The Weather Relatives blessed the Irish Festival and our reenactment of Anna Halprin’s Planetary Dance Ritual a couple of weeks ago. The rain clouds we’d been experiencing moved along fast enough so that participants avoided being rained on and the entire event avoided being rained out. We were also grateful that what’s been happening lately in many parts of planet earth didn’t happen, that the morning rainstorms did not flood the venue at Arts Landing and the Great Lawn we were to dance on.

We were not spared challenging weather, however. The heat, humidity, and glaring sun insured that the ritual would be a challenge for the witnesses and an ordeal for those running, jogging, walking, or dancing during it. In rituals as in life, challenges and ordeals are often present. Outcomes are determined by how we meet them.

The theme of taking care of ourselves as we would be serving the demands of the ritual score moved to center stage for me as we gathered, sheltered from the sun under a blue awning at the side of the performance space. We met and chatted with some participants we didn’t know and greeted with hugs the ones we did. For our InterPlay community, it felt like a school reunion with people showing up that we’ve known for so long but had not seen lately.

Some people were wearing sun hats, some deciding to use sunscreen, and people were helping one another apply it. As we were tying on the yellow bandanas that identified us as performers and finding places to secure our belonging, someone asked, “Are sunglasses ok?” Leader Alyssa responded, “Mine are staying on me. I’ve got glaucoma.” Meanwhile, trying to prepare myself to meet the demands of staying hydrated in these circumstances I became aware that I was clutching my water bottle like a toddler with her binkie, refusing to put it down. A garden hose or yard sprinkler was what I most wished for. I was picturing a possible finale for the event ––all of us running into the nearby Allegheny River, though the arresting officers performing their duty would surely spoil the mood of that moment.

In Anna Halprin and her husband Laurance’s work, valuation is the feedback phase in their RSVP Cycle. It combines “value” (the benefits, the highlights, what worked, what was achieved) and “action” (what have we learned, what would we do differently next time.) The reflection we do after the ritual is meaning making. Garrett had suggested we think of this first time doing the Planetary Dance as scattering seeds that will bring forth opportunities to do the peace ritual repeatedly in the Pittsburgh region. So, it’s important to ask one another, “How will we adjust the project moving forward?”

We’ve not done this process with the core participants yet and I look forward to engaging in that part of the process, though it may be a significant challenge to find a mutually convenient time for the group to gather. I’ve been writing in my journal my own experiences of the ritual and its effect, so I’ll be able to bring that to mind when we do have our valuaction meeting.

Here are some highlights and favorite moments

-I loved the metaphor and actuality of having the opening procession begin on an uphill path with a slight incline. Walking to the starting position behind the flags that will mark the 4 directions made it clear that we were entering ceremonial space.

-Recognizing the markings on the grass and seeing that they were clear encouraged me to think we could do better here than we’d done in the studio as far as keeping our spacing and the structure of the mandala we were to create intact. And we did.

- When the Elders slowly took their seats in the center of the circle by the drums followed by the contrast of the freewheeling energetic movements of the children, it felt important – epic in fact.

-Honoring of The Four Directions – Many tribes and ethnic groups have versions of this ceremony so it felt right, sense this ritual was a part of the Pittsburgh Irish Festival, that we used the Irish version. In the execution of the InterPlay form the Gesture Choir, members of the choir had to cross the circle lines to get close enough together to perform as a gesture choir. I’d originally written out different directions, marking on the map where dancers were to stand so, next time, I know a way we can do it that won’t interrupt the energy of the mandola. This was a great example of in the moment, letting go of the plan and doing what’s possible to complete the action of the score.

Other difficulties and discoveries–

I knew we were supposed to be facing out of the circle – standing as pillars facing away from the drums but, we all faced into the circle. Thinking about it now, the energy of the drums was where the action was, and we could not resist that. At one point later in the dance, when there were so many people who had joined us from the festival, big burly boys, slender teenage girls, people carrying babies, people pushing walkers, people who had just a bit earlier been learning Irish dancing, I found myself standing in the standing place in the center, looking toward the outside, watching up close so many people as moved in front of me. We saw one another, really saw one another. Most smiled and many sang together, the chant, ‘every step a prayer, ‘every step a prayer.”

Art of Grieving Retreat Oct

I take to poetry to describe what happened next.

Entering the ritual outdoor space,

I step bravely across the threshold.

With arms outstretched overhead,

I enter the circle.

Speaking in my loudest outdoor voice

I make a declaration, a dedication.

“I’m dancing on behalf of my friend Michele

and elders in Pittsburgh, that we may

provide spaces of comfort and caring for

them as they live out the last days,

the last hours of their lives.”

Two weeks later, to the day, I visit Michele

in a beautiful private room, picture window

overlooking a forest view. She’s not

supposed to be here. This room is

reserved for patients who private pay.

But thanks to much help from angels,

both local and beyond, she is here.

And so am I. She’s resting, and I’m dancing.

‘when enough people move with a common pulse with a common purpose, an amazing force takes over - a power that can renew, inspire, teach, create and heal.’ Anna Halprin

A month or so ago I met a young Irish dancer in the convoluted way you meet people in places like Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. A musician that plays singing bowls for sound healing sent out a notice about her collaboration with an Irish dancer––Garrett Murphy Coleman. His mother is an Irish dance who has had a long association with two dancers in my InterPlay troupe, as well as to a woman I recently met from a nearby university. Garrett was holding two free Pathways to Peace movement workshops. He would be using Anna Halprin’s work that celebrates the healing power of dance through community rituals. My husband and I had to sign up.

Anna has been such a major influence on our work as mental health professionals, down to the movement room we designed for the behavioral health clinic we founded in 1987 in Fort Worth Texas, Iatreia Institute for the Healing Arts. In the 70’s I traveled to Northern California multiple times to work with Anna, once bringing Rich with me shortly after he and I met in Nebraska. Later in the early 90’s I returned to participate with Anna in her community ritual “Dancing with Life on the Line.” In 1991, this community ritual of 100+ participants addressed the HIV/AIDS global crisis. My own gay son had not been diagnosed yet, but my concern about him made the issue something I was willing to dance on behalf of. Rich, our son, Ken, pregnant daughter, Corinne and son-in-law Bill traveled to Marin County California to join me and witnesses our performance ritual.

Garrett was born in Pittsburgh and had traveled the world as a professional dancer. He told me a story familiar to most professional athletes and dancers, that such activities had “totally wrecked his body.” Finding Anna’s work changed the direction of his life and his art-making career. She became his teacher and role model through her writings, and the videos showing her still teaching up, to and past her 100th birthday. Her daughter Daria is now also Garrett’s teacher as she continues the dance as healing art curriculum she and her mother did together all these many years ago.

Anna’s contribution to the field of dance

Anna’s own life led her to move away from the stylized type of choreography of popular modern dancers of her time like Martha Graham, Hanna Holm, and Charles Widman. Her dance explorations involved increasing dancers’ somatic awareness of their own bodies and how their own bodies want to move. Also, Anna became fascinated with the effect specific movements had on the feelings of the dancers and their witnesses. One year I came to Anna’s workshop in San Francisco directly from participating in a two-week intensive dance workshop at the University of Utah. After a few rounds of stretching movements on the floor as part of her Movement Ritual Warm Up I complained to Anna that “my tears must be connected to every muscle in my body” because tears seemed to be generated by every movement I made. She smiled with an air of understanding and encouraged me to just “let your body express itself.” I pointed out that no one else in the room seemed to be crying and she said, “They will, they will.” I took this to mean that once the other students began doing the movements as full out as I had been doing them, given my having recent dance workshop, their bodies would begin expressing their emotions as well.

The body and the power of dance

For Anna, dance became a method of self-discovery and personal and communal expression. She often pointed out that although all art forms involve our bodies, dance is the only art where our bodies are the lone art-making instrument. When she discovered through self-scanning and imaging her own body, a disturbance in her belly, and doctors confirmed with their instruments that this was colon cancer, she became convinced of the effectiveness of dance as a healing art. She would tell her personal story as a kind of lecture in her studio and often stated “I must have thought I was invincible!

The first time I heard this expression, I was looking up at her from where I was sprawled out on the studio floor, and I noted my own level of overwhelming exhaustion from overworking and stressing myself in my personal life. I decided––I must have thought I was invincible too. Later this awareness took me in the direction of what turned out to be my first book, “The Dance of Self-Caring, Self-Healing: A playbook for people who do caring work.

What makes an event a ritual?

Out of habit we often refer to the people observing a movement ritual as the “audience,” but rituals don’t have audiences, they have “witnesses.” In InterPlay we warm up the people who have come to observe our performances which breaks the 4th wall in a theatre and brings people into the experience of noticing and holding space for what is being presented rather than setting back in judgement, expecting to be entertained.

How rituals work

Rituals are about change, moving from a situation of chaos to order, from fear to comfort, from feeling separate to connected. Community Movement Rituals change the participants and witnesses and through them, the world. Anna’s first ritual involved actions taken with her husband and some friends when a serial murderer had killed six women on the trails of Mount Tamalpais near their home in Marin County. No one would visit the once popular site, so they set out to visit the places where these atrocities had happened. Their healing intensions were to reclaim the fear-stricken outdoor space and transform community grief into an affirmation of peace. Shortly after this ceremony, the trail Killer was found and people returned to the mountain and its state park. This Circle the Mountain led to Circle the Earth peace rituals, another to address the HIV/Aids Crisis and eventually the Planetary Dance. Over the decades Planetary Dances have been staged by local leaders in over 50 countries.

In our present culture of division and suspicion, people in our Pittsburgh ritual will dance, run, jog and walk to cultivate the light of belonging. We will consecrate this art space as a space for all people of Pittsburgh and beyond to come together and express their creativity through movement and dance.

