The Council: below is our Sanctuary Board of Directors, Advisors, Stewards, Wolf kin + Partners.
Jessi Rado, LMHC, Únashay Board Director, Writer + Steward
Psychotherapist, Integrative Artist and Yoga Teacher
A note from Jessi:
“Spaces to grieve do not exist. 3 days of bereavement from a job, funerals that leave no space for wailing, sanitized bodies and shortened rituals. We are far from a culture that sees the deep inherent value and healing in supporting these spaces.
We stand to lose much from not addressing these gaps. A planet in peril cannot magically find its way out without doing something differently.
We also stand to gain much from creating intentional grief and ceremony spaces. With community support, people may be able to move through a process that can be integrated into wholeness. Pain can become wisdom. Grief can become an act of praise rooted in deep love. Perhaps the healing and well-being of our planet may paradoxically lie in the intentional release of grief, the recognition of the pain that so often holds and binds us in addictive and consumptive patterns, so that we can live freely, creatively and in harmony with this place that holds our life.
As we collectively face the inevitability of loss in the face of climate disruption, global pandemics, mass inequality and the shift of perceptions of life, where will we learn how to be with the pain? How will we not become more heavily addicted, more dissociated, disillusioned or panicked? I believe that as we learn to fully mourn loss, we will come to see the right next steps to face each challenge we encounter and to let pain make us wise, sensitive, appreciative and protective of what is not yet lost. Not having any cultural context for grief, we need to re-learn this natural rhythm of love and humanness.
A grief sanctuary is a space to cry aloud, to pound the earth, to face a vast landscape and begin to place one's personal sense of loss in a wider context, to sing and wail around fire, to be seen and fully met in a broken state. After all, when we learn that our brokenness is not a defect but a doorway into deeper presence, we might discover that grief is less an enemy and more of a potent, universal human experience that comes from loving. And as long as we intend to live with love, we will need to become familiar with grief. Unashay is a space to normalize this metamorphic phase of love-grief.”
About
Jessi Rado (she/her) is a Psychotherapist, yoga teacher and integrative artist. With extensive experience in early childhood development and education, psychodynamic psychotherapy and systems of psychological and spiritual growth, Jessi now serves as a teacher of process and well-being. Her work guides others in establishing connection to direct experience, with the underlying belief that this is the path that every person, collective and society must take in order to act and live with integrity and peace. She holds an M.A. in Clinical Counseling from Eastern University and is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor Associate (LMHCA) in Washington State. She has funneled her teaching into many places, including HIV mental health clinics, yoga and meditation classes with university students, yoga teacher training programs, consciousness programs such as PCAB on Kaui, and creative projects in art and social justice with artist Swoon, Mural Arts Philadelphia and the Million Person Project. Her teaching is often described as “simple” and “accessible.”
Contact: jessicaradovich@gmail.com
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, PhD., Únashay Board Advisor, Writer + Steward
Author, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home and We Will Tell Our Own Story. Executive Director/Chief Curator, The Emergence Network. Host, 'We will dance with Mountains' Course. PhD, Department of Psychology, Covenant University, Nigeria Adjunct Professor, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Steward of "Making Sanctuary" methodology.
A note from Bayo:
“What do you do when forward movement is queered? When speaking truth to power reinforces the might of the powerful? When there is no highway to travel? The work of making sanctuary is the work of sitting with the troubling, the unsettled, the irruption of the unexpected. As home shifts beneath our feet, we will need more than just our convictions about right action and justice to meet the moment; we might need a new sense of groundedness. New feet altogether. We might need to take up the vocation of libating the ground as a cartography of exile. And what better to use for our libations than our tears?”
About
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe is a widely celebrated international speaker, teacher, public intellectual, essayist and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak.
He considers his most sacred work to be learning how to be with his daughter and son, Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden – and their mother, his wife and “life-nectar”, Ijeoma. “To learn the importance of insignificance” is the way he frames a desire to reacquaint himself with a world that is irretrievably entangled, preposterously alive and completely partial.
As Visionary Founder and Elder of The Emergence Network and Chief Host of the widely popular online-offline course/festival series, We Will Dance with Mountains, Bayo curates an earth-wide project for the re-calibration of our ability to respond to civilizational crisis – a project framed within a material feminist/posthumanist/postactivist ethos and inspired by Yoruba indigenous cosmologies. He considers this a shared art – exploring the edges of the intelligible, dancing with posthumanist ideas, dabbling in the mysteries of quantum mechanics and the liberating sermon of an ecofeminism text, and talking with others about how to host a festival of radical silence on a street in London – and part of his inner struggle to regain a sense of rootedness to his community.
