Welcome

Hello there! Welcome to Rooted Flame.

When I first started this site back in 2018 it was a place to put my poetry, somewhere I had vague hopes for as a place where who I am would welcome who you are, where perhaps in being seen myself there would be some safety for others being seen in turn. We are all of us, I think, continually becoming, selves as stories and stories as journeys. Sometimes it is easy to forget that when we think of those stories, the character arcs, chapters, meaning are all something we develop after the fact. We can search the cutting room floor for the parts of ourselves and our stories that didn’t quite fit. We can welcome them back into our lives as part of our greater context, and take those sometimes tentative steps into the agency to write and rewrite all of it.

Even then, there are so many things that shape us, so many actions dictated by necessity, of self or of survival. Our stories often circle around wounds of lack and not enough and brokenness. We do not always get the option to escape, and some threads in our stories weave through our lives painfully, wrapping themselves around our hearts and minds and bodies. Some threads tie us in knots, cut us off from whole worlds within us or our own embodiment. We may be left with a hunger at the center of ourselves for the simple sustenance that is being and becoming exactly as we are. It can be hard to see the ways we can value and be and act- not in perfectness or always getting it right, but in exploring together. When there is no map, the path is what sustains you and the “hows” become more eloquent than the “whats” in the stories of our lives.

So, what is my story? I am a clinician, a poet, sometimes a scholar, and a facilitator of the transformation and flourishing of others. I am a Brigidine and a Druid, who continually engages towards right relationship with my ancestors, the spirits and people of the places in which I live, and my gods. I am a slightly mad jumble of relationships and rituals, curious and full of wonder at the touchstones that anchor the weaving of my life. Welcome. Come and join me, standing solid, sun warmed granite against our toes from which quenching waters flow, around which grows lush and wild tendrils, brambles laden with fruit, herbs scenting the air. All manner of people are welcome to sit a spell and be present for themselves, seen and heard. And if you are not ready to speak- wild-shy or simply silent- the welcome is here for you, too, and the safety and the nourishment.

May you be well.