Your Invitation

If you live within driving distance of Pittsburgh, and the weather relatives are kind enough to have completed Saturday’s rainstorms by tomorrow afternoon, come join us Saturday August 8 from 4:30 to 6 pm at Arts Landing in downtown Pittsburgh. We’ll be gathering at the pickleball courts to warm up and share our intentions with one another. Wear white. Bring your intention (who you are wanting to dance or walk or run on stand on behalf of.) And if you miss this one, Garrett assures me this is only the beginning, the seed of what is to come to demonstrate the power of dance to transform our city and ourselves.

As someone who has supported me and my work as a grief advocate through Substack, I’m delighted to invite you to join me and Christine Gautreaux this coming October 22nd - 25th for our third Art of Grieving InterPlay Expressive Arts and Art-Making Retreat at Synergia Ranch & Retreat Center near Santa Fe, New Mexico.

So much has happened in our individual and collective lives since I first began writing about grief and the ways that the arts can help us process and transform ourselves and our lives through them. I’d love for you to have the opportunity to step away for a few days into a beautiful setting and community of like-minded folks, to playfully focus on your own creativity and what can come from all that has happened. Perhaps there is someone you would like to bring with you, in person, or in keepsakes and photos that bring them to mind.

I wanted to let you know that I added an early, early bird special for folks who registered before July 31st.

WHAT IS THIS RETREAT ABOUT?

The Art of Grieving InterPlay Expressive Arts and Art-Making Retreat is a unique gathering designed to help you explore creativity as a path through grief and life transitions.

Together, we’ll create a supportive circle where we can honor our heartbreaks, our joys, and all that life has handed us. Using InterPlay, an improvisational approach to storytelling, movement, and voice, alongside hands-on art-making, we will discover the spiral path of growth and insight that a transformed grief bestows.

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WHAT WE’LL DO

Over four days in this nurturing setting, we will:

• Engage in InterPlay practices, gentle, playful movement, storytelling, and voice that help us access the wisdom of our own bodies and a supportive group body.

• Visiting the Keva Pueblo and learning the art of mosaic jewelry making from indigenous artist Mary Louise Tafoya.

• Hold rituals of remembrance, offering creative ways to honor loved ones who have died, and exploring new ways to stay connected to them.

• Enjoy spacious time in nature, which helps us remember that we, too, are part of nature’s cycles of loss and renewal.

• Build a compassionate community, so we do not carry our stories alone.

• By weekend’s end, you’ll carry home new art pieces, deeper insights, and connections with a circle of kindred spirits.

WHO THIS RETREAT IS FOR

People who:

• Are grieving someone they love, or a life chapter that has ended, or want to honor any loss through creative expression.

• Feel called to explore their creativity, whether they’re seasoned artists or complete beginners.

• Are looking for new ways to process the complex emotions of living in these times, grief, beauty, uncertainty, hope.

• Long to be with others who understand that grief is not something to be “gotten over,” but to be companioned, witnessed, and transformed.

As Francis Weller writes:

“Soul activism is what we are called to in this extreme time.”

Through the expressive arts of InterPlay and art-making, we engage in that very activism, tending to what is most tender, personal, and profound.

WHERE & WITH WHOM

The retreat takes place at Synergia Retreat Center near Santa Fe, New Mexico.

It will be facilitated by Dr. Sheila K. Collins, Author of The Art of Grieving: How the Arts and Art-Making Help Us Grieve and Live Our Best Lives & Christine Gautreaux, MSW, Co-author of Stillpoint: A Self-Care Playbook for Caregivers to Find Ease, Time to Breathe & Reclaim Joy.

PRACTICALS

When: Thursday evening, October 22nd through midday Sunday, October 25th, 2026

Where: Synergia Ranch Retreat Center + field trip with activities included

Nearest airports: Santa Fe (30 min), Albuquerque, NM (45 min)

Space is limited to 20 people - Early Bird Discounts and Payment Plans available:

Fee (includes single occupancy lodging, private bath, and 9 catered meals): $1335 (super early bird registration by July 31st); $1435 (early registration by Sept. 1st); and $1535 after.

Fee (includes single occupancy lodging, shared bath and 9 catered meals): $1135 (super early bird registration by July 31st); $1235 (early registration by Sept. 1st); and $1335 after.

Fee (includes double occupancy lodging, shared bath and 9 catered meals): $1035 (super early bird registration by July 31st); $1135 (early registration by Sept. 1st); and $1235 after.

*Fee Day rate for Meals & Programming $795 (super early bird registration by July 31st); $845 (early registration by Sept. 1st); and $895 after.

Registration:

To Hold Your Spot, fill out this form

Join Us - Hold Your Spot

If you are wondering whether this experience is right for you, or if it fits where you are in your own life, feel free to reach out.

You can text me at (817)706-4967 or email me directly at sheilakcollins@gmail.com and we can set up a time to talk.

If someone comes to mind who might appreciate a few days of creativity, reflection, and community, especially someone moving through loss or life transition, please put us in connection with one another.

Thank you for the support you have already given me and especially for helping make this special retreat a success

With gratitude for the paths we share,

Sheila

P.S.

What past participants are saying about this experience:

“All of the activities were inspiring, but the real magic came in the group setting — being fully present with others in real time. That experience can’t be replicated on Zoom, where touch and spontaneous connection are impossible, or through reading, which is more self-absorbing and inward. While time alone is valuable, this retreat reminded me of the necessity of time together — bonding through shared experiences that deepen our sense of connection.” Gail, Art of Grieving Retreat 9/2025

“Meeting, mingling, sharing, interplaying with leaders and participants. Meeting in person and gradually (incrementally:))letting down into safe space is soul nourishing.”

Eve, Art of Grieving Retreat 9/2025

“The retreat from my usual routine brought fresh air, beautiful scenery, new people and experiences. The opportunity to try new things, reconnect to people both past and present in a supportive and loving atmosphere was sublime. The whole weekend was embodied yes, and...”

Lynn, Art of Grieving Retreat 9/2025

“I love the open permission to honor our loved ones that have gone before us. Thank you for giving the opportunity to share those cherished people who have passed with the living. It was an honor to. listen and a gift to speak of them.” Lynn, Art of Grieving Retreat 9/2025

“Christine, the connector, smoothly transitioning from one element to the next, eased us in and out and around the weekend. Love your creative energy and ability to read the room. Thank you for the beginnings, endings and being a thoughtful, supportive backbone to the weekend.” Lynn, Art of Grieving Retreat 9/2025

“i didn’t know what to expect when i arrived. what i experienced was so unlike anything else i have ever done! The openness of the other participants was inspiring, and the movement helped me connect with emotions that i didn’t know that i had buried. “ Mary, Art of Grieving Retreat 5/2026

“Sheila & Christine made me feel very welcome. Sheila’s energy is contagious, and they create an atmosphere where one feels comfortable sharing.” Mary, Art of Grieving Retreat 5/2026

Highlights of our first two Art of Grieving InterPlay Expressive Arts and Art-making Retreats were our visits to the Ruins Project in the Laurel Highlands of Pennsylvania. I learned about this living mosaic installation and mosaic museum from Dean Simpson, the marketing director of Touchstone Center for Crafts. He had suggested that I check it out as I was looking to partner with art-making organizations shortly after my book, the Art of Grieving came out. I wanted to offer retreat participants an experience of visual art-making, along with InterPlay storytelling, music and dance, since the title of my book promises these arts will “help us grieve and live our best lives.”

Though only about an hour from my home in Pittsburgh the journey takes us deep into coal country into the standing ruins of Banning No. 2 Processing Plant which was abandoned in 1946 after nearly a half century of coal production. Along with18 others like mines nearby, this mine provided the coal that warmed homes and stoked the furnaces of the Pittsburgh steel mills, helping built the modern skyscrapers, machinery, and automobiles of the last century. Rachel Sanger, a mosaic artist, grew up in these parts near the town of Whitsitt PA, a small residential village along the Youghiogheny River. The town featured company-owned housing for the largely immigrant and African American miners and their families that worked the mills, and it’s now on the National Registry of Historic Places. With a father and grandfather who had worked as miners, when Rachel decided to return home, she bought a little house that she found online that was in foreclosure. She remembered admiring that house when she had passed it on walks with her mother years before. After she bought the fixer-upper unseen and uninspected, she learned that the house had been the business office for a coal mine, and that the entire ruins of that mine were on her property.

To a mosaic artist, standing reinforced concrete walls are hugely enticing canvases calling for mosaic art to be designed and installed especially to enhance and tell the story of the location. So, for the past eleven years, Rachel has been contributing her mosaic art skills while collaborating with over 500 mosaic artists from around the world. They have been using their mosaic artists’ skills to continue telling the story of coal, remembering and honoring this place, its birds and trees, its history, its people, the miners and their family members, the patchwork houses they lived in, the work they did and the sacrifices they made to live and die here.

Rachel calls the Ruins “a threshold for moving across time,” and she recognizes that “Being from coal, I’ve been steeped in what’s beneath my feet.” Gathered outside the threshold of the Ruins we visitors begin to focus on what is beneath our feet. We learn that the bits of orange-red shale-like rock sprinkled most everywhere is called “Red dog.” It’s formed when waste piles of coal and carbon-rich shale spontaneously ignite and burn at high temperatures. The prolonged heat has transformed the shale into a durable, brightly colored material that we could salvage from the gravelly material we are now standing on to use later in our own mosaic art pieces.

Before we enter, we must learn the 3 rules that Rachel originally laid out for the collaborating artists when they were visiting. Now they seem appropriate for anyone entering what is now sacred space. Since my mind is so focused on grieving as an art and how art helps us do that, rule number one resonates deeply in my own body down to the soles of my feet.

#1. Honor what was. There is no space here where no one died so this rule reminds us to respectfully approach this hallowed ground.

