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Joan Sotkin is a long-time member of The Celebration who, at 77, still runs her own business and is getting healthier every year. She now enjoys the advantages of having learned many life lessons and how to live a satisfying life in a rapidly changing world. 

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When a sunny day turns dark, lessons in surrender and the fragility of life are on deck. Sometimes our worst experiences provide the greatest life lessons. Grab your life jacket (seriously, grab your life jacket!) and “just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip….”.
Susanne Kennedy, founder and owner of Networking for Introverts, is a Referral Marketing Expert, helping entrepreneurs create strategic plans to get more business by referral. She specializes in helping introverts like her understand and work with their strengths rather than against their weaknesses. She is the past VP of Leadership and Education for the Northern New Mexico chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners, former Assistant Governor for District 5520 of Rotary, and an award winning Toastmaster.

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Charles is a native of Kentucky. He learned how to play piano and got the hell out. He’s lived in Nashville, Los Angeles, New York and Santa Fe and is a musician, teacher, performer, amateur playwright, and writer of short stories and song.

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Henry describes himself as an avid explorer of possibilities for healing and awakening and for new ways of seeing and being in the world. He is also a healing sound practitioner, conscious movement guide, teacher and musician on a spiritual journey and quest for over 40 years since leaving college after his first year. His talk is on “opening doorways,” a theme he sees as being especially important at this time in our world. Henry believes that we are all being called upon to open doorways and help midwife a new story for our lives and our planet. He will share key experiences that have been ‘door openers’ for him on his journey as well as medicine and insights from along the way. Henry moved to Santa Fe from South Florida over a year ago.

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Following the Grand Entrance, the Goddess persona may take over the rest of the proceedings. If that is the case, then the Goddess has let Dianne know that she would like to discuss the Cliches, Contradictions and Conundrums presented by New Age verbiage. She may also expound on other things as spirit dictates.
Dianne is a long time Celebrant (I mean LONG time!), so this is her twenty-somethingth talk. (Anyone remember when we met at the Santa Fe Vocational Technical School auditorium? I do.) Dianne has served the Celebration community in many different capacities over the years and witnessed many changes. She appreciates this community very much for its enthusiasm, live music, multifarious points of view, sense of humor, with an occasional dose of irreverence as needed.

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This talk is about my mother, Kaye Brinker, and her penchant for inventing or distorting words and phrases for comic effect. I’ll be reading in great part from a book my sister and I compiled of all the coinages we could remember. I’ve spoken a lot about how my mother hurt us; I thought it was time I spoke about one of the many ways she delighted us.
Rand Lee is a freelance writer and alien language inventor in love with words ever since he read Isaac Asimov’s “Words From the Myths” when he was a child. As his mother would have expressed it, he comes by this honestly: both Rand’s parents were writers, too.

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Steve has spent the last 30 years running large humanitarian programs in more than 11 Asian and African conflict zones from Burundi and the Sudan to Indonesia, last working with the ebola crisis in Liberia.
Coming back to the United States in his mid-60’s has challenged his thinking about who he is if he is not helping people in the 3rd world to regain stability and move forward in their lives.

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Among serious professionals, it is a common belief that several different people may legitimately “interpret” the same dream in several different ways. But there is only one way that the English phrase: “I love all inhabitants of this Earth” can be translated in Italian: “Amo tutti gli abitanti di questa Terra.”
The research study that he started in 2004 provides empirical evidence that the language of dreams is an actual language just like Italian and English. As the language of dreams is based on logic, Fabio’s study finds that it is the dreamer (in other words, every one on this Earth!) who is best equipped to understand his/her own dreams and draw from them the infinite wisdom, information and foresight they provide.
His study produced a book, the DREAMANUAL which provides the grammar and vocabulary of such a language. Fabio’s talk will include 12 dreams that have changed his life and the lives of others.

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I was born in Wales and came to America as a single mother with three little boys. I worked in Detroit at the first model Headstart program during the late sixties riots. Later I moved to Berkeley and worked with teachers who wanted to learn early childhood education. In 1987 my son Scott suffered a traumatic head injury in Australia. After he came out of a three month coma,  I organized volunteers to care for him because he fell outside the Australian medical system. After four years he died. I moved to Santa Fe in 1990 and began working hospice during the middle of our AIDS crisis. In 2005 I started Coming Home Connection, which trains, places and coordinates volunteers to provide free and low cost home care for those nearing end of life and long term disability. We typically care for approximately 50 people at any point in time.
My current focus is to establish a social model hospice house in Santa Fe called Scott’s House and develop a program for children released from Albuquerque cancer hospitals. Our medical system is severely broken, so it takes all of us working together to provide care in times of need. I wrote a book, called Hold My Hand-A Mother’s Journey, available on Amazon.

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What has shaken you awake in life? How have awakening experiences become central to your personal narrative? As we face our mortality, wake-up calls can help us to question our values, beliefs, lifestyle, and consciousness.
In this talk, Mary Rives will explore how the meaning we ascribe to wake-up call experiences creates our stories and helps us feel more fully alive. Perceiving our stories from different perspectives allows us to consciously change the narrative arc of our lives.
Mary Rives, MS, is passionate about people’s stories. She specializes in helping elders in the early stages of dementia to craft their memoirs. She also facilitates and records parents’ birthing experiences, as well as the life stories of others with tales to tell. She offers writing workshops, and loves living in Santa Fe with her beloved husband Keith and their cat George, Her heart delights in being alive and being of service.