CREATIVE CONVERSATIONS
IN THE SPACE BETWEEN WORLDS
Relational Inquiry for Transformative Times
Image credit: Sebastian Unrau
Embodied inquiry weaving Indigenous and Western ancestral knowledges
with(in) ecological imagination, consciousness studies, and creative communication.
land
ritual
story
cosmos
Here is the living ground of my practice: writing, research, teaching.
I work with(in) the spaces where knowledge is relational and creativity becomes a way of listening ~ to land, to lineage, to the fields of consciousness that hold us all.
Te Horo Beach, Kāpiti Coast Aotearoa. Image credit: Simone Gabriel
I enter this rite of passage ~
to sustain, to replenish,
to drink from the deep well of my own becoming.
Through the ebb and flow of your fertile waters,
remind me how life continues:
through silence, seeding, and return,
old knowing rekindled,
and the not-yet-born nurtured into being.
about
A scholar-practitioner, I work at the intersection of story, ecology, ritual, and consciousness ~ where creative communication becomes a field of relational inquiry and transformation. My practice explores how writing, ritual, and ecological imagination can bridge Indigenous and Western ways of knowing, welcoming dialogue between human and more-than-human worlds.
Born in Aotearoa New Zealand and raised in Australia, I now live on the Kāpiti Coast in the south-west of Te Ika-a-Māui, the North Island of Aotearoa. Of Māori (Ngāti Raukawa) and Pākehā (Scottish, Irish, English, and Nordic) ancestry, my recent work honours an unfolding whakapapa (relational lineage) while drawing on more than three decades in environmental advocacy and the creative and performing arts as a professional writer, producer, and lecturer.
My doctoral research in Creative Communication (Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand) investigates ritual not only as humanity’s oldest articulation of consciousness, but as a contemporary activist practice of relation, renewal, and becoming.
Through writing-as-ceremony, ritual activism, and other co-creative inquiries, I explore how relational and artistic practices can restore dialogue between mind, land, and cosmos ~ renewing our capacity to meet ecological and psycho-spiritual crises with imagination, courage, and care.
Story begins where the world listens back.
a slow archive of lived practice
Welcome to this place where writing, ritual, and scholarship meet. While this site holds my name, it is not simply an personal site, nor a conventional academic portfolio. It is a space of presence, inviting you into the cosmology underlying my work:
writing as embodied practice,
creative entanglement with ritual activism,
a pathway to ecological and psycho-spiritual renewal.
Emerging at a threshold moment ~ the completion of my PhD ~ this site gathers what has been learned, and what remains alive and unfinished. Rather than a showcase of past work, it offers a walking-with creative potential. Here, theory, art, and lived practice intertwine ~ sharing the professional and ethical foundations of my work as a writer-scholar whose practice is at once rigorous and soulful, poetic and political.
My intention is for this space to be both reflective and forward-looking, to serve as a digital locus of belonging, acknowledging where I come from, the places I write-with, and the futures I co-create. It is also a repository for future evolution ~ essays, rituals, reflections, and news of emerging publications and projects. May this become a slow archive of lived practice ~ of memoir, theory, ecology, and change ~ documenting the weave of my creative life as an ongoing offering in writing the sacred.
Image credit: Colby Winfield
Mother of wild breath and turning sky. You who ride the upper currents of consciousness, whose descent clears the way for consequence, and the abundance of our becoming. Bring your tempests of truth, your fierce reset, your whirling song of purification...where revelation waits beneath the noise.
writing as ceremony: a response to rupture
Once, the world was held together with old songs, with spider-silk stories binding psyche to tree, and blood to soil. But the relentless march of colonialism and the severing blade of Western thought have wrought an ontological rupture in relational ways of knowing (Escobar, 2018). Where once the land and its people spoke in chorus, now a schism yawns in the West – a deep forgetting (Fisher, 2013) – splitting mind from wildflower, heart from howling wind. In this chasm, disconnection widens; its shadow lengthens into the crises that now grip our age – ecological unravelling, existential unease, the grief of a world unmoored (McPhie, 2019).
And yet, beneath the concrete and circuitry, an older knowing endures. Indigenous ways of seeing have never forgotten. Many have long spoken of kinship in languages beyond human tongues, of reciprocity as the foundation of being, of life unfolding in spirals of giving and receiving (Marsden, 2003; Roberts et al., 2004; Donald, 2010; Kimmerer, 2013, 2024; TallBear, 2019). And now, as the so-called “modern” world teeters at the edge of its own unmaking (Latour, 1993, 2018), voices rise from its dreaming depths – scholars, artists, mythmakers, seekers, wayfarers – calling not for nostalgia, but for re-membering, for renewal, for relational artistry. A return to the great, breathing web of relations. A way of seeing and being that does not clutch at control but instead leans into reciprocity, not as metaphor, but as a movement of memory, muscle, and marrow (Gumbs, 2020a, 2020b).
