Meet Michelle Carrera: Your Companion in Grief and Liberation

Some of us are born listening to what others can’t hear. My life has always followed the hush between things, between heartbeats, between endings, between the living and the dead. I’ve walked with grief in many forms: the loss of my father, the loss of home, of kin, of species, of selves. Grief is not what broke me. It’s what made me fluent.

I built Grief and Liberation as a creative ecosystem, a place for the grieving, the dying, and those who walk beside them. It’s a space for grief to become story. For ritual to hold what capitalism abandoned. For language to compost shame. For endings to open, not just close.

I am a certified death doula, grief companion, and Interfaith Animal Chaplain, but my real training comes from collapse, community, and the long work of returning to myself. I’ve accompanied the dying and the broken-hearted. I’ve held grief ceremonies in forests, kitchens, and parking lots. I’ve written obituaries for species and for former selves. I’ve stood barefoot in compost and understood exactly what it was saying.

This work is not a service. It’s a remembering. A devotion.

I don’t walk ahead of you. I walk beside you.
As a writer, I craft stories shaped by decay, ritual, and rebirth.
As a doula, I offer presence, tenderness, and truth.
As a companion, I hold space for grief in all its strange, beautiful forms.

For more on my other previous and current projects, visit www.michellecarrera.com

At the heart of this space is a vision that refuses to fragment. Spiritual, political, ecological, personal, collective: it is all woven together, like root and mycelium, branch and breath.

I believe in a world where every being, human and more-than-human. can live freely, with dignity, with enough. Not just survive, but thrive. And I know, deeply know, that none of us get free alone. Our liberation is entangled. We rise together, or not at all.

Spiritually, liberation is about movement, about flow. Guiding souls back to themselves, back to the earth, and back to each other. It means tending the wounds that live in the body and the land, unlearning what colonization taught us to forget, and remembering how to live in balance. It is listening to ancestors and stones alike, letting them speak what we’ve been too busy or too broken to hear. It is sacred rebellion and soft return. It is grief as a compass and tenderness as a radical tool.

Politically, liberation is the everyday work of resistance and repair. It’s breaking the machines of harm, standing beside the silenced, and building something else together. It looks like mutual aid, decolonization, re-indigenization, and a refusal to abandon each other. It’s holding hands in the fire and knowing we will not let each other fall. It is as much about dreaming as it is about doing, rooted in collective care that doesn’t flinch when things get hard.

Ecologically, liberation means falling back in love with the living world. It’s letting awe guide us and responsibility anchor us. It means seeing rivers as relatives, extinction as grief, and climate collapse as both a wound and a wake-up. It is protecting, preserving, and planting. It is fighting for the wild to stay wild and for the earth to breathe freely again, as kin.

This is not a metaphor. This is the work. And this vision, this ever-unfolding, rooted, shimmering vision, is what shapes every word I write, every life I honor, and every offering I bring. Grief, death, love, freedom, these are not separate things. They are portals. And I am here to walk with you through them.