Hello! It’s my pleasure to introduce myself. My name is Zeratha, (pronounced Zair-Uh-Thuh). I am an intuitive visionary artist, tarot reader, regenerative culture catalyzer, eclectic witch, climate change grief facilitator, a teacher, gardener, plant medicine worker, and single mom with an MA in Social Innovation and Sustainability.
My family consists of two daughters 7 and 9, our Frenchbo dog Fongito, our two brother Persialayan kitties Mello and Nugget, and our many plant babies. I have a wonderful ‘friend fam’ that I adore too. I grew up in New Hampshire till I was about 13, deep in the magickal forest in a rural area. I then spent about ten years in Wisconsin in the Fox Valley between 13 and 23. Finally, I moved to Portland in 2000 and have been here for almost 24 years now! Portland is on the unceded lands of the Multnomah, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla tribes, and many others. The weather and climate here are usually temperate and the ecology and natural environment lush and very green. I truly love the Pacific Northwest bioregion and am passionate about protecting this bioregion.
Areas of passion, skill, studies, and interest that inspire and inform my work in the world include regenerative culture building, visionary intuitive art, spiritual ecology, participatory and social art interventions, psychedelic culture and facilitation, entheogens, permaculture, bioregionalism, heart-centered processes for processing grief around the converging crises of our times, witchcraft, nature-centered spirituality, herbalism and plant magick, gardening, artivism, tarot and divination, neuroscience, social and environmental justice, whole systems design/thinking/science and liberation psychology. I recently trained as a certified FLOW and GGN-Z facilitator with the Good Grief Network. I also hope to train as a psilocybin facilitator in the near future.
On a personal level, I am a neurodivergent, queer, pansexual, femme. I am also a highly sensitive person or HSP. I struggle with chronic illness, managing and embracing my neurodiversity, and the challenges of finding a place in a larger culture and society that often does not feel welcoming to queer, neurodivergent, highly sensitive people with chronic illness.
On a societal level, as a white ‘woman’, I do have built-in privileges that I want to acknowledge. I constantly strive to learn more about decolonizing myself and to be aware of dimensions of privilege. All of my past and present activism and work have consistently had a thread of social and environmental justice and repair running through them. Throughout the years I have been a community organizer, activist and facilitator with various community, nonprofit and activist groups and collectives. I have worked with various populations and have had personal and lived experience with diverse life circumstances and populations, though desire to continually broaden my experience and understanding.
I have personal intimate lived experience with members of my immediate family and others, who have struggled with serious mental illness, alcoholism, substance abuse, addiction, and incarceration. I also have lived personal experience with ‘outside’ communities of rebels, artists, ravers, culture shifters, activists, and more. I am familiar with the struggles of complex intergenerational trauma and patterns. I am familiar with navigating challenges of physical, emotional, and mental challenges; both my own and others, in my communities of friends and family. I am familiar with the struggle of facing and dealing with grief for the crises of our times and how this can feel even more intense as a single mom of young children headed into an uncertain future. I believe that my background and indeed my personal challenges and circumstances, position me to be an empathetic, sensitive, creative, and attuned artist, culture shifter, healer and facilitator.
My soul/world work and my values firmly center love, equality, diversity, inclusion, justice, mutual aid, community, tolerance, harm reduction, power with, creativity, systems thinking, honesty, access, interconnection, deep and active listening, reciprocity, gratitude, awe, compassion, receptiveness, mindfulness, transformation and liberation for all.
I am very interested in an integral approach to personal and collective healing that can also be a catalyst for regenerative culture building and for processing and catalyzing grief and anxiety about the state of the world. I would like to put into practice an approach that combines psilocybin facilitation with creative methods of exploration and integration such as painting, spiritual tools like the Tarot, explorations rooted in connecting and grounding to the Earth, mindfulness and plant medicine, into a self and culture-shifting liberatory framework.
Humanity finds itself on the precipice of so much uncertainty in our current era. Our individual and collective grief around the converging crises we find ourselves facing can feel unbearable and paralyzing. I would like to help people use heart-centered processes, art-based processes, psilocybin therapy, and other effective liberatory tools for facing and catalyzing their grief and trauma. It is my intention to facilitate transformation and healing in this way to make room for new resilient internal and cultural stories of creativity, connection, liberation, and adaptability. It is my sincere hope to use this work as a vehicle for facilitating positive change on personal, collective, and cultural levels that ultimately enable needed healing and culture shifting.
I have been an artist my entire life and have mostly been self-taught. Artistic expression and creativity of all types have unfailingly been a driving critical force for me. I have always been deeply fascinated by spirituality, religion, altered states of consciousness or ASC’s, the supernatural, the occult and mysticism, and these elements are consistently seen throughout my artwork. I consider myself an intuitive visionary artist. Much of my work is a visual expression of relationship to and with the Divine, with Spirit, with Cosmic forces, with Life and Death, with Creative and Mystical forces. I also do work that is a representation of patterns, archetypes, energies and systems found within the natural and social world and is often also an inquiry and exploration into ecology, science, culture and psychology as well.
I have been participating in group shows since 2010 and had one solo show in 2014. I hope to have more solo shows in the future. Although I’ve had significant breaks due to childbirth, family trauma, and the pandemic, I continue to try and stay involved in the Portland art community and am participating in shows again which feels great! I strive to continue to develop my art business. I offer commissions and have many paintings for sale as well as other services such as Tarot readings, magickal tools and more.
I began my undergraduate college years majoring in Fine Art with minors in Eastern Philosophy and Cultural Anthropology at the Wisconsin Community College in Menasha, WI. However, I became frustrated with the traditional standard approach to both teaching and learning fine art. I wanted to do my own creative thing and felt constrained and impatient. I discovered Marylhurst University which at the time was one of the few schools that offered Interdisciplinary Studies and moved to Portland, Oregon in 2000 to attend. I then began a self-created program that combined Social Sciences, Environmental Studies, and Spirituality and graduated in 2004 with my BA in Interdisciplinary Studies. During those years I continued doing art on my own time. In 2005 I regularly traveled up to Seattle, WA for 1.5 years to attend an MA program in Sustainable Communities. I then transferred to Goddard College in Vermont to finish my MA in Social Innovation and Sustainability. My graduate studies actually reincorporated an art focus but was again a self-designed interdisciplinary studies program that combined Sustainability Studies, Community Building, Ecological and Participatory Art, and Whole Systems Design. I graduated in 2009. My thesis was titled “Harvesting a Sustainable Cultural Consciousness: Tools, Frameworks, and Processes for Creative Community-Based Energy Descent”.