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
April 2025-2026 Cohort now enrolling!
Most sessions held Wednesdays, 12-2pm eastern time, recorded for those unable to attend live!
Course structure
Our class will meet 6-8 times per season via zoom. These sessions will include:
grief magic Workshops welcoming each season
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.
Collective Studios/parallel creative play
The second meeting will be a collective studio, during which we will create art alongside one another inspired by the season, and share reflections on our grief and creative process.
workshops and studios with guest instructors
Each season will have 1-3 workshops or studios with guest instructors, sharing their approaches to grief tending, creative process, and seasonal magic making with us.
Seasonal Grief Rituals
Each season we will also have a collective ritual drawing on the themes we are exploring that season, sometimes led by me, sometimes led by a guest instructor.
Seasonal book clubs/discussions of Grief magic related Books, Essays, and resources
We will have one class per season set aside as a “book club” to discuss one- several suggested readings or resources for that season.
Seasonal community Reflections + Art Sharing
The last meeting of each season will be a space for sharing reflections and participant artwork created during that season.
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.
Class Schedule
All sessions will be held on zoom and recorded for those unable to make it live.
Slight changes in our schedule may occur, but I’ll do my best to let you know and update our calendar ahead of time!
SPRING - RESTLESSNESS, CRACKING OPEN, & RESURRECTING THE SENSUOUS
April 22nd, 12-2pm eastern time - Welcome and Opening the Space
April 23rd, 12-2pm eastern time - Spring Workshop
April 30th, 12-2pm eastern time - Spring Studio
May 14th, 12-2pm Eastern Time - Spring Ritual with Danica Boyce
May 21st, 12-1:30 pm eastern time - Somatic workshop with Lee Datura
May 22nd - 12-2pm eastern time - Studio/Workshop with Xenia Viray
May 27th - 12-2pm eastern time - Book Club: Excerpts from Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief by Cindy Milstein; The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, and “Uses of the Erotic” by Audre Lorde
May 28th, 12-2pm eastern time - Reflection and Art Share
Midsummer- Summer Solstice - Spilling Over, Becoming Libations
June 4th, 12-2pm eastern time - Midsummer Workshop
June 11th, 12-2pm Eastern Time - Midsummer Studio
June 18th, 12-2pm eastern time - Workshop with Yumi Sakugawa: Discipline as Pleasure
June 25th, 12-2pm Eastern Time - Workshop with Damiana Calvario - Decolonizing flower essences
June 26th, 12-2pm eastern time - Midsummer Ritual
July 9th, 12-2 pm eastern time - Book Club: Excerpts from Saving Time: Discovering Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell and Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna Haraway
July 16th, 12-2pm eastern time - Reflection and Art Share
Late Summer - Adorning our Edges, Going to Seed, and Becoming Ripe Fruit
July 30st, 12-2pm eastern time - Late Summer Workshop
August 6th, 12-2pm eastern time - Late Summer Studio
August 13th, from 12-1:30pm Eastern Time - Somatic workshop with Lee Datura
August 20th, 12-2pm eastern time - Bonus Studio: Ritual Design
August 27th, 12-2pm eastern time - Song Circle with Peia Luzzi
September 3, 12-1:30 pm eastern time - Book Club: Excerpts from Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World by Perdita Finn and Medicine Stories by Aurora Levins Morales
September 10th, 12-2pm eastern time - Reflection and Art Share
Fall Equinox - Samhain - Easing the Passage, Belonging to Multiple Realms, & Becoming Compost
September 24th, 12-2pm eastern time - Fall Workshop
October 1st, 12-2pm eastern time - Fall Studio
October 8th, 12-2pm - Discussion: Grief Rituals and Connecting with the Dead - Sharing Practices and experiences
October 15th, 12-2 PM Eastern Time - Song Circle with Francis Cimmaron
October 23rd, 6-8pm eastern time - Workshop with Perdita Finn
October 29th, 6-8pm Eastern Time - Grief Ritual with Naila Francis
November 5th, 12-2pm eastern time - Book Club: Excerpts from A Paradise in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit and The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Tsing
November 12th, 12-2pm eastern time - Reflection & Art Share
Winter Solstice - Resting and Dreaming in the Luminous Dark
December 3rd, 12-2pm eastern time - Winter Workshop
December 10th, 12-2pm eastern time - Winter Studio
December 17th, 6-8pm eastern time - Solstice Ritual with Dori midnight
January 7, 12-2pm eastern time - Divining in the Dark: Tarot as Muse
January 14th, 12 - 1:30 pm eastern time - Somatic workshop with Lee Datura
January 21st, 12-2pm eastern time - Poetry workshop with Tom Hirons
January 28th, 12-2pm eastern time - Book Club: Excerpts from Wintering: The Power of Rest & Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May; Rest as Resistance by Tricia Hersey; and A Slower Urgency by Bayo Akomolafe
February 4th, 12-2pm eastern time - Reflection and Art Share
Spring Equinox - Losing, Joy, and Planting Ourselves as Seeds
