Dear Rain,

There was once

a time

when I had forgotten your name…

Sahel hot breath drying

me from inside out,

parched and shriveled,

I itched like a red rash

in the sun,

awaiting the balm of your season…

Nine months I waited,

pregnant with longing,

I gazed at each passing cloud

as if you would remember

my name, my foreign tongue,

my body bathed in the

baptism of your showers…

but none had ever

known me.

They continued on their merry way,

forsaking me to the

desert snake and acacia thorn…

Yet when you came,

your inky black locks

tumbling forth from the sky,

I let loose a primal reckoning

of recognition,

dropping my pagne

to the Earth

and dancing naked

in the deluge ~

delighting in the way

your raindrops played

the soundboard of my skin ~

awakened once again

in a dance of sweet

remembrance….

~ BEE 8/27/26

A mountain of smiles…

a sparkling spirit…

a voice of angels…

and pen of gold ~

she wrote of pain and heartbreak,

sang us rising out of the

shattered versions of our pasts,

She took the power

from jokes and made

laughter hers to own…

her southern twang,

coaxes us forward

even as

the sinking of our hearts

feels the chasm left behind.

Dolly, sweet legend,

you’ve earned

your spot in the hall of fame of

our collective soul.

So, for you, Dolly,

we shall dance a little bolder,

sing a little louder

give with bottomless generosity,

and commit to bringing out the

best of humanity by

being our big beautiful

unapologetic selves….

8/26/26

ABSTRACT: Grief and loss are often hidden realities in snow science and mountain professions, yet acknowledging and processing these experiences can yield deep insights into human factors that shape decision-making, safety culture, and community resilience. The ski, snowboard, and avalanche mitigation industry — including researchers, forecasters, field workers, and operations professionals — faces a uniquely high rate of trauma and fatalities, and cultural norms often favor stoicism, dissociation, and rapid return to work. This paper examines how authentic engagement with grief can illuminate the human dimensions of loss that are frequently sidelined in technical disciplines. Through an in-depth case study and synthesis of lived experience with professional practice, we explore how confronting grief deepens understanding of risk perception, communication, and interpersonal dynamics in high-stress environments. By situating personal loss within the broader context of occupational risk and human performance, this paper fosters dialogue about mental health, community support, and the value of human connection in an industry that historically understates emotional impacts. Readers will gain insight into how openly addressing grief can strengthen empathy, enhance safety culture, and promote wellbeing across research and practitioner communities. Ultimately, this paper advocates for integrating human factors awareness — including grief and loss — into professional practice to build more compassionate, resilient mountain communities.

KEYWORDS: Grief, Human Factors, Decision-Making, Loss, Mental Health, Resilience

1.BACKGROUND/CONTEXT

We work, laugh, and grieve alongside people we love — and all of us, eventually, will lose someone, or be lost ourselves. The reason this topic is of such deep importance to me is that throughout my guiding/educating career, I was with companies who lost clients, I lost dear friends, I grieved as many as eleven losses in one year. In 2021, I was heli-ski guiding for Valdez Heli Ski Guides and preparing for my day when we received the news of the fatal heli crash that took five lives; two of which: Greg Harms and Sean McManamy, were my dear friends and mentors. Five minutes later, I climbed into the helicopter to do the very same job that had just killed them the day before. Combining this tragedy with the losses I’d already endured, including the sudden and devastating loss of my own father, had me reeling. I began and ended each day alone in my cabin swallowed by tears. I skied scared, hypervigilance gripping me with an aversion to risk that crippled my ability to make decisions. In high potential consequence terrain, I was hesitant, scared and not able to think clearly. Eventually, this blew out my knee, cancelling the rest of my season much to my relief. That year I could barely begin to process one dear friend lost, before another tragedy claimed another life. This happened repeatedly as I struggled to make sense of a world where multiple friends in our mountain community could all lose their lives in so many different accidents. My guiding and avalanche educating was suffering greatly as my nervous system struggled to adjust. I was slowly becoming unable to do the career I had loved so powerfully for so long. Drinking it off and getting back on the horse wasn’t fixing anything. In fact, it was only making things worse. That’s when I met Laura McGladrey of Responder Alliance and finally felt seen and understood. I began a long road of healing and tending to the compounding grief that had nearly eaten me alive. As I worked to repair my nervous system and tend to a heart that had been shattered, it was clear I wanted to become a part of the solution. I knew then that I would become a wounded healer. I had spent thirty years guiding people through the external wilderness, specifically so I could hone my craft guiding them (and myself) through our inner wilderness of grief, trauma and loss.

