image credit – Christina-Pivarnik
My Song
The Paths That Found Me
I have followed a rather winding path. Gardens, herbs, dreams, Chi Kung, ceremony, storytelling, community art, foraging, poetry, forests, music, meditation, and so many other things I never expected to find myself doing. For a long time these seemed like separate interests.
I am not so sure they are anymore. Again and again, I seem to find myself in the same place: exploring how we might come into deeper relationship with ourselves, with one another, and with the living world around us. Sometimes that happens through art. Sometimes through movement or meditation. Sometimes by gathering people in a circle. Sometimes by standing beneath a tree long enough to realize that perhaps the tree is not the background to the story. And sometimes it happens over food, laughter, a garden, a dream, a poem, something nobody planned at all.
Things in my Basket
Over the years I have gathered a rather eclectic basket of things. There is herbal medicine and foraging in there. Growing food and designing gardens. Storytelling, poetry, narration and songwriting. Meditation and Chi Kung. Dream work, ceremony, visual art, movement, guided visualization, public engagement and community building.
It is, admittedly, a fairly unruly basket. But I have discovered that one thing often feeds another.
My knowledge of plants finds its way into a forest walk. Chi Kung might become the beginning of an art workshop. A dream opens a door into a poem. A garden becomes a gathering place. A ceremony becomes a way of remembering our relationship with the seasons. I love those crossings. That is often where something unexpected begins to grow.
Learning Through Relationship
Some of my deepest learning has happened through people who generously shared what they knew.
Beginning in 2014, I studied Seven Lotus Chi Kung with my beloved teacher Jan Zickler. With Jan’s encouragement, I began teaching in 2020. The practices have become one of the quiet anchors in my own life, and I am grateful to be able to share them with others.
For six years, I also had the great privilege of learning alongside Cree Elder Grandma Amy Eustergerling Wuttenee, Manchew S’quao — Earthworm Woman. At the PLOT Community Sharing Garden and Newton Medicine Wheel, I helped her with Medicine Wheel teachings and seasonal gatherings for children, families and people of many generations.
Those years changed me. Grandma Amy taught me a great deal about ceremony, relationship, listening, and the importance of how we gather. After her death, I was honoured to help carry the Medicine Wheel gatherings forward.
I continue to discover how much of what our teachers give us takes years to understand.
At the PLOT , with Grandma Amy
Dreams, Forests & Other Doorways
I have participated in transpersonal Jungian dream-sharing groups since 2009, with mentorship from Dr. Diane Greig, and began facilitating dream groups several years later. Sometimes our explorations wander beyond words into visual art, movement, drama or sound—because dreams themselves are not terribly interested in staying neatly inside one box.
I have also facilitated forest walks, guided visualizations, workshops and community experiences in many different settings.
The forest remains one of my favourite classrooms, although I suspect the forest would laugh at being called a classroom. To me, everything there is alive and brimming with consciousness: trees, moss, birds, fungi, stones, water, roots, and countless beings I may never notice at all. I am surrounded by teachers. Mostly my job is to become quiet enough to realize it.
Gathering & Creating Together
Collaboration is one of my favourite ways to work. I love what happens when people bring their own knowledge, stories, imagination and ways of seeing into a shared experience. Something begins that none of us could have made alone.
Since 2016, I have helped steward the PLOT Community Sharing Garden and Newton Medicine Wheel, where gardening, art, ceremony, food, music, children, elders, community celebrations, difficult conversations, unexpected friendships and all kinds of life have managed to grow together.
Public engagement art has become another expression of that same curiosity. Rather than making something and asking people simply to look at it, I am interested in what happens when we open the door wider.
What happens when everyone gets to bring something? A mark. A story. A question. A movement. A memory. A wish written on a paper leaf, or placed with a stone. The work changes. Usually we do too.
photo—Jasmeen Virk, at the PLOT
Ceremony & Life’s Thresholds
I completed a two-year program with the Center for Sacred Studies, attended gatherings of the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers, and completed facilitator training with Teen Talking Circles, with an emphasis on reflective listening and conflict resolution.
As a Minister of Walking Prayer under the umbrella of the Buddhist Association of Interfaith, I am able to officiate weddings and other ceremonies marking life’s important transitions. I love helping create ceremonies that feel true to the people at the heart of them.
Joy, grief, beauty, silliness, silence, music, mystery—there is room. The moments that matter most are rarely just one thing.
Gardens Beneath It All
And beneath much of this has been a garden. For more than 25 years, I have made my living through Gardens De-Vine, my fine gardening and specialty pruning practice. Working closely with plants has taught me patience, timing and observation, and that living things have wonderfully individual ways of insisting on becoming themselves.
A garden is never static. Neither are we. We are always listening, responding, making room, finding out what needs tending, and occasionally discovering that something has planted itself somewhere because it had completely different plans.
Some of the Paths That Brought Me Here
I am a Chartered Herbalist through Dominion Herbal College, an avid forager and Forest Alchemy walk guide. I have studied and facilitated dream work, meditation, Chi Kung, talking circles, ceremony and community-engaged practices. I have spent many years learning from gardens, forests, community, beloved teachers, collaborators, and all sorts of beings who never offered me a certificate.
I use what I have gathered from these different paths to inform my life, my teaching and the experiences I create. After all these years and all these apparently unrelated interests, I think I keep arriving at something surprisingly simple: Pay attention. Be curious. Make something.
Gather together. Listen to the living world. There is always another conversation beginning.
“Teresa has a wildly eclectic assortment of gifts and interests, and Tree Song gives them space to grow in the same garden. Look closely and you discover they share the same roots: curiosity, creativity, relationship, community, and a profound love of the living world. She has a remarkable way of helping whatever she touches, people, gardens, ideas, communities, become more fully itself.”
— A. Nelson
