Grief magic: Time-Bending, Shapeshifting, and Becoming multitudes

The Veil by Helen Lundeberg

A year long creative cohort exploring themes around grief, magic, and shapeshifting in tune with the seasons. Participants will explore their own processes of shapeshifting, magic, and story-telling, creating and sharing creative writing and art inspired by the themes we explore together.

Upcoming Course Dates

Next cohort begins April 2025!

Course structure

Our class will meet 5 times per season via zoom. These sessions will include:

  1. seasonal grief magic Workshops

    The first meeting of each season will be a lecture/workshop drawing on seasonal themes, folklore, and stories connected to grief. Participants will be given creative prompts inspired by the season to work with.

  2. Seasonal Collective Studios

    The second meeting will be a collective studio, during which we will create art alongside one another, and share reflections on our grief and creative process.

  3. bonus workshops and studios with guest instructors

    There will also be seasonal live and recorded bonus workshops and studios with guest instructors, sharing their approaches to grief tending, creative process, and seasonal magic making with us.

  4. Seasonal Grief Rituals

    Each season we will also have a collective ritual, sometimes led by me, sometimes led by a guest instructor.

  5. Seasonal community Reflections + Art Sharing

    The last meeting of each season will be a space for collective reflection, sharing artwork, and a seasonal creative ritual.

Class Schedule

TBA

course Topics

In addition to exploring the above themes, we will also be exploring the following:

  • Ancestral Stories, Myths, and Timekeeping: Myths, Magic, and Folklore connected to the seasons and grief*

  • Taro't’s Major Arcana as guides for grief and creative process

  • Imagination Spells: Envisioning and Practicing Living Futures

  • Art, imagination, and grief as collaborators and ecological processes

  • Grief as Time Travel: Exploring constructions and experiences of space and time

  • Grief, Shapeshifting, De/Constructions of the self: becoming multitudes

  • The Politics of Enchantment: Mundane Magic, Care, and Enchantment in the Everyday

  • Entanglement + Collapse: staying with the trouble of love amidst collective + ecological loss

    *While I’ll be drawing largely on European myth, folklore, and magic, students are encouraged to explore their own ancestral stories and practices.

What if, despite the massive amounts of violence and loss we find ourselves immersed within, the past isn’t dead, and neither is the future?

What if our creative practices are also practices of composting impossibility?

WHAT IF THE WAY GRIEF DESTABILIZES & DECOMPOSES US IS ALSO A CREATIVE PROCESS?

A creative cohort of grief magicians & shapeshifters: Community based learning

Grief Magic is a learning community for those who feel profoundly disrupted by grief. This class is an experiment in seeing what happens when we spend the year attuning to ourselves, one another, our personal and collective grief and joy, the seasons, our own capacities to imagine and create and stay with the trouble of living and dying amidst a sea of grief.

Coming from a background in community organizing and community based education, I believe our relationships with one another and this world are the places where knowledge and understanding are made. While there will be spaces where I am sharing in a lecture or workshop format, much of our explorations will be collective dialogue and sharing about our creative and grief processes with one another- rather than simply me sharing with you.

While each session is recorded, I think of the course as an invitation to be with each other in grief, magic making, and creative process. All this to say, you’ll probably get more out of it and feel more connected to the course if you plan to attend most classes live- though this isn’t a requirement, and there are ways to participate via our discord for those unable to make it live!

a trauma, grief, + joy informed learning space

Every thing in our class is an invitation and optional, and choice is central. There are many ways to participate and no one right way. Listening to your body, your resistances, your excitement and interest will be encouraged throughout our course.

Grief is given a place at the table in our class discussions and check ins, but also in the design of this course, which is designed for those us who feel profoundly changed by our grief.

We will also be creating space to share about our joys, and to lean into those places in our lives where we feel nourished - to tend to the both/and of our grief/joy, and the relationship between the two.

This class is an invitation to really welcome ourselves and our grief however it arrives, emerges, and changes, and to let it be the vast, shapeshifting landscape of experience that it is.

"Joy is the capacity to do and feel more. As such, it is connected to creativity and the embrace of uncertainty...Joy is a process of coming alive and coming apart..."

-Carla Bergman & Nick Montgomery, Joyful Militancy

rooting your creative practice in nourishiment

Instead of rooting our creative practices in capitalist expectations of endless productivity, at the expense of ourselves and the earth, we can have creative practices that look more like ecosystems. We can root our creative practice in attunement to ourselves and others, with seasons and cycles of growth and decay.

FAQs

  • While attending live is encouraged, there’s no shame if you can’t make them, and there’s no need to let me know ahead of time. Please feel free to watch at your own pace. All sessions are recorded. If you plan to mostly participate via recording, you can connect to other students through using our course discord.

