About Amber

Amber Seashine Kara

Amber Seashine Kara passed away on April 29th, 2019 after a 3-year fight with breast cancer. She was 44.

Amber was born on April 19th, 1975 in Carmel, CA. She spent her early years on the big island of Hawaii, and later childhood and teen years in North San Juan, CA– Gold Country.

After earning a BS in Marine Biology from The Evergreen State College, she worked briefly as a marine biologist, but felt called to work with families and children more strongly. She felt that whales were doing ok – it was people who needed the help.

So she returned home to work at Summa Institute, a non-profit devoted to the wholeness of children and family, where she taught Natural Learning Relationships workshops, led family camps and retreats, and facilitated rites of passage.

Amber Season Kara

She met and fell in love with Albee, and they were married on June 10th, 2000. In 2003, Summa Institute, Amber and Albee, and her parents Josette and Ba Luvmour moved to Portland. Her two children (born in 2006 and 2009) soon followed and Amber enjoyed the life of a stay-at-home mom until she was professionally drawn to become Executive Director of Summa Institute and found an independent school in downtown Portland called Summa Academy, which opened in the fall of 2013.

She worked in that position until her illness forced her to resign in July of 2017. Without her, Summa Academy was not sustainable and was forced to dissolve.

In the last few years she found fulfillment and great happiness in being a stay-at-home mom, spending time with children and family, cooking, sewing, journaling and gardening.

Amber Seashine Kara

Her greatest inspiration was drawn from nature – oceans, forests, and the incredible and awesome variety of life on our planet – especially flowers and elephants.

She also had a rich inner life, and in relationship with her loved ones was able to live from a place of timeless love – a deep ever-present connection to the consciousness that underlies everything, beginningless and endless. In the face of immense physical suffering and inevitability of death, she deeply accepted the impersonal nature of our universal evolutionary process, even as the grief and sadness about the deeply unfair situation made it’s way through her and her family. When we are deeply connected to the love that is our source, we accept the truth that we are not separate – from each other, from our family, community and planet, from ourselves. Allowing that wholeness in each moment is a journey that never ends – and leads to the great freedom and self-knowledge that is our birthright as humans.

Amber Seashine Kara

Amber knew that love which has no opposite, and while her planetary existence has ended, the shining star of her expression of that love has touched us all deeply. And that love will never die.

Albee Kara
May 3, 2019