Olivia’s story…

"Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”

-Michelangelo

I've always been a collector.

Not of things, exactly — but of disparate ideas, questions, and experiences I intuitively felt connected somehow. Theology and art and food and psychology and justice and creativity and hosting. The inside of my brain has always looked a little like a squirrel's nest in fall — full of seemingly random treasures, accumulated with great enthusiasm and a deep trust that each piece is necessary for the whole.

What I didn't know for a long time was that I was also a sculptor.

Some of the chiseling away was chosen.

In college, a video and photography professor cracked something open in me. He wasn't so interested in what was literally on the screen. He kept pushing us to “dig deeper, keep going, figure out what you’re actually trying to SAY.” It was uncomfortable and disorienting and one of the most formative experiences of my creative life.

Up until that point my art had been very literal. Suddenly I was being asked to trust the abstract, to sit with uncertainty, to keep chiseling until the essence of the thing was clear.

And then some of the chiseling was done for me.

The floor fell out from under me many times throughout my 20s. Fracturing family structures, toxic workplaces, burnout, mental health struggles, the lonely journey of building community in a new city, a modern world on fire. Each of those experiences was a chisel strike too. Not the kind you choose, but the kind that happen to you and leave you with a choice: let them break you, or let them teach you.

I chose to let them teach me. Not always gracefully, and not all at once. But over time, in the accumulation of hard seasons and small revelations, I began learning the skills I needed to survive — and eventually to thrive — amidst the difficulty of being a human being in a complicated world. How to hold uncertainty without being destroyed by it. How to stay present when everything in me wanted to check out. How to grieve and hope at the same time. How to find the root of a thing instead of treating the surface over and over.

Professionally, I continued collecting experiences, ideas, and skills. Working in non-profit communications, food service, grocery store sign artistry, marketing agency admin, and freelance design. Trying everything, finishing some things, abandoning others, picking up pieces of a puzzle I couldn't yet see the shape of. Each experience taught me something new.

The Trader Joe's chapter was the one that changed everything. It was the first job I'd had in years that was just a job — when I clocked out for the day, I didn’t take a professional identity with me. And it was the first time I was paid to make art.

I had been creatively stopped up for years — full of ideas with nowhere to go because starting felt too scary and the stakes felt too high. And then I learned to make impermanent art - shelf tags and display signs that could be erased the next day. It was liberating. (You can read about the whole story here.)

When the outcome stopped mattering, I stopped white-knuckling the chisel — and the statue started to appear.

I discovered what has become the quiet foundation of everything The Gathering School teaches: when we focus on doing the small things well, with curiosity and without attachment to the outcome, we build muscles that give us far more creative agency in our lives than we ever thought possible.

Over the past couple of years, the statue’s form has started to take shape. Looking back now, I can see that every experience — the beautiful and the brutal ones — was a chisel strike. Each one removing a little more of the unessential until what remained was this: a deep, abiding belief that the skills we need most as humans — to be present, to create, to connect, to hold uncertainty with grace — are learnable. And that the wounds that teach us these things are not detours from the path. They ARE the path.

That's The Gathering School. It was always in the marble. I just finally found it.

here's what I've learned that I most want to pass on to you:

When we approach our lives with endless curiosity and a process mindset — when we stop demanding that every experience immediately justify itself — we begin to see how all the disparate, seemingly random pieces were always part of one cohesive whole.

So, come join us.

Make some bad art, savor some good food, dive deep into essential relational skills-building and let’s see what we can make together.

You might just find yourself in the process.