Wild - To connect with the divinely wild sense of who we are as humans and the untidy but profound mystery that we are honored to live amidst
Lotus - the recognition that the deepest beauty grows out of muddy waters Living - true healing is an everyday practice...it is a way of being... a living art |
About MeWild Lotus Living is me - Summer Starr.
I grew up on a small farm in the beautiful northwest of the United States and though I loved living close to animals and nature, I found myself drawn to big city life for most of my adult life. I went to school in Seattle and San Diego, obtaining a BA and masters degree in International Development - focusing on non-profit management and microfinance. My career in the non-profit sector took me to Vietnam, Kenya, Ghana and India where I mostly worked on small grassroots development projects. The bulk of my experience was in Mumbai, India where I lived for 4 years. But this was my professional life - during this time of profound professional development unbeknownst to me I was also living into pretty dysfunctional mindsets and ways of being based on supremacy culture that were actually preventing me from bringing the fullness of my being to the work I was passionate about. In 2007 I had a psychic opening and was given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. This was an opening to a deeper calling that was trying to come through. This calling is a desire to reconnect with nature, including my own true nature as an empath with the gift of traveling the shamanic realms and connecting with other-than-human beings. Part of my path of following my calling has been to reweave personal and ancestral patterns of disconnection from earth and the profound intelligence of the natural world and larger cosmos. My life experience has given me the gift of being a compassionate witness for some of the ugliest parts of humanity. It has brought me a depth of understanding about the human experience that connects me on a heart level to the wisdom traditions and scientific philosophers. As you will see in my blog, my path to re-connection to my true self is found in my re-connection with the earth and a divine sense of creation. I experience this as a heart and soul level awe about the mystery of the natural world and the sense of what lies beyond. I still actively tend our world through non-profit work where I run community programs and, in partnership with others, I facilitate co-learning spaces where we work to collectively face and work towards dismantling systemic oppression. I balance this more left-brained work with deep relationships with nature spirits and the ancestor realm, which takes me into the right-brained space of the imaginal and mythic. My ultimate dream is that each one of us becomes an ambassador for the forces of nature that work wildly within each of us. That we learn to live authentically, to care for all peoples and the earth that birthed us. That we commit to doing the hard but necessary work to untie the knots that bind us from realizing the truth and beauty of a more balanced co-creation. |