Welcome to Collective Self

Welcome. I’m Lori Kane, Whidbey Island-based essayist, poet, and author. We also hosts retreats, talks, and workshops: our 2018 workshop series lives on the Silly Dog Studios website. Check it out!

Books hold some of humanity’s deepest magic. Books are where I fully belong. I write so that somebody else might open a book and find exactly the thing they need at just the right moment for them—like other authors have done for me across my entire 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.

The new book Unshaken Wonder: Becoming Playful Elders Together 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 these: 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? And what exactly is unshaken wonder—the wonder that appears to sit at the core of playful elders around the world? 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 at least 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?