People: Maribeth Helen Keane
Name: Maribeth Helen Keane (she/her)
Location: Los Angeles, California - on the land of the Tongva peoples
Occupation/ Business: I'm an herbalist, writer, artist, intuitive guide and teacher
Who makes up your family? Myself, my partner Barret and our sweet old cat Scarlette
What core principles / values inform your practice? Gratitude, reciprocity, intention, communion, rest, embodiment, connection, deep listening, ancestral remembrance, spirit, intuition
What are you currently working on? I'm currently at a threshold in my life after living for a very long time with mysterious chronic illness symptoms and getting to the root of life long mental health challenges. I'm taking things quite slow as I navigate this shift while celebrating the healing I've witnessed within my body and mind and as an extension of this, within my relationships and my work as well.
I'm weaving threads of community and connection with the earth while nourishing what feels to me like a much stronger foundation than I've had in the past. For the moment I'm resting, I'm breathing, I'm listening, I'm nourishing my body and I'm planting seeds for what is to come as I step forward on this path.
What daily practices or rituals connect you with your centre? Making & sitting with my morning tea, meditation, movement: walking or yoga, drinking water, resting with my cat, tending plants, lighting candles, cooking, writing and reading.
What does community mean to you? I'm currently redefining what community means to me, as I imagine many of us are as we continue to navigate the pandemic and these uncertain times. Community for me is a feeling, a verb, one of the most important threads in the tapestry of healing, and of being alive, really. I have spent a long, long time searching for community and it is only now, as I move further into my 30s that I am starting to have a real sense of what it means to be held by and a part of a community.
I personally feel like I'm still figuring this all out and it is not what I thought it would look like, which has been an important thing for me to understand and embrace. I've come to know my community as being much more than just humans, it includes animals, birds, trees, plants, the elements, my spirit guides and ancestors.
How does community care and self-care intersect for you? I have found being in connection with community to be an important part of my self-care practice. I'm not sure we can have one without the other as we are interdependent beings.
The more I heal, the more I understand how much we need each other and that we are not meant to walk through this life alone. When we honor and get really clear and honest about our boundaries, about what we are able and here to offer, then we are much more available to our communities, both in giving and receiving.
What is something you're proud of? That I've learned how to stop abandoning myself and that I never gave up on my healing.
My cup is full when… I'm walking outside with my partner, in the sun among the plants. When I am listening deeply to my internal tides and rhythms. When I am holding space within my community to connect with the plants and with the medicine of our own breath, together.
I'm grateful for… Love, in all of the forms it shows up in our lives
Where can we find you (website, IG etc.)? @maribethhelen and www.maribethhelen.com
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Lastly, please use the space below to share with us something that comes to mind – a poem, a drawing, a thought, a story, a book you’re reading – whatever you are sitting with right now.
Here is a poem by Wendell Berry that I think of often and always feels resonant:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
13.12.2021
