Let Yourself Be Dreamt

Do you remember the first time you felt claimed by the Earth? By a place? A particular seaside cove? Grove of aspens? An entire land?

Do you remember the first time you were named as beloved by something other than human? The dragonfly perhaps? Or the wolf? Or the orca whale? Where did they find you? In the wilds? In a book? In a dream?

Have you touched that intelligence that is so "other" there are no words to translate it's voice, and yet you hear it, with the tuning forks of your bones, and the antenna of your hair.

What if we could court that feeling? That encounter? What if we could lean into our own belonging?

This is what my dreamwork is about. It's the love language between deep ecology, poetry, and the mythic. The vehicle is intentional dreaming with bees, or serpents, or the Earth, but the material is your own chthonic relationship to dandelions, stars, pavement, dew, dust, creeks, wastelands, badgers, alligators, horse maidens, bardic heros, murmurations, and wildfires.

Let yourself be dreamt.

The Underworld Shadow of the Distorted King

Last night I dreamt I was in the arms of an Ash tree. Above me in the high, bare branches was a king snake. Below me, was another king snake. I remember thinking, as long as there are king snakes around, I won’t be in danger of rattlesnakes.

To understand this thinking, you must know I have a lifelong phobia of rattlesnakes after a traumatic childhood experience which invariably connected rattlesnakes with childhood abuse. I have spent my adult life repairing my relationship with the serpent.Back to the ash tree. In Norse mythology, the Yggdrasil, or World Tree, is an Ash tree. It's branches reach into the heaves and roots spread over the whole of the earth and into the Underworld. In ancient Ireland, the Ash tree is one of the guardians of the land. In Greek Mythology, the nymphs of the Ash tree were called the Meliae, which means ash tree and is a derivative of the word for honey (melt). The king snakes came directly from reading these words from Martin Shaw about the distorted King archetype and our longing for the honorable inner King:

“A King or Queen is a centralized point inside the psyche which has the power to radiate outwards, make decisions, hold boundaries, enjoy three-day feasts, and draw up the gates when necessary. There exists an interdependence between them and their servants and kingdom. This is a built-in posture of the self, not an argument for external monarchies or dictatorships.….The savage and distorted King is a force that anyone living today has experienced in abundance. We are far more familiar with this than a King image that is strong, decisive, cultured, and fair. When that image is denigrated or entirely lost, then the psyche is adrift from ancestral anchor-points that could root it in a fertile sea bed with the bones of captains and great ships.”

We are in a very real confrontation with the underworld shadow of the distorted King. The Queen or Sovereign Earth is speaking volumes through every possible language she has. Every shadow and every illumination is interwoven, and we are being asked to do the seemingly impossible: to both confront our collective fear, pain, and illness, and to heal ourselves and the planet.

 Note: Gopher snake baby died in my hands after I found it on the road

It must be stated that it is a privilege to be contemplating the “big picture” mythic undertones of this moment in the world. As I read beautiful poetry and inspiring words from people I follow online, I am also marking my privilege to do so. We can practice awareness around our projections of perspectives you or anyone else “should” have.

I, for instance, am privileged to work from home, even if I have trouble making rent. I don’t have kids who are out of school now. I am not dependent on the school lunch system to feed my children. I don’t have to juggle already sick family members and kid’s homeschooling. I am not forced to work in hazardous conditions. I am not currently in danger of eviction. There are so so so many people who are living through very real, terrible conditions that are now being hit with the virus and the nearly impossible need for social distancing. There are small businesses that may not make it. There are refugee camps with no preventative supplies. So while the big picture stuff is something anyone can ruminate on from any background, let’s also be collectively aware that any kind of talk as to the big “why”, or spiritual growth, or consciousness raising is often (at least on social media) coming from a place of privilege. As such, how then can I give back? What is my social responsibility?

I am going to make every effort to not impose any sense of what you or your family “should” think or do. I know social media can seem like a place of authority because we speak from an often unconsciously learned sense of marketing to the public. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I am doing my best. I am scared. I am hopeful. I am learning. I am privileged. I am also a small business owner. I have big picture ideas and many small anxiety-driven fears. The earth is speaking. We are capable of great harm. We are capable of magic.

Love you.

