Roots & Reckoning

ROOTS & RECKONING

A Day of Grief Tending, Ceremony, Celebration of

Life with Community in the Heart of Texas

Private Gathering • Dallas Fort Worth • Saturday May 9th

There are parts of us that have been waiting, quietly and patiently, for permission to be seen. In the rush of ordinary life, we learn to set aside our deepest sorrows, our unfinished grief, our unnamed longings, so that we may function and participate in the world as it asks us to.

But what is left unresolved does not disappear. It settles into the body. It lives in the pauses between words.

It waits.

On May 9th, we will turn toward what waits.

In a private beautiful barndominium homestead held as sacred space in the Dallas Fort Worth area, we will be invited into an encounter with what has not yet been tended. The grief that never found a witness. The emotions stored in the body long before they were understood. The persona we constructed in order to survive, and the self that has been living quietly beneath it all this time. Through grief ceremony, celebration of life, movement, and ritual, we will be given the opportunity to meet ourselves more honestly than the ordinary world typically allows.

As the day deepens, we will make our way into the Temazcal, the ancient Native American sweat lodge tradition — a ceremony of purification, prayer, and deep returning. We will blend Meso-American indigenous tribe rituals along with Lakota Native American practices and songs. Inside the womb of the earth, in the presence of steam and stone and darkness, we are given the opportunity to shed what we have carried and to breathe ourselves back into something more essential. This is a ritual of surrender.

We will close our time together in an Integration Circle, where we harvest collectively what has been opened across the day. We tend to the beginning with the same care we bring to the end, so that what has moved through us does not simply pass, but takes root. The intention is not to leave with a residue of an experience, but with a different relationship to yourself and to your life.

ABOUT YOUR GUIDE

She knows what it is to search for home across a long distance.

Of Indigenous American and Mexican descent, she carries within her the particular grief of diaspora — the wanderer who comes from away, whose roots were scattered before she was born, who has spent her life learning to belong to herself in the absence of a singular place to return to.

This is not a wound she has overcome. It is a knowing she has learned to carry with care, and to offer back to others who are finding their own way through displacement, loss, and the long work of becoming whole.

She is a Grief Tender, Death Doula, and Holder of Threshold Spaces, not comfortable, but workable. Not resolved, but honest.

Having moved through significant personal loss herself, she does not come to this work from theory. She comes from the interior. From the places in herself that had to dissolve before something truer could emerge. Her gift is not in having answers, but in holding a quality of presence that allows others to stop running from their own questions.

She serves as a mirror for what has been unseen, unloved, or fragmented across the course of a human life. In her presence, people often find the parts of themselves they quietly stopped believing in. She does not hold space from a place of having arrived. She holds it from a place of knowing the road, and trusting that the soul, given the right container, knows its way back to itself.