Posts by Amy Marotz

This is what the Wisdom Studies actually prepare you for. Not the lessons about crystals or breath work or auric reading—though those matter too. They prepare you for the moments when the ground disappears beneath your feet, and you discover you’re still standing. Because the foundation goes deeper than the ground

By Amy Marotz, M.Ed. My grandfather, Grandpa Ed, was a second-generation Czech immigrant who dairy farmed the same land in northern Minnesota his entire working life. He was a man of few words and enormous hands—hard-working in the way that generation was hard-working, which is to say he didn’t know another way to be. But…

I didn’t have a name for what I was seeing. But I knew, in the way you know things before you have language for them, that I had just been shown something important.

Then the teacher said the word: fractals.

And then — in what might be the most ambitious thing a middle school teacher has ever attempted the day before a holiday break — she challenged us to draw our own.

It was a little heady. We were twelve. But we leaned over our desks and started designing patterns we liked, then tried to extend them outward — from a Post-it note to a full sheet of paper to, eventually, the chalkboard. Watching a pattern you invented with your own hand scale upward like that, staying true to itself at every size, is not something you easily forget.

For an artist already wired to seek pattern and complexity in everything, it was a small detonation.