In my childhood, I was probably seven or eight years old, I moved to the south where creationism is against, you know, whether there’s dinosaurs or whether there was, you know, Adam and Eve. And somehow I just was able to mesh those stories together. I was already playing with story. I was able to ascertain that they weren’t real, that they were metaphor and allegory. And I could find the beauty in the stories, even at that very young age. There was always this curiosity and I could find God in everything, in the nature. I just adopted this curiosity about life and finding magic in everything and beauty and everything.

True art is an expression of yourself, and you’re putting yourself out there. The beautiful stuff, the ugly stuff, the happy stuff, the scary stuff. So I started doing collage workshops and that really combined my love of words with my love of image and art. And what I found that was so curious and fascinating to me was that when people did a collage, if they put words in the class, like cut out words like, you know, friend, family, happy love, hate, the mind would hone in. And that collage was about those three words and nothing else. And the mind didn’t expand.

I started teaching classes where I didn’t allow words, but don’t allow words because when you have a picture, the picture will tell a story because our minds naturally try to make sense of things and we start seeing things. And so one of my mantras for my process is every story you see in a piece tells a piece of your own story.

So I’ve been doing collage for a while, probably maybe five years when I met Dakota, and Dakota was a middle school teacher at that point. She had something she had to work to want to stop by her classroom. And so the halls were dark, the lights were all on and everything, and they must have had a project for the students, a collage project, the images of the kids, they had closed like photos themselves.

So Dakota is like a few steps ahead of me. I’d like to go tell me about this kid, because he had, like, his head was inside of a tiger’s mouth. And Dakota told me about this girl. It was like this hallway was whispering to me. It was just so fast. And because I was, like, getting this little autobiography as I’m walking down the hallway. And I think that was the moment that I really realized, a: what collage could do and b: and that I was a conduit for the language of art.

All these people and all these images offer breadcrumbs, little hints of where we want to go on our journey, what our journeys are, and methods of approaching those journeys and finding lessons in life.

I go to collage like I would go to church is to go to learn something is to have something revealed to me. I work purely from intuition. I don’t like having an idea of what you want to do because the images are so sacred that you’re just letting something magical and wise within you. Do the collage for you.

I teach people to just dabble in the mystery, so it becomes very journey oriented rather than result oriented, and that’s where the fun is. It’s such a gorgeous way of letting life come.

So a power she wants, like let the river bring you yellow leaf today in a, you know, a dead squirrel next week and just let life come to you. Use her however she wants to be. However she wants to stock the pantry. Just open that door and say what we got.

And what are we going to make with it?

I believe everything is within us. And this is just one of many, many, many techniques of tapping into your inner wisdom and letting God’s spirit universe speak through you and guide you.