Grieving as an art doesn’t have rules but more like “suggested practices.” Honoring what was––the ancestors, who we were and who we are becoming now, is central to grieving any loss. It’s also important to return, again and again, on anniversaries and times of celebration to honor who and what we have loved and to experience the gratitude and gifts such memories still bring into our lives.

Upcoming Retreat

Rule #2 – “Build Relationships.” For Rachel this means relationships with the materials and the setting, with the story of the object or image being created and with the people and themes represented. And since the Ruins is a collaborative art installation, each artist must be aware that their piece will have a relationship with those pieces already there.

In relation to grief ––As we learn more about grief, we understand more fully that it is not something we do alone. Grief is a collaborative project. We companion one another on the life- long path of letting go and remembering, of building into the future on what has been laid down by the past.

Rule #3 ––“Walk the line.” For a mosaic artist, the pieces of different sizes and shapes need to connect. The role of the art maker is to select and assemble the different sized, often irregular, sometimes broken pieces together in such a way as to form a line that directs the eye of the beholder of the art installation from one place to another. The line establishes the connection.

In relation to grief ––Since the finished mosaic art piece will represent in some way, a loved one gone from our view, the pieces are selected and assembled to represent connection and a larger whole. The mosaic I made during my first visit to the Ruins was to represent myself and my five siblings, all deceased by then. Our instructor Erika Johnson suggested I create a forget-me-not flower and fasten it onto a larger rock that could sit on my desk or dresser. To create the pedals, I used chips of red dog stone and brought them together in the center with a fan-shaped mushroom I found on the ground beneath the space where we were working. The piece continues to remind me of my siblings, yes, but also of the time I spent at the Ruins collecting the pieces and learning to create something new from them. It’s clear what the song writer Maggie Rogers maintains, “The work we create is always creating us.”

An upcoming Art of Grieving Retreat in NM

Our next retreat will be in the Santa Fe area where we will connect with artist Mary Louise Tafaya and learn to use mosaic art to honor what was in her part of the world. In her home on the Kewa Tafaya Pueblo, Mary Louise will guide us in doing a small version of what she does––create jewelry using natural stones and shells in a mosaic inlay style that has been done by members of her family since the early 1900’s. We’ll build relationships with the mosaic materials she provides and with members of her family who will help us create a piece of jewelry, (wearable art) that will remind us always of who it represents and of our experience making it. Take a look at Mary Louise Tafaya’s work https://www.marylouisetafoya.com/

Santa Fe Retreat

Check out the Santa Fe retreat description and take advantage of the early-early bird discount by July 31st

Santa Fe Retreat Info

To stay connected to Rachel Sanger, who is a masterful writer as well as mosaic artist, and her Ruins Project go to The Ruins Project

This past weekend I celebrated the Summer Solstice with a community of women online marking the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, and in the Southern Hemisphere, the shortest. The word Solstice comes from the Latin sol which means sun and sistere which means stand still. The sun literally stands still for 3 days and in ancient times this was an important time to go into communal ceremony. I look forward to this time away from ordinary time each year since I want to do as they did, align my life with this season of the year and activate its energy of receiving and replenishment. For me, remembering the summer solstice always provides an enduring connection to my son Kenneth, who, after a four-year journey with AIDS died in the early morning of the Summer Solstice of 1997 at age 31.

As we begin the ceremony by calling in the directions from our separate living spaces, nine other women are visible on my computer screen. I see again the nearly full moon through the high ceiling windows of that long ago living room turned into the dying room of our Texas home. Something happened in those moments as my son’s spirit was about to leave his body that I am still processing and learning from since that night 29 years ago. I want to go back, as the person I am today, to reexperience those mysterious moments and to share what they continue to teach me about the art of grieving and the gifts that grieving bestows.

I live in a culture that discourages such conversations, that has made of grief a private matter, something to put behind us and move on from. But after many years of studying and writing about the Art of Grieving and how the arts help us to grieve, I follow the suggestions of indigenous cultures contained in art images such as the one of the Sankofa Bird of West Africa. Looking back over its shoulder with an egg in its mouth, it communicates without words, “We must go back in order to go forward.” Seeing grief as a spiral rather than a series of stairsteps we climb offers me, with every turn of the new year, a new perspective from the place where I presently reside.

I wrote about my experiences of the loss of my best friend and two of my three adult children in my 2013 memoir, Warrior Mother, Fierce Love, Unbearable Loss and the Rituals that Heal that was published by She Writes Press. In the process of learning to write well enough to write the stories and eventually get them published I processed and metabolized the experiences. Here is how I described that mysterious experience in the pages of Warrior Mother –

“Shortly after Ken died, I mentioned to (my sister) Maureen the experience I’d had of Ken’s energy entering my body. Her response was, “Oh, sure,” like everyone knew about that, and she mentioned a name for it, which didn’t stick with me. Later, when I asked her about it, she didn’t remember the exchange and didn’t know what I was talking about.” Later, just before the book went to final edit “I went to Google and typed in ‘moments near death’ and found a reference from the Encyclopedia of Death and Dying. It mentioned a “’death flash,’ a sense that an energy has been passed from the dying person to a companion.” The account stated, “This phenomenon has not been successfully studied but has experiential validity for those who feel they have been part of a mysterious transfer.” I only know that it was such a vivid body experience that I can still relive it by just putting myself back in that moment.”

A year later I was teaching InterPlay in Atlanta, and I chose the retelling of this experience to demonstrate the storytelling form, “Gesture Choir,” which involved a storyteller, (me) retelling something with somewhat exaggerated gestures as though it is happening in the present while choir members stand behind the teller and support them by copying their gestures. As I began my telling I could feel the support of the bodies behind me, moving with me and I understood why the nickname for this form from those of us familiar with it is “we’ve got your back form.”

“My son Kevin was sitting in the dying room facing me with his back to his brother Ken. He said, “I don’t even have to look back there to see what’s happening. Ken’s energy is getting so big, it’s too big for his body. It’s filling this room.” When he said that, I looked up into the high-ceilinged room and agreed, I felt it too. And then, something caused me to shutter and open my mouth and take several big gulps of air into my mouth and lungs. As I said and did this in the retelling, my choir members did it as well. “And then, I experienced a feeling of total peace, the kind people talk about as “the peace that passes all understanding.”

This totally confused my mind. “Your son is dying,” I said to myself. “How can you have peace?” But it was there. Sending my awareness into my own whole body confirmed that peace had filled me. And it is doing so now as I tell you about it. Next, a message came to me perhaps as an explanation of what was happening in the retelling, “Some stories are too big for one body to hold.” It seemed my fellow choir members were helping me to go back there and re-experience that story in the presence of respectful witnesses. Reflecting on these experiences––the original one, the remembered written one, and the telling in community one confirmed for me the value such actions have in our present lives.

I have become certain that Ken is and will always be a part of who I am and of who I am becoming. And that mystery which science has yet to explain? When I am at the threshold of my own transformation from this life, could I call on Ken’s energy to help carry me to wherever he is now?

Actions to consider - If you believe as I do that using the arts of storytelling, music, dance and visual art will make the wisdom in your grief experiences available to you in your future life check out The Art of Grieving: How Art and Art-making Help Us Grieve and Live Our Best Lives.

If you’d like to experience a communal gathering of respectful storytellers who honor what has been by sharing with one another the people and things they have loved that are, even now, helping them become who they were meant to be, consider joining Christine Gautreaux and me for upcoming Art of Grieving InterPlay Expressive Art and Art Making Retreat in Santa Fe October 22 – 25^th.

Santa Fe Art of Grieving Retreat

Members of our far-flung family are preparing to gather in Omaha this weekend from around the country to celebrate my granddaughter Tori’s wedding. As we lug suitcases filled with new or seldom-ever worn dress up outfits, wait in airports for our flights, or stop at service stations to refill our gas tanks, we are filled with gratitude to Tori and her fiancée Blake for providing this happy occasion for us to get together. It seems in these days of over-committed schedules we need an important reason to step out of our busy lives and a wedding is one of the most compelling and happiest of reasons to let go of our usual routines and travel to celebrate. In the life cycle of our family, the impetus to get together most often these past 20 years has been funerals with a few graduations sprinkled in.

Reading the organizational details on the family agenda Tori sent out by text, I notice the invitation to help with the set-up of the reception space on the morning before the wedding. I text back immediately to sign up for that work party as memories of preparations for Tori’s mother Corinne’s wedding 40 years ago flood my mind. I’m on the highway with my son Ken, Tori’s uncle, driving from Arlington Texas to Lincoln Nebraska a few days before her wedding. The back seat is filled with the supplies we will use to construct centerpieces for the reception tables when we arrive. Sometime during the 11-hour drive, the realization that no one in my husband Rich’s family, (Corinne’s stepfather) is planning to attend her wedding. The sorrow of this realization causes me to pull into a truck stop, find a pay phone, and tearfully urge his eldest brother Chuck to come. He hears my plea and understands my pain. He apologizes for his parents and the fact that they have given up airplane travel. He agrees to not only come himself but talk their brother Jay who lives in Arizona into joining him. As I write this, the image of one of my favorite wedding snapshots comes to me––the three of them sitting on separate steps of a stairwell at the reception sporting comedic, playful smiles that remind me of the type of over-the-top levity they brought to the entire gathering.

Expectations of this upcoming wedding are borne out by most every wedding no matter the ethnic background, religious association or geographic location of the participants. People of different generations, but especially the elders will tell stories of former gatherings and of their younger selves, and most especially, of loved ones that are missing this happy occasion. Due to the either/or way we often think about emotions some people may be surprised by the tears that well up in their own or other people’s eyes during a happy occasion. At Tori’s wedding shower recently I gifted her a framed cross-stitched sampler of the Irish Blessing, made by her deceased mother before she was born. As my granddaughter studied the piece thoughtfully many women in the room looked around for tissues to dab at their eyes. Someone remarked, “This is a real ‘tear-jerk-er’ moment.” Someone else suggested, “It’s the wine!”

