Rose
handmade incense from pinyon pine resin & juniper cones with bamboo charcoal and tools for incense ceremony.
some things about rose…
rose is a seed sower, registered nurse, incense-maker and folk herbalist. enchanted by the expansive medicine of plants as they invite relationship with place and encourage new ways of listening, she finds medicine in how we are with each other and the earth. she encourages people to engage with plants as medicine from meditation to planting to gathering to medicine-making, realizing our healing capacity through gentle communication, consensual interaction and belonging in reciprocity with the humxn and more-than-humxn-world.
above the silver lake reservoir, probably talking about the fluffy pink eucalyptus flowers just out of frame
incense making - gathering aromatic materials from local plant communities, rose crafts scented portraits of place, making incense from hand-gathered materials including tree resins, roots and flowers. Working with recipes from antiquity as inspiration, she makes incense from the forests, fields, cities and coasts where she calls home. this is a practice in gratitude and exchange, ritual and ceremony. fragrances permeate our dna, reaching beyond our “thinking” minds into our embodied experience. we can even inherit this from our parents. that this science resonates with the traditions of people from myriad cultures who work with aromatic smoke to connect with ancestors and spirit inspires awe and mystery! for rose, incense-making has become a small place to practice the larger world she longs for, where plants are gathered with gratitude and burned in ritual and ceremony to connect us to a culture that values reciprocal relationship and equity.
place - lately her homes have been multiplying: drawn by the fragrant plants of california, she currently resides in los angeles among the planted persimmons and the Plumeria, though she maintains close ties with plants + people in the southern Appalachians of north carolina and the islands of the Penobscot Bay in coastal maine. She is humbled to be among a new-to-her and multi-faceted flora and to acknowledge the diverse indigenous people of this region, the Gabrielino-Tongva people, as well as the many people that call los angeles home.
birth work - as a doula and labor and delivery nurse, rose has collaborated to facilitate a hospital-based volunteer doula program, where she witnessed the profound impact of genuine support in birth. She continues to advocate for consensual, person-centered birth practices as well as the expanded availability of doula support in birth and sustainable work for doulas.
equity - healing work is inherently political. Much of the etiology of disconnection and dis-ease is born of patriarchy, white supremacy, and colonization. Black, Indigenous and Immigrant, People of Color are disprapportionately impacted by systemic inequities, simultaneously facing the erasure, exploitation and commodification of their own healing traditions.
gratitude and lineage - She is grateful to her grandmother Margaret, whose poetry inspired kinship with plants and place and to her mother for insisting on the power of symbols and encouraging her to play with spices. She extends thanks also to Janiya Williams, Jessica Johnson, Barbara Hotelling, and Michelle Lawhorn for welcoming into the work of ARMC Volunteer doulas as well as the many birthing families and doulas who inspired her with their compassion, courage, wisdom and tenacity; to Debra Pascali-Bonaro and the Philadelphia Alliance of Labor Support who trained her and began her path in birth work, and to Graham Wesley for recognizing affinity and synergy in our lives and medicine work. Rose has taken classes with the Terra Sylva School and the Chesnut School of Herbal Medicine.