Reflections on Keynoting the “Rooted in Community and Connection” Conference

What happens when 120+ educators, artists, and activists gather to explore what it means to be rooted in community, to flow with creativity, and to face resistance with open hearts? Jennifer Johnson and I were honored to keynote the E3 Washington Conference this year with a three-day collaborative offering. Together, through mural-painting, collaborative poetry, movement, and deep reflection, we created a living experience—rooted in art, grown by community, and shaped by nature herself.

*The first layer: collaging the ‘resistance rocks’ onto the mural.*

Day 1: Stones in the River

We opened the space by inviting participants inward. Through poetry, meditation, reflection, and choice, we asked each participant to tune into the resistance inside of them, to call up and name that resistance. We asked the question: What stops you? What gets in the way of you stepping into the fullest expression of who you are? Of creating the life you want?

Participants wrote their innermost fear on fabric ‘rocks’. Like rocks, resistance isn’t good or bad, it simply is. Rocks can stop the flow of water. They can also be a foundation of beauty, of strength. Even so, we don’t need to carry them around—rocks in our pockets can drown us. Individuals made a choice to release their fear, then dropped it in a basket. With movement and intentionality, we deepened that release, knowing the resistance will return, knowing we will need to release it again and again.

With attention and care, Jen and I collaged the rocks, the resistance, onto the bare canvas, as we listened to other presenters talk of resilience, community, and collaboration within the field of environmental education.

Throughout the day, a forest began to grow around the rocks, seating them in a landscape. More people added their inner fears to the rocks, creating a dry waterfall of resistance, of belonging.

Together, we named and released our resistance, setting the stage for the next two days..

*A participant adds their resistance to the rocks as I paint the forest around.*

Day 2: Becoming Water

As I stood at my easel, Hanford McLeod of the Nisqually tribe spoke to the conference attendees, sharing history and truth of the Nisqually people, stories of gathering redcedar bark as a child from the forest around us, the deep connection of his people to this land.

With living moss, gathered from nearby maple trees, as my paintbrush, I painted moss on the rocks and trees in front of me. As the moss grew over the words of resistance—layering, softening, transmuting—I felt the fears move through me, the fear of not being enough, the fear of rejection, of failure, of success—all fears I know intimately. As they moved through me, I gave them back to the earth. I stood, rooted in community, transmuting resistance into flow—through my body into the earth. Sometimes with a shiver of recognition. Sometimes with a soft sweep of breath. Always down, down to the ground.

Rock after rock I painted. Fear after fear transmuted, the resistance losing potency as moss grew on rock after rock, and Hanford’s words washed over us all.

At the bottom of the mural I came across a rock with shame written on it. Shame. Such a familiar and damaging emotion. Shame that can only be released in the light, in community. Moss wasn’t enough, so I looked to the redcedar tree rooted nearby and grew one of her roots into and around the rock. The Redcedar’s strength is in centuries, its timeline is its own. When it visually cracks open the rock, I imagine shame breaking to a thousand pieces, crumbling, and falling away, released.

In the evening Jen and I hosted our collaborative poetry workshop. Over eighty people recalled resistance and how they moved through it. With Jen as their guide, they explored water as teacher. Writing, sharing, collaborating on lines of poetry. As they learned from water, so did I. They wrote and I painted. First, a trickle of water, hesitant, moving through cracks and crevices, finding the path of least resistance. As their collaboration continued, the water began to flow in earnest, rushing over rocks, washing around, over, through resistance.

*Water begins to trickle down and wash through resistance.*

I painted and they collaborated, transforming our collective resistance into flow, movement, action.

Together, we become water.

Representatives from each group stepped on stage, sharing the line their group co-crafted, creating a waterfall of words. Of movement. Of hope. Transmutation in action.

*Sharing the imperfect, impromptu poem in a waterfall of words.*

Day 3: We Are the River

In the morning, Jen sat by the fire, writing the final poem, crafted with words and lines from the night before. I put the finishing touches on the mural, knowing I could work on the painting for a hundred more hours and releasing my own need for perfection. Beauty lies in the imperfect.

We closed the conference, rooted in community and connection, standing in a circle under the mountain, the nearby river as our guide.

*Gathered under the mountains as wel close the conference.*

Jen shared our poem and people heard their words in the telling. They saw their resistance washed away, layered into the mural itself. We each shared with another, what we will bring home to our own communities, what actions we will take. Then, facing the river, we closed our eyes, imagined picking a stone from the beach of the Salish Sea. Holding this stone in our mind’s eye, we rested our intentions, our commitments, in the stone, then tossed it into the metaphorical water in front of us. We saw the ripples in the water, watched more ripples adding to our own, coming together to form a wave—a wave that can reach across the Salish sea, across the world. Knowing it all starts right here.

I left the finished mural behind and brought with me a renewed sense of collective power—we ARE the river—and a deeper trust in the imperfect beauty of the creative process.

Gravity Rocks Resistance

Collaborative poem, written by many, refined by Jen, freely given to all.

Brave and Steady
Step into the River.
Release all you carry.

Roots expand,
Seeking stability,
Cracking
Through Shame
To
Reveal Truth.

Water, we implore,
Hold us in Connection.
Weightless and free.
A community of glinting networks,
Flowing through space and time.

Water disregards resistance~
Choosing the least.
She offers no attention to that which
Attempts
To stop
Flow
Block or challenge, innate power to
Overcome
Anything in the path.

Generations ebb and flow
Relenting cycles of energy
Grinding down
Damming beliefs and limiting patterns.

Water seeps through soil and
Secrets.
Trusting the ever-changing phases of the moon.

Committed to relentless renewal,
Steady transformations
And the quick fury of flood and downpour.

Water tells us there is no past,
Only the timeless dances of change.

Awareness through resistance
Licking the soil’s banks,
Rolling rocks of despair
Up the shore where new life
Reaches in, lifts them up
To skip atop the water in song
And joy

Water is infinite, as our we
Which is to say, not at all.
And yet, she is abundant life force.

Ruthless compassion,
Showing us how to disappear,
Evaporate, renew
And begin again.