Your Neighbors

We are BJ and Val, your neighbors

We were both raised in traditions with a love of music, gardening, art, good food, and neighborliness — the kind of upbringing where the ordinary skills of a good life were practiced out loud and shared. When we found this property available in 2023, it somehow felt like just the place to put all of that to work.

The sanctuary is our homebase, and the life we live here — growing food to give away, singing for joy, sitting in quiet, tending an old building — is the life we hope more neighbors can share in. Below is a little of who we are and how we came to this.

Our musical backgrounds

Music has been the through-line of both our lives, and we offer it here not to perform but to share. We are both classically trained musicians, and we met singing in the Utah Chamber Artists — an internationally recognized, actively recording chamber choir and orchestra based in Salt Lake City. We sang together on their recent Christmas album, Noel — listen on Spotify or on Apple Music.

Between us we sing, write, and arrange music across classical, traditional, and current styles, and we play piano, organ, harmonium, guitar and ukulele, and flute — and we're working on the mridanga drums. We sing kirtan daily, and we hold a devotional sing-in where we welcome singers from any tradition to join us in call-and-response, singing our appreciation for all the goodness we can name. All faiths, one room, voices together.

We came to this through real training, with respected voice teachers and coaches, but we care far more about joy than technique. We teach a way to connect to the voice that gives people back the keys to their own instrument — so you can enjoy it for yourself, not just to perform for others.

Val taught classical voice to young people for fifteen years. She trained in opera and studied in Los Angeles with Shigemi Matsumoto before turning toward choral music and joining the Utah Chamber Artists in 2010. BJ has been in professional musical productions since childhood, and he has woven children's choirs and music into his teaching and therapy work throughout his career.

We think of this as a kind of “music and food church” — a place where nourishment takes center stage and good happens just for good's sake. We are for all the faiths and a practical unity: being neighbors that nourish each other with goodness and gardening.

Our work, and who keeps the doors

The sanctuary is our homebase. BJ is a therapist serving neurodiverse individuals and the adults who care for them, through TrueNorthNeuro.org. Val's work lives at ValWise.org. We keep uplifting music playing in the sanctuary day and night and study daily in front of the stained glass, marveling at the beauty and the work that went into this building and wishing to share it with the community regularly.

Forest Sanctuary is a WholeFam.org effort — a small family of projects rooted in the same simple belief: that neighborhoods can take care of themselves through gardening, quiet, the domestic arts, and a willingness to share goodness.

We primarily enjoy the property for the growing season, and our work can take us away — especially in the winter. In our absence, our beloved sanctuary caretaker, Ben, tends the property and keeps the doors looked after. Over the past two years we have felt warmly welcomed in Forest, and we are proud to call it home.