My Path

Rootmother grew from nearly a decade of herbal and apothecary work, community care, disaster response, ritual practice and deep listening.

Before Rootmother, I founded Akasha Apothecary in 2017, creating handmade organic herbal products centered on women’s wellness, postpartum care and the healing potential of cannabis and CBD.

In my twenties, I spent several seasons growing cannabis on farms in Northern California. It was there, while tending the gardens for hours each day, that my relationship with the plants truly deepened. I learned from the elders, from the land and from the plants themselves. I learned how to listen.

It was also the first time I consciously felt the presence of my ancestors. As an adopted person, that connection grounded me deeply. I knew this was the path I wanted to walk for the rest of my life.

When the growing season ended, I bought a one-way ticket to Kauaʻi, returned five days later and began building my dream of reconnecting plants with people and people with plants.

I started Akasha Apothecary with $200 and an irrational level of belief that I was going to change the world. I highly recommend this kind of delusion when following your dreams.

What I did not yet know was that grief would meet me along the way and completely transform how I lived, served and understood my work.

In 2020, the CZU fires swept through the Santa Cruz Mountains, where I grew up. I was living farther north at the time, but I knew I had to do something. I began organizing volunteers and gathering herbal medicines, diapers and other essentials for families who had been evacuated.

At every turn, people showed up. The Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History offered us space. Organizations donated supplies. Herbalists from across the country sent medicine.

From that collective response, Renegade Community Apothecary was born, a disaster relief and wellness project that supported hundreds of families, first responders, farmworkers and elders.

Grief had moved me into action, service and deeper relationship with my community. It showed me that grief can bring us closer to one another, to the land and to our own wholeness.

After that experience, my work could never return to what it had been before. I witnessed what becomes possible when people gather, tell the truth about what they are carrying and offer their gifts in service to one another.

From that soil, WILLOW:: the Village Grief Nest ~ was born.

I began holding circles on the land where women could gather and witness one another’s grief. We brought it to the altar, the fire and the ocean. We screamed the primordial screams of the Mother and cried the tears of our grandmothers. We allowed our grief to be seen by the village, and something within us began to transform.

I fell in love with the process of this work: the unfolding, the remembering and the rebuilding. It is a humbling honor to witness people reclaim parts of themselves and feel the plants and their ancestors supporting them through that initiation.

I hold this work with deep reverence and responsibility. I am devoted to bringing truth to the altar, even in its most painful and unpolished forms, so that it can be witnessed, felt and transformed into something generative for the individual, their lineage and the living world.

My community work has continued to evolve. In 2025, I founded the Ancestral Wellspring Collective, a nonprofit healing justice project that houses several community programs, including Renegade Community Apothecary. Through this work, we continue creating accessible and culturally relevant care for the communities we serve.

Across every form this work has taken, the devotion has remained the same:

To make beauty, ritual, nourishment and meaningful care available during the moments we need them most.

I truly love what I do. I love the people and communities I serve, and I am deeply honored to walk this path alongside you.