February 25th, 12-2pm eastern time - Spring Equinox Workshop
March 4th, 12-2pm eastern time - Spring Equinox Studio
March 10th, 12-2 pm eastern time - Workshop with Perdita Finn
March 18th - 12-1:30 pm eastern time - Somatic Workshop with Lee Datura
March 25th, 12-2pm eastern time - Book Club: When No Thing Works: A Zen and Indigenous Perspective on Resilience, Shared Purpose, and Leadership in the Timeplace of Collapse by Norma Wong; We must risk new shapes by Sophie Strand
April 1st, 12-2pm eastern time - Reflection and Art Share
April 8th, 12-2pm eastern time - Closing the space
Art by Mirelle Salamé
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
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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.
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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.
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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!
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Our collective studios are free time/virtual studio/craft/parallel play time to create art alongside one another.
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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.
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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
Danica boyce
Danica Boyce is a writer and educator in vernacular spirituality, folklore and song. She’s called to labour at the dream of undoing the wounds of imperialism by sowing love and connection to the living world.
For the past seven years Danica has been producing the popular Fair Folk Podcast, a research-based show making information about traditional cultures of Europe available to folks around the world.
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.
naila francis
Naila Francis is a certified grief coach and death midwife, an interfaith minister and a writer/poet. As the founder of This Hallowed Wilderness, she helps people transform their relationship to grief and loss through holistic, heart-centered individual support, workshops, community grief tending and rituals. Her work is often informed by her love of poetry, nature and community. She is also a co-founder of Salt Trails, a Philadelphia collective normalizing and holding space for grief through community rituals. An ardent joy enthusiast, Naila believes in grieving well as a liberatory practice that deepens our capacity for pleasure, connection and compassion.
You can follow her on Instagram and Facebook @thishallowedwilderness and learn more about her work at www.thishallowedwilderness.com
peia luzzi
Peia Luzzi is an American born song collector, writer and multi-instrumentalist based in the mountains of Appalachia.
Like water from a deep well, she draws inspiration from her ancestral roots of Celtic and Old World European folk music. With a voice that dances nimbly from Child Ballads and 17th C. Irish laments, to Scottish Waulking Songs, and Bulgarian mountain calls, she has traveled & studied extensively over the past 12 years to reconnect with her own ancestral song tradition. With three studio albums to date and international touring since 2014, Peia has acquired a dedicated and diverse following around the globe.
Camille Sapara Barton
Camille Sapara Barton is a writer, embodiment facilitator and movement artist that supports organisations to flow through transitions. Their work creates relational wellbeing by increasing connection to the body, care practices, grief and imagination. Camille supports people to reduce stress and increase resilience, while navigating change. They also offer trauma informed facilitation and consultancy to support cultural workers, funders and those working with socially engaged topics.
Camille’s movement practice explores the interplay between bodies, words and vibration by weaving dance, clowning, somatics and sonics. Their work aims to deepen ancestral communication technologies and grow imagination gardens.
Camille is the author of Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community (2024). Based in Amsterdam, they designed and directed MA Ecologies of Transformation (2021 - 2023) which explored how embodiment and socially engaged art making can create change through the body, into the wider world.
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.
Xenia Marie Ross Viray
Xenia Marie Ross Viray (she/they) is an imagination healer, frequency artist, and creativity catalyst. She is the eldest of three sisters, and her name means kindness to strangers. Born as a brick-and-mortar fashion business, Myths of Creation is a container for experiments, art, writing, and gatherings at the intersection of creativity, spirituality, and meaning-making. Xenia guides spirited innovators who want to bring their natural genius into form. Her offerings include Create Your Cosmology: a course in Authentic Belief Creation, Imaginal Temple, a creative mystical mentorship, Emanate: Business School for Mystics, Garden of the Imaginal Substack, and an evolving cornucopia workshops which you can find at MythsofCreation.com and @mythsofcreation on IG.
