Welcome to Collective Self
Welcome to my personal writing space and author page. I’m Lori Kane–Whidbey Island-based community herbalist, essayist, poet, author, home canner, mystic, sci-fi fan, aunt, antiracist, Alzheimer’s care partner, and co-conspirator of others playing and working for love, life, wonder, curiosity, and freedom for life on our beautiful earth. I recommend searching this site by keyword and just getting lost for a while–allow the universe (or multiverse) to find something for you that you didn’t realize you needed.
I’m a full-time herbalist at the moment, so most days you can find me online at Ritual Mischief. Daniel, I, and others also sometimes host retreats, talks, walks, teas, games, and workshops. You can learn more about those by signing up for the Ritual Mischief email newsletter, or on Daniel’s website, and sometimes on our Silly Dog Studios website.
Books hold some of humanity’s deepest magic. In the presence of books–like in the presence of forests and fields–I feel I fully belong. I write to understand the moment and so that someone else might open a book to find exactly the thing they need at just the right moment for them—like other authors have done for me across my life. I write so that others have the experience of drawing in their breath with wonder and delight as they’re reminded of the deep magic at play in our world, and within humanity herself, even here, even now.
My latest collaboration–the Mystic Routine–is a series of eight activity books. They live on the Ritual Mischief website. They’re about waking up, centering on what matters most to your community/self/ancestors, and holding on to wonder throughout your lifetimes.
Our latest book Unshaken Wonder: Becoming Playful Elders Together can be ordered from you local bookstore. And is available in digital form on Amazon and in print form on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s, Books-a-Million, and BookBaby’s bookstore here. It’s for people asking themselves questions like: How do I get back to my playful self? How do I get back to being in love with humanity? What does it take to become a playful elder today? What does it take to encounter wonder daily? What does it take to reconnect with the wonder at our core during times of increasing polarization, isolation, exhaustion, and anger and when confronted by pain, death, injustice, and horror? I suspect that to find unshaken wonder we must be ready to unlearn much of what the old us thought was true. That we must feel a little bit ready to open ourselves up again to new possibilities, people, ideas, and places. Ready to let go of what doesn’t matter in this moment in favor of what matters most to those fully present and together here, right now.
Are you ready?
Recent Writings
Becoming Sanctuary
If you’re experiencing yourselfas a lonely individual right nowdon’t read this whole thing yet. Firstgo outside, touch a treetalk with an old person and a child and a birdeat something made for you by anothermove, rest,...
The Wisdom of Forests and Fields
D & I were walking Cora and Eva in a grassy field at the edge of the woods this morning. We like to make Cora run back and forth between us as we walk, because she is very young and we are very not, and this way she runs 10 times the distance we walk with Eva. But...
Poetry at 50, in the US, as a woman [white], 2021, during a pandemic, in a glorious & painful spring, a flash poem, in four parts
1. Our flags always fly at half-mast now.Wide and unhealed wounds on high for the world to seeflap dripping loss and pus rains down into the public square. Below themwhite men, whips still in handand a few hard-yoked women, their heads downplodding alongfacing only...
Pandemic Emotions, September 2020
This is for Bayo, who prompts me to be more honest and open, more me, and to let go into becoming more us... Some friends are saddened right now by humanity's apparent reactionary rush to re-occupy familiar ways during this Covid-19 global pandemic (known as the Great...
Five Things I Adore about Turning 50
Chaos, love, death, peace, rage, wonder, protest, gratitude, and humility. Throw in “so hot that I could pass out” and this could be a description of what going through menopause feels like. 😉 Here though, these words are what the world herself feels like to me...
10 Habits for Falling More Deeply in Love with Your Humans using Zoom
So many articles are circulating right now about how exhausted and drained people feel after Zoom meetings. I get that. Back in my corporate and academic days, that used to happen to me during Skype meetings and conference calls all the time. I'd often sign off from...