Why Lichen?

Lichen looks like one organism, but is at least two, and often three or four. Lichens live on all kinds of things—bark, rocks, the ground—but only thrive where the air is fresh. Very slowly, using their bodies, lichens break down rocks into soil.

Lichen exemplifies some understandings on which I base my practice:

• We are made of relationships

• The external conditions of our lives shape us

• We can shape them back

I specialize in working with those looking to heal from the impacts of dehumanizing systems on their lives, whether they’ve been targets of those systems or participants in them or both. I often work with helping professionals, caregivers, and organizers, as well as those harmed by carcerality, economic injustice, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and the offshoots and intersections of these systems.

My clients are teachers, nurses, parents, social service workers, folks who are formerly or currently homeless, folks who have spent years in prison or are in and out of Buncombe County jail because their ways of surviving are criminalized; whoever I am working with, we walk together to reclaim feeling and resist pathologization of suffering and the ways we survive it.