Perdita Finn
Perdita Finn is the co-founder, with her husband Clark Strand, of the feral fellowship The Way of the Rose, which inspired their book The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. They are currently at work on their next book together Circles Not Lines: Spiritual Community Beyond Patriarchy. To find out more about her devotion to “ecology not theology” visit wayoftherose.org
In addition to extensive study with Zen masters, priests, spirit workers, and healers, she apprenticed with the psychic Susan Saxman, with whom she wrote The Reluctant Psychic. Perdita Finn now teaches popular workshops on Getting to Know the Dead. Participants are empowered to activate the miracles in their own lives with the help of their ancestors and recover their own intuitive magic. Her book Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World is an intimate journey through her recovery of these lost ways. She speaks widely on how to collaborate with those on the other side, on the urgent necessity of a new romantic animism, and on the sobriety that emerges when we claim the long story of our souls. Her next book is The Body of My Mother.
She lives with her family in the moss-filled shadows of the Catskill Mountains.
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
Yumi sakugawa
Yumi Sakugawa (she/they) is a second-generation Japanese-Okinawan interdisciplinary artist based in Tongva land and the author of several published books including Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe and There Is No Right Way to Meditate. Her multimedia installations have been exhibited at the Japanese American National Museum, the Smithsonian Arts & Industries Building, and the Peabody Essex Museum. Her newly released affirmation deck COSMIC COMFORT is now out in the universe.
Damiana Calvario
Damiana Calvario is a Mixed woman of color, daughter, sister, caregiver, community member, survivor, and first generation immigrant. Her practice, rooted in care work and mutual aid, blends together her Mexican roots, mixed upbringing, food as medicine, Curanderismo studies, Traditional Mexican Medicine and western herbalism training.
Damiana’s instagram @laluneria
francis cimarron
Francis Cimarron (they/them) identifies as white, disabled, queer, a solo parent, Jewitch, woodland creature, performing musician, craftsperson, ritual artist, tarot reader, somatic practitioner and educator.
Their primary music project is Mother Marrow, a dark, ritual folk expression, drawing from a symbology deeply interwoven with the natural world, and exploring the ways that relationship can transmute suffering into beauty. Music and art as a communal sacrament is the thread that runs throughout this work.
They have been inviting groups into communal song, leading rituals, and teaching nature awareness and ancestral arts at earth skills gatherings for 15+ years.
Trained as both a birth doula, and a hospice volunteer, Francis continues to pursue further education to better support these transitional times.
Cost & PAYMENT PLANS
Cohort based Course - Full access
Access to this year long cohort based course is $1,500 which can be made in 1 payment, 6 monthly payments, or 12 monthly payments.
There are also still several unclaimed needs-based partial scholarships (which bring the cost anywhere from 40-80% off)- please fill out the form below to claim!
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 $35 per month for 12 months or $350 for the year. Get access to recordings of all the guest workshops and course materials for a fraction of the cost and time commitment. 🌸
Note: This option does NOT include recorded cohort sessions aside from guest/bonus workshops. You will have access to recordings of those sessions in pink text in the course schedule!
Scholarships
Full and partial scholarships for low income and BIPOC students are available. Please complete an interest form by 4/3 for this next round of Grief Magic.
PAYMENT PLAN CANCELLATION & REFUND POLICY
If you’re considering enrolling in this course, thank you so much for your support! It truly means the world to me.
As this is how I pay the bills, as well as guest instructors, admin support, and overall budget and plan how many seats are available in each course, etc., cancellations of payment plans and refunds for prior payments are not available except in case of emergencies or unforeseen circumstances.
Choosing a payment plan for the live cohort is a commitment to pay the full course amount in monthly installments to be automatically deducted from your account (not a “try-before-you-buy” situation!).
If you are excited about this course but unsure if you will be able to pay the full amount, please fill out a scholarship interest form or consider signing up for the self-paced option - which does allow you to cancel at any time!
Thank you for understanding!
xoxo
Mara June