The Wounded Masculine

I just finished teaching a dream retreat based within the Path of Pollen/Lyceum methodologies. As a result, my dreaming has been turned up a notch.

I have been dreaming of love and pain. In my dreams, I am both a man and a woman and we are in love. We are each other. In all dreams, as the woman, I am trying to save the man. And as the man, I am trying to protect the woman. It is always the man who is riddled with bullets or wounds. Who is hunted by the underworld god. Who is bleeding out. Who is fevered and dying. And it is always the woman who is trying to save him. In one, as I wipe away the blood from many bullet wounds I realise that underneath the blood he is covered in a thin layer of propolis. When I see this, I know that he is strong enough to survive. Propolis is, after all, the immune system of the honeybee, made in reverence with the budding life sap of the trees and the inner alchemy bee.

I know that it is not my job to save the wounded masculine, but this week I have been feeling him so strong. In me. In the world. In men. I have been feeling all the places the divine masculine sacrificed himself. All the places the divine masculine has been exiled to the edges of the sea and the desert. Exiled from our tidy, hurried lives. All the places he took the bullet so that we could survive. I know that it is Patriarchy, among other systems of dominance, that has wounded women. Laid claim to our sovereignty. Violated our womb and our bodies. Silenced us. Killed us. The same belief structure has created systems that harm the Earth and all her living creatures. But I also know the this system has cut wounds so deep in men and the masculine that he/we are now fevered with the impact. Burning up. Breaking down.

Today I am simply feeling compassion for all the places in ourselves that have been suppressed, oppressed and violated by the current system of dominance we live within. I want to cry tears into the bullet wounds I witnessed in my dreams and watch them wash the injuries clean.

Call it resurrection of the self. Call it saving each other. Call it the deep work. Call it the shadow. Call it the beloved. Call it what you will, but regardless of where you fall in the spectrum of expression that we call the masculine and the feminine, we are in the laboured work of healing. We need all of ourselves. We need the feminine flow and masculine sturdiness. We need the women’s holding and men’s tears. We need the moonblood and the salt. We are calling our exiled, wild soul back to ourselves.

Oh, my beloved, come close: I am willing to look into that dark chasm of wounding and coat it with my tears, my love, my lion’s roar, my propolis, and my honey.

Re-piecing A Hive Together

I dreamt last night of a hive torn to pieces. Every bit of comb on the ground was covered in bees. It was the largest hive I’d ever witnessed. Night was approaching and I had to gather all the bees and broken comb. I had to provide them with a new home in a hollow under my bed before it got too cold. Many people around me were oblivious, but some unexpected friends and family came to help. No one had protective clothing. We gently took up each comb with bare hands. Despite the darkness, despite the cold, despite the gravity of destruction, the bees didn’t sting. They understood we were here to help.

I was reminded this morning of the delicate balance of relations. A bee, in her nature, stings. It would be unwise to pretend the bee doesn’t sting, the snake doesn’t bite, the lion doesn’t devour. Yet, it would be equally unwise to assume their instinct stops there. All beings also feel. They also have the ability to sense intention. How often have we recounted amazed stories of human interactions with the wild where an animal that should have roared, charged, balked and bit, instead remained still, while the fishing line was removed from her great watery eye, or the steel jaws loosened from the trap?

Our human-centric greed has torn the nest asunder, but it is our very humanness that can defy fear and reach bare handed into the broken system to mend it. You just have to do it. Screw careful planning. Start the garden, risk love, write the book, speak to the trees, march with the youth. The people who join you may not be who you expect. The people who are listening may not have revealed themselves yet. Do it anyway. Mend the nest, mend the weave, mend the rifts despite the odds.

Dreaming with Nature

The dreams were waking me up at night.  Black widows inside my home.  Black widows all over the ceiling.  Black widows building webs closer and closer to me.  No way out.  I am not particularly afraid of spiders, although I am cautious of black widows, having grown up in an old 1930s home.  I tried to reason out why I was having these nightmares.  I read about black widow symbolism.  I questioned my relationship to spider, web and venom.  For two weeks my nights were filled with the dark ladies.  Then, one morning, after other terrifying infestation dream, I opened my eyes and said aloud “It’s my bees.  There is a black widow inside my hive.”

