Roots
Counsellor (M.A.) | Ecotherapist | Death Doula | Movement Guide
Like most, I was inducted into the identity project with little grounding in any real, rooted culture. I was led to believe that growing up meant becoming worthy enough to plant a flag in the groundless territory of the techno-industrial machine that tears at the heart and flesh of the living world. I resisted this premise as a young man. But it took long searching and real suffering to finally see and accept what it obscured, that true maturity requires not ascent, but descent, and that we must grow down in order to grow up.
It has been a long and winding path through dense and diverse terrain to arrive here, with you. I have lost my way countless times, only to be found again and again at deeper layers of the spiral. At each layer, a more honest and humble reckoning has occurred. Each turn of the spiral has brought me closer to the ground, bowing ever lower to the grace of it all.
What has emerged from this path is a practice of listening — to land, heart, body, soul, and story; to the wild intelligence that lives beneath inherited beliefs and borrowed ambitions. To the holy other.
Much of my work is about unlearning the reflex to dominate, optimize, extract, or perform. It is about relearning how to attend and attune, to belong, and to respond and create with care. I am less interested in answers than in the quality of the questions and relationships we are willing to live inside.
If you’ve found your way here, you may be carrying a similar fatigue with the hollow promises of progress, or a longing for something more rooted, relational, alive. This space exists not to offer certainty, but companionship, not a map, but a shared orientation toward what is real, enduring, and worth bowing to. We begin, as always, close to the ground.
Carl Jung once suggested that modern people don’t see God because they don’t look low enough.
It is in the soil that my soul is reclaimed. It is in the dark silence of the Cathedral of the Wild where I find my song. I am here to sing with you, to sustain a welcoming tune so you might hear your own song within yourself and courageously inhabit your unique role in the epic ensemble of the living world.
I am here to remind you of the sacred thread that has always guided you so you can step forward into life reconnected and renewed, embodied and ensouled.
May this space remind you that even in the densest shadows, life continues to call, to sing, and to grow. There is soul here.
The world is a love story that wants desperately to include us again.
— Sophie Strand