No, I can assure you, as a grief advocate, the wine doesn’t get all the credit or all the blame. It’s the way feelings work. Our bodies remember the past while our minds are busily focused on other things. A similar setting, a familiar song, the scent from candles or flowers may ignite what is sometimes called “a grief burst.” We are transported to a different place on the Art of Grieving spiral, emotionally touched. I have come to call these moments “Sweet Sorrow.” Embracing it allows the sorrow to soften and become sweeter through the years. It reconnects us to people and things we will always love while teaching us what really matters.

When the smile of a bride reminds us of her mother who isn’t here, through the magic of storytelling, we remember the gifts her mother’s life has brought us, and it seems her mother comes into the room. Phil Porter, the co-founder of InterPlay, the system I practice and teach, often reminded us of the quote, “Laughter and tears, laughter and tears, when they’re together, there God is.”

My granddaughter Tori is getting married May 23rd in Omaha Nebraska. As Tori’s mother’s mother I was invited to the wedding shower being held April 26.^th The groom’s mother is the hostess for the shower and attendees will include Tori’s long time and more recent girlfriends and work associates, most of whom I’ve not yet met. While Tori was growing up in Lincoln Nebraska, her grandfather and I lived in Fort Worth Texas and then Pittsburgh PA, a couple of plane flights away. We visited often, for family vacations, and especially when her mom was being treated for breast cancer, so I know many of my daughter Corinne’s friends. But when we spoke Tori told me that they were not coming to the shower, only to the wedding. She gave me full permission to skip the shower saying something like, “I understand that people who live far away probably can’t make the shower since you’ll have to travel back here a few weeks later for the wedding.” The matter seemed settled. It’s too big and expensive of an idea to travel twice.

But a night or two after that conversation I woke up with the certainty that only comes after a productive processing dream–– it was clear to me; I must go to the shower.

First, since the groom’s mother is hosting, and Tori’s mother won’t be attending, she died a few days after Tori’s 7^th birthday, I need to go and represent my daughter. And it would be good to meet Tori’s friends before the wedding since the shower is a smaller more intimate gathering. But it was the shower gift that I intended to give Tori, the handmade framed art piece, that made it necessary for me to be there in person. I didn’t want to wait and bring it to the wedding and see it get mixed in with potential air friers, baking dishes, and steak knives. I needed to be there in person to see her open it.

My shower gift to Tori has hung in a prominent place in my home for 37 years. At this time in my life, I often move about my home noticing individual family treasures and musing about who they should be passed on to. This decorative piece called Tori’s name and this occasion seemed the right time to share it. This folk-art piece, surrounded by its white wooden frame, displays a cross-stitched image of the Irish Blessing ––“May the road rise up to meet you, May the wind be ever at your back, May the sun shine warm upon your face, and the rains fall soft upon your fields…”

The piece was created by Tori’s mother, my daughter Corinne, who placed her initials CW in tiny letters at the bottom next to the date1987. She gave it to me as a gift on a special occasion, perhaps a birthday shortly after she made it. Doing the math now I realize she would have been 25 years old at that time, married, but not yet a mother of what would become a family of three children.

The Irish Blessing was especially meaningful to me and our family since my mother, Corinne’s grandmother Jane Graham was raised by her grandmother, Mary Catherine McCarthy who was born in Ireland. Counting the greats, Mary Catherine would be my great grandmother, Corinne great-great grandmother, and Tori’s great-great-great grandmother.

Doing a bit of research on embroidery and cross-stitching, I found it to be a beginner- friendly form with thousands of years of history. Begun as a practical way to mend garments in Egypt, China, and Peru it uses simple x-shaped stitches to create images on fabric. In the 16^th century creating samplers of letters and numbers became a way to teach young girls’ literacy along with needlework skills. During the expanded settlement of the western United States in the 19^th century, framed cross-stitched folk-art helped settlers decorate and establish their “Home Sweet Home.”

Often these art-making forms are handed down through mothers and grandmothers but that isn’t how Corinne learned them. Since my mother and grandmother didn’t sew, I learned to sew in high school and made my own dresses for special occasions like school dances and proms. My mother, later in her life did a bit of “crewelwork “which is a type of embroidery done with wool yarn on a thick fabric base. I only know of one floral pillow cover she made and left a bit unfinished when she died. At my request Corinne finished it for me.

Corinne likely got involved in handwork after cross-stitching reemerged as a hobby in the 1970s, made even easier by the availability of low-cost kits that contained patterns, directions, and all the tools, thread, and fabric an art maker would need.

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This handwork contains another type of art within it––the art of poetry. The Irish Blessing follows the pattern in the Gaelic Oral tradition of poetry that contains not only rhythm and metaphor, but symbolic imagery drawn from nature, and often a voice of prayer. During the later years that this version of the Irish Blessing lived at my house, I came to add another art. I would sing or chant the Blessing out loud to myself.

On one occasion, as I was experimenting with my singing version of the poem, the pronoun for God, seemingly by itself, from “his” to” her.” I wondered if having recently had the honor of dancing to Bobby McFerrin’s version of the 21^st Psalm had inspired this in me. McFerrin dedicated his version of the 21st Psalm to his mother, and in so doing, changed the pronouns for God from he/him to she/her. It brought a smile to my face when I remembered my daughter as a young high school age girl declaring to me “I’m much more conservative than you are Mother.” And then, another memory of her, when she went to college, meeting me in the front lobby of her 400-person freshman dorm at Southern Methodist University with another amazing declaration, “I can’t believe I am the only woman in this dorm that supports the Equal Rights Amendment!”

I’m not sure how my granddaughter would feel about my song version of the Blessing, but I offer it to Vitoria from me, her mother, and, on behalf of “all our relations” that “Until we meet again may God hold you in the palm of His/Her/Their Hands.”

For several of us who stayed over Sunday night, the Spring women’s spirituality retreat came to completion on Monday morning. Six of us stood surrounding the fire pit behind the medicine lodge, sharing final reflections, while tending to the collection of burning pieces of paper containing the prayers of the weekend’s participants. After ensuring that the fire’s embers were fully out, we backed away from the circle and I said out loud, “Now, may our every step be a prayer.”

Later, reflecting on that prayer I remembered that I first heard that expression when I lived in Nebraska, down the street from Nebraska Poet Laureate John Neihardt. As a dancer, Neihardt’s reference to the Lakota Sioux wisdom in his book Black Elk Speaks “Let every step you take upon the earth be as a prayer,” led me to energetically accept the Neihardt Foundation’s invitation to bring members of my dance troupe to Neihart’s garden to help him celebrate his 90^th birthday.

During the nearly 3-hour car trip to Fort Worth, where two of our passengers lived, we processed the weekend, highlighting where we had come to as a group––– the importance of becoming dedicated peacemakers in this time of war and division. One of the women reminded us of the 108 day, over 2000 mile “Walk for Peace” that a group of monks from Fort Worth had just completed in February. “Their monastery is very near where we’re dropping Cindy off,” Beth said. Once we got good cell coverage, we confirmed that a stop at the monastery would not take us more than a couple of blocks off our planned route to get me to the airport.

The visit to the Buddhist monastery was magical, the flowering shrubs, the reflecting pools, magnificent sculptures and gigantic rock formations. And in each setting sat an offering of fresh fruit as an act of devotion, to cultivate generosity and symbolize a connection between the physical and spiritual worlds. In order to share memories of our time there we took pictures of ourselves in front of the enormous iconic dragons that guard the gates of the sacred site.

I was dropped off extra early at the airport due to the reports of long lines getting through TSA but I experiencing no lines and no difficulties. I went directly to the Admiral’s Club Lounge and called my husband to check in with him as I began reentry into our regular life. He had some not good news to share, a family in Fort Worth that we have been close to for over 25 years had just experienced a shocking tragedy that mourning. We talked about whether I should postpone my flight home, get a hotel room and a car, and stay to offer assistance. After some discussion of all the behaviors such a plan would involve, we both felt it didn’t seem the right action to take. But I was still feeling unsettled and unsure when I boarded my plane and sat down in my assigned aisle seat in the middle section of the plane.

I got busy connecting to the wifi and organizing my belongings, not sure how I wanted to spend the 2 1/2 hour flight, when I heard the flight attendant call out that the cabin door was about to close. I noticed that, although the plane seemed full, the seats in my row were empty. As I looked out towards the door, I saw an orange robed bald man coming toward me. Clearly he was a monk. Sure enough, I pulled my legs in towards me as he moved past to sit in the window seat in my row. If I had been feeling unsettled before, I was now in full befuddlement. Like, what are the chances of sitting next to a monk so directly after visiting a monastery? I tried to distract myself, I watched a part of a movie, and finally decided I need to share this coincidence with the gentleman in my row. I take out my phone and find one of the pictures we took at the monastery and showed it to him with the comment. “This is where I was this afternoon. Does this have anything to do with you?

A big smile comes across his face. Yes, I was there this morning. What time were you there? I look more carefully at the photo I’m sharing and read the time stamp, “2:45 pm.” He takes out his phone and shows me a picture of himself and the monk who led the peace walk to DC, both broadly smiling and dressed in full colorful regalia. He explains that he was in Dallas to present on one of his specialties, teaching meditation to children. Since children have a lot of excess energy, he teaches them “walking meditation.”

“Like every step a prayer” I ask and he says yes. We then chat further and I learn that his branch of Buddhism is connected to the Vietnamese monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, known for “engaged Buddhism,” and as “the father of mindfulness.” I mention that one of my InterPlay students was a former Buddhist nun and student of Thay (Tie) who taught many of us walking meditation at our Leader’s Gathering on the shores of Lake Michigan several years ago. I admited that as a dancer, walking meditation works better for me than too many hours of sitting.