For the world is unravelling. Wildfires storm across parched landscapes, floodwaters surge over ancient riverbeds, and vanished species leave an aching silence in their wake. The pulse of the planet falters under the weight of human excess – forests razed, waters poisoned, soil stripped of memory and nourishment (IPBES, 2019; UNEP, 2025). We are living in the throes of a severance so vast it is both ecological and existential (Adams, 2020). The Earth keens, and so do we.
As planetary health declines, threatening “the very survival of humanity” (Wallenhorst & Wulf, 2024, p. viii), the toll is not only material, but deeply psycho-spiritual. A great malaise thickens – eco-anxiety (Pihkala, 2022), climate grief (Atkinson, 2021), and the exhaustion of those who have spent years bearing witness. Activists, allies, and advocates – those who refuse to turn away – are worn thin, carrying despair, fatigue (Chen & Gorski, 2015), and the crushing weight of a world that feels too broken to hold.
Yet, amid collapse, something else stirs.
Something quieter.
Something insistent.
As Holthaus (2013, p. 3) asserts, the “real root of these [environmental and sustainability] issues, both cause and cure, lies not in our science or technology but in our own spiritual and intellectual poverty or, more hopefully, in our own spiritual and intellectual resources.” The question is not how we might heal the Earth – this is no human-led rescue mission – but how we might respond differently to the ruptures that have estranged so much of humanity from the more-than-human world (Roszak, 1992; Abram, 1996; Kimmerer, 2013; Fisher, 2013; Latour, 2018; Zhao et al., 2021; Akomolafe, 2024).
I did not come to this work with a hypothesis. I came with questions – not to be answered, but to be lived. What might ritual offer in times like these? What becomes possible when we listen differently – not just to the love and grief and beauty of the world, but to the land itself? This work is not a theory of ritual. It is a walking-with, a weaving. Writing as ceremony. It follows a thread spun from lived experience, from earth-attuned ritual practice, from critical Indigenous, posthumanist, queer ecological and ecofeminist thought. It is a braid – part witness, part critique, part offering – asking what it means to be in right relation when the old stories no longer hold, and the new ones are still being dreamt.
This is not conventional research. It is inquiry as ritual. Listening as method. Story as response.
Image credit: Robbie Herrera
Keeper of the divine spark ~ ignite these rites of healing and justice. Teach us to tend the hearth within. Let desire be devotion, and the warmth between us a covenant with the sacred.
May it be your fire that guides our way.
re-membering ritual lineage
To re-member ritual is to reweave it into the fabric of our lives ~ to bring it once more to the heart of community. Across cultures, relational ceremony guided planting and harvest, upheld law and governance, tended grief and transition, and wove kinship with land, ancestors, and more-than-human beings. Mediating between the seen and unseen, these practices were revered, initiated, and protected by those who carried them.
In many Indigenous nations ~ and among diverse ritual practitioners who sustain their own ancestral traditions with care ~ ceremony remains a living thread with(in) the cycles of life. So too among contemporary ritual-makers who, from fractured lineages and artistic possibility, are ethically reinventing ceremonial forms. Yet alongside these enduring and emergent expressions runs another story: a shadow-tale of silencing, erasure, and misuse.
From the rise of the Western Church, through the witch hunts of early modern Europe, to the criminalisation of Indigenous rites under colonisation, nature-attuned ritual has borne a long history of violence and suppression. The assault was strategic, targeting both practitioners and practices, and in many places it continues. Fear, shame, and forgetting linger in the ceremonial psyche of the modern industrial mind. [4]
Out of this wounded ground, ritual has been variously demonised, appropriated, institutionalised, commodified. When reduced to symbol or spectacle ~ a service to be outsourced, a spiritual aesthetic ~ ritual fractures from the wider web of life, separating from direct relationship with the sacred. [5]
And yet today, many are being called into a quiet resurgence: to re-member ritual and ceremony as creative consciousness, as an artistry of resilience, relation, and world-making.
My writing emerges from this fertile terrain. As both scholar and practitioner, I write with(in) ritual rather than about it ~ treating the page itself as a ceremonial site. Through language, rhythm, and embodied attention, I participate in acts of re-membering: calling back what was severed, restitching relation with the sacred, reweaving self and soul into deeper intimacy with(in) the more-than-human world.
Sacred weaver of tides and time, moon-mother whose light curves the belly of night – I have turned to you in the dark moon, when the world folds in upon itself and the body remembers. You who carry the first nightsong, who bind the sacred into soil and scent, keeper of rebirth and all its thresholds – your face now full, I call to you once again.
