Dreams and the Spirit

in Eugene, OR

Friday Nov. 21 7 – 9 pm, and Saturday Nov. 22, 2008 9 am – 3 pm

Facilitator: Linda Neale, LMFT, LPC from Portland, OR

assisted by Willem Larsen & Toni Timmers

Location TBA

Dreams are a call to reality and to living life courageously. Dreams never lie. Called “the royal road to the unconscious” by Freud, some dreams prepare, announce or even warn about certain situations, often long before they actually happen. As Carl Jung said, “One cannot afford to be naive in dealing with dreams. They originate in a spirit that is not quite human, but is rather the breath of nature.” You will learn the dream interview method, enabling people to interpret their own dreams, in a safe and secure setting.

This workshop is limited to ten people, in order to give enough time to learn this form of dream interpretation, and to allow participants to discuss at least one dream each in a group setting.
Cost: $75
To enroll: Email timmerst@lanecc.org if you are interested in participating and send in your registration below. If you have questions, you can call Linda at 503-452-4431.

Text: The text for this class is All About Dreams by Gayle Delaney, although other books will be used as well. This book can be purchased at most local bookstores or through Amazon.com. Please buy or borrow this book before the workshop.

Facilitator: Linda Neale is a licensed marriage and family therapist, author, ceremonialist, and the founder of Earth & Spirit Council. She has led dream groups for eighteen years, and is the author of The Power of Ceremony, a book on the role of ceremony in modern culture.

Download registration form.

Dear Friends, Readers, Listeners, Visitors, and Supporters:

I’ve always wanted to do more with the College of Mythic Cartography, ever since I had the vision of a jar of seed that would inspire a flowering of storytelling and cultural roundtables of folks bringing back the “ancient fresh ways” that marked our (for most of us) distant ancestors as wise sustaining villages, bands, and peoples.

I’ve already received much help from friends and contributers, and for that I thank you.

I believe strongly in the power of Open Source, collaboration and open access to ideas, experiments, and lessons learned.

Lately I’ve struggled with bringing the kind of attention and resources to the College that it needs to fully do this work. I know it needs more donations then I have so far received to keep it going, though honestly it doesn’t require much. And I can’t bring myself to “charge” for this cherished jar of seeds. That doesn’t seem in sync with the spirit of the College at all.

I truly believe that all of us stand in the first tremors of a great Rewilding Renaissance, and I dearly want to do my part and keep helping in the way that I know how. I also want to make sure that I create content that actually serves the needs and interests of supporters.

In that vein, I’ve recently come across a funding strategy that I plan to start experimenting with, using a website called Fundable.com. I think many small donations can make this whole endeavor fly, and I want to make sure that everything I create here actually has an audience that has declared their interest and expectation.

In Fundable’s words:

What is Fundable.com?

Fundable.com lets groups of people pool funds to raise money.

Each project has a description of how much money needs to be collected and what it will do. Once enough pledges (not payments) have been collected, Fundable turns them into real payments and sends the total to the project’s organizer.

No one takes a risk when making a pledge: if a collection expires before reaching its total in pledges, Fundable deletes all pledges and never charges money. This lets you participate in a group purchase or fundraiser without worrying about what other people will do. No one pays until and unless everyone else makes a pledge.

I’ll post a series of podcasts that I’d like to do, with a fundraising goal on each. We’ll start with this:

“Where are Your Keys?”

Evan Gardner, who rewilds in Molalla, OR, has made a breakthrough. But does anyone even feel ready for it? Over a period of years, he pieced together all the most effective language-learning techniques into one, seamless whole; a game called “Where are Your Keys”.

Everyone knows about the epidemic of endangered indigenous languages, all over the world, and yet linguists and teachers continue to use old, academic and schooling methods, that for those many of us who studied foreign languages in school and college, we know they don’t work. We never achieved fluency, and we struggled to learn them. For those that did gain some mastery of their chosen language, they did it by actually traveling to its home and immersing themselves in the culture.

But how do we do that for languages on the edge of extinction, with one 90 year-old fluent speaker left? How do we create the experience of immersion, as best we can?

Evan has the answer. So far, he has struggled with getting the message out there. Since “Where are Your Keys?”, by its very nature, creates not students, but Teachers, he knows in only a matter of time the game will spread like wildfire, as Teachers make more Teachers. But will it happen in time to save the endangered native languages where you live?

Please donate to making this podcast possible. 

Thursday, November 13th, 7pm-9pm at the First Unitarian Church (note location change), Portland, Oregon, Sobonfu Some will speak on “Fanning the Fire of Community,” as part of the 2008-09 Natural Way speaker’s series.

