Caving: Supported quietude for nourishment and as fertile seeds for creation

Caving is a practice I developed spending time in darkness. Participants visit either an actual cave in nature, or create a cave with heavy cloth. A cave provides a space for quietude and slowing down. Caving is a potent experience that offers incubation space, a safe and quiet place to be with the intention that whatever one does in the cave can be a source for nourishing oneself and one's creative evolution. When time slows down and one removes the visual, subtle sensation is invited to arise. Sensing, feeling, and attending take primacy over doing and producing; paradoxically one finds oneself in a space that is immensely generative. A cave has an opening, and particularly with the cloth caves this opening and closing can be very effective for modulating one’s relationship with surroundings. Opening and closing is understood as a root of composing — in art and life.

Cave Sessions take place regularly at studios in Oakland and Berkeley, can be offered as part of private sessions, and are incorporated into Cave Forms Workshops.

More recently, the work has taken the form of Cave Art / Incubations, a description here:


Cave Art / Incubations are an opportunity to work in a small group and practice the nourishing experience of Caving and the aesthetic explorations of Cave Forms.

It is a retreat space to nourish your quietest being and incubate your desires in preparation for the darkest weeks of the year, through movement, writing, transdisciplinary arts, subtle inquiries, and stillness. We will spend the time in the studio-as-cave, at times in quiet and explorations under and out of the cave-cloth. We will access a creative practice, our cave art, to set in motion our incubations, and find the seeds for creative ideas to be sewn later, and to let them go. The workshop will offer a chance for collective support of the elemental force of water, and will make a bridge from the unknown as a rich resource into creative process.

Cave Forms 

Cave Coast Collective