We learn of the similarities of our coming to Pittsburgh. He came to study for his PhD in Religious Studies at the University of Pittsburgh while I came about the same time in 2005 following my husband who had been recruited for a job at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Before we land in Pittsburgh the monk gives me his contact information and the address of his monastery, the Pittsburgh Buddhist Center. This turns out to be only a few miles from my house. ”I guess it’s possible that I’ll be seeing you again then,” I say as I thanked him for the conversation and blessing cords he had tied onto my wrist. He had placed his hand over the cords and said something like, “May you be supported and protected as you serve others in your compassionate work.” Walking through the airport I realized my unsettledness was gone. I was experiencing a sense of peace that seemed to be coming from a certainty that I was exactly where I was suppose to be. It hadn’t been easy to figure it out but if I hadn’t taken that flight, I would not have had that unlikely experience with the monk.

My husband meets me at the airport and I excitedly tell him about my encounter with the monk on the plane. I show him the colorful braided strings on my wrist and feel especially glad I have them. Otherwise, how could I confirm the unlikely truth of the story I was telling.

I met Brad Wolfe, the founder and executive director of Reimagine in March of 2020. When we authors, teachers and thought leaders had to move our in-person classes and workshops online or surrender to disconnection and isolation. Brad’s organization was committed to transforming how people from all walks of life engage with loss, adversity, and mortality, and as a musician, he was exploring those notions through music. When it became unwise to continue recruiting large groups of people for in-person events, Reimagine invested their funds and futures in becoming the port in the storm for artists like my co-author and me. Though I strongly doubted that what we did, using the expressive arts of InterPlay to tell our stories would work online, the Reimagine platform and staff enabled us to continue sending our presentations on our book Stillpoint, promoting radical self-care to those caring for others. Thankfully I was wrong, and later, Reimagine became the reflective space where with the help of other improvisational InterPlay artists from around the country and beyond I could explore the art of grieving using the arts of storytelling, music, dance, and visual art.

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When the material became a book, The Art of Grieving: How Art and Art-making Help Us Grieve and Live Our Best Lives, Brad graciously agreed to write the foreword. He called the book “’a populist treatise” on how grieving can become not just a skill, but perhaps the essential skill for our time.” When the aim of Reimagine developed into becoming an online social platform that facilitates the healthy externalization of pain in community, the connection to the heart of my work was solidified.

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Over the past few years, alongside helping lead Reimagine, Brad has been writing and recording songs with his band, Brad Wolfe & the Moon. Turns out music is the most researched of the art forms in its effect on our brains, behavior, and health. As I noted in my book, “the capacity of music to facilitate a change in one’s emotional state is enormous. And music’s connection to grief is undeniable in African American spirituals, known as “sorrow songs” and from a more recent form, the blues, music can express for us the emotions inherent in our grief. It can take us in a progression from negative to positive, from discordant to resolved.”

Brad’s songs explore how the hardest moments in life can reshape who we become. Here is a description Brad sent of the first of a three-part upcoming event on Reimagine. If you have an interest in how music helps us to grieve, don’t miss this.

Part I: Why Wait, inspired by my grandmother Sally, who endured Auschwitz and held a deep belief that life is fragile, and we must treat each other with compassion.

Free Virtual Gathering: Why Wait

Short Musical Film, Conversation & Reflection

· Thursday, April 2, 2026

· 5pm PT / 8pm ET

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From Brad:

We’ll debut a short musical film about my grandma’s story, followed by a conversation with my own dad and several voices from the film, who have each found their way through loss.

Alongside the gathering, you’ll also have access to a unique Reimagine reflection space — a place to share the songs that carried you through hard moments, explore your own experiences, and connect with others walking their own path.

If you feel the pull, I hope you’ll join us.

I don’t know exactly what will happen when we try this together. But I believe music can be more than catharsis.

It can help us remember that we are alive.

Warmly,

Brad Wolfe

Co-Founder, Reimagine

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We’ve just finalized the schedule for our upcoming Art of Grieving InterPlay Expressive Art and Art Making Retreat being held May 28 to the 31^st near Pittsburgh in the Laurel Highlands of Pennsylvania. We now know that, during our collaboration with Touchstone Center for Crafts, one of the arts we’ll be able to experience is Blacksmithing.

Blacksmithing has come a long way from the necessary shop in every town in America where people brought their horses, their most reliable form of transportation, to get shoes. It’s now a popular craft and art for self-expression, a way to make art out of what happens to us, particularly the stuff we don’t initially chose. Useful or decorative objects can be made by forging, shaping, and joining metal using fire, a hammer and an anvil. The physicality of the work for the maker includes bending, punching/slitting and welding the metal into the shape of a functional tool or a piece of art. After engaging in this art, we makers will share stories of the experience and how it and the object we’ve created connects us to the memory of someone or something that is gone from our sight.

Just after getting the confirmation of the blacksmithing art experience, my thirteen-year-old granddaughter Kyra, who is a dancer, introduced me to another art form having its own revival. We were on a Facetime call when I asked what she was doing, and she said she was “bedazzling!” I had to admit I’d never heard of that, but she showed me how she was attaching beads, glitter, and sparkles to mundane objects on her dressing table. The handle of the eyelash curler and the top of the eye shadow container had already undergone this beautification process. It was a way of passing the time. It seemed a way of processing as we talked.

Her mother and she had planned a trip to the beach but that was looking less likely as the afternoon wore on as her mother was tied up in court. When I asked why Bedazzling? she reminded me that she was about to take part in a dance competition with 1000 other dancers. She showed me the recently bedazzled team uniform she would be wearing. I could see how her efforts and the material she used had transformed an ordinary shirt into an eye-catching attraction that would stand out on any stage or in any large room.

I thought of the handwork that women young and old, have engaged in for millennium. Long gone are the high school Home EC classes that taught girls to sew. Making and wearing home made clothing now is called “wearable art.” I thought of my daughter’s cross stitched art pieces she framed into gifts, my mother’s incomplete crewel embroidery, later finished by my daughter. Always going in the direction of beauty, what we make with our hands seems to focus we humans on embracing and connecting with ourselves and one another, allowing time for slowing down and the reflection it brings.

For more details on the 2026 Art of Grieving Retreats and to register click the button below.

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Art of Grieving May Retreat

During the first No Kings Rally last April I was in Taos, NM visiting my brother Miles and his daughter Heather. Heather had been a 5^th grade schoolteacher for 30 years, so she was well seasoned to help us assemble the art supplies and encourage our creativity to make our protest signs. Messages the marchers sent to the government via the artwork on their poster boards often began with “Keep Your Hands off…” For my brother, who was going through cancer treatment at the time, his message was “Keep your hands off our Social Security!” Mine was “Keep Your Hands off the Truth.”

To grieve, we must identify and acknowledge what we have lost or are in danger of losing. Truth itself can be what’s lost in the midst of the mayhem, even when public officials aren’t dedicated to purposely fabricating reality. Marketing professionals are experts on damage control and the “spin” they give when referencing an event.

To challenge the distortion of reality that occurs in public discussions, a quote by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynahan is often referenced, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.” Personally, I have a visceral reaction when I hear or read something untrue. Like the buzzer on a game show that sounds loudly when a wrong answer is given, my body signals me that “this is not the truth.” I may not know what is true, but, without a doubt, this isn’t it.

I had known for years that our current president had a well-practiced system of creating and promoting his own reality. This system was taught to him long before he assumed office by one of his mentors, Roy Cohen, counsel for Senator Joe McCarthy. He came to the public’s attention in 1954 during the senate hearing that explored the witch hunt search for communists in the army. Here is the system with some of the nuances Trump has developed:

· Start off making something up and repeat it often. Make sure other officials and loyal press professionals echo your untruth in matching talking points.

· When questioned or accused of anything, deny it.

· Keep denying until you need to lie.

· Lie and get others to lie with and for you. (Use your influence to seek revenge on people who refuse to confirm your lies.)

· Counterattack your accusers and sue them and the journalists who reported or printed what you did or said.

Note: Independent journalists have learned during Trump’s second term that in order to not amplify his lies they must say, after quoting something he asserts, the phrase, “without providing any evidence.” And, in order to provide a balanced account, when reporting on his expressions of constructed reality, they must provide the facts that counter his version.

Art, Grief and the Truth

As a grief advocate, I know that, during times of great loss, truth is often revealed. The veil between the worlds is lifted, and our perspective includes a greater reality. And when those truths are revealed, as Nietzsche suggested, we need art “so as not to die of the truth.” The musician rapper, Bad Bunny’s half-time show at the Super Bowl last weekend offered a dramatic demonstration of just that. After weeks and months of seeing on our screens, Spanish speaking, and brown and black people people being attacked, removed from their homes, work sites, and family members, becoming disappeared or incarcerated, without access to legal counsel. We’ve seen the harm and even death that has come to members of peaceful communities as they try to protect recent and long-term immigrants from ICE.

Sunday, at the biggest sporting event in the country, some 135.4 million viewers experienced through the arts of music, singing, drumming and dancing, a history lesson on Puerto Rico (and the fact that its inhabitants are US citizens), and a celebration of the rich, joy filled, family-oriented culture of 65 million Latino people who currently reside in the US.

Seeing the dancers climb the electric poles took me back to 2017 when I was teaching the Art of Grieving in the mother house of the Sisters of Divine Providence. The sisters were worried and offerings prayers for the safety of members of their community serving in Puerto Rico at the time of Hurricane Maria that caused a total blackout. They were without electricity or any ability to communicate for weeks and months.

