share your spiritual biography in 10 words, or less:

Mama prayed I’d speak in tongues; I am the flame.

where are you turning for soul nourishment / joy / aliveness?

brunch with beloveds, birds in flight (outside and inside), every tree, and my sheltie puppy.

what is a text you hold sacred?

Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer

what is a spiritual practice currently sustaining you?

singing while driving.

how would you describe the work you feel called to do in this world (even if it is not the work you get paid for)?

I’m called to love, feel the whole of it thoroughly, and tell about it. 

I’m incredibly lucky to get paid for some of that work. Like today when I got to love a stranger who was dying. I told her about it right through her last breath. I got to tell her how beautiful she was, how beloved, how brave. 

knowing that none of us “has it all together,” what is one question you are wrestling with, or bit of wisdom you are struggling to enflesh in your daily life?

I have to remind myself constantly to relax my default people-pleasing muscles. It’s like when your shoulders are up near your ears and you have to keep gently telling yourself to let them fall. But the next thing you know they’re hugging your ears again! While I’m currently safe and strong enough to be disliked, my pleaser default was set long ago and is annoyingly entrenched in my personality. I keep reminding my taught “must please others” muscles that they can relax now. Breathing through the fear and letting go the lie that pleasing others will protect me. I am safe. I am strong. It’s ok if someone is mad at me. (omg no it’s not ahhhhhhhh!) <3 Still working on it. 

who is one elder / ancestor / mentor whose guidance you draw from? what is one piece of wisdom they have offered?

Oscar Bradford Wilde (chihuahua mutt and love of my life) 
Love is the hardest thing we ever choose to do. And the only thing worth doing. The only.

what’s one oppressive untruth you are practicing unlearning / divesting from?

That I shouldn’t be so sensitive ;) That the world /shouldn’t/ break me. That broken-open-messy-raw-me is not the most glorious me there is.

what is one thing you wish were required listening / viewing? (please link to the song, poem, art piece, podcast, etc.)

Loretta Miller performing Leonard Cohen’s ‘Anthem’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Am4UayoAPE