Bio
Jennifer is a Quaker, a member of Berea Friends Meeting in Kentucky and a sojourning member of Swarthmore Monthly Meeting in Pennsylvania where she has been living since 1996. She is a licensed psychologist and certified school psychologist who has studied, practiced, researched and taught psychology since 1969. She has worked in settings from preschool through adulthood, with people having differences (emotionally, psychologically and spiritually). In her writing, she attempts to integrate her profession and her spirituality. Her first book “Dancing with God through the Storm: Mysticism and Mental Illness” was written after being the Cadbury Scholar at Pendle Hill and listening to and documenting over 100 people’s stories of their experiences of connection with God. She paints as a form of prayer; many of her paintings are influenced by the stories she hears. Presently (and for over a decade now), Jennifer works as a school psychologist in early intervention with three-to-five-year-olds, leads art retreats, drums with womyn, and on 2nd Fridays is involved in a program for folks to come and share their creativity. The creative and spiritual are her sources of hope for a larger world at peace. Fun is also important; Jennifer loves to dance and recently has discovered hoop dancin’.
About this web/blog site:
When I was young, I did not talk in public. But I wanted to be a teacher. I was in a pickle. When I started graduate school, I received an opportunity to teach psychology. It was traumatic but I got up I front of a class and started talking. I have not stopped. In fact, no one believes that story about me now.
In December of 2012, I was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer. I have no family that lives near me and if I had had time, I might have become very frightened about facing cancer in those circumstances. But, I felt led to send mass emails to lots of people I know. What came back was love beyond measure. I had no idea that would happen. I called it my love tsunami and my love tsunami remained in motion until my last cancer treatment. I called the way it happened, Living Out Loud.
I have been a writer all of my life. I did not talk when I was young but I DID write. I have piles of writings. But, I have put very little of it out for publication. I feel that my next step in living more out loud is this blogging process. Now I want to write out loud.
I hope you will join me on this journey. I love sharing it!
The stuff of the world is there to be made into images that become for us tabernacles of spirituality and containers of mystery. If we don’t allow soul its place in our lives, we are forced to encounter these mysteries in fetishes and symptoms, which in a sense are pathological art forms…
The point of art is not simply to express ourselves, but to create an external, concrete form in which the soul of our lives can be evoked and contained. Art is not about the expression of talent or the making of pretty things. It is about the preservation and containment of soul. It is about arresting life and making it available for contemplation. Art captures the eternal in the everyday, and it is the eternal that feeds the soul.