Nothing is outside of the creative process. Our emotions, our ancestors, our relationship to spirit, the ecologies and intersectionalities we live within: all of it can be included in our creative alchemy to meet the complexity of our times.
My relationship with rivers has been life-long. The inquiry that I am currently tending in California began in Minnesota almost 10 years ago, channeling in relationship with the Mississippi River and her consorts: the Minnesota, St. Croix, and Vermillion Rivers. I wrote about one of these moments of channeling in my Embodiment Studies graduate thesis years ago in This Mutual Shaping, when the river spoke through my body as I danced barefoot in the mud:
All alivenesses, no matter how constrained physically, are still dancing in response... A part of this dance, a part of what you longed to have been told by elders, and long have been held within, a part of this dance is agency through contact, is your ability to find the subtle ways in which you can choose a response.
This is what we will be doing in the RESOURCE workshop series, donation-based in-person events happening over the next four months in Los Angeles. This series is a participatory journey into the living heart of my PhD inquiry and Mental Health Coordinator Capstone project: catalyzing a paradigm shift to include support for personal and collective transformation within creative industries.
I just moved to Los Angeles this summer, called by the ocean and by this place where movies emerged in Southern California, stories rippling out to shape our culture. When I arrived at the place I’m staying at in Culver City, just down the block from a Sony Pictures movie studio, one of the first things I did was orient to the nearest body of water. I found Ballona Creek ten minutes walk away, a concretized body of water that flows through Los Angeles to the Pacific.
As is common for me in processes of ecological attunement, the land began speaking to me and shaping my relationship with it in ways I wasn’t consciously aware of.
This body of water found me in two different places. In Culver City where I walk to sit under the bridge and sing to the water or mediate, the Ballona is wrapped in concrete: a tiny trickle ankle deep and stagnant, park workers driving trucks along the riverbed to pull debris from the water.
But I also discovered that the beach that I love going to in Venice (the one place where they seem to be lowkey chill with dogs on the sand) was right next to where Ballona Creek releases into the ocean. And between the concrete channels and the ocean is the Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve, where the creek becomes marsh, flooding and shapeshifting in all the ways that it needs in its process of filtration. It’s wild the change in this same creek after moving through the wetlands, the current is full bodied and strong as it opens outwards into the ocean.
Connecting with water always feels like coming home for me. Even if the flow is siloed in concrete. It’s still a body of water I can sing to. Still a being with consciousness, with aliveness, with a destination, a systemic attractor moving toward the ocean.
The concrete rivers are a sacrifice zone, which has been the core of my PhD research and my creative practice: an inquiry into patterns that are polysemous, like pharmakon, holding both poison and medicine.
Sacrifice Zone are “a political ecology of life and death, the goal of which is to concentrate death in some places so that other places might experience full, sustainable life.” (i.e. superfund sites, clear cut forests, polluted oceans)…[The] concept of sacrifice, derived from the Latin “to make sacred,” is polysemous, signifying both violent victimization and sacred life. This explains why some activists have employed the sacrifice zone concept to generate a positive vision for transforming sacrifice zones into sacred zones.”—Ryan Juskus (2023)
Relationship to these places have always had the ability to go either way for humans, to be held in either an extractive relationship or a regenerative one.
This theme of what our ecological sacrifice zones can illuminate in our relationship to cosmology and creative process has been dreaming in me for months, as I looked for the right container for my PhD practicum project and my Mental Health Coordinator capstone. What emerged was an exploration of four elemental allegories, each holding a different layer of climate complexity embodied in the ecosystem of Los Angeles.
For a long time I didn’t know what to name this workshop series. I tried a bunch of names on during the design process, and then as I was creating the flyer for it, it coalesced into a naming of itself with the word RESOURCE. That word just dropped in, seemingly out of nowhere and said, “this is what I’m called.” And though I hadn’t been consciously thinking about it, the name made so much sense to me because of that paradoxical non-dual dance between the two kinds of resource, both how we relate to resource through patterns of extraction within dominant culture and the ways our relationships can be regenerative through reciprocity with ecosystem, ancestors, and spirit.
This first workshop is RESOURCE THE RIVERS: the restoration of a circulatory system between creative wellbeing and collective complexity, a systemic inquiry into what happens when we turn toward the places that have been sacrificed, covered in concrete, the places where our fear of nature has become an existential threat because of choices made by previous generations. Los Angeles is built on a floodplain. It isn’t as simple as letting the rivers return to their natural patterns of flooding. There’s a whole other layer of contact and reciprocity that is needed now.
As I prepare for the first workshop, every few days now I’ve been going to this flowing body, Ballona Creek, walking there to sit with the concrete, to sing to the water, to listen, and to dream this offering. This podcast episode emerged as an expansion of this animate conversation.
If you’re local to Los Angeles, I hope you’ll consider joining me at the RESOURCE workshop this Friday, July 31st in Venice, CA. Or if you know anyone here who might resonate, please pass the word along. I’m also opening up my wider practice as a Relational Field Consultant, Systemic Constellations Facilitator, and Mental Health Coordinator for theatre, film and television. Over the next few months, I want to create deep connections with artists here who can invite me into their creative process as one who brings attunement to embodied wellbeing and collective transformation, supporting art that is alchemy for regeneration.
