In the Cave of the Dreaming Bear

Some nights, at the edge of sleep. I picture myself approaching the roots of a great tree – the oak that once called me to a country home, or a beech, or an ash – singing the chorus of the song that was given to me as a key to a place of regeneration and creation.

Praise and serve the Mother
and let her grace unfold
Praise and serve the mother
and reenchant the world

An opening appears for me among the roots, and I go down into the breathing dark of a warm and cozy space. I snuggle with a family of bears. We are family. I am welcome.
    Then I am called into the embrace of a primal form of Earth Mother, and am nourished and loved and replenished.
    I can now go down to a cave deep in the world of the tree. It is light-filled and full of creative tools and toys, especially art supplies. There is a long wooden pointer there. It points unerringly, like a huge compass needle, in the direction I need to take. Sighting along it, or with it, I can see scenes of possible and desirable futures in the outer world.
    I can go from here along paths where other adventures await. I may start following the flow of an underground river to a waterfall, where I can enter a place of the ancestors by going through and under the falls, or leap up over the falls into a different kind of experience.
    I can picture myself rising up through the tree, as through a library from a Borgesian dream, with countless levels filled with bookcases and galleries. I can make it my intention to read in these books and bring back a few pages in the morning.
     I always hope that the pages I’ll bring back will be from books of my own that are not yet written or published in this world, but can be.

I am launching my new online video course.The School of Imaginal Healing, for The Shift Network this week by leading a journey to the Cave of the Dreaming Bear.

Art by Tracy Cunningham

Mosswood dreaming

Here, if you tread very softly among the cedars,
you may hear the low midday snores
of the soft secret race of big-footed beings
who grow pink hibiscus in their dreams.

You can't miss the tree that is the portal
to the three worlds because it is more real
than the others. This is the One Tree
that knows you before you know it.

When hungry spiders skitter over your bed
you forget to be scared because you are hungrier
than they are. You gobble them up fast
and burp out webs of shining possibility.

With your toothbrush in front of the mirror
you see a giant boa rises to rhyme with you
wrapping itself around the tube of your body
squeezing the old dead stuff out.

You see that people have fire slumbering
in their bellies even when they are cold
and muddled and living on ashes.
You turn on the pilot lights in their souls.

You walk through wild orchards to a wild shore
where sea turtle resumes your lessons.
You'll wear armor on your back but leave your soft bits
 exposed, so you can't hide from life in a hard shell.

When you ask, "Where's the rest of me?",
you create a conga line where you are joined
by the belly dancer and the golden child,
the red horse, the Empress and the Fool.

Here, when you let love spill through your eyes
every blade of grass is in love with you.
You lie in the creek bed like a pebble
and the water rounds your sharp edges.

In pilgrim hands you are carried to a stony place
as an offering. You rest in a cairn for a thousand years
until you spread wings and fly to your truest lover
and let the Earth have you under the warm sun.

The fire has been built for you, and in you.
You become cloves and cinnamon.
Rising again, you spread yourself wide.
As aurora, you color the world.

Here myths spill into the day
like ripe fruit falling into your hand.
You dive into the pool of dreams
and meet the salmon that fed the first shaman.

Stuffed with hazelnuts, it gives itself to you
and explodes on your palate
and feeds the whole company with magic
in a new miracle of filberts and fishes.

Soul Tree: Joining Earth and Heaven

We can’t lose our way if we go to the root of things, to the roots of a tree. By finding the right tree – a tree you know that also knows you – you can reconnect with the soul of nature. You can find grounding for soul in this world, and a shaman’s ladder to travel between the worlds.

      I once moved to a place in the country because of a tree, an old white oak behind the house that had survived the lightning. I knew it for a guardian of the land and a wise ancient. Sitting with that tree, I would have impressions of all the seasons it had lived. When I walked the farm road towards it, I would sometimes feel its silent greeting. Sometimes I watched the moon rise over the hills from up in its branches. The oak became a tree of my dreaming, and a portal to the ancestors. Rooted deep in American earth, the oak also joined me to the ways of oak seers of my bloodlines in the Old World, to the druids “grey, wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed”, to the sacred oak at Dodona where the Greeks listened for the voice of a god in the creak and rustle of the branches. After the first snows, when the cold stung my eyes, I saw that the oak still hung onto its leaves, longer than any other shedding trees on that land. Oaks hang on.    
     What trees call to you, on country walks, or out of memory or dream? Any tree may be your soul tree, and it may also be your sole tree, the One Tree through which the three worlds of the shaman’s cosmos are joined, and which may become your ladder between them.
      At the start of most of my depth workshops, I lead a standing meditation in which each person in the circle finds the image of a special tree, and then lets the body take the form of that tree, rooted in Earth, rising between Earth and sky, feeding on sunfire. We let our bodies sway as we stand, as a tree will sway in a strong wind, giving a little in order not to be snapped. We see the seasons changing around us. We feel what it’s like to have a squirrel run up our trunk or to have birds nesting in our hair. As the meditation deepens, we feel ourselves reaching deep into the Earth, through the roots system, going deep and spreading wide. We feel, with our inner senses, how we can travel this way to connect with the animal powers, and with ancestral spirits, and to receive healing and blessing in the realm of the Great Earth Mother.
      Then we let our awareness ascend to the high branches. We picture ourselves perched up there like a bird, or a happy child in a tree house, able to look out in all directions from this excellent place of vision. We imagine that we can fly now to a person or place at a distance and look in on them and sometimes, quick as thought, we are there. We discover that from the place in the high branches, we can not only see across any distance in space, we can scout across time, and travel into the possible future to see what lies on the roads ahead for ourselves and others. This is something that tree seers have always been good at.
      Now we go higher, in the world of the tree. We feel ourselves rise up into the canopy, up to the green crown, and then feel ourselves rising up higher and higher until the sky opens and we are in the first of the many levels of the Upper World. We are on our way now to make or renew our connections with our authentic spiritual teachers.
    
Text adapted from Dreaming the Soul Back Home by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Picture: "Dream Altar" by Siiri Liivandi. "A safe place," writes the Estonian artist, "to offer and generate dreams."

Le Hêtre: Beech Gate

The roots of the beech are living serpents
There is a green woman in the tree gate

her eyes are the green fire of growing things

The winged deer stamps its hooves

impatient for me to go in or go up.

High in the branches, close to the crown,

the raven couple wait for me

but for now my way is down
into the painted cave, past the see stone
where a ruined king came to call me.

For time I do not count I am among the long
luminous elegant people who raised me
when I was away from my body as a boy.
But I will not spend another life with them,

not yet. I feel my way down, ever down

to the shallows of blind fish

where grains of sand sparkle like jewels.

I choose the grain that glows like cinnabar
and it becomes a universe. I see now

how the infinitely large is contained
in the infinitely small, how the high branches
of the world tree in one universe
are the roots of the tree of life in another.

- Hameau de l'Etoile, April 27, 2014

Graphic: Le Hêtre de Ponthus, Forêt de Brocéliande