More about my story
Love the land and the seas.
Carry on our family legacy.
Listen to Spirit. Do your art.
Be a light. Love life.
That’s what my father, R. Kent Wolcott, taught me as we traveled the world. His death in 2014 took me down the path of Time Traveling, working with my Ancestors, and personalizing the crisis of how we tell the history of climate change and this critical moment for humanity.
Here’s more about my own Odyssey.
My odyssey to understand the root causes of our current challenge - from which, I figured, my ministry would grow - took me from California to Haverford College, where I studied Anthropology and Religion, and worked at KPFA in Philadelphia to working in social enterprises, conducting research on systems thinking and traditional knowledge in Kenya, obtaining my MA in international sustainable development from the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, England. There, I initiated and co-directed a 33-country program on ReImagining Development. When the World Bank hired me to do a values-based evaluation of an integrated water management program in Tamil Nadu, India, I met a network of thinkers-practitioners whose work and thinking was so impressive that I moved to India to learn from them.
One day, when I was living on an organic farm and experimenting with green enterprises and alternative healing systems in southern India, a survivor of severe human rights abuses told me his family’s stories with such agony that my heart broke open. As a well-trained somatic healer, my first instinct was to touch him; but I knew that would have been culturally inappropriate. I started to sing. I sang his story back to him. When I was done, an old woman emerged from the back of the hut where we were sitting, and placed her hands on my head. She said nothing, but everyone, including me, had tears in their eyes.
And thus I let go of the self I had known and began to sing people’s stories back to them, using my rough knowledge of American folk music.
Sometimes, I walked from village to village, singing to all I met. Singing became my teacher. Singing showed me the regenerative force between people, landscapes, animals, plants, and the Sacred, however we might name that mighty force.
I began to innovate with culture, co-creating monitoring and evaluation rubrics that drew from ancient cultural knowledge specific to a given locality instead of imposed from outside.
Music, art, dance, ritual, ceremony, family stories, ancient traditions, spirituality, religious practices: in this creative nexus one could find traditional knowledge, passed from generation to generation, of how to live sustainably in a particular place.
I knew that this was what was missing from the field of so-called “sustainable development.”
So I went to Union Theological Seminary, to deepen my practical knowledge of religion and spirituality. There, alongside the growing Center for Earth Ethics led by Karenna Gore, I came to have long conversations with indigenous peoples of my own country, instead of someone else’s country.
I realized that they originated climate change differently than I did. They started with the Doctrine of Discovery. Taking a cue from them, I did a deep dive into history I thought I, as a climate change “person”, understood. I learned that they were correct. It is far more accurate to originate the mindset that led to climate change into the histories of colonization the great European witch hunts and my own family history. This became my thesis. Even before I was finished with my thesis, I was getting inquiries into it: I knew that the way I was connecting the dots was a critical story. And so I started my eco-theology company, Sequoia Samanvaya, to help others in retelling what we now call our re-enchanted ecological family histories.
A key part of the process was reMembering the stories of my ancestor,
Oliver Wolcott.
In learning to reMember my family history, I also saw a way of renarrating our national history. Independence and respect of indigenous nations go hand in hand. We cannot have the practice, the learning, of the one without the other. There is, for all that we choose to dismember it, a core part of ourselves as Americans who did sit in sacred circle with indigenous peoples as part of the foundation of our nation.
We can respect the earth.
That is the Wolcott Legacy I choose to continue to uphold.
A legacy of innovation, creativity, courage, bravery, cultural bridge-building, engaging closely with land and water, earth and sky, and respecting indigenous peoples.
In my blood is both the victim and the perpetrator.
I do not need to repeat the patterns of violence that my ancestors also enacted upon the same people who inspired them. I can create a re/newed legacy.
After I had a firm foundation in guiding and teaching, my ancestors called me to start engaging more substantially with other Families and support them in reMembering their own origin stories and our collective origin stories as a nation and a people differently. I thus became a Legacy Advisor. I currently work in that capacity with Ocean Funders, an initiative of Innovation 4.4.
All of this - from doing wedding ceremonies to redefining legacy - is part of my ministry.