spring time transmissions

on working with the monoliths of fear and pain

May 03, 2026

living in the transformations of time, watching chapters “end” but really just proliferate into their new forms, taking cues from the innate wisdom of all living organisms. what’s that quote about how the only constant is change. thinking about this in the context of fear and pain, a place where movement ceases. where the fear and pain replicate embodied shadows through time, existing to preserve the moment and prevent change with the caring intention of protection. maybe this is why spring feels like such an antidote, encouraging growth, nurturing the capacity to sit with the feelings. bringing air, movement into those original emotional monoliths. dusting them off, allowing oxygen to gently perforate their surface, reminding themselves of their porous capacity, suddenly finding wiggle room in their footing, loosening their anchor into the terrain. from this place in my life, i visit the monoliths with the hopes that through the loving presence of the present they(i) will soften and see themselves into their new forms, again and again.

are we all consciously and unconsciously integrating our experiences of love, loss, grief, and joy all the time?

Mar 28, 2026

a diagram of a semantic atom for all my freaky quantum heads, read more here. tldr; the article proposes a tiny, formal “unit of meaning” (semantic atom) that links emotions, colors, and decision-making using quantum maths, building a bridge between psychology+natural sciences.

In this inquiry, I am referring to emotional integration - the acknowledging&processing of emotions/experiences, particularly hard ones, however I also find myself also wondering about the integration of positive emotions/experiences—love, joy. We often unconsciously default on processing the hard, but what does it mean to integrate the positive? Can either take place without intention?

A lack of emotional integration can feel jarring, invasive—coming at you from the outside in. Integration can feel accepting, compassionate, from within. Some days I feel it all whirling around me(hearing Philip Glass’ Dance score) through me, other days it feels like a part of me. Some days it feels as though the world is coming at me, and other days it’s me coming to the world. Someone once described an un-integrated experience/feeling exists as an island that when brushed up on, feels as though you are thrown back there, with no bridges to connect you back to land. Integration is the building of the bridges, the ease of movement between you and the emotions/experience. (recommended reading relating to departure from existing systems, re-contextualizing the “glitch” Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russel. for the french philosophy lovers, Line of Flight by Deleuze and Guattari). There is a part of me that wants to question integration, to understand integration as erasure of the emotion its trying to integrate, to relate integration as compliance, however I remind myself this is inherently not how integration works and recognize this is a protective response. Regardless, I honor the choice to not lean into integration, everyone is the author of their own story.

Below is an un-edited list of all the responses received when I asked people on instagram “Curious what helps support you while/in integrating experiences of loss and grief and joy and love?”.

Warmly,

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The joie de vivre returns to me in waves in the form of the most mundane imagery.

Jun 20, 2025

Musing in the parking lot. That thing is happening where I’ve been looking at and thinking about photographs and now it’s all I can see. Everything is a photo and it’s annoying but special. The joie de vivre returns to me in waves in the form of the most mundane imagery.

In my teens and most of my twenties, I existed mostly in this space. All I could see were photographs around me. Over the years, as my field of vision expanded into other medias/mediums it would oscillate between them and in more recent years, on none of them. Expanding my world into a different professional realm that is not directly tied to art-making gives me more space to observe in a new way, but also provides me the space to pause and also through that space realize and understand just how special it is to be an artist at mind.

When I oscillate from non-art field of vision to art field-of-vision, it feels like a gift and feels like the string that connects me to purpose is plucked, vibrating. In feeling connected to my own sentient experience I then feel connected to others around me. This trained eye I devoted so much time to early on helps connect me to the spectacle of living. It is a gift and a means in which I process, reflect, interpret everything in and around me.

It is everything, a mine-forever thing, here unconditionally to keep me company, here forever in on some cosmic joke. In that profound simplicity the noise that pulls in and out around it (external elements, recognition, social media, gallery, financial gain) feels inconsequential.

print available through Song Cave annual fundraiser & update

Mar 22, 2024

hi friends, writing to share that Song Cave is having their annual fundraiser which offers 5x7” c prints from so many wonderful artists and poets for $75 each - I have a print available but encourage you to browse all the offerings available for three more days - LINK HERE

While I have you here I’d also like to share that I am still open for custom print sales or commissions however I’m operating on a different turnaround time these days - some may know so apologies if this is old news, I am almost to the end of my first year back at school, finishing my undergrad degree likely followed by a masters, in social work (i will note that custom print sales are a wonderful and greatly appreciated way to support me as a student while i make it through school in financially precarious times, email me).

It’s funny the many directions lifes winds take us, always here if you want to connect.

Speed of Trust

Aug 08, 2023

(trigger warning) Part of being made to feel so small through adolescence is that when you are forced to let silence shape you, fear takes up so much of that space. Speaking vulnerably about things that are not concrete or are new to me activates a part of my nervous system that has been conditioned to feel fear and danger, my body and voice are often halfway out the door in the first minute. It’s taken years to get to a point where I feel capable and equipped to turn my attention to this and find different on-going ways to re-shape this part of me. Disavowing and internalizing my own experience and feelings at the command of an abuser for over a decade nurtured an often disappearing person. This left me especially vulnerable to further harm as an adult.

It’s important to state that it’s our society that helped shape, support and protect a person who could do this kind of harm and particularly to a child (there is little that is unique in this experience). The same society that has helped create and support conditions where access to healing is its own kind of privilege.

If for not having access to resources over the years I don’t know that I could have reached the same place I am today. When I speak and my voice shakes now, the fear goes all the way back to kid-amanda. At 31, many of the communication pieces have been untangled and I’ve experienced a kind of self-assurance and confidence that is new to me. However, it always seems like the game where new /old pieces appear only once the ones in front of you have been seen and heard. I suspect this will always be the case but with less frequency over time.

