Gallery
Where Beauty Rises from the Broken
Here, in this gallery, grief takes form. What began as small acts of devotion—arranging petals on Hunter’s grave, tracing circles of color, gathering fragments of light through a lens—became a language all its own.
Each mandala, each painting, each photograph is both offering and conversation: between mother and son, earth and sky, silence and the pulse of the living world. These images were made from what was left, and from what refused to leave—the love that endures, the beauty that insists on being seen.
You are invited to linger. To let your gaze rest. To feel the tender alchemy of loss becoming art, of mourning turning toward wonder.
Grave Art | Manadalas | Paintings | Poetry | Photography
Grave Art
Hunter is buried at River View Cemetery in Portland, Oregon. In the first stunned days after his death, my house filled with flowers—tokens of love that soon withered and browned, echoing the unbearable truth that everything beautiful fades. One afternoon, undone by the sight of so much dying beauty, I began to tear the flowers apart. I separated their petals by color—crimson, gold, ivory, violet—and carried them to the raw mound of earth that covered my son.
There, in the sacred ache of that place, my hands began to move before my mind could follow. I made spirals and circles, hearts and suns, mandalas of mourning. Each offering was a prayer stitched from silence, a conversation between grief and the living world.
Day after day, I returned—sometimes in tears, sometimes in awe—as the wind rearranged my patterns, as rain softened the colors back into soil. The first creation bloomed on September 4th, one week after Hunter’s death. I continued until October 11th, when the season turned and the earth asked for rest.
What began as anguish became devotion—a daily practice of beauty born from ruin. These images are remnants of that communion, where love met loss and made art of the ashes.
Mandalas
Paintings
Painting came as another way to listen—to grief, to memory, to the quiet hum of life still moving through me. Each brushstroke felt like breathing again. These images are less about depicting the world than revealing what trembles beneath it: the unseen, the holy, the tender pulse of return.
Poetry
In the early months of grief, poems poured out of me—unbidden, insistent, like breath after being held too long. They arrived before understanding, carrying truths my conscious mind could not yet speak. Often, I would reread them hours later and be startled by their clarity, their imagery, their knowing.
Each poem became a teacher, guiding me through the descent into sorrow, showing me where love still lived inside the loss. They are both map and mirror—evidence of how grief writes its own language through us when we allow it to speak.
Photography
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When the rains came and the cemetery grew too wet to kneel upon, I turned inward—toward warmth, toward the small circle of light that remained inside me. The grave could no longer hold my offerings, so I began to create mandalas on tables in my home.
These mandalas are continuations of that first language of petals and prayer. Each one began without a plan—just movement, just color finding its way through sorrow, just shape emerging from stillness.
As I created, the boundaries between grief and beauty softened. Circles became portals. Color became medicine. In their making, I felt the same quiet communion I had known at Hunter’s grave—a whisper that creation is another name for love that refuses to die.