A colorful crayon drawing of a house with red and white checkered curtains, a green lawn, and a light blue sky with a yellow sun.
Text reading 'bringing beauty home' with a wood texture effect.

death care

Every death tells a unique story of time and can be beautiful. The more we become in touch with what our values around living and dying are, the more ideal our deaths become. When we avoid death, we avoid life!

A death doula is non-medicalized spiritual, emotional, and practical guide, tending to all things surrounding death and end of life transitions. 

These are the areas Claire specializes in ~

  • Sitting Vigil ~ being in the acute dying stage with the person who is dying, and/or their family, friends, and companions; as a guide and support person who provides empowerment and presence for all involved.

  • Adorning Death ~ whether you are in a nursing home, a hospital, or at home, bringing beauty, art, ritual items, altars or whatever is meaningful to the space can provide a sense of ease and peace. Embroider your shroud or dye with Earth pigments like ochre, find the perfect outfit to die in, or prepare a playlist for your vigil.  

  • Hearth Tending~ preparing your home, heart, and logistical material life for death. Sorting out sacred items, documenting stories about your possessions; you can do this any time you would like! You do not have to be dying to prepare for death.

  • Earth Centered Post-mortem~ finding the most aligned way for you to live out your values as you die. Connecting you with green burial, home funerals, willow woven caskets, body composting etc.

  • General Nourishment & Practical Guidance ~ have you completed your advanced care directive? Do you need to have a conversation with your community? Complete a living will? Let’s get you on track to die with your affairs in order.

  • Ancestral Death Practices ~ support in finding and honoring your own ancestral death practices and rituals. Creating a living conversation about traditions, and wishes that connect you to your lineage.

  • Legacy ~ ceramic hands, land legacy, and other projects to create legacy and story to leave behind on this Earth.

We need more community around grief and dying ~ please reach out if you have any questions or would like to dive deeper into getting support from Claire as a death doula.

To be in this process with folks is the greatest honor of all.

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A person crouching down by a small creek in a natural outdoor setting, wearing a red dress and silver jewelry, touching the flowing water with their hands and bare feet visible.
A bird with brown, white, and black feathers holding a lit candle on its back.

“Death is an inherently creative act.”

–HEIDI GUSTAFSON

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Clay alphabet letters shaped like G, O, A, T, and X on a weathered wooden surface

flower practices

Flowers love to speak with us. They are the beauty bringers, spiritual whisperers, and gentle guides of the thresholds.

In practice, flower essences help us align with our most true vibrational frequencies through presence.

Communicating with us through the vibrational resonances of the Earth, their life force energy when preserved in the memory of water becomes a guide for the rivers, the waters, and the ecology of our own bodies.

This unique ability allows stuck emotional patterns, behaviors, or disharmony to be dislodged. Shifting hard or long standing issues with a gentle yet powerful ease.

Claire offers a variety of ways to connect you with the blooms:

  • 1:1 Flower Essence Session ~ these are 35 minute sessions. We will presence through poems, meditation, and intuitive guidance. This is a collaboration, so come with an invocation of how you would like to shift within your own life story. A flower formulation will be made specially for you, and sent within 1 week of your session.

  • Essences, Vessels, Hands ~ these are 1 hour sessions that combine craniosacral, essences, dreams, spirit, energy medicine, and other intuitive guidance as it arrives. If you would like more information about these sessions, please contact Claire. 

Claire teaches flower essences & energetic medicine as well as Spring/Fall Essentials of Herbalism at The California School of Herbal Studies. To see more about upcoming flower classes, click here.

A watercolor-style illustration of a pink and white flower with large petals and a long stem.
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A clear glass flower-shaped container filled with small blue flowers, placed in a grassy field with purple and white flowers.
Illustration of a large, ripe strawberry with green leaves at the top, featuring white and red highlights to suggest texture and seeds.

“If we fall in love with creation deeper and deeper, we will respond to its endangerment with passion.”

–Hildegard of Bingen

Illustration of three blue stylized flowers with petals around circular centers.
Close-up of white flowering plant with green leaves and blurred background of greenery.

EARTH ART + SCHOOL

This is a forthcoming project, which will emerge in time!

For now here is a poem to soothe your interest.

REASONS TO LIVE


Because if you can survive

the violet night, you can survive

the next, and the fig tree will ache

with sweetness for you in sunlight that arrives

first at your window, quietly pawing

even when you can’t stand it,

and you’ll heavy the whining floorboards

of the house you filled with animals

as hurt and lost as you, and the bearded irises will form

fully in their roots, their golden manes

swaying with the want of spring —

live, live, live, live! —

one day you’ll put your hands in the earth

and understand an afterlife isn’t promised,

but the spray of scorpion grass keeps growing,

and the dogs will sing their whole bodies

in praise of you, and the redbuds will lay

down their pink crowns, and the rivers

will set their stones and ribbons

at your door if only

you’ll let the world

soften you with its touching.

RUTH AWAD, You Are Here

Watercolor painting of green and yellow leafy plant with a brown seed or nut at the base
A wooden table with a bundle of small red berries, a branch with more berries, a roll of string, a pair of scissors, and part of a woven basket with more fruits inside.
Orange fabric with a black totem-style butterfly design in the center, surrounded by pink and purple embroidered border.
A repeating pattern of stylized wave lines in black on a white background.