Sophia's Portico

06/11/2026

✨✨✨NEW PROGRAM!!✨✨✨
👂🏽WHISPERS from the EARTH🌍

Inviting us into relationship with Gaia, Mother Earth.
Exploring what the Earth whispers personally for you.

SESSION 1
When: Monday June 22, 6:30–8:30pm
Where: Sophias Portico
Cost: $20 (per session)

SESSION 2
When: Monday June 29, 6:30-8:30pm
Where: Outdoor location TBA
(depending on weather.)
Cost: $20 (per session)

👩🏽‍🏫Presenter: Ann Beeching

I invite you to join me in exploring ways of slowing down, listening deeply to nature, and discovering what the Earth may be whispering to you.
🌍The Earth does not speak in concepts or directives.
It speaks in whispers—threads of wisdom woven through wind and leaf, through rock and water, through the forest and cornfield, and your body. For 80 years I have been in a Relationship with Earth growing up on an Indiana farm with the forest as my playground.🌳

📖I attended College in Salt Lake City, Utah, hiking and skiing in the Rockies. In my 40s and 50s I explored art through painting peoples Sacred Animal Companions and earned a degree in Interior Design and began creating sacred space in clients homes and teaching Interior Design at Purdue Fort Wayne. I teach students to see landscapes in rooms that support their clients lives.

🌳In 2025 I was certified as a Forest Therapy guide realizing how Nature has painted the story of my life by walking with me through each step.

✨Ann Beeching’s life includes being an Artist of Sacred Animals, an Interior Designer and professor at Purdue University Fort Wayne, a study of the spirit world, including the spiritual beliefs and art of ancient and modern Maya of Central America. Last year, she completed a 6-month training course as a Forest Therapy Guide and is certified with the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy.

06/08/2026

Sophia's Portico Open House 5/31/26

We had such a WONDERFUL turnout!!!

Thank you to our neighbors at the Reiki Connection Center and
Lyndy, Reiki Master for opening their doors and offering services!
(Business owners, Please feel free to tag yourselves, and share any additional info in the comments)

Thank you to all who came out to visit, it was a BEAUTIFUL DAY! 🤗

06/05/2026

"For I am woman and made of
stardust and magic, that ancient,
uncontrollable essence of the cosmos,
simultaneously soft and fierce"

I am a free radical, an energy
you will never see coming

An enigma even, watch me,
learn from me, but do not try
to control or explain me

For I am a creation so ineffable
that man has yet to understand,
describe, explain or appreciate
my complexity

Though he definitely attempts
understanding, trying to remake
me in his image, that too has failed

For I am woman and made of
stardust and magic, that ancient,
uncontrollable essence of the cosmos,
simultaneously soft and fierce

I am the wind and the rain,
the moon and the sun and,
in any given moment, the
cycles of life and death

Do not underestimate or
attempt to control that which
you cannot understand, even
as you refuse the evidence
right in front of you

For, I am Woman,
a cosmic creation
that is both life
giver and destroyer,
a free radical burning
with the fire of a
billion stars and
She who will save us all

__________________________________________________________________
Free Radical, ©Arlene Bailey, Her Sacred Wild
Art, Holy Savage, ©Anna Sun, https://www.konst.se/annasun

06/01/2026

"Sometimes the greatest thing we can give another person is the feeling that they do not have to carry life alone."

Those Who Stay

Showing up for others
is a quiet kind of love.

Not loud,
not performative,
but steady,
the kind that stays
after the conversations grow heavy
and the days become difficult.

It is answering the call
late at night,
sitting beside someone
without trying to fix them.

Most people
will celebrate your joy,
but few will sit comfortably
with your grief.

Real care reveals itself
in moments that offer no reward:
in patience,
in consistency,
in presence.

Sometimes the greatest thing
we can give another person
is the feeling
that they do not have to carry life alone.

We all know
what it feels like
to need someone
and find silence instead.

That is why being there wholeheartedly matters.

Because in the end,
people rarely remember
what was said.

They remember
who stayed.

~ 'Those Who Stay' by Spirit of a Hippie

✍️ Mary Anne Byrne

~ Art by Anne Virlange

05/31/2026

"we cannot command the storm,
only the resilience within us
while passing through it."

Discovering Strength and Resilience Within the Storm

“It’s not what happens to you,
but how you react to it that matters.”
~ Epictetus

I think I carried Stoicism long before
I ever knew its name.
Before the books,
before the philosophy,
before I learned that emperors and slaves
could speak the same truth
beneath different skies.

Marcus Aurelius wore a crown,
Epictetus once wore chains,
Seneca stood among power and politics,
yet all of them arrived
at the same quiet understanding:

we cannot command the storm,
only the resilience within us
while passing through it.

That is Stoicism.

Not the absence of feeling,
not the death of grief,
not hardening yourself
in a world that bruises easily.

It is learning
that pain may visit,
fear may whisper,
loss may hollow the heart,
and still,
your character remains your own.

The Stoics knew
that suffering is woven into life
as naturally as winter follows autumn.

No soul escapes hardship.
No life remains untouched
by uncertainty, failure, or loss.

But strength is not found
in outrunning suffering.
It is found
in standing upright within it.

An emperor may feel powerless.
A slave may possess freedom
no prison could ever take.

Because life is never measured
by the hand you are dealt,
but by the courage,
discipline,
and dignity
with which you choose to play it.

And perhaps that is why
Stoicism endures,
not as armor against pain,
but as a reminder
that even in our darkest hours,
we still have power
over the kind of person
we become.

~ 'Discovering Strength and Resilience Within the Storm' by Spirit of a Hippie

✍️ Mary Anne Byrne

~ Art 'Free at Last' by Janice VanCronkhite

05/31/2026

6/3 & 6/17 🪘Drum Circle🪘