Sobonfu is a member of the Dagara tribe, Burkina Faso, Africa. Recognized by the elders as possessing special gifts, her destiny was foretold before her birth. She is an eloquent, profound speaker.

I strongly encourage all of you to attend Sobonfu’s talk. There are a great many parallels between her culture’s traditions and those of the native people of North America. Her book, “The Spirit of Intimacy,” is a best seller, and she leads workshops on spirituality, ritual, grieving and intimacy.

“My work is really a journey in self discovery and of building community through rituals,” she says.

Teachers and ambassadors from sustaining cultures, like Sobonfu Some, have the ability to remind us what it means to discover our own village nature again. I personally think Sobonfu has key insights that will help heal the wounds of cultural poverty that many of us possess. Bring your friends, attend as a community. You’ll feel glad you did.

I’ve set up a link in the sidebar to make it easier to find all the CoMC podcast episodes. Check it out:

COMC PODCASTS

I’ve also noticed the most popular podcast, “Rewilding Adulthood”, received twice as many downloads as the second  most popular. Ninety-five downloads and counting! I feel honored to have a readership with such mature interests (insert smiley emoticon here).

What does it mean to “hold space” for emerging social technologies, like Non-violent communication, Consensus decision making, Agile Teamwork, and Open Space Technology gatherings? What skills do we need to do so? What happens if we don’t choose to hold intention and attention around the social spaces that we create?

I interview Diana Larsen, of FutureWorks Consulting,  a world-class facilitator in teamwork and social technologies (and coincidentally, my mother). Together we explore the world of “holding space”.

 

 Holding Space With Diana Larsen - COMC Podcast Episode 22 [59:46m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I ran across a passage in Robert Bringhurst’s book, “A Story as Sharp as A Knife: the Classical Haida Mythtellers and their World“, that I think will get you active and potential storyjammers excited:

Chapter Ten: The Flyting of Skaay and Xhyuu, page 217

We could describe the interaction of Skaay and Xhyuu as nothing more than banter - simply a way of passing the time and making a couple of bucks from a gullible anthropologist young enough to be the older poet’s grandson and the headman’s youngest son or nephew. That description is fine as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. In the impromptu mythtelling contest staged by Skaay and Xhyuu there is a structure – just the sort of structure that often seems to spring up out of nothing when skilled musicians jam. Skaay and Xhyuu are telling jokes and spinning yarns, but that is not quite all; they are also working within a tradition as demanding in its way as the Virginia reel, the minuet, the ballad, or the twelve-bar blues.

In Scotland, such a contest between poets is known as a flyting. But the Flyting of Skaay and Xhyuu is different in character from the Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy or other familiar Celtic examples. Classical Haida mythtellers don’t  inflate their pride or anger artificially, nor do they confess even their subtler emotions directly; they speak through characters and events, the way musicians speak through notes, motifs and chords, and painters peak through colors, shapes, and lines….

…Just as the classical Haida poets avoid portraying or praising themselves directly, so they avoid the directly abusive language often found in Scottish flytings. Skaay and Xhyuu are survivors, not combatants: two old refugees from death who have somehow not forgotten how to laugh.

Myth is a language made of timeless, not of momentary forms. The themes of the Flyting of Skaay and Xhyuu are not concocted for this occasion; they are original in a different sense. They are thousand- or ten-thousand-year-old stories put to current use; they renew the present world by rehearsing what is known of how that world came to be.

[bold emphasis added by me]

Some exciting news from the folks from Pulling For Wildflowers; the camps have budded off into a group of overlapping traveling bands, each walking their own hoop. Planning and networking to commence at next year’s root camp! In their own words:

To my Indian Brothers and Sisters, to those who dance the Dance of all Nations, to members of the Dragon Clan, to Coyote’s Camp, to my Two-Spirited Walks Between Relations, to the Longhouses of the Fairies and Witches, and to all who strive to Walk in Beauty……

I humbly greet YOU with the HONOR you deserve and with LOVE and Gratitude in my heart for all you do.

