Meagan’s Roots

       This is a hat tip to one of my most profound mentors, and to one of the deepest and most soul-shaping apprenticeships of my life.

      I first met Sage Hamilton through another formative apprenticeship in my early adulthood – dancing and playing music on the floors of Melissa Michaels’ work in Boulder, Colorado, where I grew up and came of age. Those years offered me one of the closest initiations into adulthood I could have imagined in this culture. I played music for the dance with Sage’s husband, and Sage herself appeared one evening for an elders’ night, her quiet charm and lived wisdom gleaming unmistakably in her eyes.

      A few years later, in 2007, Sage invited me to sing with a group of teachers and parents as part of the preparation for one of the plays she was creating with her homeschool program, Sage Programs. It was a natural and delightful fit. From there, our creative collaboration deepened and widened, and before long I found myself in a true apprenticeship with Sage – learning from her extraordinary experience as a teacher, storyteller, theatre director, and community builder, as well as from her deep grounding in Rudolf Steiner’s Waldorf education pedagogy.

      Together, we cultivated a distinctive approach to theatre with children and families. Each process began with one of the high teaching wisdom stories that Sage had so carefully gathered from cultures around the world. We would spend long hours exploring the deeper layers of these stories – through Jungian lenses of personal growth, through questions of community health, and through the developmental needs of the children we were serving.
Sage encouraged my creative spirit in ways that helped me find my footing and flourish as a teacher, director, choreographer, playwright, and songwriter. After our story conversations, she would send me off to write plays so that the children could stand inside the stories themselves, and to compose music that parents could sing – carrying the wisdom of the work into their daily family lives.

      What emerged were less conventional theatre productions and more epic works of community ceremony. Staff, parents, children, and the wider community lived inside each story for the full arc of the process. Again and again, these stories rocked us to our foundations – deepening connection, strengthening resilience, adding to our collective medicine bags, and drawing us steadily toward greater health.

      For over 15 years, we moved through the cycles of the seasons together, creating more than twenty original plays with music. Over time, our relationship matured into a playful, rich colleagueship that continues to this day. Even after I moved away and began a family of my own, we have remained in creative dialogue – stoking each other’s imaginations and supporting one another’s ongoing work in education, artistry, and lifelong learning.

      Who I am today — as an artist, educator, and human — has been profoundly shaped by this mentorship and collaboration. I carry deep gratitude for Sage Hamilton and for the years of work we shared through Sage Programs.

      We are currently working to make more of these plays available for purchase, along with consultations with Sage and I, so that other teachers, families, and communities can bring this work to life in their own settings. You can learn more about Sage Programs in its current form here: www.sageprograms.com

May this profound work continue to ripple beauty and healing balm and wisdom and love into the world in all directions!