Roots and Branches

the theory and practice of living a creative life.

Roots + Branches

Posts

  • You’re being asked to forget your power for a reason

    Creativity, as a regular and expanding practice, is the key to calling our power back. “Hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced.If we really want to understand this situation, we have to begin by understanding that for decades we have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of…

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  • Take 60% off my 9-month creativity group coaching program

    Hello friends! As some of you know, next month Symbiosis starts: it’s 9 months of creative expansion, grounding, energy work and intuition. It’s like a coaching program, MFA, artist’s residency, energy work space, science lab, and mystery school all rolled into one. Each month, we engage in expansion activities, grounding, practical nuts-and-bolts creative coaching, and…

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  • two quick practices for wayfinding with your desires and dreams

    It’s wild out there. For those of you know who me personally or have followed my work closely for a while, you know it’s wild in my own world too: A time of transition for myself, alongside pretty much everyone else on the planet, alongside all our systems and structures we’re used to (for better…

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  • Increasing our capacity for wonder: Or things we learn in dreams

    Digital collage, Julia Skinner, 2025 (scroll down for why I chose Mugwort) A decade or so ago, I used to write about things you learn in dreams. Inspired by Gary Burnett, one of my professors and dissertation committee members, who regularly wrote Facebook posts sharing the wild and wonderful lessons from his own dreamscape (and…

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  • Imagination and capacity: Some practices to meet the moment in all your creative possibilities, rage, and joy

    In the past few days, we as Americans (and as members of our interconnected world, wherever you’re reading from) have moved into a new stage of our collective experience. As a historian, I know this is all part of a continuum. An evolution of groundwork laid over years, decades, and centuries aimed at oppression and…

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  • Despairing about the state of the world may feel rational, but these are irrational times Everyone I’ve been talking to lately is moving through a sort of oscillation, wavering between intense hopelessness and sadness (personally or collectively) and a deep, unflappable knowing that everything is going to be ok. It’s a jarring feeling, particularly if…

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  • History requires us to be active participants in its creation.  We aren’t just passive consumers of history, but active creators. Our daily decisions, our habits, from what we eat to who we engage with to our sleep patterns, clothing, and job schedules all become patterns that connect to the ways we define a given age.…

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  • We are living in a liminal moment. For the last few months, maybe a bit longer, everyone I’ve spoken to has seemed almost at the threshold of something.  Some element, or maybe even most elements, of their life as it was have crumbled away, and while in most cases we recognize this crumbling as an…

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