  • I upload the captions, chat, along with class slides from the first session of each season (all other sessions don’t have slides). You’ll also receive pdfs of handouts and prompts, some which will come with audio recordings.

  • If you want to be in creative process, this class is for you. You do NOT need to consider yourself to be an artist or have any prior art experience!

  • Our collective studios are free time/virtual studio/craft/parallel play time to create art alongside one another.

  • We will celebrate you showing up however it is that you show up. We will also practice letting our art practices be sustainable and gentle—not rushed and forced, with no expectations of folx to present completed, prolific projects.

  • You will be able to access or download all course materials to keep indefinitely!

Your resident grief magician

My name is Mara June. You might know me for my grief memes, which are one of my creative practices….

But I am not a grief expert nor a grief therapist. I am just another human disrupted by grief - I am messy and being present with death and grief has assured me that there is lots I don’t know and lots I won’t figure out.

And I am a space holder and a creative facilitator, who feels a deep need to create collective experiences to be with grief and uncertainty—as well as to be with joy, play, and imagination, and magic.

I am a collector and tender of questions, stories, and inspiration, not answers. I am learning and unlearning alongside you how to stay with the trouble of our times, and how to make trouble for systems that depend the repression of our grief and joy.

To learn more about me, my trainings, approaches, and background, check out my about me page.

What students are saying

“Mara June is an incredibly gifted facilitator, herbalist, death worker, storyteller, and an exemplary example of community care. Their passion and love for the work they do, space they hold, and those they serve is immeasurable. What I value most about working with Mara, is the room for grief and joy to meander throughout the group and class, as well as happen simultaneously.

Mara has a knack for fostering connection and care with plants, grief, creativity, each other, and ourselves. I leave Mara June’s offerings completely enthralled with what I’ve gained and hungry for more. If you are curious about the work being done at Motherwort & Rose, I highly recommend jumping in – you’ll be met with such a soft and lovely landing.”

— Jillian, Tears of the Gods participant

“I am in the current cohort of this @motherwortandrose magic and I cannot recommend it enough. It is such a beautiful space to tend to your grief and learn and grow and know we are all grieving something, all of the time. We are never alone, and Mara creates that feeling in every class.”

— Abby, Tears of the Gods participant

“I AM SO, SO GRATEFUL FOR THIS COURSE. MARA IS A SKILLED, THOUGHTFUL, AND WARM FACILITATOR, AND THE GENTLE AND ADAPTABLE PACE OF THE COURSE MADE IT FEEL INVITING RATHER THAN INTIMIDATING… I FELT SO WELCOME AND SEEN BY THE COHORT OF FELLOW GRIEVERS. I DON'T HAVE THE WORDS TO FULLY DESCRIBE HOW MEANINGFUL THIS COURSE WAS TO ME. IT MADE ME FEEL HOPEFUL THAT I CAN CONTINUE TO FIND SPACES WHERE I CAN FULLY HONOR MY GRIEF AND MY HUMAN-NESS. THANK YOU, MARA.”

— Geraldine, Herbalism for Grief Support Student

guest instructors & facilitators

for 2024 course (2025 course guests TBA!)

Ariane Vanessa

Ariane Vanessa is an interdisciplinary artist and expressive arts therapeutic facilitator living on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), scəw ̓aθən məsteyəxʷ (Tsawwassen), and qʼʷa:n̓ƛʼən̓ (Kwantlen) nations (so-called Richmond, British Columbia).

Often reflecting on how everything exists in relation, Ariane attends expressive arts processes as rituals of engaging in dialogue and relationship with life, each creative exploration pinning a location on the map of being and being with. She cares deeply about facilitating invitational spaces for folks to meet and respond to the internal and external landscapes of their lives while honoring presence as an evolving process. In these journeys, she helps draw upon and nurture imagination, play, and the expressive arts as resources in expanding the realms of what might be believed to be possible for collective healing.

Lee Datura

(she/they) OIC, RCST

Lee is a somatic practitioner and biodynamic craniosacral therapist. Her work centers supporting folks healing from burnout, emotional and physical trauma and creating a deeply compassionate container for learning tools to support the nervous system. She offers 1:1 somatic coaching in person or online as well as group nervous system workshops and courses. She believes healing means coming home to our very nature, that we are fractals of the inconceivable magic of the ecosystem, planet and galaxy around us & that healing happens in relationship. 

Website: www.daturasomatics.com

IG: datura_somatics

meztli yoalli Rodríguez Aguilera

Meztli Yoalli Rodríguez Aguilera was born and raised in Puebla, Mexico. They are an Assistant Professor in Latin American and Latino Studies at DePaul University. They received their Bachelors in Cultural Anthropology at Universidad de las Américas, Puebla, and a master’s in social Anthropology at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), in Mexico City. Dr. Yoalli  Rodriguez earned their Ph.D. in Latin American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. They are a member of the Decolonial Feminist Network in Mexico.  Their book manuscript (under contract with University of Illinois Press) is titled tentatively “Grieving Geographies, Mourning Waters: Race, Gender, and Environment on the Coast of Oaxaca, Mexico.” Where they intertwine grief, ecological loss, time, and race. They also have experienced deep personal loss and grief, so their work is based on their embodied experience.  When they are not teaching or doing research, they collect records and select music around Chicago and Mexico. 