In our divided country there was plenty of opposition to the idea of having the songs in the half-time presentation be sung in Spanish. “No one will be able to understand their message.” That’s the beauty of music, drumming, dancing, and theatrical enactments in stage settings, they don’t rely on words. There were two messages in English, one on a billboard projected throughout the stadium. “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.” Bad Bunny’s final statement “God Bless America,” was said in English, followed by the naming of the 23 independent countries that make up South and North America. Good Bless Americans all!

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Since writers write, and practice is a good thing, sometime in 2015 I began a weekly online writing project. I set out to write and post weekly on Constant Contact in a blog I titled “Dancing with Everything.” My prompt was to write about anything the national news was focused on or anything happening in my personal life that was calling to me, while asking the question, “might this situation involve some aspect of grief? Not surprisingly, I became a much better writer. And, from my research, writing and people’s responses to it, I learned a great deal about both personal and communal grief and their connection in western culture. I learned how people often do not recognize grief in themselves let alone know how to help themselves or their loved ones to navigate it. After years of the weekly blogs and playing with the topic in improvisational communities online and in person, using the expressive arts of InterPlay; singing, dancing, storytelling, I became an advocate for using the arts to grieve. I became convinced that the arts are how our ancestors, from whatever culture, grieved their losses and deepened their communal connections. In May of 2025, these insights and discoveries were condensed into the book, The Art of Grieving: How Art and Art Making Help Us Grieve and Live our Best Lives. In February of 2025, I moved my writing to Substack.

As I’m writing this, two peaceful protesters have been shot and killed in Minneapolis by federal ICE agents whose salaries are being funded through the taxes we pay. Not hard to see this as a moment of extreme individual and collective grief, horrific losses before our eyes that raise many questions. Are these government employees so poorly trained that they are unable to carry out their assignments without behaving in a cruel and instigating manner? Are they being encouraged to behave in such a way as to instill fear in those that resist this armed intrusion into their neighborhoods, and those watching on their screens, so they may demonstrate the raw power they has been given them by an aspiring dictator?

Most viewers are aware that the videotaped segments of ICE employees we see repeatedly on our screens do not show the behavior that Trump, Vance and Kristi Noem repeatedly claim they see ––“domestic terrorists” come to harm the ICE officers and interfere with ICE’s mission of deporting “the worst of the worst.”

Members of the public who see people providing mutual assistance to one another, filming what is happening in the freezing temperatures, elder legal immigrants removed from their homes without proper clothing on, citizen’s accosted, young children separated from parents and family members, all behaviors that would bring city police officers’ sanctions and/or immediate firings.

These conflicting interpretations of the responses to the multiple cell phone videos taken by journalists, protesters, and community members, showing the shootings from various eye-witness positions illustrate what defense lawyers and law enforcement professionals know well – the unreliability of eye-witness testimony. People often see what they want to see or what confirms their firmly established beliefs. As I hear people, including the administrators and politicians, fabricating what they are seeing on the videos, and continuing to drill down on their well rehearsed pronouncements, lines from a song often sung at funerals come to me. “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now, I’m found, was blind but now I see.”

Amazing Grace was written by John Newton, a former slave trader and slave ship captain who became an English Anglican clergyman after a life-threatening experience in a storm. In the song he proclaims his former self a “wretch” and tells the story of his redemption. After his conversion Newton worked into his elder years to pass the British Slave Trade Act in 1807 which abolished the slave trade in that global empire.

To the parents and family of Alex and Renee–As a parent who has lost two adult children, and lived long enough to see the good that sometimes comes from tremendous loss––May the tragic death of your children. filmed by many who cared deeply about their welfare be the catalyst for the “blind” citizens of our nation to see the truth. To believe what their eyes are telling them, and respond accordingly.

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When I left my home in Pittsburgh on Thursday December 18^th and flew to Palm Springs to begin what has been, in the last few years, my usually holiday time with family, I unplugged. There had been so much on my plate, and there would continue to be during the 18 days of the family gatherings. I didn’t refer to this time way as a vacation, or an intermission, or a time out. I knew I needed a break, and the word I used was “unplugged.”

Now that I’m home and attempting to restart my life, I’m aware that whatever unplugging really means, it’s clearly something I’ve seldom ever done in recent years. When I’ve traveled, I’ve taken my technology with me, holding online classes from hotel rooms, attending virtual meetings, keeping up my writing practice, being available for short conferences with clients, even arranging book presentations in places I’d traveled to.

But with all the rapid-fire change that has been going on in the body politic this year and all the angst that rapid changes in technology itself has been causing me, I thought it worth a try to experiment with staying away from it all. Shortly before I was to return home, I began to write a few lines about this experiment of being unplugged and only a couple of sentences in, several things I needed to do immediately came to me and I left the essay to carry out those demands.

Once home I googled the word “unplugged” to see what others might mean when they use it and found some interesting references. “Digital Detox Cabins in Nature–– Cabins in 50 locations in the countryside of the UK. The promise––“To unplug and escape the everyday grind and relax in nature.”

There’s a brewery in Ohio that goes by the name “Unplugged,” a smart phone company with a hardware battery disconnect switch that uses the name, and a non-profit. Their listing was sparce, with missing information, but the website for “PA Unplugged” describes “a statewide coalition working towards a cultural shift in our approach to screens and social media during childhood and adolescence. 20 + grassroots organizations, representing 3000+ Pennsylvanians across 10 counties and counting.”

Whew! Just reading these descriptions causes me to need to take a break and a breath. Western culture’s unrelenting connection to changing information that come to us through technology has created a pace that is not the speed of human brains and bodies. What’s needed? Stepping away, I hear advice from a song, popular when I was a younger adult, “Slow down. You move too fast. Gotta make the moment last, Feeling Groovy.”

In reconnecting, it’s taking me a while to find a rhythm or groove that feels smooth and easy– that flow state where what we do feels productive and satisfying. What has this completely unplugging experiment taught me? Like a friend once advised, “let go of tension but don’t let go of your immune system.” In the future I won’t unplug completely again, but be sure to stay connected to the people and practices that sustain my health, wellness, and human spirit.

I started teaching online reluctantly. When the world as we knew it shut down in March of 2020, my coauthor Christine, who is significantly younger said we just need to teach from our book online. The book, the second edition of Stillpoint: A Self-Care Playbook for Caregivers to Find Ease, Time to Breath and Reclaim Joy, was published in 2018 when Christine added her touches and become its second author. I said with a certainty that embarrasses me now, “what we do won’t work online.” I’m so glad I was wrong. The class based on our book is still meeting weekly 5 + years later. It’s attended by professional and family caregivers from around the country, regulars and new people who hear about us from the online platform Reimagine. We said when we started, “People are gonna need this, what with the isolation of the pandemic and all.” But Christine and I admit often to one another that we need this hour-long dose of community and opportunity to use the tools of InterPlay to focus on our own selfcare.

Shortly after the caregivers’ class began; to become more comfortable with the techie part of teaching online, I started an InterPlay class I taught by myself on Friday mornings. Starting out I got a lot of help from experienced InterPlayers who were looking for classes online and we explored together how to get the platform to do things it was not originally designed to do. At that time, the zoom platform was a one voice platform which is why choirs had trouble using it for their rehearsals and performances, and transmission of music was spotty. Now, nearly 6 years later, zooms gotten smarter and so have we.

The attendance at the Friday class is often small, 5 or 6 people, though some come in from other states and countries. The spirit of play has been maintained, and that includes playing with the platform itself. Members start off as the caregivers do in their gathering by sharing ‘What’s Up? which means, what of all that has been going on in your own life would you like to share in a few sentences. Then please give us a gesture that goes along with what you’ve said, and we’ll give it back to you. Then after a physical warm up that I lead, we take turns listing what we could talk about and out of that, decide what we want to play with using specific InterPlay forms.

The other day, Mike, who works in the tech industry, played with an experience he had had online during an improv class. The students in that class were taking turns in an individual time limited exercise where the instructor was holding up a clock that showed the students when their time was up. Mike noticed that the students were ignoring the clock and were all going past the allotted time, which seemed odd to him. In the debriefing, he mentioned this noticing and no one in the class knew what he was talking about. If turns out that the students did not see the timer, but he did. Exploring further they figured out that the other students were on Speaker View which highlights the person talking and he was on Gallery View, and could see everyone (including the person holding up the timer.) Being an astute person, he later wondered, “How often might that happen, that the perspective I have is very different from the perspective or view that other people are having, not just online but in life? “

Later, when it was my turn, I choice a three-part InterPlay storytelling form to explore the body signals I get when something feels true or false. The directions are to dance or move as your body wants to and then pause and listen to what comes to mind, images, memories, or quotes. After I performed the form, I reflected on how satisfying it was that what had begun as a kinesthetic experience was translated into a sound––a buzzer, in the case of untruth, and a dinging chime when something felt true.

Mike said, I didn’t hear the sounds.

This was so unbelievable to me that I insisted on making the sounds again. Mike said again, “I can’t hear the sounds.” Then as a tech person he offered a possible reason. I think it’s because I have noise cancelling headphone on.” We then began experimenting with the audio settings on our computers. We both put our audio settings on the setting, “Original Sound for Musicians” and I repeated the sounds. This time, he heard them.

And yes, this setting modifies echo and noise cancellation which I need to have on when I’m doing podcasts. I remembered one Saturday when I was teaching online our new home generator turned on for its automatic weekly test. I could barely hear myself talking since the generator is just behind the wall in my studio. The students assured me that they could hear me fine. They did not hear the incredible loud noise that I did. I guess in the world of technology, like in our in person world, it’s not just what we send out, but what people hear or take from it.

Today World AIDS Day 2025 arrives with both heartbreak and a call to action.
More than 37 million people worldwide are living with HIV. Over the decades, the epidemic has taken tens of millions of lives, including the life of my then 31 year old son Kenneth. These loved ones stories shaped families, communities, activism, art, and the global movement for dignity and health.