It was my first year keeping bees, and at the time I did not know how common it was to find black widows and other eight-legged in or near a hive.  It makes sense: honeybees must be a real juicy meal.  I told the bees I’m coming, and dawned my gloves and veil.  Sure enough, she had taken residence in the back of the hive, fat and deadly.  The bees couldn’t expand their nest, and they were living with a predator.  The bees had let me know what was going on, and I finally got the message.  I was dreaming with bees.

This was my first experience of consciously experiencing communication from the natural world through dreams.  In an age where talk therapy is our chief modality for addressing emotional and mental states of unrest, dreams become entirely self-centered.  We defer to the modern day agreement, that dreams are our subconscious at best and the detritus of our day at worst.  Don’t get me wrong, I love and have benefited from talk therapy and the psychoanalysis of dreams.  I think both have a very useful and important place.  I would agree that many dreams are the product of our subconscious knocking about. But what if it’s not always our subconscious claiming a seat at the table?  What if Fox is knocking at the door with a wink and a swish of his tail?  What if Raven is keeping a steady eye on your dreamscape, daring you to ask her a question?  What if your ancestors, in their moon-white bones, are clattering around the house rearranging the furniture?  To get to the point, what if we are not just dreaming “of”, but dreaming “with”?

I have dreamt with my bees since this first visit.  Sometimes they heal me.  Sometimes they cover me with honey.  Sometimes with sting. Sometimes they share things that are about me, and sometimes they are about the bees.  I had a hive visit my dreams and inform me of it’s passing shortly before it died.  I had another black widow dream and once again, went looking and found the same.  Even disregarding my personal relationship to bees, is it so much to imagine that the wild might be reaching in to touch us? From a shamanic perspective, dreams are a way to work directly with the spirit world.  What would the spirit world be without the language of the wild?  Nature is our interface with Spirit.  It is the color palate and Spirit is the hand the moves the brush.

"The Spring Witch" George Wilson - Creative Commons

When we invite the pad-footed spirit of the wild into our dreams we are asking to be worked.  As mythologist Martin Shaw says, we are being dreamt.  In my Dreaming with Bees course, I make it clear that we are not seeking to dream of bees. I am asking students to invite the bees into their dreams.  To dream with the bees.  Whether you dream of bees or not is a mute point. It is about the courtship with a nature ally, with a spirit and with a fellow living creature.  The living earth is dreaming her way into being, and we are dreaming with her.  If only we could break free of the ecological nightmare we’ve created and remember our body is her body.

People ask me all the time, what does dreaming have to do with beekeeping?  Why do you teach beekeeping and dreaming classes? The answer is this: whether we know it or not, when we set up a hive in our garden, become a player in it’s story, and share in it’s vital resources, we are seeking kinship.  Some conscious or not-so-conscious part of us is reaching out to a species that has been an enigmatic friend to mankind since prehistoric times.  A species that has never and will never be fully tamed.  A guardian at the gate to the wild.  An emissary between the worlds.  To know this creature, we have to do everything we can to break away from conventional beekeeping practices and the man-conquers-nature/woman mindset.  To do this, we must find the crooked, forgotten paths deep in the woods.  The ones that twist out of sight and have no guaranteed destination.  These are the paths of our animal memory.  Our ancestral memory.  Our indigenous selves.  The observer. The shaman. The Seer. The Dreamer.  The Wise Woman.  The other ways of knowing.  The ways that speak in pine groves, antlered visitors, ocher and sun on bare skin.  We dream with bees, because we are dreaming ourselves back home.

Dreaming with Bees Summer Session Tele-conference course begins Monday August 7, from 5-7pm PST

Stalking the Wild Feminine

It’s going to be hot out there.  No-option-but-naked kind of hot.  Snake weather.

The bees will be gathering water from the banks of the Eel.  The water ouzel will be dancing her grey-winged hop up and down the river.  The bears wont come near.  There are too many of us.

Tomorrow I’m going backpacking with thirteen dear friends.  A reunion in the California wilderness.  Ten years ago, we piled our bright eyes and burgeoning adulthood into a few likely-to-fail vehicles and set out on a four and a half month journey into the wilderness.  I wouldn’t exactly call is a backpacking trip; it was less hike-through and more wilderness emersion.  Alumni and friends of the Sierra Institute program, we went to learn about ourselves from the wilds and each other.

