My Storyline
At nineteen, I moved to Moscow for a year, in search of truth, freedom, and dusha—soul—in a foreign language.
Instead, I found myself inside a country undergoing profound social and political dissolution while navigating my own passage from girl to woman. Communism was crumbling and so called democracy was rising. I lost my bearings, my voice, and my -round.
I came home carrying stories I didn’t yet know how to integrate or digest.
The Body Gave Me Another Language
Years later, I discovered an embodied dance community in Boulder, CO Golden Bridge, that catalyzed an unconventional spiritual awakening and a deeper inquiry into who I was, what I was here to do, and what it means to become human.
I danced Five Rhythms, traveled, studied, and eventually returned to Colorado for an apprenticeship in SomaSource -story, body, creative rites of passage, life cycles and thresholds.
At the same time, I immersed myself in a self-designed Master’s in Transformative Language Arts at Goddard College, concentrating in Embodiment Studies and soul-centric human development. I began to dance and write my way through place, body, memory, and imagination. I wrote a coming of age mythopoetic memoir, Girltruth from the Belly.
I followed Little Red Riding Hood into the metaphorical belly of the wolf.
There, I began exploring what I call StoryBody Writing: braiding mythos, memory, movement, body, place, and imagination into a writing practice that helps us enter the stories we carry and discover what we do not yet know.
Writing became another way of listening between and below the words.
Motherhood Brought the Questions Into Another Terrain
After becoming a mother, I wanted my daughter to experience an education alive with hands, heart, and head: with Story, movement, beauty, nature, imagination, and soul.
I completed Waldorf elementary teacher training and became deeply immersed in human development, the wheel of the year and a soul-centric model for becoming human.
Our life became seasonal. Storytelling, song, nature, craft, gratitude, festivals, and the hearth became part of the rhythm of home.
For more than fifteen years, I have been rewilding this path of education with the natural world -blessed by schools, farms and communities across the United States. I worked as an educator, storyteller, writer, HearthKeeper, song leader and facilitator with children, adolescents, families, and communities. I brought students into fairy tales, inspirational stories of human biographies, Norse mythology, the Kalevala, and the mythologies of ancient civilizations. I led choirs, festivals, pageants and plays; published books of poetry written by middle schoolers and adults; wrote and directed musical plays based on fairytales and legends, and guided adolescents through a Transformative Language Arts Hero’s Journey of poetry and life-story writing.
I told hundreds of old stories. At least 1200 to be exact!
When one of my first-grade was navigating terminal illness, the Russian tale Ivan, the Gray Wolf, and the Firebird helped carry our class and school community through the bewildering terrain of life, death, grief, and renewal. We moved with song, nature, art, Story, grief tending, and ritual. The old, old stories gave us hope, food, and carried us.
Again and again, beauty and awe, wonder and grief and the strange, awesome mess of being human taught me something I had sensed for a long time.
Story is alive.
Story is not simply something we tell. It is something we enter.
It can replenish and resource and accompany us through thresholds. It can help us metabolize experience. It can loosen an old story and make room for another. It can return us to body, imagination, memory, relationship, and the living world.
Beyond the Classroom
My years inside educational and developmental systems —Waldorf, Montessori, Reggio Emilia-inspired and democratic education, somatic practice and rites-of-passage work, have given me enormous respect for what intentional human development can offer.
They have also brought me again and again to the edges of systems.
I remain interested in what cannot be systemized or standardized:
the living human being
the living story
the living world
the freedom to become
relationship and reciprocity with one another
and the more than human world
Over time, my work has moved beyond the classroom and more deeply toward the terrain I have been circling all along: Story and writing. Body and imagination. Human development and threshold. Nature and season. Creativity, grief, beauty, and the strange work of becoming. Hearth and Wheel
Today I work with women moving through thresholds and transitions, using Story, embodied writing, creativity, ritual, and the living world as ways of listening for what is changing, what is asking to be composted, and what is trying to come into being.
My devotion to children, educational programs and families remains part of this work and part of what Hearth and Wheel is becoming.
Hearth and Wheel
The hearth has been with me from the beginning: bread, Story, nourishment, tending, relationship, the fire at the center.
And the wheel keeps turning.
I hold a BA in Russian Studies and an MA in Transformative Language Arts from Goddard College, as well as Waldorf teacher certification and SomaSource certification in embodied and creative rites of passage. I have a Reiki II certification, am certified in Wisdom of the Earth Essential Oils, am beginning a cranial sacral training in Core Synchronism and will be studying more deeply with Dr. Martin Shaw in his North American Myth school over the next two years.
My education continues through fairy tale and myth, writing and movement, Goethean observation, herbalism and medicinal aromatics, and sustained relationship with plants, place, and the living world.
The Work
We live in a time of story sickness.
Disinformation. Narrative weaponized. Old stories wielded to keep people small, afraid, divided. And underneath it all, a longing for meaning and possibility. For goodness, beauty, and truth.
Which stories do we actually need, and why? When do we dismantle the old story, and when does it still carry wisdom we cannot afford to lose? How do we rewild stories that have calcified into dogma? How do we find, inside the oldest tales, the medicine most needed now?
These are questions I have followed for decades.
Story is a nested doll, a wild matryoshka. Layered, alive, waiting to be cracked open. An old tale can hold many meanings at once, revealing something different depending upon perspective, season, cycle, place, body, and lived experience.
My work brings Story into relationship with writing, body, memory, imagination, place, and the living world. We listen for what is between and beneath the words. We follow images, sensations, and threads. We write into questions and our own wild becoming.
Sometimes an old story needs to be questioned, dismantled, or reimagined. Sometimes we need to eulogize it. Other times, there are fruits to harvest, preserve, and savor. And always, there are new seeds to plant. There will be stories that we are blooming into.
Hearth and Wheel is a home for this exploration
through myth and fairy tale, embodied and creative writing, seasonal practice, and rites of passage with women, children, families, and communities.
Currently open: the Fall Story Writing Immersion & StoryBody Facilitator Training. Hearthkeepers (educational enrichment) and The Healing Hearth (one-on-one work) are taking shape — join the list to hear when they open.
A few additional threads…
I live in Boulder, Colorado with my partner, our teenage daughter, and two beloved cats, Acorn and Violet. I love learning new songs, weaving old stories into new shapes, and discovering the plants and wild wisdom of my home bioregion.
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