This year, North America lost many powerful leaders in our industry. Grief is one of the most primary of all human emotions. Many cultures have beautiful rituals around grief. People connect. They are given space to wail, scream, laugh, dance, be held, be in community around the fire. Yet, in our Western culture, there is an unspoken discomfort with grief and so it is often met with clichés such as “At least they died doing what they loved”. We treat death as traumatic rather than inevitable. Indeed, sometimes tragic accidents ARE the cause of death; yet we are still shocked and surprised that it could happen to our loved ones, our colleagues, or in our workplace. The people that heal most effectively from the loss of a colleague are ones who work in a place where connection, trust and psychological safety existed prior to the loss. Then, when the worst-case scenario becomes the new reality, the base of connection and support already exists and people feel safe to express their own experience of grief. When this basis is not present and the culture operates under the age-old paradigm of “suck it up and deal”, “the show must go on”, “shit happens”, “get back on the horse” or “drink it off”, we are faced with the tragedy of an industry where some people are able to healthily dissociate and continue to do their jobs, but others struggle to integrate what they are experiencing with continuing to be competent at work. The reason this should be of utmost importance to employers is because it impacts the bottom line as well as retention of institutional knowledge.

There is a research gap connecting the impacts of grief as a human factor in our decision making. This paper is a compilation of my lived experience, case studies from ski patrols, professional athletes, heli-ski companies and forecast centers with whom I have worked intimately; as well as an integration of the current research on grief and risk. My aim is to highlight Mammoth Mountain Ski Patrol for their choice to engage with this differently. May we look more closely at their model to investigate how we can emulate their bold innovation in cultural change.

Rachel Reimer’s Rise Study, an interview-based study of 17 interviewees in the U.S., Canada, France and Switzerland, defined psychological safety as: “Psychological safety was defined by research participants as feeling safe enough to show one’s full self and to speak up when feeling unsafe due to either mountain or human-caused hazards based on the principles of trust, interconnection, and reciprocity within a group. Factors that supported psychological safety were (in order of strength in the data) vulnerability, teamwork, physical safety, and gender diversity. Psychological risk in relation to human-caused hazards was found to significantly affect physical safety from mountain hazards for both members of the profession and their clients.” (Reimer, R.D. & Eriksen C. 2025). Though this study does not center on grief in particular, my case studies have shown that in order for employees to feel comfortable expressing how their grief is impacting them, it is of vital importance to first create a psychologically safe workplace prior to the incident.

2. SYMPTOMS OF GRIEF AND WHY THEY MATTER IN AVALANCHE TERRAIN

Grief is not a single emotion — it is a whole-body, whole-brain state that touches cognition, emotion, physiology, and behavior simultaneously. For most people, this is disruptive but manageable within the rhythms of daily life. For ski patrollers, guides, field researchers and avalanche forecasters, it is distracting within an environment that offers no margin for disruption. That is why the way we have traditionally tackled the “grief issue” at work has been to dissociate. Healthy dissociation is an effective tool that, at times, enables workers to stay focused enough to do their job effectively. However, problems can potentially arise when that box of emotions, shelved during the event, never gets taken back off the shelf, and a variety of coping mechanisms (most commonly drinking) are employed in order to keep said box on said shelf. Research on grief has effectively broken down the typical symptoms into five categories.

2.1 Cognitive symptoms: the reality of “brain fog”

Practitioners often describe grief-related cognitive changes in metaphor — fog, static, a slowed-down brain. This is not just a figure of speech. A neurocognitive model (Békés et al, 2023) proposes that grief creates a temporary imbalance between two competing brain systems: the basal ganglia, which govern habit and procedural memory, and the medial temporal lobe, which governs flexible, contextual memory and learning. The competitive relationship between these two systems underlies common cognitive experiences in grief such as a sense of “brain fog,” and the intense stress of bereavement can cause this normally flexible interaction to become imbalanced, with one system temporarily dominating the other. In practice, this can look like difficulty concentrating, memory problems, and intrusive thoughts or images of the person who died, or a state of depersonalization, confusion, and inability to focus.

For someone in charge of an avalanche mitigation route, a forecaster out making field observations, or a guide determining a particular slope’s stability, this matters enormously. Avalanche terrain punishes exactly the kind of attentional lapse, memory gap, or slowed processing that grief produces.

