On a spring morning, in separate rooms, in different towns, Constance and I sat down for storytime … Over zoom. Like many get-togethers over the past year, ours was a virtual one, but her energy traveled the miles and ether to permeate the air around me. It soon became quite apparent that the playful energy that Constance exudes, effortlessly, has a mind of its own. Most of the questions I had prepared lay untouched as we meandered through the story of who Constance is, and how she moves about the world.
What sits with me even now, a month later, is the awe and deep connection that guides her work and activism. And still, beneath the awe and connection is a commitment to play, to wonder, and to beauty.
“Our birthright as humans is to realize that we are the earth walking. We are the earth reflecting on herself.”
Through The Work That Reconnects, Constance facilitates spaces for people to remember and reconnect with our sense of Gaia. She believes that our connection with the Earth is inherent and has only to be re-discovered. In spaces like Gaia Passages and The Work That Reconnects, Constance uses theatre and play to bring people back into a relationship with the earth.
As a human in early elderhood, Constance holds many questions about what it means to be an Elder in our modern world. “Elders hold so much wisdom and are the ones that can bring that wisdom back into the culture”.
She finds ways to address these curiosities through her work with the Elder Action Network and Gaia Passages. The focus at Elders Action Network is to empower elders to step into their elderhood from a place of unity, rather than the separationist mentality that perpetuates a sense of ‘us vs. them’. Like Gaia Passages, the Elder Action Network centers the community and village in the success and health of the individuals within these ecosystems.
But the story isn’t over yet! Constance insists that the “most jazzy thing about” her is the fact that she is grandma. During the time she shares with her granddaughter, Constance falls in love over and over again with the world and earth through the eyes of her young one. This sense of awe, the ‘wow’ and love, permeates Constance’s entire story and is what I carry with me from the time we shared.