But 2025 brings a new kind of grief: a historic global funding crisis that has disrupted essential HIV prevention and community-led services many of the places that need them most. UNAIDS warns that these cuts have sent “shockwaves through low- and middle-income countries” undermining the progress activists have achieved over these past 40 years.

And so, this World AIDS Day — with its theme, “Overcoming disruption, transforming the AIDS response,” — asks us to hold two truths at once:

• We honor the resilience, brilliance, and leadership of people living with HIV.
  

• And we mourn the systemic failures that continue to endanger lives and widen inequities.

For those of us who work in grief, healing, and community care, this moment hits close to home. It reminds us that grief isn’t just personal — it’s structural. It’s political. And it’s collective. When systems falter, communities carry the weight. When funding is cut, it’s caregivers, activists, and everyday people who patch the holes with love, labor, and art.

Today, I’m reflecting on what it means to hold space for loss and for possibility — and how our practices of storytelling, embodiment, and collective care can help us meet this moment with courage and connection. Since 1988, communities throughout the world, and U.S. presidents, have commemorated World AIDS Day on December 1st. It was just a year ago that President Joe Biden, standing on the White House lawn said, “we renew our commitment to accelerating efforts to finally end the HIV/AIDS epidemic.”

The Trump administration is discontinuing this tradition. They announced that the U.S. is declining to participate this year.

Read more here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davewessner/2025/12/01/on-this-world-aids-day-the-us-declines-to-participate/

I wanted to share a blog I wrote last year about this day and the power of community art.

The Power of Community Art One Year Ago

by Sheila Collins | Dec 5, 2024

With all the media attention on the incoming president’s appointments, you may not have heard that this week, in honor of World AIDS Day 2024, sections of the AIDS memorial quilt were exhibited for the first time on the White House South Lawn. Our current President Joe Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden hosted an event with survivors, their families, and advocates, offering a powerful tribute to those who have been lost to HIV/AIDS. Each square of the quilt has been handcrafted by friends and family members in memory of someone who died of AIDS since the disease came on the scene in the US in the 1980s. The AIDS Memorial Quilt began with nearly 2000 individual squares and was displayed for the first time in 1985. It now has 48000 panels, weighs 54 tons and spans 1.2 million square feet. In the nearly 40 years since it began, it has traveled and been exhibited in communities all over the US.

For those of us who have been impacted by HIV/AIDS, the expression, “better late than never applies” with this exhibition and with how long it took for the governmental authorities, politicians, and scientists to recognize the threat of AIDS and put resources into addressing it. Millions died, included our 31-year-old son, Kenneth. In my mother’s memoir, Warrior Mother: Fierce Love, Unbearable Loss and the Rituals that Heal there is a scene between Ken’s father and I, holding a conversation in a hospital corridor when we first learned of Ken’s diagnosis in 1993.

“How is it we get to go to the head of the class?” I spit the words into the atmosphere. “No ten years of symptom-free HIV status. No time to try alternative approaches to staying healthy. Nothing I know will be of any use now.”

George seems to be studying the patterns on the floor. “When are these people gonna wise up? They pay no attention to nutrition and then wonder why people get sick. “

” And where were the Centers for Disease Control? I raged. “Why didn’t they pay more attention to this disease when it first came on the scene?”

Finally looking me in the eye, former radio broadcaster George, said in his most professional newscaster cadence, “They ignored it because it was discovered in gay men.”

The AIDS Memorial Quilt has become the largest community arts project in history. It played a huge part in gaining support from health care authorities to address the disease and in eliminating the stigma that was part of what caused the disease to run rampant in the gay community in the US.

Why might this exhibition of these handcrafted art pieces sewn together and sprawled out on the White House Lawn be important at this time?

As one of the surviving family members, I’m glad to be reminded of the role an art piece such as this has played in helping the public identify the people behind the numbers when we learn of a communicable disease. Numbers are just numbers until an art piece shows us how many individuals they represent–the people behind the numbers. I also appreciate the opportunity to remember my son and his friends who became victims not only of the disease, but of the way it was handled by the governmental agencies that our taxpayer dollars had funded to keep us safe and healthy. After all we’ve been through it doesn’t seem the time to put people into leadership positions who have no experience or intention to achieve what these organizations are charted to do.

Here’s a link to Warrior Mother – https://amzn.to/3CZqJJj

And a link to my latest book - The Art of Grieving: How Art & Art-Making Help Us Grieve and Live Our Best Lives here https://a.co/d/fZpyfMT

View the AIDS Memorial Quilt here https://www.aidsmemorial.org/quilt

Dear Friends,

Read more

This coming weekend, November 1st and 2^nd will be the 44^th year of the Dixon Studio Tour, the longest running artist studio tour in New Mexico. My younger brother Miles had been hosting people in his Miles Smith Pottery Studio (that has sat behind the building that currently houses the Blue Heron Brewery on Highway 68) for 20 of those years. Despite a recent cancer diagnosis, he told me he had signed up to participate again this year. When the hospice staff asked him what he would like to do to maintain his quality of life he told them, “Keep throwing pots!” Miles threw his last pot a few weeks before he left us on July 15^th of this year, but not before he let us know of his joyful excitement that we family members were going to hold his studio open for one more year as a memorial to him.

. For the past few months, Miles’ daughter Heather Lockhart and her friends and family members have been cleaning the 1000 sq foot studio, organizing and arranging it to display 50+ years of Miles’ artworks in clay, glass, video, paper, and pen.

On the eve of the show’s opening, with help from my husband and dear friend, Christine Gautreaux, I am excited to spread the word to as many people as I can, especially to folks who care about art and art-making and that are physically close enough to drop by studio #6 this weekend.

What can you expect if you accept my invitation? In touring Miles’ studio, you will be able to:

· Experience a complete retrospective of Miles’ art career with representative samples from each of his 50 + years of pottery making, artfully arranged by daughter Heather and her friends.

· Have the opportunity to purchase domestic stoneware; cups, coffee mugs, bowls, planters, vases, framed and unframed ceramic and paper visual art – both museum quality and seconds.

· Actually “meet Miles” through a rolling video and watch him give examples of how he works in his studio. Observing his teaching style, you may also appreciate this result of his art-making as a videographer and his previous 22-year theatrical career as an actor, tech director, and scenic designer.

· Learn more about the various techniques that Miles, as a life-ling learner, utilized–– Eico Japanese technique, Infused Glaze painting, Raku, and Farris Chloride, Naked Raku, Ceramic Pastel, and Faux Oil Paint Pallet Knife Painting

· See up close the various types of kilns, wheels, equipment and work space arrangements Miles used to calculate and experiment with glazes and execute his work. Influences from years spent as a set designer in the theater are evident when you notice that the enormous shelves he built to hold his pottery are on wheels for ease of mobility around the studio.

· Appreciate a photo collage put together by family members that honors the over 30 years he lived on a boat in the Seattle WA area before he moved to NM. When I found some large images of Miles’s hands in the studio, I placed them in the collage that includes his family members, colleagues and friends who impacted his life, and seem a reminder that except for brief periods when he brought apprentices in to help him fill corporate contracts, Miles’s fingerprints are still on every piece.

If you are in the studio at 5:30 pm Friday, please join the family as we use the storytelling, dancing, musical forms of InterPlay to appreciate and celebrate Miles’s Life.

I’m standing in the ruins of a former coal mine located on the Youghiogheny River beside former railroad tracks, removed now to create the Great Allegheny Passageway about an hour from my home in Pittsburgh. It’s an early fall morning and the chilly air is intermittently warmed by the sun reflecting off the roofless cement walls. Nature’s trees, shrubs and vines had come to claim this spot during the past 100 years but now they interact with mosaic images of local flowers and birds, mosaic maps of the surrounding terrain, and of the countries where miners and artists have come from. The most elegant and detailed are the mosaic portraits of particular miners and the women who took care of them.

The mine shut down in 1948 and that last explosive act caused the deaths of the final three miners to die here. Their names are written in mosaics on the cold grey cement walls. Though my ancestors and I are not from around here, I know I’m stepping on holy ground.

Everybody knows that Pittsburgh was a steel town but long forgotten are the 150 or so coal mines scattered about Fayette County, a short river barge or railroad trip to the city. There was a time when the fires from coke “beehives” in the hills lit the night sky, and black soot shot into the air, affecting people’s healthy breathing and the white bed sheets hanging on clothes lines across the region. Half the patch towns that provided company housing and a company store to serve the immigrant miners recruited from the British Isles and Eastern Europe countries are gone now. In the 80 or so patch towns that remain or in the big city, there is little recognition of the contribution that the labor of their ancestors made to the steel industry and the skyscrapers that build the modern cities of our present world.

In planning the inaugural Art of Grieving Retreat with Dean Simpson, the marketing director for Touchstone Center for the Arts he suggested we offer an art-making experience using mosaic art. Fashioned from small broken pieces of stone, glass, or found objects, people could make a memento of a loved one. And if we liked the idea of mosaic art, we absolutely had to visit mosaic artist, Rachel Sanger’s Ruins Project, a long-term collaborative mosaic art installation that transforms the ruins of Banning #2, a former coal mine, into a mosaic museum.

Rachel is a master mosaic artist and teacher, and she is from coal, many generations back. Like many who grow up in rural communities she moved away in pursuit of her art-making career. A decade ago, she bought a small 100-year-old fixer-upper house from a posting online. She remembered admiring the house as a child when she and her mother would go for walks in their neighborhood. After signing the “as is” contract to purchase she learned that the house had been built as the business office for a coalmine. Later walking her property she discovered, in the overgrown woods nearby that she had also purchased a coalmine. To this mosaic artist and her students and colleagues, those sturdy cement walls, created when cement was first invented, were giant canvases calling out for their artistic creative imaginations. As of now, 527+ mosaic artists, from highly accomplished to rank beginners have contributed their mosaic art to these walls. To walk among this collaboration is to be drawn into conversations between pieces of colorful things.

