Kim Birdsong
Kim Birdsong was born and adopted in Naples, Italy, and has lived most of her life on the Monterey Peninsula.
Her background includes a master’s degree in Transpersonal Psychology and a graduate certificate in Women’s Spiritual Development. Kim spent 17 years working with trauma and sexual assault survivors, combining her training in trauma care with her specialized knowledge of grief work, dream work, ritual and art in healing. For three years, she hosted her own radio show, “Spirit Matters.” She served as Client Services Manager for the Monterey County Rape Crisis Center for ten years.
“It is my belief that a curious, compassionate outlook and a creative response have the power to bring about true and lasting healing, both personally and collectively.”
Meeting Grief
The experience of grieving is one we all share, yet seldom do we grieve together. As with many other practices in the western world: banking, education, therapy; grieving is privatized. We have lost indigenous practices of grieving together. We discover the impossibility of trying to contain the grief ourselves while releasing it at the same time. When we grieve together, we find we are not alone in our despair. We are welcomed and held in community.
In the Meeting Grief workshop and ritual events, Kim partners with Linda Anne Goulet, a certified End of Life Doula and Tai Chi/Qigong instructor to work through the 5 Gates of Grief as outlined by Francis Weller. At each gate, each entry point into the hall of sorrows, participants will write, share and learn an accompanying movement practice.
The intention of these workshops is to provide a safe container to explore and to recognize how feelings of grief present in the body, how they arise, make themselves known and how they fade away. We will not eliminate grief, nor analyze it clinically or critically, rather we will become curious about it, sit with it, and move with it. In one another’s company we become a bit more familiar with and fluent in grief’s particular soul language, and in doing so, create a bit more ease and space in our hearts.
Meeting Grief Workshops are offered every 8 weeks or so and are strictly limited to 8 people. Please contact Kim directly via email for further information. Workshop dates are also shared on Francis Weller’s website, www.Francis Weller.net under the calendar tab.
Rain to Root
In this debut collection of poems, Rain to Root, Poems of meeting grief and grace, Kim Birdsong explores the often fierce and disorienting landscape of grief. In the year following the death of her son, Kim turned toward writing to try to cope with the depth of her sadness and to come to terms with the unavoidable truth of impermanence. Her raw and honest poetry follows her journey from the first moments of pain and despair, through a period of questioning, adjustment and reorientation, and finally to revelation and acceptance.
Through these accessible verses, Kim invites readers to join her on this journey into the dark soul territory of grief. As she takes up this apprenticeship with sorrow, she tracks her inner landscape, becoming curious and paying close attention to its shifting contours and pairs this with her abiding love of the landscape. These efforts lead her through this dark terrain as she slowly gains footing on new ground.
You will hear a full range of expression and emotion— from sadness and frustration to anger and confusion and gratitude— contained in variety of forms from lyric and free verse to letter poems, list poems, structured verse and haiku. With a Foreword by Francis Weller, Kim prays that you will also feel the grace that comes from bowing to what is alive in the depths of the heart.
Anticipated Release Date: November 1, 2024
Dreamtending
Developed by Dr. Stephen Aizenstat, DreamTending is a method of working with dreams and their accompanying images. It holds that the images that visit us in dreams are alive and can inform us about our personal unconscious and provide glimpses into the collective unconscious. Further, these images can speak on their own behalf from the perspective of a world unconscious. Rather than narrowing the meaning of a dream or particular image down to a specific symbolic association, DreamTending opens images to possibility and invitation.
Kim offers individual and group sessions in DreamTending with fees on a sliding scale.
Collage
From the French word coller, to glue, collage is a traditional art form that uses paper and other media to create new images. In this modern age, it has evolved beyond its origins to include the world of digital imaging, computer manipulations and AI creations. Kim is a traditionalist and employs old-fashioned scissors and Yes! Paste, gluing old magazine and book images onto archival, acid free 8-ply mat boards. Computer editing is kept to a bare minimum and is reserved for tiny touch ups. From the final piece, a digital file is then created and used to make fine art prints, greeting cards or prints, metal prints or acrylic blocks.
Collage allows for nuanced and multi-layered imaginal expression. Kim describes it as visual poetry. Conceptually, juxtaposition of images has meaning, as does the serendipity of finding or not finding particular images. The rules of perspective bend, and interpretations, as with a dream, are forever unfolding. Her work reflects her deep love for the natural world and is infused with the archetypal themes of embodiment, belonging, divinity, passion, beauty, and grace.
For Kim collage has been the primary creative vehicle for the expression of life’s inevitable pain, carrying her prayers for its resolution. It allows for the reconciliation of sensuality with rationality, whimsy with gravitas, and the peaceful acceptance of the past with present, infusing hope and possibility with visible and tangible action. It provides both resolution and the subsequent invitation to open. It celebrates the beauty of it all.
Implicit in the gluing of the images into their final form is a commitment, to the work, to healing and to the emotional and spiritual evolution of the artist. It is a process of truth, eliciting a deep trust in the process, in one’s intuition and in one’s ability to adjust in the moment.
Kim offers Visioning workshops at the beginning of the calendar year to assist in seeding intentions. Private and group collage sessions are also available as an adjunct to counseling and to assist with the integration of medicine journey work.
Photography
In the realm of photography, Kim bows deeply to those with years of experience behind the lens. She calls herself a devoted amateur whose love and respect for the craft was rekindled while on tour in India in 2008. She shoots with Nikon and Sony and remains a perpetual student of light and composition. Primarily photographing while traveling, she is eternally drawn to the myriad ways humanity honors and expresses the sacred, and to revealing and honoring our common humanity in the glorious faces of those she meets around the globe.
Kim accepts bookings for small photo shoots and portrait sessions.