ROOTED MOON COLLECTIVE
Our story and philosophy
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The Need
Rooted Moon was born out of a need to create a safe and supportive space for our family, in the midst of arriving in a new country, while expecting a baby, and coping with all the feels surrounding a growing pandemic. Needless to say change was inevitable and painfully necessary. Our home became our sacred space and our perspective and priorities began to rapidly change.
Our Priorities
Our priorities are to create nurturing space in an intentional and holistic way. For us this means surrounding ourselves with the things we love most, getting rid of the things we don't, creating comfortable and usable space in every room, eliminating clutter with sustainable organizational strategies that work for us, filling our home with the elements of nature; beautiful plants, scents and sounds and creating an environment of comfort that eases our hearts and settles our souls on a daily basis.
The Practice
Tackling the art of packing, unpacking, sorting, donating, organizing, folding, hanging, and incorporating tradition and ritual along the way, TAKES PRACTICE. Developing traditions and turning routines into grounding rituals is a vital piece of that practice when organizing and rooting down with intention. The uniqueness is in each individual family story. The collection of stones from different countries, paintings from India, textiles from Africa, family portraits and pre-Colombian treasures, all create a narrative and reflection of our identity, values and purpose. It's not just the "things" but the story being told and the traditions that make every story more sacred. Designing your home to hold space for these stories, rituals and connections is key to the practice of styling a space to honor your story.
Rooting Down
To be rooted is to have a stable foundation, and from this stability we can build our lives and thrive, we can adapt without falling sideways when the wind blows. Living abroad in the Foreign Service, the wind blows often. We move every few years and experience the complexities of uprooting your entire life to relocate to a new country. We naturally crave stability, and with that the concept of home becomes essential to establishing those roots. We are guests in our host countries and our roots intertwine with the ancestry of the world, establishing for us a new sense of community, connection and humanity. How we root down and identify those connections to home creates stable roots for the soul, allowing us to show up in the world with purpose and integrity.
The Moon
Our first post in this Foreign Service life was in El Salvador. After two years in country it was time to wrap our minds around packing up and moving on to the next place we'd call home. We felt loss and sadness, frustrated, overwhelmed and alone...and then I looked up at the night sky. The moon was in its waxing phase, on its way to brightness, almost full and whole again. We weren't alone. We had the moon. The same moon you can see from any point on the planet, no matter where you live or what you do. The moon we see at early dawn is the same moon you'll see when your sun sets. The same moon our ancestors gazed at, prayed under, celebrated and cultivated tradition. The same moon that has watched over the development and destruction of Planet Earth for the past 4.5 billion years. We found our moon, and realized in that moment that she is our anchor to this life, to our past, present and future. She reminds us that we are all in motion, connected to each other and natures infinite cycle of life, death and rebirth. Collaborating with this energy, moving with it instead of against it, has become the most obvious way to flow through change, grow roots and thrive wherever we live and in whichever stage of life we happen to be cycling through.​
I'm LESLIE...
Founder of Rooted Moon Collective
​​Leslie Mansour is originally from San Diego, CA and currently lives in Bogota, Colombia. She served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco, working with artisans on product development, design and marketing. While living in Washington, D.C. she worked at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop as their Staff Photography, Teaching Artist and Deputy Director of Arts Programing. Leslie has been a photographer for 20+ years, along side curating art spaces and solo exhibitions. In April 2021 she founded Rooted Moon Collective, answering a call to begin intuitively curating living spaces. Her experience as a Visual Artist, Curator and Creative Professional inform and guide her holistic approach to designing, styling and organizing private homes into sacred space. Leslie is a mother of two, a Master Kombucha Brewer, and practices yoga, somatics and anti-racism. She believes in practicing traditions and rituals that heal generational trauma, reconnect us to natures cycles, honor authenticity and ancestry, and ground us more deeply into the essence of our truth, inviting us to serve our community and uplift the collective.
Transformation and transitions are uncomfortable but can be approached with ease and intuition. The challenges of moving your family all over the world, reinventing and rediscovering yourself each time, is an invitation to grow our roots more deeply into evolving versions of ourselves and our shared humanity. Leslie is here to help you find your moon and create your sanctuary, so you can root down into your home and discover sacred ground within your soul.