My Process

We just lived through something monumental. Together. And all I got was this T-shirt.

As Arundhati Roy so eloquently wrote in The Pandemic is The Portal on April 2, 2020, “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

These words hold a sort of prophetic importance to how I seek to spend my limited time on this earth - heralding others through portals, with grace, intention and deep care.

I create portals - thin spaces for us to touch the core of our own and our shared humanity, and to bring some of that embodied wisdom into the world.

1. We are living in a moment of intense Polycrisis (a situation where multiple, distinct crises interact and overlap, producing a combined effect that is more severe than the sum of its individual parts)

   
   -of capitalism, individualism and greed
   -climate breakdown/catastrophe
   -big tech data hoarding and surveillance
   -militarism, violence
   -racial, gender and class, able-bodied and many other supremacies and inequalities

   
   

2. We have the responsibility to hold ourselves, each other and future generations with the utmost care, respect and reverence.
   

3. We must unlearn dominant, supremacist, colonial ways of knowing and being in the world, and learn humble ways of relating to ourselves, each other and the earth - rooted in genuine curiosity and Love. We need each other to do this work in community, best forged through dialogue (using Paolo Friere’s Dialogical process), through which wisdom arises from each person's soul through dialogue with others based on Love, Solidarity and Mutual Respect.

My role- as I see it, is to facilitate intimate moments for people to touch their own humanity and connect with the humanity of others–to touch the pain of the world in ways that aren’t overwhelming, or dissociative, but in a cathartic way that is generative and honours the paradox in our hunger for a transformed world and the realities that we live in.

I do this by using Grief as a Portal to Greater Love, drawing on many ritualistic and ceremonial practices I’ve studied, participated and led.

I seek to harness the wisdom of the covid-19 pandemic, that the most precocious thing we have in this life is the time with those we love, and to support people visioning and bringing gatherings of love, grief and celebration to life.

Grounding Beliefs

From the election of Donald Trump in November 2024 until his January 20th inauguration, chef Alyssa Becker (who now sits on the advisory board for MVX), co-organized a series of intimate gatherings across the east end of Toronto. For the first few months of this administration, through all the psychological overwhelm many of us experienced, we responded to the moment by hosting intimate gatherings with meals and deep discussion around how we respond to the moment as individuals.

Hope In The Cracks

Context