Coming from a background in community organizing and community based education, I see the classroom as a space made up of relationships, and relationships as the place where healing happens, as well as a place of deep learning. While there will be spaces where I am sharing in a lecture or workshop based format, much of our exploration of what is shared will be collective dialogue - rather than simply me sharing with you. While there is no requirement to share, this is a space where I hope all will feel that their insights and experiences are welcome and valued.

While each session is recorded, I think of the course as an invitation to be with each other in grief and our desire to support others in grief. All this to say, you’ll probably get more out of it and feel more connected to the course if you plan to attend most classes live- though this isn’t a requirement, and there are ways to participate via our discord for those unable to make it live.

Every thing in our class is an invitation and optional, and choice is central. There are many ways to participate and no one right way. Listening to your body, your resistances, your excitement and interest will be encouraged throughout our course.

Grief is given a place at the table in our class discussions and check ins, but also in the design of this course, which is designed for those us who feel profoundly changed by our grief.

We will also be creating space to share about our joys, and to lean into those places in our lives where we feel nourished - to tend to the both/and of our grief/joy, and the relationship between the two.

This class is an invitation to really welcome ourselves and our grief however it arrives, emerges, and changes, and to let it be the vast, shapeshifting landscape of experience that it is.

Sinking into our relationships with plants teaches us so much about practicing the art of sensing, noticing, slowing down enough to give plants and our bodies and the places we live our attention. Remembering that we are already being held. Opening to nuance and not knowing. Opening to the possibilities of care and mutual aid between species, to being “stopped in our tracks in wonderment” of the ecosystems we find ourselves in and the beings we share them with (Queer Nature). And that noticing, remembering, opening, sensing, becoming re-enchanted to the world is in itself incredible medicine. This class is an invitation to embrace slowness and the possibility of enchantment as medicine, and see what doors that opens for grief support from plants, their wisdom, and their stories.

Instead of rooting our creative practices in capitalist expectations of endless productivity, at the expense of ourselves and the earth, we can have creative practices that look more like ecosystems. We can root our creative practice in attunement to ourselves and others, with seasons and cycles of growth and decay.

With the plants as guides and collaborators, we get to make our creative process a process of attuning to the world and ourselves.