Image credit: Casey Horner
lineage & lenses
With Indigenous and colonial-settler ancestry, I honour the gifts and complexities of these entwined inheritances.
Raised within Roman Catholicism, my early experiences of Western ceremony and devotion later opened to far-reaching spiritual seeking ~ a journey that has traversed many paths and ultimately led me into the practice of ritual grounded in kinship and more-than-human care.
My work is shaped by my relationship with land and sea, by ancestral listening, and by a deep commitment to decolonial ethics and ecological accountability. It draws from critical Indigenous studies, posthumanist and new materialist thought, ecofeminism, and queer ecology ~ lenses that I weave together as a living inquiry into ritual and writing-as-ceremony.
Creative and evolving, my mahi is grounded in presence, deep listening, and co-creation with place, community, and multi-species kin.
the silkmoth story
When I was a child, my first love was a boy named William. He would bring silkworms to school in a shoebox, feeding them mulberry leaves and sharing with me the slow wonder of their metamorphosis.
I watched those soft, chubby creatures spin their cocoons in the dark, weaving silk around themselves until they emerged as silkmoths. William would tend them lovingly and whisper, “Soon you will fly free.” And he always kept his promise ~ releasing them into the night air, where they lived only briefly, fragile and luminous, before their time on Earth was done.
Unlike butterflies, silkmoths bear no bright wings or dazzling colours. They are earthy and humble, living just a few days as adults. Without mouths to feed, they consume nothing at all ~ leaving no trace of devouring, no hunger pressed upon the Earth. Their short lives are wholly given to love, reproduction, release. And to offering. For in their cocoons, their gifts are precious: threads of silk, spun from the mystery of becoming.
And yet, I learned much later that in the traditional silk trade, these moths are sacrificed, denied their flight: their cocoons boiled before emergence, their threads extracted before the moth can take wing. Perhaps this is why the memory of William’s hands opening the shoebox feels so radiant ~ his tender care, and my remembrance of it now, are small acts of release, gentle rituals of honouring, returning life to life.
There are, however, gentler ways of weaving with these threads ~ practices known as peace silk, where the moth is allowed its full cycle, to break the cocoon and take wing, before its remnants are gathered. The fibres are shorter, the cloth less lustrous, but what it carries is rarer still: the shimmer of life released, of beauty not taken by violence but tended with patience. Where silk is gathered in this way, I honour it ~ as an emblem of reciprocity rather than extraction, of relationship rather than ruin. If I am to wear silk, it is only silk that is kind.
The silkmoth was my first encounter with the quiet power of transformation: a gift from a little boy I loved, and from creatures whose life cycle taught me that the sacred is not always spectacular. Sometimes it is soft, hidden, woven in the dark until it takes flight.
As a symbol, the moth carries the wisdom of quiet transformation. A creature of night, it speaks of intuition, vulnerability, and the soul’s longing for light. It moves through mystery and shadow, embodying beauty in obscurity and the courage to seek truth within the dark.
For me, the silkmoth has become a living emblem of ritual activism: the mythopoetic work of creative healing within rupture, of finding light through the unseen journey, of weaving beauty and offering from transformation itself.
And with it, a reminder: never to take for granted the fleeting nature of life, nor our need to tend it ~ with reverence, with tenderness, with love.
Image credit: Petr Sidorov
I really really enjoyed this course. You are an inspiring and passionate teacher who pushed me to transform my story. You are incredibly articulate and I came out of every session with new, fundamental nuggets of knowledge... Thank you so much!
Charlie, F.
Emerging Creative Practitioner
- Wellington Aotearoa New Zealand -
Simone Gabriel, you are the most incredible teacher, mentor, creator, and person. I am beyond grateful for your presence in my life.
Kelly M.
Creative Media Producer
- Anchorage Alaska USA-
That was amazing! I came away with so much to think about. I really loved the focus on ceremony as leadership...so inspiring and provocative.
Audience member
Celebrants Aotearoa Conference 2025
- Wellington Aotearoa New Zealand -
what people say
Feedback from past work
references
[1] Díaz, S., et al. (2019). Summary for policymakers of the global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). IPBES Secretariat.
[2] Pihkala, P. (2022). Toward a taxonomy of climate emotions. Frontiers in Climate, 4, 738154.
[3] Simpson, L. B. (2017). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. University of Minnesota Press.
[4] Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the witch: Women, body, and primitive accumulation. Penguin Classics.
[5] Driver, T. F. (2019). Liberating rites: Understanding the transformative power of ritual. Routledge. (Original work published 1998)