2.2 Emotional symptoms

Guilt, anger, hostility, restlessness, and a diminished capacity to initiate or maintain organized activity are common, alongside numbness, sadness, fear, shame, loneliness, yearning, self-reproach, and helplessness. A professional relies on their situational awareness coupled with their vast knowledge of their field to make decisions. These feelings actively compete with these professional resources needed to effectively assess a hazard or lead a team (Ernstmeyer et al., 2024).

2.3 Physical symptoms

Tightness or heaviness in the chest or throat, nausea, dizziness, headaches, numbness, muscle weakness, and fatigue are typical, and a weakened immune system and disrupted sleep are common as well. Grief is also physiologically taxing at a level most people don’t expect. Intense grief has been associated with increased cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events, including myocardial infarction and Takotsubo (stress) cardiomyopathy — the “broken heart” is a real physiological event, not only a metaphor. A body running on impaired sleep, elevated stress hormones, and reduced physical reserve is not a body operating at its baseline capacity for a demanding physical job in cold, high-altitude, high-consequence terrain (Schoo et al., 2025).

2.4 Behavioral symptoms

Grief doesn’t push behavior in one predictable direction — it destabilizes the whole system, and different people (or the same person at different times) land on opposite ends of the spectrum (Osterweis et al., 1984):

· Risk-Philia: restlessness, taking greater risks, purporting a disdain for life, suicidal tendencies, substance abuse.

· Risk-Avoidance: avoidance of work involving hazards, hypervigilance, social withdrawal, changes in physical activity level, lack of engagement.

2.5 Spiritual symptoms

Spiritual symptoms can vary widely and range from a loss of faith to a disconnection from a sense of mission. Feelings of purposelessness can lead to a stuck feeling of apathy and identity loss. The original reasons for choosing this line of work can be temporarily (or in some cases, permanently) suspended in a state of deep questioning. Why guide if this works end in death? Why patrol and get paid so little to put my life on the line day after day? Why endure sleepless nights to produce a public forecast that people ignore anyway and die in an avalanche? These questions are examples from my actual clients.

2.6 Decision making impact in potential high-consequence terrain

Avalanche professionals consistently manage uncertainty under pressure — incomplete information, evolving snowpack, weather, group dynamics, and time constraints to name a few. Human factor research dating back to 1994 (McCammon, 2002; Fesler et al., 1994) shows that cognitive shortcuts and biases can cause people to overlook clear signs of danger or make irrational decisions, rooted in things like overconfidence, complacency, ego, and social pressure — all under normal cognitive load.

Grief adds a second, invisible load on top of that. A grieving forecaster carrying brain fog, impaired concentration, and emotional flooding is not operating with the same margin they had before the loss — even if nothing about their training or expertise has changed. And critically, that impairment can express itself as either extreme: the guide who becomes reckless, chasing intensity or numbness in terrain they used to treat with more caution; or the patroller who becomes so risk-averse that hesitation itself becomes the hazard, in an environment where indecision at the wrong moment can be just as dangerous as overconfidence (as was my experience at VHSG). Human factors research has spent two decades cataloguing how ordinary cognitive biases get people killed in avalanche terrain. Grief deserves to be named as its own distinct human factor — one with a documented physiological and cognitive basis, and a bidirectional behavioral signature that current human factors frameworks don’t yet capture.

3.CASE STUDIES IMPACT ON HUMAN FACTORS AND DECISION-MAKING

Nathan’s drinking intensified. Emily could no longer sleep. Mark refused to go on mitigation routes. Sally began taking unnecessary risks. Joel quit. Suzy had anger outbursts at her colleagues. Tyler suffered a scary near miss at work due to insomnia and brain fog. All these symptoms of grief dramatically impacted decision-making in potential high-consequence work environments. We all know these examples. We have lived this reality time and time again in this industry.

These examples, with real people’s names changed to protect their privacy, are drawn from years of working with clients as a resiliency coach specializing in grief, trauma, and loss.

