Our Story — Lucia LaFerme

My story

Growing up along the marshlands of coastal Virginia, the tides informed me as much as my own heartbeat. I was conceived on a boat and spent much of my first year on the one named after my grandmother and I, learning to walk on it, while traveling the southeastern seaboard, with our Samoyd Chimo's help.

As a teen, I would run to the shoreline and let the wind and salt air carry it all away. When I would swim in the ocean, sometimes I would feel that water nymphs were around me, playing with and taunting me...

Watercolor was my preferred medium, from my first lesson at 6 years old with Cordula, the old Russian woman who had painted our church's Madonna.

I was called the class artist at the small Catholic school I attended for 9 years, but I was uncomfortable with that, shying away from attention and labels- truly my own inner critic had the loudest voice of all.

I graduated the school an atheist, the only one, despite my belief in nymphs...

And yet I went into school for massage therapy at 18, feeling a calling to use my hands, which as a child i would have the sense of being huge, as big as the house, or the whole world, it was the most bizarre but beautiful sensation. I've only met one other person who described this feeling as well, my Thai massage teacher.

Color is infinite and infinitely subtle within the world of natural dyes.

Once I was able to coax the primary colors from plants using minerals and water and patience, the rainbow opened up to me... and that's what I continue to explore. Color is infinite and infinitely subtle within the world of natural dyes.

Rooted in feeling, in color

Both my parents were in chronic pain growing up, and I wanted to help, to be of service. I also had plenty within me that needed healing, although I didn't realize it at the time.

I studied at 2 different 500 hr programs in Richmond, VA and began to consider midwifery, and trained to be a doula, had a private practice for 2 years.

Then my father died, and I grew restless in my grief, and hopped on a train to California, where I camped in the redwoods with friends and hitchhiked around the country as a wild and reckless thing.

Before long I found myself at The Heartwood Institute in Northern California, and reconnected with my studies and deepened my bodywork practice, diving into Reiki, CranioSacral, Polarity Therapy and Shiatsu.

After graduating there, I roamed up to British Columbia and down to Kauai, looking for a place to have a family inside of community.

I ended up settling in Nevada City, CA in 2005, and had a boy child in 2006.

He brought me immense and happiness and peace, and fulfilled my lifelong desire to be a mother.

We lived on 10 acres for almost 5 years, and then moved 'into town', 30 mins away, as a single mother.

My bodywork practice has guided me thru all these years, keeping me close to my heart and our shared humanity.

After developing some autoimmune issues, I came back to color and art thru dyeing in 2015. This was, and is, profoundly healing for me.

Indigo was my entry, and I was lucky to have studied with Graham Keegan and Aboubakar Fotana in 2016 and 2017.

Blue reconnected me to water and my childhood by the ocean. It helped awaken me to dream again.

Then came a summer of yellows and golds and then one of pinks and reds.

Once I was able to coax the primary colors from plants using minerals and water and patience, the rainbow opened up to me...and that's what I continue to explore. Color is infinite and infinitely subtle within the world of natural dyes.

As a synesthete, touch has always translated into color, for a long while so seamlessly I didn't know I was experiencing it, also assuming everyone felt this way.

I think this is a large part of why my bodywork is fed by my intuition- it is rooted in feeling as color, and color is as mutable as the water holding it.