Xenia Marie Ross Viray

Xenia Marie Ross Viray (she/they) is an Imagination Healer and who works at the intersection of creativity, mysticism, and meaning-making. Her mission is to help creative pioneers anchor their unique genius earthside, and to reconnect the schools of thought, and groups of people who have been disconnected. Her favorite forms of expression are  experimental workshop containers, channeled writing, and multisensory digital collage. As a translator and synthesizer for the multidimensional creative, Xenia helps people become intimate with their true gifts and creative processes. Her offerings change seasonally, and include courses, workshops, a multimedia Substack zine Garden of the Imaginal and her creative midwifing container, Imaginal Temple. She works with astrology, human, design, tarot, and the school of life to bring more magic into the earth realm. She loves cats, coffee, and laughing. You can find her cackling in Brooklyn and enjoying sweet treats with her partner Jacob and their familiar Paco, the cat. 

Rabbi Adina Allen 

Rabbi Adina Allen is a spiritual leader, writer, and educator who grew up in an art studio where she learned firsthand the power of creativity for connecting to self and to the Sacred. She is cofounder and creative director of Jewish Studio Project (JSP), an organization that is seeding a future in which every person is connected to their creativity as a force for healing, liberation and social transformation. Based on the work of her mother, renowned art therapist Pat B. Allen, Adina developed the Jewish Studio Process, a methodology for unlocking creativity, which she has brought to thousands of activists, educators, artists, and clergy across the country. A national media contributor, popular speaker, and workshop leader, Adina’s writing can be found in scholarly as well as mainstream publications, and on her website at www.adina-allen.com. Her first book, The Place of All Possibility: Cultivating Creating Through Ancient Jewish Wisdom will be published this Spring by Ayin Press. She and her family live in Berkeley, CA. 

dori midnight

Dori Midnight is a community care worker, ritual artist, theologian, writer, and deep listener oriented towards collective healing and liberation. For over two decades, Dori has woven rituals and practiced intuitive, community based healing in one-on-one sessions and in radical movement spaces, in collaboration with the seen and unseen, plants, stones, songs, and more. Dori offers workshops on rituals and remedies for unraveling times, re-enchanting Jewish ancestral wisdoms as a liberatory practice, and queer magic and healing. Supported and inspired by a wide web of dreamers, witches, artists, and web workers, Dori’s work is also rooted in feminist, decolonial and abolitionist scholarship, queer liberation, and disability and healing justice work. Dori has been in deep cahoots with movement work for Palestinian liberation, prison abolition, and queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice.  Dori lives on the occupied lands of the Pocumtuc and Nipmuc, by the Quinnehtukqut River, also known as Northampton, Massachusetts. 

Dori’s website

More Instructors TBA!

Tom Hirons

Tom has been storytelling publicly for over 15 years and writing for much longer. In 2015, he co-launched Hedgespoken travelling storytelling theatre and Hedgespoken Press and these are often his main focus, elliptical approaches to changing the world, blessed with plenty of Trickster and a good helping of unfathomable magic.

Essentially a cheerful fellow driven to apoplexy and grief by the madness of our times, Tom is calmed most effectively by walking on Dartmoor, by sleeping in the deep greenwood and by the sound of true words spoken.

Tom hopes his work provokes you into a deeper relationship with this marvellous world, or sings a remembering song to you, or inspires some kind of cathartic fit that takes you home via the stars… There's much to lament and grieve, and much to be angry about and take action against, but to be alive is an incredible thing. We do not know when death or disaster will take us, so let us live fully while we may and nourish the web of life around us as much as we possibly can.

Tom’s website

Cost & PAYMENT PLANS

Cohort based Course - Full access

Access to this year long cohort based course is $1100, which can be made in 1 payment, 4 monthly payments, or 8 monthly payments.

Sign up for the waitlist below to be updated when the 2025 course begins enrolling! In the meantime, check out our self paced study option!

Self-Paced Study

Painting by Nom Kinnear King

For those looking for something a little quieter, more self paced, and or a little less commitment, join our Self Paced Study of the Grief Magic course for just $30 per month for 12 months. Get access to all the guest workshops and course materials for a fraction of the cost and time commitment.

This is also a great option if you weren’t able to sign up before the class filled!

Scholarships

Scholarships for low income and BIPOC students are available but have our scholarship form has not yet opened for our 2025 course, please sign up for the waitlist and check back for updates!