Nancy Messegee
Nancy Messegee is a text- and movement-based artist living in Austin, where she is dedicated to fully inhabiting and exploring the sacred spaces of body, home, and world through iterative creative practice. Born in upstate New York, she grew up in a village of 750 residents in Alaska, which she left at 16 to attend and then graduate from Yale, becoming the first woman in her family with a college degree. Although there are three continents on earth she has yet to meet in person, she has road tripped through every one of the 50 United States, witnessing in their vast complexity both sorrow and beauty. Her decades of deep work as a teacher and parent reflect her ongoing fascination with and commitment to human growth and development, to the mystery and power within liminal spaces, to the transformative potential of textual and somatic experience. She is the founder and owner of Enchanted Rock Studios, an online space offering greater health, awareness, and peace to those who engage with her writing and coaching.
Praxis Statement
As necessary initial nourishment to the greater health, awareness, and peace that I can offer my readers and clients, I create and participate in rituals of both word and movement, repeated forms that exist to strengthen connection to the mystical and to illuminate the changes within, as the familiar context holds space for the content’s progression. As the forms are repeated, their inherent benefits accumulate and expand, and mind, body, and spirit release and transform, revealing new details and deepening intensity for the next cycle. Even mundane tasks and ordinary vessels can become transcendent experiences and sacred spaces through the application of the mindful purpose of ritual. I’m fascinated by developmental, physical (in somatic, built, and natural environments), and metaphorical liminality and by ritual’s ability to both mark and prompt these various forms of liminality—to loosen the grip on the last stage and increase momentum toward the next one—where conscious process evolves into useful outcome.
Research Interest
My work is transdisciplinary, with a current focus on the themes and challenges that arise from the aging body, the weight-gaining and -losing body, and the life stage of reserve parenting, on what it is to consider, understand, and serve self and others in these processes. Through compassionate witnessing and expression, I can both coach real people and create fictional characters as they navigate the territories between middle age and death, between one size and space of self and another, between the unpredictable rising and falling levels of their young adult children’s needs for support. My praxis is centered in my own traversing of this terrain and further deepened by application to others. I’m drawn to the extra-rational as a source for revealing the resonant meaning in circumstances; I’m inspired by the quantifiable as a source for validating felt experiences.