I’ll tell you my story so you can understand what making art means to me.

For starters, I didn’t do well in academic studies from day one. As a child and young teen, I had poor scores on many subjects except for art. Despite winning local awards and an art scholarship in high school, my father had suggested I look into engineering. When it came to college, he told me that studying art would be a waste of my student loans because I would “just get married and never pursue art again”.

I graduated from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, got married, and continued a successful career as an illustrator and designer. I worked for publishers and advertising agencies, creating images for books and services primarily oriented to healthcare, environment, and holistic practices. I have also been a shamanic practitioner for over two decades, facilitating shamanic healings and painting the inspiring messages from shamanic journeys.

Like most freelancer artists, my career shifted with the marketplace until everything came to an abrupt halt and I contracted several Lyme bacterias. I went from being very healthy, well connected to my community, with lots of enjoyable work, to an isolated person with 20% of my original energy and physical abilities.  I continued to take on work even though there was a period where my hands became so disfigured through reactive arthritis that I had to stop every 15 minutes to place them in buckets of ice water to reduce the inflammation and pain so I could continue to draw. It was a prolonged healing process that took many years and created a financial debt that required me to sell my home. I moved south for better weather and into a smaller space to fully recover and create something new. As my health continued to soar, so did the ideas for where I wanted to direct my artistic energies.

I knew I could contribute to the urgent issues of this world with my artwork. Every day on the news and social media, we witnessed reports of global warming and animal extinction with the accompanying descriptions of disappearing and/or destroyed habitats. The mass production of imprisoned and tortured animals for food also weighed heavily on me. They were all part of the same issue and affected the entire planet, including new virus strains that were now a pandemic. There were many other people like myself that were tapped financially, and emotionally and were evaluating their value to contribute. I felt depleted and occasionally moved towards hopelessness with all that was going on politically, environmentally, and with the pandemic. I knew I wasn’t alone in these feelings.

During this time, I read about quantum healing and learned that experts in this field were applying this methodology to restorative practices. I journeyed on this concept and came to a place that held great potential. I saw that I could incorporate this healing technique into the energetic restoration of the habitats and species that were disappearing. The Journey to Rewilding and Quantum Healing Sanctuary was birthed due to my need to contribute and I knew there would be others who might benefit but even more so, I knew we needed many of us to pool our energies in order to make a change. It’s a creative visualizing tool designed to help anyone with a spiritual practice and an interest in this issue to contribute to this energetic field.

Scientists agree that today’s extinction rate is thousands of times higher than the natural baseline rate, with up to 150 species of animals and plants going extinct every day. Anyone and everyone can contribute to restoring the environment to help these living beings through focused meditations, shamanic journeys, or prayers.