AMANDA LANHAM
Rooted in a childhood shaped by natural systems thinking and expanded through a Master’s in strategic leadership toward sustainability, her ecological philosophy runs deep. Amanda is an experienced facilitator of learning experiences in music, nature and creative innovation. She is a qualified Music specialist and artist. She is uniquely placed to blend art, pedagogy, ecology, systems thinking, and embodiment. It’s re-enchantment through resonance. Through nature-led creative practices, Amanda helps people slow down, reconnect, and find coherence in chaotic times.
She creates multi-modal works to help people reconnect with heart paths, kinship and belonging through ‘place’ based nature. Time and attention are the left and right hands that guide towards coherence in chaotic times and lead us back to our own agency. Her weekly invitations are breadcrumbs through playful portals, embodied explorations and paths less travelled. If you’ve ever stumbled into a mushroom ring and wished for an elf to guide you to the magic of wild places, that’s Amanda.
Find her near wildflowers, carrying her journal filled with washi tape and chatting about the surf or her most recent hike. Easily kidnapped with authentic chai tea.
The artwork, In the Undercurrent is an exploration of relationship with water and place over time: A lived ecology of witnessing.
Confluence (definition 1): a situation in which two things join or come together.
Confluence originally felt like I was simply meeting the creek, to experience some peace and quiet. What unfolded was something else.
“I must be a mermaid, I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.” Anaïs Nin
From the creeks to the sea, I feel at home among water. It’s not so much a siren song as a magnetic pole. I return like a homing pigeon for belonging, recovery and recalibration. ‘Being’ by Tallebudgera creek is an act of quiet devotion and tender appreciation. Not just the water, also all the plants and animals that co-exists here. I feel like their home is my home.
The connection to their biosphere led me to a deeper acceptance of life as it is, rather than what I wanted or expected it to be. Especially in a time of healing after knee surgery, at a pace so much slower, which was foreign to me. There is a deep sense of ‘enoughness’ when being with water and nature. Witnessing their lives gave me permission to move slower, hold thresholds, coexist on edges, reach higher perspectives and give depth to liminal awareness.
As I came to know the creatures and plants through quiet, repeated witnessing, I began to notice the health of the place and how it shifted over time. In paying attention to their rhythms and responses, I became more aware of my own. During that season, my knee was healing slowly, in a way that felt unfamiliar and uncontained. The creek seemed to move without urgency, holding change as part of its nature, fluid, ongoing, alive. Attuning to that flow helped me understand the pace of my own recovery differently, not as something to hurry, but something to inhabit.
The fluidity of creek helped me to refrain from trying to box in different stages. This way, any misalignment began to be understood as alive, rather than wrong. Water moves, and we do too, life never stays still and it’s this sense of endless movement, particularly that of water, that really helped me surrender in the flow.
My journey of healing did not require fixing, explanation, or progress, it required relationship, ecology, permission, and time. Care for self and care for place emerge through the same practice: attention over time.
In connecting to this place and its waters I reconnected to a deeper sense of belonging and felt sense of interconnectedness. Healing was through relationship, to self, to the community I came to understand and the planet we share together.
I made this work slowly, in return to a place that met me where I was. I offer it in the same way.
Confluence (def 2): the place where two rivers flow together and become one larger river.
This second definition of confluence echo’s my experience of a deepening awareness of a connection that was already there within me.I arrived seeking quiet, I left knowing I was already part of something larger than myself.