My Story
MY NAME IS MONICA ECHEGARRETA.
Over the course of my life, I’ve been many things, and it seems I’m still all of them at once. Teacher, with a degree in Visual Arts from Central University of Venezuela; art researcher and historian; master’s in Literature from Pontifical Xavierian University of Bogotá; Hatha and Vinyasa yoga instructor and practitioner; writer and creative guide. Also a traveler, a reader, keeper of two cats, tarot enthusiast, embroiderer of worlds, and tireless mountain climber.
I like to think I’m not a single version of myself, but a small cosmos in motion, made of callings, passions, questions, and contradictions.
This space was born from that weave. Here, you’ll find that writing shows up as a ritual of connection: with the word, with the body, with the cycles that transform us.
About Lunaria Ritual
Lunaria Ritual is a space devoted to writing, understood as a creative, intimate, and symbolic gesture. A place where writing answers to listening, to caring for the inner voice.
The name comes from lunaria, a flowering plant with purple, white, or pink petals that, as it dries, reveals what’s inside: seeds silvery as moons, like little mirrors. Its scientific name is Lunaria annua. It’s typically planted in winter and blooms in spring and summer; it’s also known as the moon plant or the money plant. Native to Europe and parts of Asia, and now widely naturalized elsewhere, it grows in shaded, damp places, as if it needed silence to transform. It’s a plant of transition and memory. It’s gathered once the color has faded, once it shows what remains.
That’s how I imagine writing in this space. Like lunaria, moving through silences and transformations until it reveals what it holds inside. Every word can be a seed, a mirror, even a moon.
That’s why this place is called Lunaria Ritual. Because writing alongside others is, at least here, a way of inhabiting time with our hands, our ink, and our souls.
A New Cycle
I’ve spent many years walking alongside other people. I’ve been a Spanish teacher, a Literature teacher, a yoga teacher; a teacher of many things. And along that path, I discovered that one of the things that moves me the most is helping others reach their dreams of becoming writers. To me, teaching means sharing, listening, and offering presence; it means learning together; it even means deepening my own practice every time I guide someone else’s; it means simply being there. For a while, I built these spaces in partnership, until life led me to my own space, one that answers only to my own way of guiding and understanding writing.
From this journey, Lunaria Ritual is born, where I now accompany the writing of others.
Thank you for being here.