Root Story

Cat Gibbs

Hummingbird Ears with Nothing to Offer

Cat did not come easily to the path of grief ritual holding. Her response to wounding as a young girl was to shut down her capacity to feel, in both heart and body. Over the past year, she has stepped up into a strong leadership role, holding the seat of design and ritual flow.  Much to her own trembling surprise, Cat is finding both an intuitive ritual competency and the strong voice of eldership.

Over the past two decades, Cat has traveled rocky roads inwardly and outwardly: diving deep into nature connection and cultural repair with Wisdom of the Earth Wilderness School, journeying with plant medicine, and apprenticing in grief tending and ritual literacy with Randy & Rowena Jones.  Along the way, she has gathered powerful tools of witnessing, tending both herself and others, and holding the big picture at the same time. No simple task.

Community members frequently seek Cat out for personal and relational anchoring, her capacity for deep listening, her long acquaintance with shame and shame resilience, her warm and joyful heart, and her trauma-informed approach, above all for the safe space she holds.

Cat has spent over ten years working for SelfDesign Learning Community as an Educator, mentoring and supporting parents in unravelling their deeply held beliefs around children, parenting, school, and learning.

Belinda White

Belinda is a deep nature connection mentor and guide for children and adults in Vancouver and beyond, a skilled photographer, and a passionate storyteller who lives and breathes the art and magic of weaving with image and word.

She dwells at the potent intersections of story, nature connection, inner tracking, earth arts and cultural repair through writing, poetry, workshop and ritual. Belinda came to this work through the profound struggles of raising a child through divorce and without an extended village. Along the way there have been two enduring questions: What is it that connects us deeply to life? Can the trauma of disconnection be repaired?

Belinda’s desire is to weave a basket of belonging and she tends to ritual space with a sensitivity and care especially for those who fall through the cracks. These past 5 years, she has deepened her study of mythic storytelling, applying the old tales as medicine, deep listening, inner tracking, grief tending and council practice. Belinda is immeasurably grateful to Wisdom of the Earth, Jon Young, Randy and Rowena Jones, Malidoma Some, and the many Youngians, Mythologists, and poets that have carried the seeds of deep imaginal connection forward to these times.
 

Visit Belinda on Instagram and Facebook @applestarphoto @theTwiningTrail 
@apple_star_learning

See more of her photography and writing
https://applestarphoto.com
https://substack.com/@thetwiningtrail

Stevie Chernish

Stevie’s winding journey has taken her on many walks of life, wearing many faces. And so, she welcomes those folks who live apart from the mainstream narratives that often dominate our colonial culture. Stevie is a fortress of reckoned silence who holds a fire to light the way for fellow travellers carrying heavy burdens of rejection, abandonment, those queering the in-between, the confusing places of dark and light, traversing the skin into the hollow bone.

Immersed in the 8 shields lineage, School of Lost Borders, and the work of Bill Plotkin, Stevie is also indebted to her studies of ritual, moon, and dream work carried by such as Randy and Rowena Jones, Meladome Somé, Dallal Olver, and Michelle Cunningham. Her passion for culture-building flows through her Death Café offerings and her counselling practice. Stevie welcomes the lost art of grieving and nature connection back to modern times. Stevie weaves together strands of tradition and intuition to craft spaces that hold sacred grief and support others to be welcomed in their many selves. 
 

Stevie knows the territory of loss oh so well. A forever quester in the dark woods on the search for belonging, she seeks to find the Deeper Holder. She courts this great Mystery with a dedication, fixing her eyes on the North Star, and inviting us all to explore what death, in its many forms, takes from us and what it offers us.
 

www.steviechernishcounselling.com

Robyn Fila

The map is not the territory.

Who am I? A traveler, a mother, a teacher, a learner, a mentor, a weaver of tales, a disciple of life, a speaker of tongues and part ocean.

Hailing from a long line of dissidents and truth tellers, I come by my ways honestly and have a strong line of Slavic women at my back.

In my work as a program manager and instructor at the University of Victoria, I am as committed (if not more so) to unlearning and unraveling as I am to learning in a traditional sense. My work in experiential learning crosses epistemological, ontological, mythical, geographical and temporal boundaries. I track the edges, boundaries, containment and the protection of spaces.  I am comfortable holding questions without simple answers and I like going off script.

 In love and in grief, with grit, grace and guile.

Sequoia Lesosky

Following his cry for village, Sequoia has become an embodied specimen of a human devoted to be in service to the collective health. His gifts work like the fungi, sometimes unseen, but connecting people to vital nutrients that keeps them thriving. 

Humble as fungi, he loves to support others in finding their authentic roars and cries. He brings deep love, care and harvestable dedication to ritual and community containers.

Li Samadhi

Li is a compassionate and intuitive space holder for grief rituals.  She co-creates a safe, grounded environment for people to express and process their emotions. With an understanding of the transformative power of ritual, Li brings a nurturing presence that allows for vulnerability and healing.

 As the lead drummer in the ritual, she uses rhythm and sound as sacred tools to guide participants through their emotional journeys, creating a rhythmic heartbeat that connects everyone in the space. Her drumming weaves together the collective energy, helping to anchor the group in the moment and amplify the release of grief in a communal and supportive way.