Sitting with Trees: A Green Love Letter to Black Elder Women

Event Information

Four years ago, Photosynthesis: A Green Love Letter to Black Women was shortlisted in this space — a poetic offering honoring Black women as life-givers, memory-keepers, and sources of quiet strength. Nearly two years ago, that poem evolved into a formal research study: Sitting with Trees: An Eco-Autoethnographic Research Study about Optimal Aging and Black Womanhood.

Today, these threads return in conversation.

Sitting with Trees: A Green Love Letter to Black Elder Women is a virtual dialogue with two elder women who participated in the original study. Together, we revisit their experiences, reflect on new encounters with nature since the research concluded, and explore what aging, memory, and ecological connection mean to them now.

Blending poetry, eco-autoethnographic inquiry, and oral history, this gathering centers Black elder women not as subjects of study, but as living archives. It honors aging as deepening - as rootedness, as photosynthesis, as a sustained relationship with light.

This offering is both continuation and gratitude. A return not to repeat, but to listen again - and to witness how wisdom grows over time.

Contributors

Dr. Christal Mischelle Omni, MPH, MLS

A Black Joy scholar and Black women’s health researcher whose work is ancestrally guided and archivally supported.

She studies Black women’s lives through listening, land, memory, and joy as ancestral transmission, cultivating research practices grounded in care, patience, and relational accountability; Dr. Janet Haynes is an educator, scholar, and thought leader who earned her EdD from Fielding Graduate University in 2002.

She is best known for advancing auto-ethnographic research focused on African American women in corporate leadership. Her work spans published textbook contributions, doctoral mentoring, artistic residencies, and service as a federal grant reviewer; Gloria Lambert is a co-founder, alongside her two sisters, of a women’s organization dedicated to strengthening relationships among Black women and building community through fellowship, leadership, encouragement, and support.

She brings extensive administrative experience from her work in education as well as city and county government, and currently serves in community development within the planning division for the City of Lenexa. Outside of work, Gloria enjoys puzzling, long outdoor walks, and spending quality time with friends and family.

OMNI Institute of Well-being
OMNI Institute of Well-being (Outreach, Mentorship, and Narrative Inquiry) is a research-informed creative wellness collective founded by Dr. Christal Mischelle Omni. Rooted in eco-autoethnographic research and Black feminist traditions, the Institute centers nature as a site of teaching, learning, healing, and well-being.

Through courses, community gatherings, publications, and intergenerational storytelling initiatives, OMNI creates spaces where scholarship and lived experience meet. Signature offerings include Sitting with Trees: Nature, Memory, and Black Elder Wisdom, eco-embodied writing workshops, and public conversations that honor Black elder knowledge as intellectual and cultural inheritance.

The Institute advances a culturally grounded alternative to commercialized self-care, reframing self-restoration as relational, ancestral, and ecologically connected. By integrating research, art, and community dialogue, OMNI cultivates spaces where memory is honored, aging is dignified, and nature becomes both mirror and mentor.

Insta: @drchristalmischelleomni

Insta: @omniinstituteofwellbeing

Location of event

Location: Webinar.