ART IS A SPIRITUAL ACT AND A HUMAN RIGHT
Alta Mesa Center for the Arts, under the leadership of Mary Volmer, is an interfaith arts and spirituality hub, housed within and sponsored by Orinda Community Church.
Please join us each month for our 2nd SundaY READING SERIES
Coming up at Alta Mesa Center for the Arts…
We are living in a time of accelerated change—climate change, technological leaps and bounds, and radical shifts in political, global, and social climates. So how do we support ourselves through the stress of so much change? In this workshop series, we turn to nature to find solace, insight, inspiration, and medicine to guide us through the pressures and uncertainties of this era. Through observation, immersion, meditations, and generative writing practices, we will explore what nature is, what medicine is, and how we might weave healing into our hearts, our communities, and the Earth itself through the medicine of our writing.
On October 12, we will work with processes that take you deeper into the subtleties of nature, and on October 26, we will explore "other minds"—i.e., animal, plant, elemental, and directional intelligences of nature.
Price for each session of this salon is on a sliding scale: $15-$45. You can attend one session or both!
Rae Diamond is a neurodivergent interdisciplinary artist, educator, and nature advocate who inhales life and exhales poems, music, and other creations. They are the author and artist of floating bones (First Matter Press), the author of The Cantigee Oracle (North Atlantic Books), and will continue to develop their next book as an artist in residence at Bunnell Street Arts Center in Homer, Alaska in 2026. Rae is the founder of the Long Tone Choir, a student and teacher of Qigong, and a lover of both the transcendent and the absurd. Find her online at raediamond.com and @raediamond on Substack.
Mission
We believe that art is a spiritual act and a human right. Contained within that sentence are our two primary goals: a) to provide a place for artists to engage in the spiritual aspects of their art and for spiritual seekers to use art to deepen and discover new avenues of spiritual experience; b) to provide a place where people from diverse traditions, artistic practices, and economic realities come together in community.
From experience we know that art can bridge the divisions, substantive and arbitrary, that divide us. We come together not only to practice and teach the arts, but to celebrate and learn from our differences and to foster lively and respectful interdisciplinary dialogues. We seek unity in diversity. We welcome professional artists, writers and musicians, experienced amateurs, hobbyists, mystics and seekers young and old. Wherever you are on your artistic and spiritual journey, whoever you are, we welcome you.