Engaging in a particular art offers life lessons and opportunities for transforming our feelings, attitudes and perspectives. Rachel, whose writing about mosaic art is as elegant and clear as her cut and hammered images says,” Yes. I know people whose lives were saved through mosaic…Certain very old rules give you a framework, a best practices. And then you are free to interpret them in infinite variables. Andamento, (the flow describing the way pieces are laid down), “teaches us the lesson that life is all the path. It is all the path.

Our Mosaic Making Process

Our tour guide and art teacher Ericka Johnson describes mosaic art as moving “from Broken to Beautiful,” and I get the power of that metaphor to speak to a person in grief or mourning. She asks, “Do you want your mosaic art piece to live outside on the ground in all kinds of weather or to hang inside on a wall?” That’s the biggest decision my classmates and I needed to make before beginning our own mosaic pieces. This defines the type of substrate you fasten your selected broken pieces onto. After adopting Ericka’s suggestion to make the Forget-Me-Not flower with pedals and a center, we are offered pieces of stone and glass and found objects, some from nature. I select a mushroom for my center. Reminded of a steppingstone in my garden that displays the small, pressed hand prints of my 3 young grandchildren, a gift from my daughter in the year 2000, I chose to arrange and fasten my selected items onto the flat side of an interestingly shaped rock. Installed in this way the finished piece could be displayed on the ground in all kinds of weather. Others chose to arrange their pieces of stone and found objects onto a slender piece of white substrate, already outfitted with a fastener on the back so that it could be hung on a wall inside.

What We Must Overcome

The process of creating something new that has never existed before involves decisions to make and some risk taking. As in life, much uncertainty is present as to how things will turn out in the final piece, especially when the art form is new to the maker. A “Beginner’s Mind” can be helpful to lessen expectations of oneself ––especially when we’d just viewed some award-winning world class mosaic installations. Perhaps a willingness to be awkward, even bad at something as we set out. And then there’s comparisons with others nearby. Seated at a long table, it’s easy to see what others are doing, and I notice that I like some of what my neighbors are doing better than how my own project is going. I keep selecting and re-selecting the item I need to go in the center of the pedals. Nothing is working, the items are too big, too little, too ugly, or calling to much attention to themselves.

Rachel says you need to build a relationship with your material, and finally I do. Trial and error, trial and error, I finally experience a note of satisfaction that the pieces are coming together in some kind of pleasing arrangement that does justice to the individual pieces and the arrangement of the whole. After completing my memento, I decide that I don’t want to put the piece I’ve created outside on the ground. I plan to put my mosaic that honors the many losses I’ve had in recent years––my four siblings, my former husband, and my parents who left this life many years ago, on a tabletop in my living room or on my desk where I can be reminded of the people it represents and the creative process I engaged in to birth it.

This past weekend I learned that my recent book, The Art of Grieving: How Art and Art-making Help Us Grieve and Live Our Best Lives won a silver medal in the category of Best Adult non-fiction personal e-book at the 2025 IPPY Book Awards. IPPY stands for Independent Publishers, and the organization has been giving out awards to independent, university, and self-published authors since 1996 and this is not my first book award from this organization. My memoir, Warrior Mother: Fierce Love, Unbearable Loss and the Rituals that Heal, was published in 2013 by She Writes Press in the inaugural year for this hybrid press. When I met some of the other authors whose work had been accepted for publication that first year, I learned that, like me they had been turned down by major publishers with some version of what I was told, “Grief doesn’t sell.” It took a woman run press to take a chance on us and on that topic. When my book Warrior Mother received a first place gold medal from the Living Now division of IPPY, my excitement was enhanced by sharing it with the publishers and editors in the new company and the other women authors in the She Writes Press’s catalogue that year. In 2013, The Living Now division of IPPY defined itself as “books that change people’s lives.” As a dancing social worker, I considered that outcome an exact fit with what I had hoped my writing would do.

Both then and now, doing that happy dance in my kitchen when I hear the news and being able to thankfully share it with the many friends and colleagues who had been so critical to my books even coming into being in the first place–what a confirmation of the claims the IPPY awards make on their website. “Since the award is given after being evaluated and selected by a panel of judges with expertise in publishing, writing, design, and marketing relevance, the awards are a powerful moment of validation, and an objective endorsement.” They strongly suggest that “this book is worth your time.”

The Art of Grieving is my fourth book, and like many aspects of my career in general, in the process of writing and publishing books there has been a need for a lot of trail-blazing and innovative creativity. I was told by the main line publishers I showed my first manuscript to in the late 80s that they couldn’t publish it as it didn’t fit any of the known literary genres or sub-genre categories. On what shelf would the bookstore place it? So, my husband and I, with help from staff and professional colleagues published Stillpoint: The Dance of Self-Caring, Self-Healing through Iatreia Institute for the Healing Arts, our behavioral health care clinic in Fort Worth Texas. There was no such thing at that time as Print on Demand, so lots of costs through the years for storing, moving, and shipping boxes of books. Great stories too, like when the creek behind our house became blocked downstream and began flooding the back yard and the floor of the storage building we called the “book barn.” We tied cords around our waists and fastened ourselves to the building so as not to be carried downstream ourselves while we lifted boxes of books over our heads and got then to dry land.

Thirty years later, when self-publishing was something most any author could do, I was encouraged by people knowledgeable about book publishing and promotion to update the book. “There are lots more people care-giving now than there were back then.” I was advised to put search words in its subtitle, and publish a second edition. “Independent” publishing is not the right word for what I did with the help of colleague and my dear, “I am because she is” friend, Christine Gautreaux. The second edition that became Stillpoint: A Self-Care Playbook for Caregivers to Find Ease, and Time to Breathe and Reclaim Joy, was co-authored with Christine and contains redesigned graphics by her artist husband Joe. The poems, exercises, songs, stories stayed, and the book became what is now categorized as a “mixed genre” or “cross-genre” book. Publishers now regard this trend of combining traditional genres as a positive thing that creates a unique reading experience. The book has also become, since March of 2020 when we put it online, the core of a popular weekly course Christine and I teach together, attended by family and professional caregivers from around the country and the world.

It is the e-book version of The Art of Grieving that has won this current award. I submitted the e-book version because I knew that an e-book that contains relevant, carefully curated color images is at this point in time, uncommon. It wasn’t until October of 2024 that Amazon brought out the first e-reader model capable of displaying colors since the company began making e-readers 17 years prior. This could be considered evidence to support what my daughter used to say about me before she became a young mother herself. Corinne would tell her friends, “The trouble with my mother is that she has always been ahead of her time.” In this instance, I was certainly ahead of my own skills and understanding of the power of images to enhance the meaning of my written words.

I have for years been posting images with my blogs on Constant Contact, Substack, and social media platforms which has caused me to notice that the combination of images and words may be increasing the power of both. But though it was my idea to add photographs from the images we’d take with our cell phones, this version of The Art of Grieving e-book could never have come about without innovator and early technology adopter, Christine. Besides her techie skills, the library of images we drew from came from her art-making habit that she taught me, of photographing the beauty that surrounds us as we go about our daily lives.

Historically in the publishing industry photographs and drawings have been important for comics, graphic novels, children’s picture books, and what are referred to as “coffee table books.” But due to the cost of printing color images, printed black and white typeset books have only black and white or grayscale images, or an insert of a few pages of color images in the middle of a book of text. At this point, the big publishers aren’t interested in adding images to e-books. Their concerns are that images may increase the file size and therefore the expense. And for the big numbers they go for there may not be enough people yet who have e-readers that will display color images on their screens and tablets. So it’s up to we independents to do the experimenting.

Now that color images are possible in e-books–I became curious about what else this might make possible? Encouragement to add images to the electronic version to this particular book came about when I realized how important the image of the spiral was to the central theme of the Art of Grieving. I came to see that our culture already has an erroneous image of grief–that of climbing stair steps to a top landing where the journey is complete and people expect their grief to be finished. The color image of a spiral on the front of my book is a much needed accurate image of the path and process of grief. We can expect that our memories and the grief associated with them can be ignited by something in the environment, sometimes when we least expect it, and that that will likely recur throughout the seasons of our lives.

Once we decided to take pictures of images to illustrate the ideas in the book we saw the spiral image everywhere, in the hotel’s hallway carpeting, on a coffee shop’s wall, (the copper image above) and in collected art pieces at a Palm Springs spa. Using our cell phones with better lenses then the cameras most professional photographers had to use until recently, Christine and I added the art of photography and images of nature to the arts I’d written about in the book; storytelling, music, dance, and visual arts.

The process of making this e-book with color images was not a simple or easy one, as is usually the case for new, first time processes. There were unidentifiable glitches and few experts to consult with. Christine was also in the situation of being with her ill father and family members, supporting him during what turned out to be the last weeks of his life. The Art of Grieving claims that art-making helps us to grieve and to live our best lives, but there were times when we both questioned the wisdom of trying to add images to those words. But like after the baby’s born, all the pain and labor it took getting them here, having the book receive an award does encourage us to have gratitude that we persisted to a successful finish.

Authors in the current era of publishing must do it all for the preferences of the various audiences we hope to attract. Besides actual books that many people like to hold in their hands, the e-book version offers ease of transporting a book, searching favorite passages, and now, the enhancement of images. And finally, the audio version of a book makes it possible for readers, while driving or doing dishes, to have books read to them by a book’s author. If that’s your preference, the audio version of The Art of Grieving, read by me with help from my daughter-in-law Jody and Brad Wolfe, the director of Reimagine who did the Foreword will be out this October.