This season, I joined forces with Ken Wylie and Aidan Manahan of Archetypal to provide a different type of organizational support to an innovative team at Mammoth Mountain. I have been expressly given permission to use their organization’s name. I would like to celebrate companies like Alterra and Mammoth who are courageously thinking outside the box to update creative solutions to old problems. In the case of Mammoth, their ski patrol had suffered the unimaginable loss of not one, but two patrollers in less than a year. What Ken, Aidan and I proposed was entirely new to the ski industry. Previously, the majority of organizations, following an incident, would direct impacted employees to resources such as local therapists listed under their Employment Assistance Program. Many people in these industries are so exhausted on their days off that doing laundry is difficult, much less calling an unknown number on a card and explaining the complexities of a career in avalanche mitigation to a person who may be unfamiliar with these nuances. Instead, Ken, Aidan and I spent two weeks integrating with Mammoth’s Ski Patrol. We coached 100 people in two weeks. Much of this “coaching” was simply offering empathetic witness, deep listening, and an outside perspective to help them process the difficulties of grieving colleagues while still doing a good job at work. We skied laps, rode chairlifts, ran toboggans, did ceremony at the tragedy sites for those lost, and most importantly, we identified people who could use a more therapeutic approach than we could offer and successfully made warm handoffs to the local Eastern Sierra Counseling Center. We ended our time there giving recommendations to leadership based on all we’d learned from our deep listening. Our outside presence allowed space for employees to lean in and share openly. It enabled them to feel seen and validated as well as to normalize their grief symptoms. It proved to be the equivalent of releasing a pressure valve on a steam container before it burst. The impact was palpable and our supportive relationships with that mountain’s team continue as they prepare for another season ahead. Our hope is to apply these unique techniques prior to tragedy striking by offering training in resilience, psychologically safe workplaces and with Wylie’s unique archetypal model, which is helpful to understanding our own individual relationship to risk and decision-making. (See Figure 1). To quote Wylie himself: “As humans, we have a choice of how we respond to adversity. We can choose to be a victim or not. Agency is achieved when we choose to direct our own lives even in the face of adversity.”

Figure 1: Archetypal’s Mindset Calibration for Risk Decision Making

4. OTHER RESOURCES/EDUCATIONAL TOOLS

One thing is clear: there isn’t one model or methodology to rule them all. This is an ecosystem in which we are committed to working together to provide the best possible toolbox to support those in need. In lieu of a comprehensive listing of resources, I would like to highlight a sampling from this ecosystem.

4.1 Responder Alliance:

https://www.responderalliance.com/

Responder Alliance is an industry leading organization, known for translating best practices in stress mitigation, including employee loss. Responder Alliance has been endorsed by the International Congress in Alpine Rescue’s guidelines on stress mitigation. (ICAR 2023 Guidelines). The Responder Alliance is known for its four impactful courses: Psychological First Response for Rescue, Stress Injury Awareness for the Individual, Stress Injury Awareness for the Team, and Incident Support for Traumatic Stress. The tools that Laura McGladrey and her team have created are now globally recognized and utilized to build resilient teams and provide structured guidelines for a team to train before, during, and after an incident. I have provided in the figures below some of their most widely used and effective tools, uses by permission.

When we arrived at Mammoth, we discovered that the ski patrol and their resilience team had been training with Responder Alliance for several years, including support in the previous loss of a patroller. This allowed a common framework that was a compliment to our work, extending past traumatic stress to a 3-3-3 framework that was useful in collective response to grief.

Figure 2: The Responder Alliance Team Stress Continuum

Figure 3: The Responder Alliance 3-3-3 Protocol

This 3-3-3 Protocol is perfectly adapted for grief providing a structured framework of checking in on people to understand how they are processing their grief as well as what continued support they desire.

Figure 4: The Responder Alliance Trauma Stress Questionnaire.

4.2 S.O.A.R. Survivors of Outdoor Adventure and Recovery:

https://www.soar4life.org/

SOAR is a non-profit that was created to support survivors of outdoor accidents. They offer peer-support groups that are clustered around similarities (parents, siblings, partners, colleagues) led by coaches and therapists who are trauma informed. They also offer free online community workshops open to all.

4.3 American Avalanche Association: The Resilience Project

The A3’s Resilience Project is a compilation of resources from a directory of therapists to grants to online workshops. It is an incredible resource, full of tools.

4.4 Mountain Muskox :

https://www.mountainmuskox.com/

Mountain Muskox exists in Canada and has many chapters for in-person peer support networks and meetings for survivors of outdoor trauma.

4.5 The Redside Foundation :

https://www.redsidefoundation.org/

This resource currently serves the professional outdoor guiding communities of Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Washington. They provide financial help and assistance finding mental health support for guides who have experienced trauma on the job.

4.6 Three Influential Books as Resources:

Sapolsky, R.M. (2004) Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: the acclaimed guide to stress, stress-related diseases and coping (3^rd ed). Henry Holt and Company.