Holly Truhlar, JD, MA., Únashay Board Director + Steward
Grief Therapist / Ritualist / Community Organizer
A note from Holly:
“At this time in human history, with ongoing ecocide, rampant injustice, late-stage capitalism, and accelerated personal losses, there’s incredible need for place-based grief tending. At the same time, in my personal experience as a griever, and professional experience as a grief therapist and ritualist, there are so few spaces where grief is fully and intimately held. The beauty of a grief sanctuary such as Unashay is that the land and more-than-human world can help hold the sorrows that need to be witnessed and metabolized. And, there is an energy, a magic, that is built when we return to such a place time and time again. There’s safety in this type of sanctuary that allows us to make necessary journeys into the underworld and back. A knowing that we’re cared for, knowing that we’re welcomed and held in the threshold.”
About
Holly Truhlar (she/her) is a grief therapist, community organizer, and lawyer. She integrates her Doctor of Law and Masters in Transpersonal Counseling Psychology to create justice- based, transformative relationships between people, groups, and the more-than-human world. She’s currently practicing and researching social technologies, such as ritual, Deep Democracy work, and interspecies communication, that foster large-scale trauma resolution and collective nervous system regulation. She's been called to help hold grief in these troubled and transitional times, so she lives with her heart broken open and soul centered.
Contact: hollytruhlar@gmail.com
Ben Myler, Únashay Advisor
A note from Ben:
“Learning about the vision of Únashay was exciting and encouraging. I hope to advocate for such spaces and to see sanctuary develop in ways that are accessible for folks who are within the intersections of marginalization. Those who have the least access and who carry so much.”
About
Ben Myler (they/ she) has lived in New Mexico for ten years. They now live on the land that is Únashay. They enjoy, greatly, the beautiful outdoors and Abiquiu community. They enjoy learning ways to build and create; and consider it such a gift to be among so many talented and knowledgeable neighbors/ friends. Ben served as Supervisor at St. Elizabeth’s Men's Homeless Shelter in Santa Fé for 10 years.
Marah Moore, Únashay Board President
A note from Marah:
“I moved from the east coast to New Mexico in 1981 to attend a quirky little liberal arts college in Santa Fe and have lived in New Mexico (the land of entrapment) since, raising my four children in the high desert of northern NM. I completed a Master’s degree in Community and Regional Planning in 1993, and have spent more than 30 years working with non-profits and philanthropic foundations, helping them move more effectively towards the changes they hope to see in the world. I am retiring at the end of 2023 and will turn my creative energy towards making more art— a passion that has been back-burnered for much too long!
I am excited and honored to spend time in my retirement working with Únashay. Before I was 30, I lost a daughter and a husband, and have since lost one of my parents and many others who were dear to me. I have experienced the grief of divorce and betrayal, and the grief of living in a world that is imploding in so many ways. There is so little support for those who are grieving. Únashay is a beacon in the desert, and will provide support to so many as they embark on their own journey through the complex landscape of grief.”
Contact: marah@i2i-institute.com
Lizzie Hart, Únashay Board Secretary
Facilitator, Mentor and Performance Artist
A note from Lizzie:
“re - mem - ber
to have in or be able to bring to one's mind an awareness of (someone or something that one has seen, known, or experienced in the past)
sanc - tu - ar - y
a place of refuge or safety
At the heart of the crisis of humanity, the impending extinction of the human, is that we have forgotten, collectively, how to grieve. Human technology was once, long ago, rooted in ritual: the application of innate wisdom, communicated in acts of beauty, for the purpose of survival. Grief is one such forgotten ritual, though it is a ritual without form — like water in motion, grieving is a current which is impossible to define, but which shapes the griever as water in motion shapes the land.
What might we need to remember how to grieve, and why?
We need first to acknowledge that our remembering is required in order to participate in life, and that remembering is actionable, and essential. We need contact with others who share this understanding — to find one another. We need to harvest the wisdom of the land, sky and wild creatures who have not themselves forgotten. We need permission to allow our grief to shape us, organically — to let our feelings and perceptions, our bodies, our utterances, our art and our work be shaped by grief. And we need space (the confluence of time and place) to safely enter into the shaping. Unashay is in itself an acknowledgement, and it is a confluence — a place where people are invited and encouraged to remember.
