My artistic and ritual practices are, primarily, private endeavors. But they are also inextricably intertwined with my practice of the healing arts and the stuff of my life. Since these are all so bound up together, I do sometimes explicitly integrate art pieces into my healing work or accept requests for devotionally inspired art. This might look like making a talisman for a patient, a painting for the birth of a child, or embroidery for a shroud.

There are so many connections between art, ritual, craft, and medicine. I could really go on about this spider web of connectivity forever. The fiber arts, for example, have deeply informed my practice of acupuncture. While at TCM school, my first herbalism mentor introduced me to making cordage, to spinning bits of string from plant fiber. It opened a new door into exploring the felt-sense-hand-knowledge embedded in both Traditional Chinese and Tibetan Medicines. In that same program, when asked why our herbalism textbook referred to the “channels” as “warps,” one of my professors explained that the Chinese character that we translate into English as “meridian” or “channel” contains the silk radical. So, the translator made the slightly unusual translation choice to translate that character as “warp”, in order to underscore the metaphor that our channels give form and structure to our bodies, like the warp does to a woven piece of cloth. It made me wonder, what does a hand that knows the weight and tension of cordage, or a yarn, or a lute string know about an acupuncture channel, that an untrained hand might not? And how might touching into this hand-knowing connect to the ancestors and lineage holders, across millennia, who embedded this understanding in the living world?

And don’t even get me started about compost..

I accept a limited number of commissions for devotionally or ritually inspired pieces per year. To find out more about what that process entails, please inquire.