About Etched from the Soul
Some things are known by the soul
before the mind has language for them.
TWO WAYS IN
A life excavated,
layer by layer, into story.
My life as a river through stone,
with a question at each turn
for your own terrain.
A personal introduction
The why behind
Etched from the Soul
For most of this past year, I created privately. I wrote. (Somewhere along the way, I apparently decided I also needed a writers’ group.) I painted, printed, discarded, and began again, following work that kept asking more of me than I first understood. My office became part studio and part production floor: presses and cutters, rolling carts, stacks of paper, prototypes, and a steady line of deliveries. Everything disappeared when clients arrived and returned the moment they left.
Etched from the Soul is the outward expression of what has been cultivated within my inner sanctuary—a place where what is first sensed, tended, and formed in the soul is given incarnation through language, image, and tangible form.
For nearly a year, it was a gallery before it was a shop. You could walk through seas, thresholds, and altered shorelines and encounter the work without anything being asked of you. That was deliberate. I needed to remain close enough to the work to discover what was asking to be created, and to let what was forming inwardly find its fullest expression before it became something made to be held.
I think in layers. A word can open into a thought, the thought into another room, and that room into an entire universe of connection. My mind has always moved this way—following meaning beneath meaning, noticing relationships between things that may at first appear separate, and staying with an idea long enough to discover what else it contains. Trust has been cultivated over the years, and this way of knowing is part of how I listen, how I create, and how I understand the interior life.
Decades of biblical study and depth psychology have given that way of seeing a deeper structure. So have years of work in attachment and trauma, informed by Peter Levine’s somatic approach, Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal Theory, and Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems. Together, these disciplines taught me to look beneath the obvious question: to what the body carries, what the nervous system guards, what an inner part is protecting, and what meaning may be trying to emerge beneath the surface.
That same attention shapes how I create. Language asks a particular rigor of me. A single line can occupy me for days as I work to give it the precision and resonance that grief, faith, or love requires. I pursue beauty through deliberate attention to art, language, material—even a fold. Form itself becomes an invitation to participate in meaning, carrying something of the experience it accompanies.
Grief asks me to live what I have spent years helping others find language for.
Over these past several years, I lost two of my dearest soul connections, and I lost family. These losses altered my interior landscape. Creating these companions required me to keep meeting my own grief honestly.
Tides of Grief · an altered geography grew from that reckoning: a way of companioning grief from within its changed terrain, rather than speaking about it from the shore.
Love makes absence consequential.
Everything I make is meant to sit beside what a person carries, not to contain it.
What began inwardly is now taking form in the hand. Tides of Grief · an altered geography is nearing its first release: a contemplative Atlas, a deck of companions for the movements of grief, and a Mini Companion, gathered into a folio. I printed the earliest folios in my own studio, then stitched, trimmed, scored, folded, and assembled each one by hand. Making them this way became its own kind of apprenticeship. Those first folios taught me not only how the work wanted to be made, but what it would require of me to bring it fully into the world.
In September 2026, I entered another apprenticeship, a two-year Print School to deepen the craft I first learned by hand and to understand how to carry that work well beyond what two hands can make.
For me, that is also a practice of release: learning what can be entrusted to other capable hands, making room to give more of myself to writing, creating, listening, and meeting people in genuine human connection.
The woman who writes this is not the woman who began it a year ago, and she will not be the woman who writes the next version. Like the shoreline, I am shaped by every tide that reaches me.
What stays constant is the listening: to my own soul, to the people I companion, and to the work itself as it reveals what it is becoming.