Weller, F. (2015). The wild edge of sorrow: Rituals of renewal and the sacred work of grief. North Atlantic Books.

Devine, M. (2017). It’s OK that you’re not OK: Meeting grief and loss in a culture that doesn’t understand. Sounds True.

5. CONCLUSION

By sharing my case study and the other resources available, my hope is to broaden our traditional approach when dealing with tragedies. We once gathered around the fire following loss and found in our connection, a lightening of the load. It is also important to note, A colleague does not have to be killed in the line of duty for grief to impact a team or individual. This year, Snowbird Ski Patrol lost their director, Tina Biddle, who died in her sleep. So, too, did The State of the Snowpack lose Judson Wright this year, in the same manner. The Chugach National Forest Avalanche Information Center lost their beloved director, Wendy Wagner, to cancer just as the season was beginning. These losses were carried through the season by their co-workers. Yet if you speak with any member of Snowbird Ski Patrol, State of The Snowpack’s team or the forecasters from CNFAIC, they will inevitably share that though the grief was profound, the powerful healing they found in connection with each other served them deeply. If we invested in creating psychologically safe workplaces and resilient teams prior to tragedy striking, it would pay off through staff retention, fewer workers’ comp injuries, and a mission that attracts the field’s best workers.

6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to Ken Wylie and Aidan Manahan of Archetypal for their collaboration and pioneering work. Thank you to Laura McGladrey and Responder Alliance for guiding the work. Thank you to Alterra and Mammoth Mountain for thinking outside the box and having the courage to lead by example. Thank you to The Change Agency for providing powerful curriculum for leaders in the arenas of psychological safety and emotional intelligence.

7. REFERENCES

Békés V, Roberts K, Németh D. Competitive neurocognitive processes following bereavement. Brain Res Bull. 2023 Jul;199:110663. doi: 10.1016/j.brainresbull.2023.110663. Epub 2023 May 11. PMID: 37172799.

Ernstmeyer, K., Christman, E. (Eds.), 2024. Chapter 17: Grief and Loss, in: Nursing Fundamentals, 2nd ed. Open Resources for Nursing (Open RN), Chippewa Valley Technical College, Eau Claire, WI.

Fesler, D., Fredston, J., 1994. The human factor: Lessons for avalanche education, in: Proceedings of the 1994 International Snow Science Workshop, Snowbird, UT, 473–487.

Institute of Medicine (US) Committee for the Study of Health Consequences of the Stress of Bereavement; Osterweis M, Solomon F, Green M, editors. Bereavement: Reactions, Consequences, and Care. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 1984. CHAPTER 3, Epidemiologic Perspectives on the Health Consequences of Bereavement.

McCammon, I. 2002. “Evidence of Heuristic Traps in Recreational Avalanche Accidents.” Proceedings of the International Snow Science Workshop, Penticton, BC.

McGladrey, L. 2023. Responder Alliance Field Guide. Library of Congress.

Reimer, R.D., & Eriksen, C. 2025. Feeling safe enough: Psychological safety in the mountain guiding and avalanche profession. Journal of Rural Studies, 120, 103834.

Reimer, R.D., Eriksen, C., 2026. The Second Shift in Mountain Guiding and Avalanche Work: Intersectional risk, human-caused hazards, and risk-management effectiveness among non-dominant groups. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction.

Schoo, C., Azhar, Y., Mughal, S., Rout, P., 2025. Grief and Prolonged Grief Disorder, in: StatPearls [Internet]. StatPearls Publishing, Treasure Island, FL.

Deep purple as the night

I see you

staring at me

from my periphery…

calling to me in

that alluring siren song…

until I can bear it no longer

and I interrupt the pattern

of my run

to succumb to the seduction

of your delights…

thorns rip into my flesh

extracting payment

for sweetness due…

blood runs down my shins

as the stain of you

blackens my lips,

my fingertips

and the palate of the gods.

~BEE 8/14/26

Dare I tickle

this dark underbelly of life?

Teasing forth the shadows

that once delighted in

giving me night terrors

from beneath my bed…

Dare I invite my skeletons

from deep in the closet

to see what dance moves

they’ve literally been

dying

to teach me?

Dare I walk the plank

of shame

diving into the depths

of all mistakes

only to find the Kraaken

was of my own making?

Dare I dine with the

devil in the pale moonlight,

offering up my soul

in exchange for that

of an

endless muse?

What is life if

not for the daring?

what is light

if not for the darkness?

Who am I

without

wisdom of my shadow?

