Welcome. Fáilte. Welkom. Oki. Âba wathtech. Miyoonakishkatoohk. Umba wathtāch. Gwàdànisaàli nàdànásdàtłˈí. Okâch.

I share with you greetings in the languages from my ancestral lineage in English, Irish, and Flemish, as well as those from whose ancestral territories I live on, namely the Blackfoot, Îethka Stoney Nakoda, and Tsuut'ina Nations, and from the Métis Nation whose homeland I share in Alberta. I am so glad you are here.

My name is Tess Van Den Bosch, or through the language of my ancestral Flemish roots, Tess of the Woods. I smile to imagine my paternal ancestors birthing an identity that represents living near a forest in Belgium, while here and now my name has grown to deeply represent the relationship I feel and tend to with my ancestors and the earth. I am of the earth.

I am also of many other identities and complexities. A wanderer and wonderer, I am a mother, wife, daughter, sister, aunt, and friend; writer, poet, consultant, community practitioner, student; white woman and settler on Treaty 7 lands. These identities are entrenched in my reality while I actively endeavour to attune to the multitude of realities of what is present, alive, and possible in complex systems shaped by deep, often fraught, histories. They are what drives my need to tend my shallow roots on these lands so that I may actively live my responsibility of healing from the inside out to the communities of our human and more-than-human world. They are what nurtures my growing relationships with socioecological transformation, love and grief, story, ecofeminism, and ancestral memory.

I am a tender heart and spirit who yearns for transformation, so I tend lightly and lovingly the embers of our collapsing world through my professional and academic life as a consultant with Tapestry Collective Co-op and a Master's candidate in Community Development at the University of Victoria. Here, I am simply Tess of the Woods.

Through the fires of our humanity there are enduring qualities of love, grief, joy, belonging, abundance, curiousity, contradiction, change, and healing. As Rainer Maria Rilke so beautifully put it, the answers already live within us—we just need to slow down, listen deeply, honour the depth at which we wander, and humbly live into the questions. And I simply cannot live into those questions quietly from my home office anymore, because through so much of my wandering and wondering, I have felt scared, uncertain, and lonely. I have been afraid I might be doing this work imperfectly or that I might perpetuate harm. What I have come to learn, though, is that I am trying, asking, learning, growing. If you're tending to efforts that resonate with my own, know that I see you.

You are not alone on your journey. I am here tending to the embers of transformation with you. That is why you will find other wanderers and wonderers join on my rambles through the thicket of transformation. May we be tendrils to support one another as we grow.