intuitive, and relational.

Together, we’ll look at how bringing plants into art practice opens new pathways of connection, grounding us more deeply in place and strengthening our sense of belonging in the web of life. When we create with plants, not just about them, we cultivate reciprocity, reverence, and a profound understanding of interconnectedness.

This class is an invitation to reimagine herbalism as not only about healing bodies, but also about tending our imaginations, our spirits, and our relationships with the living world.

“As herbalists, we’ve long understood that health is not just about taking tinctures. We talk about food, sleep, movement, clean water, clean air, the home environment. But for too long, creativity has been missing from the conversation.

For me, creativity isn’t just a nice add-on. It is the medicine

Creativity whether through art, music, dance, gardening, writing, or theater is as essential as nutrition and rest. It’s not extra. It’s not decorative. It’s foundational to wellbeing . It’s a way of remembering who we are, reconnecting with plants, with the land, with each other. That’s what I am here to share with you today.

In my own life, art came in as a way of listening. It gave me another language to be in relationship with plants. When I started weaving art and herbalism together, my sense of connection deepened in ways I didn’t expect. And I’ve seen that happen again and again with students.

Plants themselves are creative beings. Plants are creative beings in their own right. They choreograph with light, turning and spiraling to follow the sun. They paint with pigments that shift through the seasons, green dissolving into ochre, crimson, gold. Their roots sketch maps beneath the soil, an underground drawing of relation and exchange. A meadow in bloom is a living canvas; a forest is a symphony of rhythms unfolding in time. Even the rings of a tree are autobiography, lines of drought and abundance, fire and renewal. Lichen shows us that collaboration is itself an art form, two beings co-creating something new. In every gesture, plants remind us that creativity is not a luxury but a way of living, always in relation, always in conversation with the world.

Art that Breathes: The Philosophy

(this is a summary there are a few previous posts on this substack with more detailed explanations)

Over the last few years, I’ve been growing a practice where art and herbalism meet and mingle. I call it Art that Breathes.

In a world marked by disconnection and extraction, Art that Breathes offers a relational practice. an art that listens, remembers, and restores. Like relationship-based herbalism, it is rooted in reciprocity and reverence, asking us to slow down, to honor the cycles of the seasons, and to reimagine how we live, create, and heal.

It’s always evolving, never finished.
It’s less of a method, and more of a way of being.
A manifesto in motion.
A ritual.
A relationship.
It lives in that space between hand, plant, and place.

This practice is slow. It’s reverent.
It’s experimental, ecological, intuitive.
I work with foraged plants, with found materials, with whatever the season offers.
And instead of trying to control the outcome, I let the process lead me.

For me, Art that Breathes is about weaving—
weaving together art and herbalism, intuition and craft, ritual and process.
It’s about mending what has been pulled apart—
body from land, people from place, practice from spirit.
It’s about finding our way back to wholeness—
and remembering that wholeness looks tangled, layered, and alive.

There are a few principles that guide me:

• Impermanence: letting work fade, dissolve, compost back into earth.

• Reciprocity: giving back to the plants and places that sustain us.

• Embodiment: making art with the whole body, not just the mind.

• Ancestral connection: inviting lineage and memory into the work.

• Collaboration with the land: treating place as co-creator, not backdrop.

• And art as ritual, not commodity: making as offering, as prayer, as medicine

In practice, this can look like many things:

ink made from berries,
prints pulled from leaves,
a cyanotype developed under sunlight,
or plant impressions pressed into handmade paper.
It can look like pigments stirred with river water,
or an installation that slowly weathers away in the wind.

But more than the finished piece, it’s about the gestures.
The conversations.
The time spent in relationship with plants, earth, water and sky.

Subscribe now

Lineage & Inspiration

I see myself in a lineage of artists who blurred the line between art, ritual, and ecology.
Two who shaped me deeply are Ana Mendieta and María Magdalena Campos-Pons.

Ana Mendieta pressed her body into the land, leaving fleeting marks of mud, flowers, even blood, art that disappeared back into the earth.

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons creates immersive, ritual-filled installations, thick with memory, ancestry, and the feminine divine.

Both showed me that art can be more than object. It can be ceremony. It can be offering. It can be a gift, It can be the medicine.

They remind me, again and again, that healing is possible. Even across distance.
Even across time. That we can find our way back; through story, through matter, through ritual. That art can hold grief. It can hold memory. It can hold hope. Just like the seed.

And that art can root us in something larger than ourselves. As herbalists, we already know this. A cup of chamomile tea isn’t just chemistry; it’s story, presence, tradition. Art with plants is the same, it’s medicine made visible.

That, to me, is the heartbeat of Art that Breathes.
Not art as product.
But art as process.
Not art as possession.
But art as conversation with plants, with ancestors, with land, with spirit.

Science of Creativity & Health

Now, let’s ground this in what research shows.

We haven’t traditionally spoken about creativity in the same breath as health. But using creativity whether it’s art, music, writing, gardening, dance, or theater, to relieve stress and burnout is just as important as drinking clean water, getting enough sleep, eating well, exercising, or breathing fresh air.

Art, in all its forms, is medicine.

Reducing stress and anxiety
Making art brings us into the present moment. Lao Tsu said: If you are depressed, you’re living in the past. If you’re anxious, you’re living in the future. But if you’re at peace, you’re living in the present. Creative practice is one of the quickest ways to land in that present moment. Scientists have studied cortisol, the stress hormone, before and after art making, and they’ve found that even a short creative practice reduces anxiety. The effects aren’t just immediate, they’re cumulative. The more we do it, the more grounded we feel.