After communicating with Forrest, who now owns Nonnie Camp in Arco, Kimi Jo, Clyde, and Finisia herself and based on the consensus that there should be no lapse in the annual occurrence of Root Festival, I have decided to coordinate the 2009 Root Festival. There will be much happening in and around SE Idaho. Kimi will be keeping camp near the Camas Prairie, while Forest and I will hold the camp in Arco. The festival of 2009 will look and be very different in that Finisia will not be participating. This was her decision and fully supported by those who will be holding the camps. She requested and received good, honest, loving, and heartfelt council from many of you. Asking for this and knowing she needed it was a BIG step for her. She opened her heart and mind to this council, and realized that her nonparticipation at Root Festival will hopefully begin to heal the wounds she caused and carry this Vision and these Teachings into the future, even unto seven generations. Aho

I will be in Arco for the month of June, except for the first week. The flyer announcement states that the Festival will occur from June 13-28. I am putting out a call for those of you who learned and immediately began teaching the Walks in Beauty way to consider in your hearts to come and share your understandings and skills in the nonhierarchical way to do this work and come together for and with a single purpose.

 

 

 

The only way we can do this is to give-back what has been given to us for the sake of our Mother. This year will be more focused and ceremonial than in the past, and therefore less of a Nonni camp. All of this will create safety and trust. This is the year we will kick it up to the next level. If this resonates with you PLEASE consider coming to support the direction that Spirit is taking this thing. (YES WE CAN!)

I LOVE you so
You help me see.
See YOU in Awe (all)
See You in Me
For I’m in You
And You’re in Me.
Yes, I’m in You
And You’re in Me.

Your Brother-Sister,
Spider

Email or call
(707) 869-1612

I’ve just blogged on this, but I felt the need to expand further on what it means to attain fluency in our birthright, The Original Language, and also talk about the consequences of such fluency. Dream, Story, Myth, Riddles, Land, Ecology, Animism and Language all come together to mean the exact same thing in the Original Language. I spend an hour suggesting how we can wrap our minds, muddled by modern myths, around this ever present reality.

 

 The Original Language - COMC Episode 21 [60:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The Language of Dream, whose vocabulary and grammar comes from the Land as a gift to us Humans, the youngest of all the family members in the living world, teaches us how to speak it, by speaking it to us. Every night we dip into that world of speech, which we mistake solely for another place, but who actually embodies both a place and a language. A language-place. A Mythspace. A Dreamtime. We cannot dwell in the Dreaming without speaking its language by our very presence. We do this effortlessly and fluently, yet when we awake our fluency disappears as our waking selves take hold of our sense of reason.

I’ll admit, mostly when we Dream, we sit in the lap of an Elder of the Original Language, and learn how to speak by listening. We don’t do much speaking then.

For my part, I don’t have much interest in “lucid dreaming” the kind that the waking self conspires to interrupt one’s dreams with. When it happens naturally, great…but do we understand our Dream language-world so well that we can interrupt the story halfway through and start mucking up the scenery?

We consume movie after movie, television shows, books, comics, thinking we feed our conscious sensibilities, never realizing fully that to do so actually constitutes a conversation with our dreaming self, far more fluent in the language of story-dream-myth-riddle.

Information to our Waking minds, Transformation to our Dream-selves.  Yes, that puts my experience of it well; the Original Language speaks a tongue of Transformation, while modern languages speak a tongue of Information. Modern languages and thoughts grind…Original Language and thoughts weave spells, poetry, story, music.

We have many tools before us, to work on our fluency in the Original Language. Storyjamming, Riddling, Dream Interviews, the Thanksgiving Address, the Sensory Tune-up (to create a fluent, rich depth of rewilding sensory diction upon whose new vocabulary your Dream language can flourish).

Of course, we can also study indigenous and signed languages to gain fresh insight into how others have done it.

But really, the Original Language came before all language, and from its depths all language emerged. Everyone’s; from the smallest ant who screams terror with a cloud of pungent pheromone-speak, to the tallest Mountain whose wrinkles and weather mutter constantly, to the humble Human’s chattering mouth and gesturing hands.

We don’t need to learn all these specific languages (though their speakers will certainly appreciate it if we do), as long as we learn the Original Language, we can converse with anyone.

Our language, our etiquette, our songs and ceremonies, all constitute the game we play together. As many players do, like children trying to fit in at a new school, we probably haven’t questioned the rules of the game, but rather perservered to make them second-nature as quickly as possible so that we can fit in and master the game. As so often in the modern world, we agreed to unexamined things, without even realizing that someone had offered us the contract to sign.

Sometimes, if the game doesn’t truly satisfy, one of the players questions the quality of play, the general mood that the game creates. Maybe someone even successfully changes part of a rule a little bit, creating a “house rule” to (however imperfectly) address the problem. This road of “changing the game from within” often remains fraught with heartache and wasted effort.

Even more rarely, one of the players does something that creates real and powerful transformation, by simply choosing to play a different game.