Who knew that

truth and dare

were the same answer

dressed in different ballgowns?

~BEE 8/13/26

To awaken from a poetry coma

is to see the world with fresh eyes…

As if I lay dreaming these past weeks,

floating amidst clouds

and spoken word…

frolicking with mermaids under

smoke laden skies.

Bathing between Shakespeare’s ironies

and the humanity of kindness…

I shudder from

the thundering

knock resounding on my heart…

All this ~

as I glided silkily on river’s current…

allowing waters to carry me

through fire,

allowing hope to set me adrift

in a sea of tenderness,

allowing this earth-bound body

to bear witness to death marching

ever more solidly towards us all…

and yet opening my eyes,

I bow with reverence to

the breath of life,

the eternal gratitude

for the fireweed

that sprouts from

a darkly ravaged soil…

~BEE 8/12/26

Bears Ears

and Grand Staircase-Escalante

erased in an instant.

100,000 ancient dwellings,

pictographs, petroglyphs,

ancestral sites….

expunged with a presidential

swipe of the pen…

Hopi, Navajo, Pueblo Zuni,

Ute Mountain Tribe and

Utes of the U…

Read more

Let the initiation begin ~

I give my clothes a nod

and with utter pleasure,

they evaporate ~

becoming one with hot stones…

The river engulfs me,

one cell at a time

returning to the

womb of creation

to be born once again ~

Read more

Read more

I hear her before

I see her…

the thrum of wings,

the buzz of motion,

the air vibrates with

her presence

as she dances

with

bright colors

of prayer flags

…

Read more

Come wander 
 in the meadow with me

let the quickening pace
  thrumming in your veins 
   become 
      a lazy river
                flow
 of meadowlark song
   and bees pollinating 
       poppies…

Come weary traveler 
  to this table I have set
       for you
 amidst lupine and balsamroot..

Come let your roots…

Read more

The Aspens have a lot
    to say this morning,
quaking with the news
   they have to share…
  trembling with anticipation
     of me leaning in to 
         hear more….

I love their 
  eager enthusiasm ~
like children on Christmas morn,
   just dying for me to get
      up so they can grab me
          by the hand

 and lead me into the 
   woods of m…

Read more

Read more

First cherries
of the season 
ripening in my mouth,
red juice squirting down 
my chin,
pits and stems
plucked and spit
in a ritual of
reaped harvest. 
they taste like summer,
bursting anew
with energy at the
mere suggestion of 
June.  

~BEE 6/4/26

Read more

The valley shook
with the silence
of anticipation…

wordless lightning
electrified the sky,
relentless 
in its 
own becoming 
amidst the night ~

it illuminated 
my greatest fears
from the inside out;
 
rejection…
   abandonment…
        destruction….

until morning came
and the frogs I had
unknowingly harbored
bene…

Read more

The rain arrives 
with a permission slip…
signed with the loving
signature of hot tea
and a cozy blanket.
I sip gently from
the cup of integration,
careful not to burn
my tongue on insight.
I am closing the gap
with patience,
rising to the call
like steam
lifting from my mug…
a soft prayer into
morning's gray altar,
a t…

Read more

I recently collaborated with a photographer friend of mine, Stephanie Matson for the art show at The Confluence Gallery in Twisp called Murmurations, which was a show that operated under the theme of "We The Artists", how Art can be Activism and creativity can give voice to change.  You can see (or buy) our piece at the gallery over the course of this n…

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Recently I was interviewed on Valerie Black’s podcast, Becoming Power. I just gave it a listen and would be honored if you would do. Please let me know what landed for you and what will serve you moving forward. With love, your Captain of Whimsy, Brooke Shiny Edwards

Let this be your reminder to let joy be your rebellion!

You can follow her on subst…

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Poets have long
wrestled with the fierce
lion of April as it 
tosses it’s silken mane
about with a cocky arrogance,
flinging flowers about the room
before blowing in a blizzard
of a tantrum to sweep it 
all away.
What chaos is this
into which I was born?

The challenging ram,
fiery and obstinate,
demanding snow and daffodils
all in the same breath?

I…

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This last week,
a microcosm of 
54 years,
love and loss,
blinded by piercing cold
winds lashing at my face,
lifted by magnificence,
icy peaks touching void
of blue.  
skin weathered 
and chapped, 
burnt and lashed;
my emotions ~ 
a rollercoaster of 
tears, anger, joy,
challenge and exaltation.
One step in front
of the other,
lungs bursting from
the pre…

Read more