Improving cognitive function
Making art also lights up the brain. Studies show that creative activity helps us remember better, pay more attention, solve problems faster. It fosters curiosity, a growth mindset, and keeps the brain flexible and adaptive. Creativity helps us enter a flow state, the opposite of stagnation. As herbalists we know that what is stagnant is not healthy, health is dynamic. Over time, this supports long-term brain health, even helping to prevent age-related conditions such as dementia and Parkinson’s.

Boosting the immune system and supporting the body
Art making can actually boost your immune system. Inflammation levels go down. Pain and discomfort from chronic conditions like arthritis and fibromyalgia can be eased. Movement-based creative practices like dance or even the physical act of painting or printmaking support dexterity, eye-hand coordination, flexibility, and response time. Use it or lose it, as the saying goes.

Community and connection
Creativity isn’t just a solitary act, it thrives in community, its relational. Making art together, sharing it, being part of a creative circle, counters loneliness and isolation. In a world where more and more of us feel disconnected, art can weave us back into belonging.

Emotional well-being
And of course, art makes us happy. Learning something new, making something with our hands, it brings feelings of pride, joy, and a sense of accomplishment. And here’s the best news: the quality of the art doesn’t matter. It’s the process, not the product. You don’t have to be “good” at art for it to benefit you.

More good news
Research shows that just 45 minutes of creative practice reduces cortisol, no matter your skill level. The process often carries us into a state of flow, deep focus, deep presence, a state that nourishes relaxation and healing. A 2020 study even showed that people who participated in art or cultural events—across all socioeconomic levels—had lower mental distress, better mental functioning, and greater life satisfaction.

The not-so-good news :-(
We also have to be real about the world we’re living in. Globally, 1 billion people struggle with mental health. Depression is now the leading cause of disability worldwide. Loneliness and anxiety are on the rise, and they don’t just affect our minds but also impact our physical health. For the first time in history, mental distress is rising faster than any physical health disorder, feeding what some call “diseases of despair.”

The numbers are sobering. In a recent study of 1,000 high school students, nearly half reported feeling persistently sad and hopeless. One in five considered suicide. One in ten had already attempted.

And yet remember this: we are all connected. Whatever some of us are experiencing, we all feel to some degree. Which also means when we heal, we heal together. Creativity gives us one path back into presence, into connection, into joy, into hope.

Creativity is like a tonic herb it doesn’t fix everything instantly, but over time it nourishes us. It helps us live in rhythm. It reminds us to pay attention. And when we bring plants into that practice, it becomes an act of relationship. Think of creativity as your favorite adaptogen for the spirit. Like ashwagandha, reishi or tulsi, it doesn’t cure everything, but it builds resilience, balance, and joy over time.”

“Let’s circle back to where we began.
When was the last time you felt truly alive?

(We paused here for a little fun! A plant based exquisite corpse activity)

Creativity and herbalism both bring us to that place. They remind us that healing and creating are not separate acts, but threads in the same fabric of belonging and repair.

My hope is that you leave here today with not just new ideas, but a felt sense of creativity as medicine—yours to carry, to share, to breathe.”

Subscribe now

Share

____________________________________________________________________________

If you are in New England come study with me in person

Art Of Grimoire 2025-2026

A year long adventure in Book Making and the Botanical Arts

No books have been more feared, revered, or treasured than grimoires. Emerging in the 17th century, the witch’s grimoire was a living collection of herbal recipes, magical spells, and familial ceremonies—a book of power and memory.

In this intimate year-long workshop—part bookmaking, part botanical art, part ceremony—you will create a singular artist book that celebrates you. This grimoire will be your life-book: a physical record of your place in the universe, filled with recipes, rituals, memories, and family traditions.

Many of us have forgotten how to tend and preserve our own stories. This is where your book begins. Through guided exercises, journaling, and creative exploration, you will craft a book that is both deeply personal and visually cohesive. Every page will carry a sense of wonder, with Nature as our muse as we explore ancestral relationships with plants and magic.

Along the way, you will learn a variety of bookbinding methods and structures—ranging from whimsical and playful to historic traditions.

For more info click here Art of Grimoire

____________________________________________________________________________

A little update to the Surreal Times Dinner Project

press release from APE Gallery

Surreal Times Dinner at A.P.E. GalleryNorthampton, MA — Tuesday November 4th 2025

A.P.E. Gallery is pleased to announce “Surreal Times Dinner Project”, a participatory art event organized and hosted by artist and herbalist Tonya Lemos. Blurring the line between performance, ritual, and shared meal, this dinner invites participants into a world where conversation, creativity, and food interweave in unexpected ways.

In keeping with the spirit of chance and surrealist play, participants will be selected at random from submitted applications. Those chosen will be notified by October 20, 2025.

Each participant will also be asked to bring a dish that is special to them, inspired by a woman in their lives. These offerings—personal, ancestral, or imaginative—will become part of the evening’s collaborative table, weaving together nourishment, memory, and story.

Details

• Event: Surreal Times Dinner

• Location: A.P.E. Gallery, Northampton, MA

• Date & Time: Tuesday November 4th 2025, 6-8pm

• How to Apply: Fill out the application form (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc6wz_YFFy1CozTutAARZ7WH-PzT4lnUYVme2Km1d6aXvsgRQ/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=117398767009495409335)

• Participants will be selected at random and notified by October 20.

The Surreal Times Dinner transforms the act of dining into a collective artwork, drawing inspiration from surrealist games, relational aesthetics, and the practice of gathering as art. Guests become both collaborators and audience, contributing to an atmosphere of curiosity, experimentation, and conviviality.

This project continues Lemos’s ongoing exploration of art as social practice—where connection, imagination, and shared experience take precedence over permanence.

Leave a comment

Share Art That Breathes