ritual + story + play = well-being
Welcome to RUNA—a teaching and learning community dedicated to ritual, play, and collective care.
With a fiction writer and science writer as parents, Zoë grew up steeped in language, play, and stories. As an undergraduate at UNC–Chapel Hill, she studied English Literature and Creative Writing, diving into various narrative forms — fiction, memoir, creative nonfiction, oral history, and even grammar sketch comedy.
Zoë later earned a Master’s in Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University, where she designed community-based child care programs and participatory adult learning projects. At Tufts, she focused on how communities that have experienced racism and disinvestment from the state are reclaiming agency through collective planning and building networks of care.
RUNA weaves together Zoë’s interest in collective change while living with personal grief and great uncertainty. Her most life-changing experience has been being Nelle’s sister and companion on Nelle’s extremely nonlinear, iterative, and often overwhelming journey with chronic illness. Zoë has found meaningful support as a sibling to a person facing chronic illness in Lara Irene Vesta’s teachings. From 2020 to 2024, Zoë studied with Lara in 9 and 13-month classes, immersing herself in ritual arts, land connection, ancestral research, disability rituals, and rites of passage.
Through RUNA, Zoë seeks to create a living home base for those seeking lives full of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being. Her time in Curitiba, Brazil, so far, is helping us bring this vision to life through the art and craft of building ceremony, games, and building webs of care across the U.S. and Brazil.
RUNA brings together people from diverse and diasporic cultural, spiritual, and religious backgrounds. These shared values help us create a foundation for our community where differences and uniqueness are honored, not flattened into a single story.
We build reciprocal relationships rooted in finding a dynamic balance of giving and receiving
We practice and encourage autonomy, sovereignty, and agency with ourselves and each other
We honor a multiplicity of worldviews and ways of knowing
We activate our individual and shared imagination as tools for transformation
We intentionally mark the end of cycles to honor what was and support the next phases to unfold
We support integration and coherence across inner and outer worlds in ways that feel authentic and accessible for each of us
Subscribe to The Mycelium Care Atlas
The Atlas is RUNA’s community newsletter, featuring updates about our work, classes, stories, art, and collective care resources.
Your privacy matters—personal information is never shared without your consent.
