The Council: below is our Sanctuary Board of Directors, Advisors, Stewards, Wolf kin + Partners.
Rose Gordon, Unashay Board Director
Hospice worker, Bereavement and Spiritual Care, Trainer & Mentor
https://www.circlesofcompassionatecare.com
A note from Rose:
“The need for grief sanctuary is essential during these times of both personal and global losses. Sanctuary is a place of refugia, a space where there is shelter, a sheltering space under which new life can grow. Long ago they were churches or Cities of Sanctuary - places for fugitives that were considered sacred or holy places where they could live, untouched by the law of the land.
Today we need both inner spaces and outer places that are spacious and sheltering, places where we can take refuge from the busy, marketplace aspects of life. In these intentionally crafted spaces we can tend to the layers of grieving - feel the depths and tides of loss, be tenderized and informed by loss…and perhaps identify what we treasure, what we value and what we love …and find new ways to align ourselves with what matters in our life.
Unashay can be that refugia, a sheltering space where grief can be held, explored and used to feed life.”
About Rose:
“I came to Taos in 1969 and have lived with delight and gratitude alongside the deer, coyote, rabbit and birds on a mesa of piñon, juniper, sage and chamisa in Arroyo Hondo. My two adult children were born and raised here, the land has gifted me inspiration and sanctuary. As a child I spent happy times exploring the cultural exhibits in the Brooklyn Museum along with playing street games, dreaming of planting a time capsule and reading, writing and doing art projects at school and at home.
At around 8 yrs old I developed an interest in death and nighttime dreams and decided that I had one foot in the river of life and one foot in the river of death - and that being in both those places at the same time mattered! Having realized that no one around me talked about death I let it fall into the background of my life. As I think about it now however, that interest was always quietly guiding me towards the experiences that have shaped and informed my end-of-life work.
In 1989, I spent 4 days tending the dying of a dear friend in West Texas, which propelled me into 30 years of being with the dying time of life. That has included getting a specialty degree in Hospice and Grief Counseling, over 30 years participating in a Dream group, 2.5 years working as a Deputy Investigator for the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator, 5 years serving as Director and faculty member for the Upaya Being with Dying Project, 18 years working in Hospice - training and mentoring Hospice volunteers and 7 years providing Spiritual Care and Bereavement to Hospice patients, their families and community members.
I also teach on-line sessions for the Demystifying Death course though University of Chattanooga School of Nursing, have designed and facilitated end-of-life training for international hospital staff and community members in Colorado, New Mexico and Dubai; and volunteered at a hospice in India.”
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, PhD., Únashay Board Advisor + Writer
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. | https://www.bayoakomolafe.net
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.
Marah Moore, Unashay Board President
Social Change Architect
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.”
About
Marah Moore is former Director and Founder of i2i Institute, having worked with complex social change initiatives, providing integrated research, evaluation, planning, and capacity building services. She holds a Master’s degree in Community and Regional Planning (MCRP), and has worked in the field of evaluation and planning for over 20 years. She founded i2i Institute in 1994, and has since led more than 50 evaluation studies and provided numerous workshops and trainings.
Throughout her career, Marah worked with direct service efforts to design programs that met the emergent needs of communities, state-wide and national initiatives (e.g., child welfare, positive youth development, early childhood) to develop integrated and responsive systems; as well as international initiatives (e.g. early intervention in the Russian Far East, Agricultural Research in Africa, Indigenous land rights in Southeast Asia, and Women's Economic Empowerment in Africa) to support effective and sustainable social change.
Marah is an associate with the Human Systems Dynamic Institute, where she was the Chair of the Evaluation work group, and has served on the Epidemiological workgroup for the New Mexico Department of Health.
Camille Sapara Barton,Únashay Board Advisor
Social Imagineer, Writer, Mulltidisciplinary Artist & Somatic Practitioner
https://camillesaparabarton.com
About
"Camille Sapara Barton is a writer, artist, and embodied social justice facilitator. They have been tending grief since 2017 and have developed public resources, programs, and tools to cultivate the practice with others. Rooted in Black Feminism, ecology, and harm reduction, Camille is dedicated to creating networks of care and livable futures.
Based in Amsterdam, Camille designed and directed Ecologies of Transformation (2021-2023),a masters programme exploring socially engaged art-making with a focus on creating change through the body into the world. Camille curates events and offers consultancy combining trauma-informed practice, experiential learning, and their studies in political science. They love plants, music, and dancing."
Jessi Rado, LMHC, Unashay Board Director
Psychotherapist, Integrative Artist, Visiting Assistant Professor & 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.”
Lizzie Hart, Unashay Board Secretary
Facilitator, Program Director of Gather Well Psychedelics
https://lizziehartguide.com
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:
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.
Ben Myler, Unashay Board Advisor + resident
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 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.
Aaron Bumgarner, Unashay Board Treasurer + Communications Volunteer
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
Aimee Wilson, Unashay Founder + Executive Director
Artist, Singer, Culture keener
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:
Aimee Wilson (they/ them) is Founder, Visionary Architect, Executive Director 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, 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
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.