About Rose

WHERE I CAME FROM
I was born in the mountains of East Tennessee to a family with deep roots in love, community, and belonging. But, on top of all that, they especially carried on with a fervent love for growing things. My family is full of gardeners, tenders, and teachers. Raised on my grandparents’ land, flowers have always contributed to my education - spring after spring - little gifts to compel us towards our own growing, our own reaching for light, our own roots anchoring us into fertile soils. There are profound lessons with the flowers. They represent healing in a thousand different ways. And healing is made up of continual growth. Cultivating ourselves is our greatest life’s work! I have worked very hard on tending to my own inner wholeness - I always will - as wholeness is the thing I care most about. In my next seasons I want to help others through their own continued healing and cultivation. 

I found out about Splankna several years ago through friends while I was looking for a tool to help loosen the grips of old, inadequate defense mechanisms and limiting belief patterns that kept getting in the way of healthy relationships. I had been leery of energy healing up to that point - assuming it was ineffective (or a placebo) at best…or that it was manipulative and spiritually dangerous at worst. But I kept feeling a Deep Draw towards Splankna. And a Deep Draw happened to be one of the ways I’d realized God often speaks to us - and that I ought to at least lean in with curiosity and not miss a lesson. I attended the Splankna training and was blown away by how intuitive, biblically sound, gentle, and effective the protocol turned out to be. It was such a sense of Freedom to finally lean into something that I had felt was “mine” for years, but had never been taught about. Another several years later and I’m still feeling the Deep Draw, as well as ripe timing to open up the treasure chest of healing that I’ve found and to share it with my friends. 

WHAT ARE HEALING ROSES?
There’s an author named George MacDonald who wrote the most beautiful fairy tales that I think have ever existed. C.S. Lewis considered MacDonald to be his “literary master,” as his book ‘Phantastes’ was instrumental in Lewis’ emergence into Christianity. He actually wrote MacDonald into his book ‘The Great Divorce’ as the Solid Person sent to convince Lewis to stay and embrace the joys of heaven.

The aspect of his writing that most captured my heart is an archetype woven into most of his stories named ‘Grandmother,’ a wise fairy who is so Beautiful because of how old she is. To me, she represents the consistent presence and guidance of the Holy Spirit. She embodies transformative love, deep compassion, ever-helping comfort, and a crucial empowering force for the characters in MacDonald’s tales. I return to several of these fairy tales when I feel lost and need to find myself again. 

In ‘The Princess and Curdie,’ Grandmother must swiftly prepare the young Curdie for a dangerous and urgent task. He will need to exercise keen discernment in what each person’s inner heart is, so she instructs him to thrust his hands into a pile of burning roses in her hearth - without hesitation and without resistance or he would be undone - which he does with utmost courage and obedience. When she finally instructs him to withdraw his hands, Curdie (expecting to find nothing left of them) finds his hands renewed like the hands of a child. He is now able to shake a person’s hand and feel what kind of creature they are: if they look like a man, but have the hand of a beast. Or if they look to be a beast but have the hand of a true, gentle soul. Which teaches him whom to ally with and whom to route out on his mission. Later in the story, a king - her own kin - lay dying from a slow poison intended to end his reign. Grandmother lays mounds of her burning roses all around him on his deathbed, purifying the poison out of him and restoring his vitality, 

This imagery of burning roses haunted me beautifully for years. When later reading ‘A Swiftly Tilting Planet’ by Madeleine L’Engle (another dear book), I found the line “Roses often burn. Theirs is the most purifying flame of all.” She must have loved Grandmother, too. And that sentence awakened something lovely in me.

These dreamlike story encounters continued working on me as I grew to realize that healing is my favorite art and because of the impact these beautiful writings have had on me, healing is even woven into the meaning of my name. I want my life to be a huge pile of burning roses, made up of thousands of little moments - little flames - of healing. And for the world to be a little more beautiful because of it.