Ecofeminist Manifesto

What would a world designed by women look like?

What would a world led by youth look like?

These are some questions I am asking myself as I dance around the garden in the last days of early autumn sunshine, enjoying a rare warm afternoon in Pennsylvania. I am wearing pink and smiling into the camera, recording a movement my ecstatic self wants to express. There is a shed behind me, designed perfectly to status quo specification, ugly plastic imitation clapboard siding, artificial to the extreme.

I’m recording this musing during my first month of Body Temple Dance Teacher Training which started the same week as the regenerative art incubator I’ve stepped into called the Design Science Studio. It’s been a busy time and I need a dance break.

Right now, I am preparing to submit a talk for the Women in Architecture Summit. It’s about ecofeminism, and I am asking myself, what do I really mean when I use this word to refer to my ontological ethos?

I wrote a book around the theme of ecofeminism (kind of accidentally) last year during the lockdown.

Trapped in my cabina on a picturesque hill in paradise where I was living at the Julia and David White Artist Colony, I went back through a notebook I’d begun right before deciding to move to Costa Rica. In a mad scramble to package all the wisdom I’d gathered through years of spiritual and professional training, I wove together seven years of notes on permaculture, yoga, and sustainable development work into a futurist worldview of a society based on a global ethic of peace, union, and mindfulness.

Download the 16-page e-book below.

Sensing Space:

The Sacred Architecture of Here and Now

An Ecofeminist Approach to Building a Better World

When I first started studying architecture, I was not a loud woman. One of a dozen female students in my class of almost a hundred, I was your archetypal Good Girl. Driven by a desperate need for approval, I was always striving for attention, wearing the mask of perfectionism which shielded me from the harsh judgements of others and them from my deep inner pain.

All this changed when miraculously, yoga entered my life. I was 19 when a terrible surgical accident triggered a decade-long pain flare up which caused my whole body to go into chronic pain spasm which made it excruciating to walk and participate in many activities. My then-boyfriend’s sister suggested I go to her favorite yoga studio, and after only three classes I was hooked. Not only was I finding mobility and the freedom to walk again, but I was starting to feel a strange new glimmer of hope that my soul might come back to me. In the deep darkness an ember of power was starting to glimmer and gleam.

I was actually trapped in a very bleak black place of darkness, believing I had no agency to get out and thus choosing addiction and all kinds of things my parents and society did a great job modeling to me. BUT! Because of those yoga classes, I found myself again. My soul found a path back into my body.

I developed a deep intuition and sensitivity which helps me step out of the way of myself and be consumed by universal consciousness. This gives me a very fragile grip on life and reality, but generally it works out in my favor. This is how I came to practice intuitive architecture for transforming consciousness, using the breadcrumbs left behind on my own journey into the mysterious unknown to guide others through their own depths.

I use architecture and master planning to create healing transformation, which always leads to greater resilience.

I became a loud woman after realizing there were so few advocates for children, the Earth, and other marginalized groups in society.

I became convinced the edge was an innovative and solutions oriented place, and made a home there, at the tipping point of the status quo. I became myself, a caring and sensitive person with deep insights and powerful intuition.

So, here I am in Sensing Space, sharing my vision of a Studio Sanadora, a design studio for and by women/femmes, in the spirit of inclusion, because the feminine spirit lives in all of us and is a uniting force for harmony and justice, the spirit of life itself.

We are standing together

Let us find ways to reach out and touch each other, to move one another and let ourselves be moved as one, for justice and a world that works for all.

(These are some cuties I met at Lancaster Central Market the other day, read about it in the previous post.)

Partnerships & New Developments

As a result of my partnership with the Born Global Foundation, which sponsored my participation in the DSS artist incubator and accelerator, Studio Sanadora is growing and becoming able to take on larger projects! We also now have 5 senior interns from computer and software engineering programs at Boston University working on our planetary regeneration system, HOMEdash! What a fantastic fall it has been, I am witnessing an abundant harvest of a very long legacy of hard work and dedication.

I don’t want to say everything I do is inspired by a dedication to fighting the patriarchy… but it’s not NOT about that!

I am focused on a future which manifests a synarchy, a new cultural paradigm marked by integral co-creation as the unified consciousness we are and harmony between polarities like feminine and masculine.

Something I felt like being loud about today in studio during our conversation about defuturing was the dissolution of the perceived boundary between humans/nature. We are the earth, the soil is a mirror image of ourselves.

Looking at cities and the built environment separately perpetuates this great lie that nature is outside of us, and it is coding a program into us at the very foundation of who we are that WE ARE SEPARATE. Nothing could be further from the truth.

But, all of us will find our way home to ourselves, from this 3D perspective, it just takes time. From a multidimensional perspective… Well, maybe I’ll save the 5D quantum alchemy for another time…

😉

Download your copy of Sensing Space; it’s free, but you’re welcome to leave a donation via PayPal, below!