Category: Inspiration

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Rediscovering Sari Dienes — Gratitude for My YouTube MFA

I am having one of those bittersweet, full-circle moments, the kind where disappointment and delight show up holding hands.

While going deep down the rabbit hole researching altered tins and assemblage artists, I landed on not one, but two videos about Sari Dienes. And suddenly I was hit with a realization:

How did I forget her?

I know I’ve seen Sari’s work before, likely in some New York museum or gallery when I was a teenager roaming the city hungry for art, I didn’t yet have language for. I remember being struck by her permission to use anything, flattened tin cans, driftwood, street rubbings, debris, as treasured material. Her rhythm felt familiar. Like a cousin I didn’t know I had.

And yet… I never truly clocked her. She was buried somewhere in the unlabeled vault of “things I’ve seen that shaped me before I knew they had.”

So yes, I am disappointed in myself for not being conscious of that connection earlier. For not honoring an influence sooner. For all the times I’ve spoken about assemblage without saying her name.

But oh, how grateful I am to meet her again now, not as a teenager looking up at art, but as an artist looking sideways across time, recognizing a fellow traveler.

This is why I thankful to the University of YouTube. My YouTube MFA studies are ongoing and fully immersive. Tuition is free but the tuition cost is humility, the willingness to admit that everything I think I know must be periodically burned down to make room for what I do not yet know.

I am learning to surrender certainty. To let curiosity guide me instead of credentials.

So here I am, deep in the tin shrine, reliquary, assemblage wormhole, and Sari Dienes has entered the chat like a long-lost friend tapping me on the shoulder saying:

“I’ve been waiting for you to notice.”

And now that I have, I’m listening.

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Lenore Tawney: A Glimpse into Her Studio

Lenore Tawney redefined how we see textiles, lifting them beyond craft into the realm of fine art. Watching archival footage of her in her Coenties Slip studio in New York City, circa 1960, long before I was born, feels like being granted a window into history.

Technology allows me to sit here decades later and witness her world: the light streaming in by her favorite chair, a feisty cat chasing stray strings, drawers of yarn meticulously sorted by color. These small, intimate details make my heart sing.

The clip also stirs memories of my own time in Jersey City, working in my 150 Bay Street studio overlooking the Hudson River. Like Tawney, I found inspiration in both the view and the rhythm of everyday studio life. Her practice reminds me how the simplest gestures, thread, light, and place, can transform into something transcendent.

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St. Hildegard of Bingen: Mystic, Maker, Medicine Woman

St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) was a German mystic, composer, writer, healer, and abbess, one of the most remarkable women of the Middle Ages. A visionary and Doctor of the Church, she integrated spiritual insight with music, natural medicine, and ecological wisdom.

She authored major theological works based on her visions, composed over 70 original chants (writing both music and lyrics), and produced texts on healing, botany, and natural history. Hildegard’s holistic approach saw the body, mind, and spirit as deeply interconnected, and her remedies drew from plants, food, and elements of nature.

Lately, I’ve been immersing myself in her world listening to her celestial chants, reading her herbal remedies, testing her recipes, and studying her illuminations. Her work is more than historical, it feels like a living lineage, a call to remember the sacred intelligence of the body, the earth and spirit.

A fierce intellect and spiritual force, Hildegard spoke truth to power and left behind a body of work that still inspires mystics, artists, and healers like me today.

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Salting Grief and Grace

In both Japanese funerary rites and Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices, salt is a sacred purifier, used to ward off evil spirits and cleanse the lingering energy of death. Whether sprinkled outside the home after a funeral or offered at an ancestral altar, salt marks the boundary between the living and the dead. I grew up throwing salt over my shoulder, into fire, or into moving water, a ritual of release and banishment, echoing traditions that span oceans and generations.

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Illuminations and New Sight

Ever since I got my new reading glasses, I’ve been powering through my reading list with fresh eyes, literally and spiritually. This morning, I finished Illuminations by Mary Sharratt, a luminous novel about Saint Hildegard von Bingen, the 12th-century mystic, composer, healer, and visionary.

Magical vocal arrangements

Her story is so inspiring. Hildegard’s fierce devotion to divine creativity, her bold voice in a patriarchal world, and her communion with the natural world, echo so much of what I’ve been reaching for in my own practice. Her visions, wild, vivid, unapologetically feminine, remind me that there is sacred power in speaking what only you can see.

Hildegard’s legacy is a radiant thread in the life I’m building now, of ritual, plant medicine, and ancestral memory. I didn’t expect a book to shift my inner tempo, but Illuminations has done just that. More soon. There’s work to do in the garden.

Theda

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The Saman Tree Speaks

There’s a Saman Tree at Sky Garden Retreat that has been calling out quietly for years.

Its wide, sheltering canopy hums with memory. Its roots grip the land like knuckles holding on to something sacred. When the wind moves through its branches, it feels like a whisper, like someone long gone is trying to tell me something important.

This tree is not just a tree. It is a witness. A keeper of stories. A sentinel for the land and the lives that have passed through it.

I’ve invited the team from the Black Heritage Tree Project to visit Sky Garden and meet the Saman Tree for themselves. They are here on St. Croix mapping and honoring the trees that have borne witness to Crucian history, especially the brutal and beautiful legacy of Black freedom, survival, and spirit.

There’s also an old gravity-fed well tucked into the ghut below, mostly hidden now by vines and time. But it’s there. Like the tree, it’s part of a story that refuses to be forgotten.

I don’t know everything this tree has seen, but I know how it makes me feel: grounded, protected, watched over. I know that when I stand beneath its limbs, I feel connected to something much older than myself, something enduring.

This visit isn’t about documentation alone. It’s about reverence. Listening. Remembering. And sharing space with something ancient that still lives and breathes beside us.

If you’ve ever loved a tree, you know what I mean.