SHINING
MOUNTAIN
LLC
Absence creates longing, and longing is, in essence, a prayer. When out of the entire realm of possibility we focus our attention and intention on the creative endeavor to make ourselves anew, then this is what we will become.
I have always been a mystic, a reader of myth and fairy tales, a secret singer and artmaker, and a deep believer in an animistic world, this one that is everywhere alive with spirit and wonder. I have always felt more at home in the woods or mountains, with the creatures of feather, fur, and leaf, than in human society.
Although the services I provide are about my clients’ stories and not about my own, the reason I am a coach and healer today is deeply informed by my own tale of overcoming trauma. My path has travelled through barren continents of isolation, landscapes where I felt invisible to those closest to me, and treacherous terrains where trauma and violence, both subtle and overt, blocked my way forward. I know too the heavy sea of depression and the anxiety that agitates against the next inevitable obstacle. I know the self-diminishing thoughts that grasp at the ankle, pulling us downward into the mud. I know these dark places well, and yet my story is one of hope and emergence, of moving through the universal pain of being alive to claim a state of imperfect human wholeness and my place in the circle of wounded healers.
My home is rural Alaska, where society’s chaotic jabber fades into songs of windchimes, murmuring mountain streams, spiraling snowflakes, and boreal owl’s cry. Mountains surround my home, protect it like a cupped palm. In every direction I perceive the compassionate spirits of the plants, animals, elements, and ancestors who also safeguard this place. I am fortunate to be included within the family of Ahtna peoples who still reside in this part of the interior, and to know some of their ancestral stories. Their grandparents moved with the seasons, with the cycles of abundance and scarcity; their trails crossed the wide lands and rivers in every direction. The spirits of caribou appeared in their dreams, guiding the way to life-saving harvests that fed the families for another day.
We have all lost our ancient homelands and the traditions that once sustained and balanced us. We have all become exiled and have suffered generational traumas that live on, in and through us. Yet no matter the grief that is within easy reach when we consider all that’s been lost, I believe that we are here to reclaim ourselves and nurture our generous hearts, and in doing so to remake the world into a place where we can all thrive. We must become the courageous, truth-telling ancestors we want for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
My personal work has been to return to my body, to discover in it the exiled feelings and sensations that I buried beneath layers of shoulds and should-nots. This is no simple matter, as our bodies retain the fossilized truths we would rather avoid, and the excavation work exposes us to the atmospheres of those painful events that were poison to our developing selves. Layers upon layers are uncovered as we learn to tolerate discomfort in service of wholeness. The more vast and complex we recognize ourselves to be, the more power we have to claim what it is we desire and who we want to become. This claiming is a prayer, and we sing the prayer out to a universe that is not sterile and barren as we were once taught, but alive, listening, and responsive. When we heal ourselves, we heal us all.