Welcome to Collective Self
Welcome to my author page. I’m Lori Kane, Whidbey Island-based essayist, poet, author, herbalist, home canner, mystic, sci-fi fan, aunt, antiracist. We also host retreats, talks, and workshops: our 2020 series lives on our Silly Dog Studios website. Check it out!
Books hold some of humanity’s deepest magic. In the presence of books, I feel I fully belong. I write to understand 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 series of eight activity books–lives here on the Silly Dog website. It’s about waking up, centering on what matters most to your community and yourself, and holding on to wonder.
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
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](https://www.collectiveself.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_3336-400x250.jpg)
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...
What I’m Made Of
Thanks for the fun prompt, Natalie Kinsey! I wrote this poem for fun two years ago, on January 9, 2017. Just re-found it. Forgot to publish it. Whoops. Since it still rings true, seems worth publishing now... What I'm Made Of I am made almost entirely of open sky ...