LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I live, practice, and learn as a guest on occupied, unceded Indigenous lands, the O’odham Jeved (Phoenix), which is the ancestral homeland of the Huhugam, O’odham, Piipaash, Yoeme, Indé, Diné, Yavapai, and many others. Acknowledgement without action is only aesthetics, so I invite you to join me in supporting Indigenous-led efforts to return lands and cultural resources to their rightful sovereignty and stewardship. Please consider making contributions of money (always) and other resources (only as requested/directed) to organizations such as Apache Stronghold, O’odham Piipaash Alliance, LandBack, Indigenous Roots, Water Protector Legal Collective, Native American Rights Fund, and NDN Collective, as well as to Indigenous-led movements to recognize and preserve ancestral ways of life and traditional healing, such as the Patiloni Collective*, Cultural Coalition, The Sagrado*, and Chacruna’s Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative of the Americas.
As well as honoring the original wisdom keepers and stewards of the land, I would like to pay tribute to the earth itself and the beings that populate it. I offer respect and gratitude to all organisms: the stones and the trees, the hares and the hawks, the cacti and the flowers, the coyotes and the lizards, the bees and the cicadas, the mycelium and the herbs, the beetles and the fish, the rivers and the canyons and everything between. I offer in equal measure thanks to and reverence for the wind and the thunder, the snow and the monsoon, the lightning and the sunshine—all seasons and all stages of birth, life, death, decay, and return. I am blessed to be surrounded by and to co-care for the many medicinal, decorative, protective, and nourishing species that offer beauty, shade, sustenance, and healing to those who came before me, who exist beside me, and who will survive me.
*I am a member of the Patiloni Collective. Donations support my work as well as the work of my fellow healers. The Sagrado is the fiscal agent of the Patiloni Collective until the Collective establishes independent 501(c)3 status.
EQUITY STATEMENT
I recognize my many privileges, coming as they do from places ethnic, racial, familial, economic, educational, religious, physical, and intellectual. I also commit to both learning and unlearning, to embracing identities and layers that are different from and similar to my own, to de-centering and deferring, and to remaining curious and action-oriented about what we can give to and receive from one other to support the community body as well as the global body.
I honor and acknowledge that our individual hallmarks and our locations of intersection may shift at different stages of our evolution, and that this does not excuse, make superior or inferior, or nullify our pasts. I do not expect to remain unchanging, and I do not anticipate that you will stay static either; I do intend to stay accountable and open. At our best, we move together, collaboratively, with agility and with kindness wherever our paths alone and shared may lead. We are always questioning, renegotiating, agreeing, and diverging, but we do this with respect, humility, and love. We are not one healing the other unidirectionally and hierarchically, but instead, as existential psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom says of two men at a fabled deathbed, “fellow travelers, both simply human, all too human” who share the essential condition of life.
I provide life-affirming deathcare to all who feel called to work with me. I invite us into conversation to discover how we may align, and if we find that we are not a good fit, I will to the best of my ability offer recommendations to other practitioners and/or resources with whom you may find deeper resonance.