“Everyone has to follow their own path and this requires a great deal of individual responsibility.”

—Lino Miele, Ashtanga Yoga: The Yoga of Breath, p. 46

Biography

Megan Hollingsworth, MS

Meg is a writer with an interdisciplinary education in community health and environmental studies. She writes poetry and prose in service to collective health. Her work is deeply influenced by her Quaker upbringing, Engaged Buddhism, and faith in essential goodness.

Quakers (Religious Society of Friends)

Quakerism is a Christian faith grounded in direct experience of the divine. For more with a brief on Meg’s roots in Quaker faith and practice, please see Friends.

Engaged Buddhism

For a sample of what we mean by Engaged Buddhism, please read Rewilding, Healing, Regeneration and Transformation for the Land by Mick McEvoy, Plum Village’s Happy Farm.

In 2012, Meg initiated the creative spiritual practice Extinction Witness with attention to genocide and anthropogenic species extinction. Through poetry, prose, and collaboration, Extinction Witness primarily aims to express and support complicated disenfranchised grief that Meg herself has experienced since first studying global health in the mid-1990s.

Meg is the author of Frog Song (2023), an educational book on the global ecological health crisis for readers ages 9 and up that leads with an interspecies love poem illustrated by Bonnie Gordon-Lucas. Designed as a launching pad for curious concerned minds, Frog Song includes the true story of Toughie (the last known living Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog who inspired the poem) and a section on continuation, and emphasizes how we can help amphibians, other wildlife, and fellow humans survive and thrive.

Meg’s writing has been published in online journals including Kosmos Journal, Deep Times Journal, and Unpsychology Magazine, and in print anthologies, including LOVE: The Ultimate Answer to the Meaning of Life, What do we do about inequality? - Wicked Problems Collaborative Book I, and Spirit Rising: Young Quaker Voices.

Meg holds a master’s degree in environmental studies from the University of Montana and a bachelor’s degree with high distinction in applied health science (community health education) from Indiana University. She is currently an East West Psychology and Art PhD student at California Institute of Integral Studies. She enjoys playing haiku and lives in Bozeman, Montana with her son.