In November 2019, I held my first exhibition, co-created with three other talented artists and friends. For me, the exhibition became the manifested creation and culmination of my own heroine’s journey and ‘dark night of the soul’ - having begun as early as in 2009 and come together in a mosaic of healing arts. During the past decade, I had received notebooks upon notebooks of poetry, songs and imagery, symbolic mandalas and archetypal illustrations - so when the final practicum of forest therapy training with Association for Nature and Forest Therapy (ANFT) included a ‘harvest project’, it felt natural to weave all the strings together in a shimmering tapestry of impressions from my own Source.
The Harvest Project became a journey to wholeness and a deep healing of my core wounds. While ecstatically roaming the forests of my childhood in newfound joy and wonder, my own paintings were made with a set of watercolours I got for my 9th birthday, and I painted them all in my cabin in Ula, Norway. The exhibition also included a market where I could display natural remedies and gift cards for forest therapy walks.
2019 became the year I began harvesting medicinal plants that opened for me on walks along the nordic coastline, forests, roads and mountains. I make them, but they also make me.. Through the dialogue with the plants, I have restored a deeper connection with my inner and outer nature and learned to listen to my body and the symbiosis that is created in the meeting with the essence and life force of the wild plants.. Their beings reveal themselves to me when I am in flow with my organic surroundings, often during or after forest bathing. Each wild plant has a biological and psychological effect on the mind and body, and infuse our organisms with source codes of wholeness.. This year, I have made tinctures of Mugwort, Rose Root, Dandelion Root and Chaga - infused with amethyst and rose quartz.. Together, the tinctures make up a nordic medicine-kit that keeps me healthy, radiant and flowing through winter.
With its core focus on deep embodiment and rooted experience, the practice of forest therapy has revealed my innermost essence and medicine, and re-attuned me to my senses, the power of council and the dialogue between my inner and outer nature. From an eagle’s view, it seems that ‘rising rooted’ is not only possible, but a golden key to navigating and mitigating the core challenges of today’s planetary challenges - leading to my next journey - regenerative leadership.
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The exhibition Source ‘R Us is a tribute to the sparkling light of the divine child; a result of the union of the masculine and feminine principles inside us. To our family, to our friends, to artistic rebellion and poetic wordplay. To letting go of expectations. To the unfolding of the world we want to live in - through each stroke of the brush and each act of compassionate co-creation. To innocent play and deep remembrance. And most of all a visual and sensory celebration of unconditional love, seen through the eyes and hands of the childlike soul.
We come together to evoke balance between primal wildness and healthy boundaries, the nourishing of our community with soft vulnerability over forced pressure, and to be seen in wholeness - honouring the individual and collective quest of doing the best we can with what we have. For after all, we all come from the same Source.