Three weeks fishing in the Marble Mountains, two weeks tucked under dripping canyon alcoves on the Dirty Devil river, three weeks following the creek lines through the frosty Whites, five days with grandmothers and ceremony in the Sonoran desert, twelve days vision fasting on the Kaibab Plateau with the School of Lost Boarders, a week along the sea battered edges of the Sinkyone. We sat in council, we ate wild watercress and wood sorrel, someone got lost for three days, people shared backcountry romance, people got sick, people got fed up and left, we disagreed, we laughed, we read stories aloud, wrote songs, met bears, wiggled into backcountry skin, made amends with our nature-starved souls, and broke ourselves against modern society. 

We’re going back now.  Thirteen busy adults with busy lives, affording ourselves four days to pay homage to four months of life altering earth-speak. For me this means snakes.  Rattlesnakes.  I find it a terrible irony that my favorite place in the wilderness is also one of the most snakey out there.  To further the cosmic joke, I was born for wild places, yet life offered me a highly traumatic early childhood experience with death and a rattlesnake.  Fast forward through twenty years of snake nightmares and debilitating phobia, and you find me dawning a heavy pack, hyperventilating in an Arizona parking lot, and hoofing it into the snake-rich springtime desert. I would not be defeated by phobia.  I would stalk the wild feminine and surely and she stalks me.

Now, I am versed in venom.  A woman of the bee, stung time and again.  Since that journey, when I came face to face with my nightmare pursuer, I have negotiated a new relationship with bite and sting.  I am not less afraid, but I less crippled. I am more whole.  It has something to do with learning the language of dreams.  With learning to read the story differently.  Why does the serpent bite me, pursue me, threaten my sleep? Could it be the old magic, the earth magic, seeking a way in?

The Bees became my bridge to the Snake.  In their hidden way, they revealed the old stories about the sacred serpent.  She who moves through the earth.  She who is pure creative power.  Pure sexual life force.  The embodiment of the divine feminine.  In ancient Greece, the Oracle of Delphi, she who famously uttered prophecy, was known by two names: the Delphic Bee and the Pythia.  She was a Melissae, a bee priestess, but she was also of the serpent, the earth-dragon.  Pythia is a Greek name derived from Pytho, the old name for Delphi and our root for the snake species, Python.  Pytho or Delphi was the center of Gaian mother culture; the navel of the world.  This center point was represented by a stone, the omphalos, an egg-shaped carving guarded by Python and used in the uttering of prophecy.  

John Collier [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

As Patriarchy made it’s way into Greek culture, the Pythoness became a monster.  Apollo, the sun god, slew the serpent and Pytho became the Temple of Apollo. The divine feminine force was overthrown, shamed, violated and erased.  So, we have another story of how we split ourselves from the natural world.  How we took the wholeness of human expression and divided it, driving the stake down through our own sense of who and what we are.  Divorcing man from nature.  Woman from man.  Sexuality from the sacred.  The female form, she who knows the language of the serpentine flow, is exiled from the holy.  Exiled to the point that today, in American politics around health care, simply being a woman is considered a pre-existing condition.

It is no wonder that I have been stalked through my dreams by the snake.  From a shamanic view, to be bit by an animals in dreams, often signifies taking on the animal's specific powers or medicine.  It is an invitation, never mind how terrifying.  When we dig in to the storied myth-lines of our dreams, when we look at them as more than simply the psychological detritus of our day, we find breadcrumbs towards a fuller expression of self.  We find that the antidote is venom, and the poison is our own disconnect between self and nature.

I talk to my bees.  I ask them to teach me.  I dream with them.  I dream of them.  They show me through sting, nectar, pollen and hum how to be a more embodied woman.  Let's call it earth magic.  Tomorrow I will set out on the trail, and have my conversation with the snakes: “You’re beautiful.  I love you. I love the way you move. I will not harm you. I am afraid of you. If you choose to show yourself to me, let it be gentle. I love you.”  Who knows if it does any good, but it places me firmly in my body, and I begin to weave my way back into Wilderness Self.  Perhaps our wild feminine needs to be approached as such, aware of the long exile and the fear that comes from not knowing how to be around a force of nature that is so powerful.  Even when that force is expressed through our very form.

You’re beautiful.  I love you.  I love the way you move.  I will not harm you. So mote it be.