The aim is to be able to step into fear, vs fear stepping into me. Recently I went to a workshop led by artist and psychotherapist Julia Gladstone. It explored group-as-a-whole dynamics, “Group-as-a-whole theory posits that when individuals form a group, the resulting union becomes an entity in its own right with a sum greater than its parts”. I didn’t know what to expect, but I was curious by the prompt and trust the facilitator. “Whatever it is, it will be good for me and those around me”. Being in workshop felt like holding my nervous system in my hands, practicing willingness and consent in feeling fear and in feeling it not alone.

Coalescing in the background was the possibility that this was about re-learning fear, not as fear equals bad but fear equals fear. That fear is OK and like any emotion, an informational tool.

Being present in a space means witnessing others arrive to a moment and witnessing a moment arrive to others, myself included. In this particular space, we framed observations as our stories, the person speaking being the source of the story. For me, bolstering the idea of authorship and that we are allowed to have stories. Stories are ways we as beings can affirm ones self, overlap, connect and belong. Thinking about the group dynamic in this context lead me to consider echolocation. Echolocation is the location of objects by reflected sound, a guiding tool. I thought about how humans use sound and story to locate one another, locate/reflect community and a sense of belonging. This then made me think about the inherent trust there is in moving through the world this way, trusting in the reflected sounds, stories, narrative.

I considered how moving through the world this way might be more challenging/complicated for someone whos ability to trust themselves and others has been impacted, broken. How can someone trust others if they cannot trust themselves? It’s an understatement to say that we need trust in our self and in others to have a rich and shared quality of life. In addition we must be able navigate betrayal of trust and a re-building of it when it is broken, because it is human to make mistakes. There is no sustainability in trust that is precarious. When you have learned that the door is either all the way open or all the way closed, doing the opposite and trying to find the inbetween can be severely triggering. I don’t ever blame anyone for avoiding doing so.

In workshop, I witnessed layers peel back slowly as we moved through exercises, sat with feelings. Willingness building trust, I sensed it growing in the room and how it changed the energy. The source of this story is about this experience as a whole but also a particular nonlinear moment in this space. By this point a shared discomfort felt like it had bubbled to the top and now hung heavy in the air and in our bodies.

This shift changed the environment, whatever sounds from the outside world had been reverberating into the room had stopped and the sun light felt as though it had been yanked out, convinced that I could see a faint imprint of where it had been just moments prior.

I sat there in our circle, feeling uncomfortably torn between fear, the desire to share and be seen, and the anxiety of missing the opportunity (an emotional landscape someone else in the circle had so perfectly previously described). Sitting in this feeling I felt increasingly untethered, foggy. Someone in the group arrived to their moment, and then to my surprise delivered me to mine. In hindsight, within this workshop all of my previous moments lead/delivered me to this present moment, where a stranger looked to me with curiosity in how to continue through this shift we felt congealed in. I felt surprised, then affirmed, seen. My voice shook as I spoke and I felt a shadowed urgency to get everything out..in time for I don't know what.

My body felt fear and panic but my mind was with me in this present moment, I was both speaking from and challenging the kid-amanda place. I felt a swelling embarrassment sneaking in for how much I was visibly and audibly struggling. However, being in a space with others who were willingly stepping into fear created a palpable vulnerability and courage. Words fell out of my mouth, trying to stretch over the cracks so as not to fall in, I spoke about echolocation in this context and about our amazing capacity to create and cultivate trust out of thin air. How it felt to witness trust moving through the room with us and how fast it could move shifting us from place to place - and how having faith in That: the speed of trust: Movement, could allow/deliver us out of this feeling we felt convincingly stuck in. My nervous system was on high alert so it’s hard to remember exactly what happened after that, but I believe we did collectively move through that feeling and for me, come to a place of closure, reflection and release.

I thought, as though I was watching my younger self from the sidelines: I! am! Practicing! Trust! and Fear! and it’s! OK!

My faith in Movement comes from my lived experience and experience in therapy the last seven years. Feeling like living proof that someone like me - a child who knew so much about feeling hurt and scared became a hurt and scared adult - can find healing and safety. Movement and integration feel hand in hand, integration allows for movement and movement allows for integration.

I’ve come to believe healing is all about movement, even when it is about stillness. It all feels so matter of fact now, but for a long time I had no idea I could be anything other than what I was - I was sadly manipulated into believing this for a long time but it should not be understated that trauma hinders ones ability to imagine.

Desperation levels reality, I found myself willing to risk it all (what felt like risking my own safety, health, family - what years of being blamed for my own harm will do) out of fear of what would happen to my self if I didn’t. The years that followed felt like so many things that words feel inadequate, it felt like imploding my life and family, like being trapped under/pushing around a simultaneously sharp and dense boulder, like constant re-traumatization. It felt this way over and over and over until eventually It didn’t, it feels this way far less now, and for years I wondered when it would.

Throughout those years navigating this, I struggled in the career path I had chosen and as a result often felt dispensable and like a failure. In hindsight I now know that freelancing is a relentless career and has a history of problematic behaviors towards the people who help make it all possible. It leaves me with admiration for those who work within it and advocate for themselves and their teams in spite of.

Eventually I found metrics of success that felt more aligned with my developed values. And eventually I found my center more and more and the boulder slowly lifted off and in its place there i was, a me who had been waiting for years to emerge. The beautiful thing is that my faith in Movement is really just faith in me.