I’m Piperlyne
My life has been volumes of field notes. Motherhood, grief, love, relationships, questions about God/Goddess, and A LOT of questions about who decided things had to be done this way.
I have lived through the death of my child, Eli. I am also Nolan’s mother, and parenting him has required me to question expectations that other people often accept without hesitation. What is actually necessary? What matters to him? Are we understanding the person in front of us, or expecting him to fit something that was never designed with him in mind?
Those experiences are part of why I take power, choice, and sovereignty so seriously. I know what it is to care deeply, to do everything available to you, and still be unable to determine what happens. I know that being right does not necessarily make a system or institution listen. And loving someone does not mean you get any say in their choices. I have spent a great deal of my life examining what remains mine within those realities. What I believe. What I choose. What I create. How I participate. It is an ongoing examination, and it has changed how I understand power.
For me, power is the capacity to create. There are circumstances I cannot change and outcomes I cannot secure. I still have choices, even when they are difficult or none of them are what I wanted. Understanding where those choices exist matters to me. So does acknowledging where they do not.
That is part of why I do this work. I care about what happens when someone begins to recognize their own authority. When they question a belief they have carried for years and discover they no longer agree with it. When they take their desires seriously. When they choose something because it matters to them, even if someone else does not understand.
And I care about doing that without turning their history into an accusation. I have no interest in telling someone they created every painful thing that happened to them, or that suffering was required to teach them a lesson. We can look honestly at our lives without explaining away the harm or judging ourselves for how we survived it.
There is also so much I love about being alive. Beauty, conversation, humor, the sacred, the pleasure of discovering something I had never considered. I am still curious. Still changing my mind. Still interested in who I have yet to become. Grief is part of my life, and so are love, desire, laughter, and creation.
For more than 20 years, I have brought these questions into my work with hundreds of clients and students. Those conversations have continued to shape me, too. I have taught, listened, questioned, and reconsidered my own understanding along the way. There is always another person in front of me, with a life and an understanding of their own. I care about meeting them there.
Create. By Design. has grown from my ongoing relationship with life. Deconstruct, Design, Declare, and Devote give language to practices I return to myself – examining what has shaped me, exploring what I desire, expressing my choices, and continuing to look at how I am living them.
I bring that experience, curiosity, directness, and compassion into my work. I ask questions because I know how much can open when we stop accepting something as final.
I do this because our lives matter.
What we desire matters.
And what we choose to create from here, matters.