Únashay is a place where people can take refuge from a “world-out-there”, so steeped in willful forgetting, even systematic denial, of the wisdom in grieving. Our collective wellness is the groundwater, Únashay is the well, and those who explore their grief at Únashay are those who both drink from and replenish the waters with each drop of their remembering.”
About
Lizzie Hart is a group facilitator, mentor and performance artist devoted to the revealing and replenishment of our personal and collective mythologies, in service to future generations. Her work is rooted in the principles of deep ecology, and her passion for the relational arts springs from an upbringing in and around Santa Fe, New Mexico, in conversation with nature spirits, dancers, musicians, poets, visual artists and grassroots movements for truth and reconciliation.
Contact: lizziehart25@gmail.com
Aimee Wilson, Únashay Executive Director
Listener / Culture keener / Singer
A note from Aimee:
“We need places, like the gouged out arroyos and waterways of the desert, for grief to spill. A topography of place and presence, carved by the grief that runs through it, to allow this river to have its way. By 'grief sanctuary', I mean an attempt to build a landscape for the waters to move. A landscape that is vast enough to match the inscape of grief of our times.”
About
Aimee Wilson (they/ them) is visionary architect, executive director and steward of Únashay Sanctuary. Music is their primary language, having written, performed and recorded two albums. They have served under many roles, as musician, singer, writer, social worker, organizer and fundraiser for houseless women/ queer community in Philadelphia, waitress, group facilitator and more. After much intimate experience with loss, and decades of work within a system that doesn’t take care of the grieving, Aimee was moved to summon Únashay. They dwell in New Mexico with wolf kin and chosen family, tending the sanctuary and writing music.
Contact: aimee@unashayhome.com
Aaron Bumgarner, Únashay Communications + Volunteer Steward
Aaron Bumgarner takes care of trees in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He writes a lot, lately about grief, and does quite a bit of art. The death of an incredibly close friend by suicide was a form of grief initiation for him. Feeling alone and lost in this new landscape, he realized what was lacking in grief support while seeking out any and all people, books, groups, and ideas that might guide him after his loss. Writing and sharing writing ended up being one of his main ways of processing and connecting. Visiting Únashay felt like an instant good fit, and he has continued to stay involved and help since his first visit to the land over a year ago. This has looked like supporting Noria grief cafes, in the form of facilitating and cooking pizzas after the cafes, as well as serving as Communications and Volunteer Steward.
For general questions, facilitation and volunteer inquiry, write Aaron at inquiries@unashayhome.com
Kim Zitzow, Únashay Grant Writer
About
Kim Zitzow (they/she) is an artist/weaver, freelance culture worker, medicine maker, and guide. The current beneath each of these roles flows with a reverence for the mystery of beauty ~ that healing happens when beauty surrounds suffering, that beauty-making-poetry can bleed the boundaries between the aesthetic and the political, and foreground the ethical. In seeking to know with what has not yet been lost, they are guided by the understanding that our humanness is developed, nurtured and healed through our relations of response-ability to other - human, and other-than-human.
Contact: grantwriter@unashayhome.com
Wolf hybrid kin: Senzhen, Drift, Archie + Dolly
What can we say? We’re obsessed. These heart seers and companions are indeed ‘council’ and watchkeepers of Únashay. Drift, Senzhen (senzch - en), Dolly + Archie make up our wolf-hybrid pack of pure love and ham-my delight. They have no email, you will just have to plan a visit.
Gerard’s house
The women of Gerard’s are powerful community beacons and collaborative partners to Únashay. Gerard’s house is an amazing program based in Santa Fe, that serves grieving children and families, with offerings such as Nuestra Jornada (Our Journey), Grief Connections, Stepping stones and more.
the emergence network
ten is a planetary network of care and inquiry gesturing towards new assemblages of response-ability during moments when the ways that we think about and address the troubling crises of our times are increasingly a part of those crises. We are a fugitive, underground commonwealth of bewilderment made up of social artists seeking to create new openings to age-old problems. We aim to disrupt dominant modes of perception, engagement, and responsiveness in a time of crisis by disturbing modern notions of justice, power, and human agency.