Join us to celebrate the WINTER SOLSTICE with your family and friends and build community at EARTH CHURCH, a secular gathering honoring the Earth.
December 21, 2024
3:30pm Doors
4:00pm Service
5:00pm Cookie Potluck*
*For this reception we kindly request you bring cookies to share, though it is entirely optional.
The Groves Church at
Sunnyside Community Center
3520 SE Yamhill St.
*Address on flyer is a typo :(
WINTER IS COMING...
It’s the coldest, darkest season of the year. You can already feel its arrival. In the colder months, plant life retreats into a state of rest, pulling back from the relentless demands of growth to conserve energy for the season of renewal ahead. This period of dormancy isn’t a sign of weakness but of resilience. Just as the Earth rests, we too need time to reflect, recharge, and gather our strength. Yes, WINTER is essential—and it’s worth celebrating.
The holiday season, with its magic and its call to gather, sing, and share with loved ones, offers a beautiful opportunity to reconnect, reflect, and move forward together.
Program
3:30 pm Doors Open
Music by Luke Wyland
4:00 pm Service Begins
Winter Time is Here - Alex Lilly & Alan Chang
Earth Church Welcome - Nora Colie
Solstice Gratitude Prayer- Shawn Creeden
The Longest Night - Jax Ko
Gathering Loss - Laura Green
Poem - Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner
Facing the Storms of Life - Victoria Trabosh
A Winter Song - Jax Ko
Tuning Meditation - Maxx Katz & Luke Wyland
Elm Dance - Susan Evans & Bill Layman
Sound Bath & Cedar Burning - Nikki Calabarello & Mia Reiko Braverman
Singing Together - Audience & Alex Lilly with Alan Chang on Piano
5:15 pm Cookie Potluck Reception
Bios
Luke Wyland is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, and performer based in Portland, OR (USA). Wyland has been releasing critically acclaimed records for the past 20 years in the groups AU and Methods Body, as LWW, and under his own name, working with such labels as New Amsterdam, Beacon Sound, Balmat, The Leaf Label, and Aagoo Records.
As a person who stutters, Wyland’s approach to music is informed by his idiosyncratic relationship with language. Wyland believes deeply in the cathartic power of live performance as a means for collective healing. Through an interdisciplinary art practice that focuses on improvisation, somatic embodiment, bespoke tuning systems, the cadences of disfluent speech, and time manipulation technologies, he’s collaborated with choreographers, high-school choirs, filmmakers, sound designers, and renowned musicians such as John Niekrasz, Holland Andrews, Colin Stetson, and Abraham Gomez-Delgado. He’s also the co-creator of the It’s A Fucking Miracle dance class with Tahni Holt.
Wyland has toured nationally and internationally and performed at the Whitney Museum, Ecstatic Music Festival, Issue Project Room, PICA’s Time-Based Arts Festival, End of the Road Festival, and Les Nuits Botanique, among others.
Alex Lilly is a musician, originally from Portland, living in Los Angeles. She's produced and released a number of her own albums (Obi Best, "Capades", Touché "It's Fate", and solo records "2% Milk" and "Repetition is a Sin") She's contributed to other artists as well, including the bird and the bee, The Living Sisters, and Beck. Lilly loves Christmas to an embarrassing degree and mostly importantly, she's Nora Colie's niece.
Alan Chang is a pianist, composer, and music producer known for his 19 years as pianist and musical director for singer Michael Bublé. His skills as a pianist and arranger were showcased during live performances and studio recordings. Chang's versatility allows him to blend different musical genres, including jazz, pop, and R&B. In addition to his work with Buble, he also writes and produces his own music. Recently he discovered AI which helped him write this bio. Bios aren’t his strength.
Jax Ko is a first-gen American-born Korean non-binary femme artist based in Portland. They’re a freelance illustrator, graphic designer, muralist, stylist, & professional crybaby.
Laura Green is a massage therapist, Grief House tender, friend and partner, daughter, sister, niece, and many times a cousin. She feels many things, knows very little, is good at asking questions and better and better at not having answers.
You can listen to her talk for many hours on the podcast, called Portals, she makes with her friend Sascha and hardly at all if you meet her in person at an unstructured social event. She is deeply introverted, but really quite friendly and tremendously grateful for her life, work and beloveds.
Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner is a Marshall Islander poet, performance artist, educator. She received international acclaim through her poetry performance at the opening of the United Nations Climate Summit in New York in 2014. Her writing and performances have been featured by CNN, Democracy Now, the Huffington Post, NBC News, National Geographic, and more. In February 2017, the University of Arizona Press published her first collection of poetry, Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter.
Kathy also co-founded the youth environmentalist non-profit Jo-Jikum dedicated to empowering Marshallese youth to seek solutions to climate change and other environmental impacts threatening their home island. Kathy has been selected as one of 13 Climate Warriors by Vogue in 2015 and the Impact Hero of the Year by Earth Company in 2016. She received her Master’s in Pacific Island Studies from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Victoria Trabosh is an inspiring international speaker. Her firsthand experiences navigating life’s challenges, combined with the powerful stories of Rwandan women, promise to transform your perspective and ignite your spirit. Don’t miss the opportunity to hear her speak; it could change your life.
Maxx Katz is a composer, musician, and performance maker based in Portland, OR, whose work draws on vocabulary from free improvisation, performance art, jazz, contemporary classical, and heavy metal. A classically trained flutist with an MA in Music from the University of Virginia, Katz uses flute, electric guitar, voice, and movement as instruments of radical transformation. They create work for ongoing ensembles including Yelling Choir and Floom.
Katz has been commissioned by the Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble and the 2024 Oregon Contemporary Artists' Biennial, and has created work in collaboration with musicians and dancers including Tyshawn Sorey, Linda Austin, Tahni Holt and Muffie Delgado-Connelly, John Niekrasz, Julian Otis, lauren jean crow, and Eddie Bond. Their Yelling Choir project has debuted compositions at PICA’s Time-Based Art Festival, the 2024 Oregon Contemporary Artists' Biennial, and the American Choral Directors Association Northwest Conference.
Susan Evans and Bill Layman moved to Portland in 2020 to be near family. Soon they were immersing themselves in the climate action community and the joys of being close to rivers, mountains, and the wide expanses of the Pacific Ocean.
Nikki Caballero is a Sound Healing Guide, Certified Hypnotist, and Energy Worker. Her work focuses on guiding individuals on their path to self-healing by teaching them how to access different levels of consciousness through sound and energy work addressing issues concerning the mind, body, and emotions. In addition, her practice weaves together her personal experience in the use of medicinal plants and herbs, symbolism, ceremony, moon phases, and Jungian shadow work.
Mia Reiko Braverman is an artist and incense maker based in Portland, Oregon. A first-generation Japanese American raised in Kauai, Hawaii, Mia draws deep inspiration from her cultural roots, blending tradition with artistic exploration.
She is the creator of Fumi, a project dedicated to honoring ancestral connection, the craft of being home, and the sensory power of the arts. Through Fumi, Mia offers handmade incense, curated found objects, and creations by fellow artists. Fumi also serves as a gathering place, hosting workshops like incense-making classes that invite others to connect through craft and ritual.