Healing Gardens

My name is Lorn G. Brace-Wessel. No, G. is not an initial…my middle name is just a letter. I was born in Ypsilanti, Michigan to George Toby Wessel and Betsy Anne Brace, younger sibling of Gilyon Wiley Brace-Wessel. I promptly moved to Seattle, Washington before reaching the age of one, where I remained for the next 17 years of my life.

I am now 20 and a third year student at Evergreen. My focus has shifted many times…my first year I took mostly sociology/anthropology courses, my second year consisted of mostly video editing. I have found myself more interested in ethnobotany/homeopathic medicine as well as mycology than any of these other things, so maybe this will be it.

I like to ride my bike, i like rock climbing, hiking, camping, I LOVE slacklining!!! I’m no artist, but I like to doodle and to play with clay (stop motion rocks!).

this is me doing a backflip off of a slackline on Alki Beach in west Seattle.

  These are my favorite edibles that grow in the NW....

My Creation Story:

All things are created much like the way the strokes of a paint laden brush going across a canvas eventually make a piece of art, or how each keystroke on the keyboard creates a figure that is well known, that means very little on its own, but once formed into words, sentences, and paragraphs can hold great power. Everything in the universe is and always has been, possibly, and very likely not in the form we know it as now.

Things began very simply. Picture finger-paints, of all colors, swirling into oblivion. Eventually, little bits of color started sticking together, and forming new colors, and clumping up. As these bits began clumping together, they began spinning, sucking everything in the near vicinity in, and spitting whatever tiny globules didn’t attach far off into the distance. The globules began to lose their color as they traveled on, farther and farther away from their colorful counterparts, eventually turning to white specks of light as we see them today.

Things had gotten a bit more defined, and a step was taken up from finger paints to crayons. All of existence was now contained within these spinning chunks. One very special chunk continued to swirl and mix, and churn up until it produced a nice frothy liquid. Little bits and pieces continued to run into each other and stick together, gaining more and more energy as they grew. Starting off as nothing any human could see, but amassing more, and turning into plankton, algae, seaweed, ferns, trees, as well as all manners of fish, tadpoles, and lizards. Each of these living things holding its own power, that upon death, melds back into the stream of existence from whence it came.

A great time passed, and some of the creatures crawled on land and into the trees to turn into monkeys, jaguars, and warthogs. By this time, there were all manners of creatures running rampant on the giant chunk of matter that was swirling through the heavens. As this world continued to change, and the trees receded making way for vast open plains, the monkeys took to the ground, to where they had once come. And thus, we stepped onto this planet. We’ve made our way to colored pencils…are we ever going to see a van gogh? Or are we going to be gone…