We believe in the power of creation over consumption. We follow nature’s wisdom to create simple gatherings and creative processes. We know the beauty of a good story can get us through anything together.
What Sets Us Apart
The House
We build online and in-person experiences that are welcoming, tangible, safe, beautiful, and hold reverence for the human capacity for growth.
We set the stage for development by creating passages that hold our stories each Winter.
The Life
We lean into the contrast and complexities of life found between action and rest, movement and stillness, memory and vision cultivated through music, moment, stories, art and productions.
We breathe in and out together, resourcing each other with a timeless quality of abundance, while operating with a time-bound sense of urgency and completion.
The Story
We listen and tell our individual stories, while creating sacred, shared ground that is good for the collective.
We believe that inner work becomes realized when it is witnessed through galleries, offerings and performances, where we can cultivate what has been learned to then share it more broadly, creating more ripples and circles beyond us.
Meet Mary Lynn
With a vision for building regenerative communities, our co-founder brings a blend of magical thinking and decades of hands-on experience leading movement classes, somatic therapies, group ensembles and dance theatre productions. She believes deeply in the power of storytelling for personal and collective growth.
Meet Shea
Shea Kluender is a documentary photographer, educator and world-builder. She's the founder of Shea Kluender LLC - a visual storytelling company and Her Creative Practice - an online self-portraiture school for women to become their own muses.
Raised on a family farm in Minnesota, Kluender credits her rural upbringing with fostering her ability to witness the ever-evolving natural world with a quiet, steady strength. Moving to New York City after business school to work for Teach For America was part of her plan to broaden her sense of belonging to the world. Her plans shifted when she left non-profit management to help open a new school as a founding Kindergarten teacher. The lessons she learned there rooted in community and culture-building deeply shaped her life, as did a newfound obsession with high quality early childhood literature.
During this decade of teaching, which took her from the South Bronx to Denver, Colorado, Kluender gave birth to her first daughter. She began balancing career ambitions with early motherhood. This tension started when her daughter was several weeks old and Kluender defended her thesis to earn her Principal license. Curious about her identity shift called 'matrescence,' Kluender picked up a camera when her second daughter was born two years later and began capturing the intimacy of their home life. She launched her first business, True Mama Photography, with a rental camera lens, a six-month-old in the backseat, and her first free session four hours away in the mountains. Witnessing other women participate in the unseen, unpaid labor of early motherhood felt deeply honest and worthy of documenting, and that continues to be Kluender's passion for her photography work today. When her third daughter was born and Kluender's photography business grew quickly, she turned to self-portraiture to process this transition and find a deeper truth in her life's stories. She explains these ideas in an in-depth interview with Voyage Denver.
Over the last seven years, Kluender's work has evolved alongside her motherhood experience from solo entrepreneur and teacher to community builder and visual storyteller. She has co-authored a treasured variety of creative community projects and wintering circles alongside Mary Lynn Lewark where they help lead groups of women exploring creative expression around identity, transformation and resilience. Kluender is a primary photographer at Lewark's Movement House in Denver featuring annual community traditions, seasonal rites of passage and thresholds, performances and celebrations. Their project work is archived at story house, which is also their online home for the annual wintering circle. She's deepened her photography skills through The Family Narrative retreat and sharpened her ability to tell stories with people, not about them, earning the Ethical Storytelling Certificate through Photographers Without Borders. Kluender is also a certified Art Therapy Practitioner.
Kluender's work has been published in Shots Magazine and featured online in design publications like Dwell and family photography workshops such as Sham of the Perfect. Her inaugural published gallery and show titled "mono no aware" was curated and exhibited at Movement House. Kluender's visual narratives and documentary series photography are available online at Shea Kluender Fine Art. Her collections are explicit attempts to slow down and find beauty in constant change, a direct parallel to the profound identity shifts mothers experience in their lifetimes.
She lives in Longmont, Colorado with her husband and three girls, ages 8, 10 and 12. Their home is filled with a steady stream of whimsy and heartfelt stories of love, family, growth and connection.