Roots
Counsellor (M.A.) | Ecotherapist | Death Doula | Movement Guide
Much like yourself, I was inducted into the identity project with little grounding in any real, rooted culture. I was taught that growing up literally meant to ascend upward through the socioeconomic ranks; to become worthy enough to stake a claim in the groundless territory of the techno-industrial machine that tears at the heart and flesh of the living world.
It took long searching and real suffering to finally see and accept that true maturity requires not ascent, but descent, and that we must grow down in order to grow up.
It has been a winding path through dense and diverse terrain to arrive here. 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 is a practice of listening — to land, heart, body, soul, and story; of feeling the wild intelligence that lives beneath inherited beliefs and borrowed ambitions; of relating more wholesomely with 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 feel — and how 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 a life that is more rooted, relational, vital. I am here not to offer certainty, but companionship, not a map, but a shared orientation toward what is real, enduring, and worth bowing to. I am here to advocate for your earthen inheritance so that you may remember who you truly are deep down.
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 vibrant silence of the Cathedral of the Wild where I find my song.
I am here to sing with you, to sustain a lively tune so you can rest in resonance long enough to sense your own unique song. I am here to encourage you to inhabit your essential role in the epic ensemble of the living world.
I am here to remind you of the sacred threads that weave your heart and soul with the heart and soul of Earth.
May this space remind you that even in the densest shadows, life continues grow, to call, and to sing: There is soul here.
The world is a love story that wants desperately to include us again.
— Sophie Strand
