The art of soma is slow and winding. It is art built upon many mistakes. Listening for sensations and intuitions is the goal, instead of expert technique or perfection. It is art that can only be found by touching with eyes, seeing through listening, and feeling by breathing into song.

It has always been about bodies for me—this body, the emotional body, spirit body, earth body, animal body, bodies of water, political bodies, body memory…

What is a body? Am I in my body? Are others in my body? Who lives in this body? Are gender or species defined by a body? Why does this body hurt so much? Aging, ever-changing body. Everything is held and gathered within bodies.

In today’s world, daily experiences are often of dissociation. Any act of embodiment and engagement with the consciousness of nature is part of our earth community’s healing. My solace has been a playful somatic practice that includes an active dialogue with nature—communicating/performing/witnessing and creating in collaboration.

My InbodyNature Practice exists in liminal spaces: between awake and dreaming, my body and all others forming our ecosystem, and between personal story and the collective. It is where the duality of the fractured self meets the wholeness of the universe.

Documenting and making visual my experiences is an important process of remembering and integrating my explorations and engagements. They are transmissions I carry back from nature for our community’s healing.

It is through the technology of iPhone apps, composite photography and video that I’ve been able to bridge imagination, spirit and body. My images traverse the realms of the abstract, fantasy, the mythic, gender fluidness, shape-shifting and a spirituality that is rooted in mud and flesh.

Ahjo uses the pronouns they, them, their, Ahjo.
I am a neuro-different, gender queer, pansexual, elemental creature, residing for more than 25 years on Tewa land at O’gha Po’oge—White Shell Water Place—now called Santa Fe, New Mexico. My ancestors, primarily Lithuanian and Norwegian, migrated to the Chicago area where I was born and raised.