How do we judge the play of our game, the life our culture creates? I believe we use exactly that measure: does our culture affirm life, and to what extent? Some would propose judging new rules based on whether they seem “Right” or “Wrong”. Unfortunately this usually means we’ve judged the rules of our game, by the rules of our game. An impossible situation (and does this perhaps explain the notions of “sustainable growth” and “voting for the lesser of two evils”?).

As time goes on, we understand that the measure “does it affirm Life?” biases us towards affirming other-than-human life first, because without clean air, clean water, and rich wildlands, we cannot live. Our Land comes first.

So how do we create a new game to play together? How do we pick the rules?

Well, exactly.

Fortunately, we have many games still in play, whose players quite enjoy themselves, and that have affirmed and nurtured life and land for millenia. So we have a place to start.

And now we can sniff around the world, asking these questions; if we play the game of language together, what rules will create play that affirms Life? The game of Marriage (or lack thereof)? The game of Ownership? The game of Family? Growing food?

At any time we can choose to play another game. I won’t claim that you will never have interference from others who despise the game you’ve chosen to play (and see it as overlapping into the space of their game, perhaps like a soccer game and a baseball game who have reserved the same field unwittingly).

I won’t even claim that leaving the old game will feel easy, in fact it will probably feel like you failed at it, rather than having left it as a sober and conscious adult choosing Life over Death.

But the game will never change until the players choose another. It will never change until we stop pretending that the rules of our games have innate justification. It will never change until we redream what it means to play games together, and to live lives worth living.

I have a metaphor for you. For me, this goes back to my childhood, when I had a computer with a tape-cassette drive. I would put normal audio-cassettes into the drive (which looked just like a tape player), and type commands into the computer. The computer would then silently roll the tape and either record data to the tape, or transfer data from it into the computer’s memory.

One time I decided to play one of the data-bearing audio-cassettes on an audio tape player. As soon as I pressed play, an amusing but simultaneously distressingly unpleasant grinding, banging, bleeping sound came out of the speakers, as if an electronic kitchen full of pots and pans had just rolled down a hill. Years later, while using modems, I realized they made the same sound when connecting to the internet.

This to me, puts the contrast well; Original Language, the language of immersive body experiences, of dream reason (sometimes called metaphor), sounds to the rest of the community of life like an audio cassette (with music on it) in an audio player. The music it plays determines their reaction; predatory, aggressive music will have certain effects, soothing melodic music otherwise. But putting in the data-cassette will always produce the cacophony of assaultive machine sounds, however sublimely ordered and sensibly coded, causing other-than-humans to flatten their ears against their skulls unpleasantly.

Certainly a coyote howling will speak to a deer that a radically different mind prowls somewhere out there; humans need not feel guilty for speaking like humans to each other, however much it offends other animals. We only need think about this issue in two cases:

One, when we want to speak to other-than-humans.

Two, when human language, as we experience it, has wandered down roads so toxic, polluted, and domesticated, that we no longer know what it means to speak a truly human language.

I believe both of these cases have come to front and center now. Both of them require us to stand up and pay attention. Our continued participation in the living world demands it of us.

We must return to the Original Language, bring our waking selves to a fluency in it, so that we can rebirth our ability to speak sanely, as adults who live in a community of life. So that we can join the Rewilding Renaissance, a rebirthing of belonging and meaning.

Perhaps “meaning” really signifies “belonging”. Perhaps the modern narcissistic quest for “meaning” really indicates a quest for “belonging”. Well, we didn’t come from anywhere else, regardless of what civilized myths tell us. If we want to have a relationship of belonging to our Land (before we not only cease to belong, but cease to fit into whatever habitat remains), we must choose it.

As children of the Original Dreaming Land, we always belonged. As abused children of civilization, we have tested the bonds of family to the limit.

They haven’t broken.

Yet.

I think I may have acquired some new regular readers of late; I’ve also resumed working on an initial book that I hope will encapsulate the fundamental purpose and methods of the College of Mythic Cartography (I hope to expand on them later in other books).

These two things taken together suggest to me that posting some first draft excerpts would help new readers understand more fully the ideas and aims of the  College.

I can’t promise to begin exactly at the beginning; but I’ll certainly start somewhere near the Center and work outwards.

I’d like to provide yet another example of the profound woundedness and intellectual dishonesty of the modern world. To do this I will do Richard Dawkins the disservice of having him wear the dunce cap for today. One of Foreign Policy Magazine’s Top 20 public intellectuals, no less!

Richard Dawkin’s book, “the Selfish Gene”, made the (supposedly) provocative proposition that genes use us as vehicles for their perpetuation. They live their lives through us, and the chemical code of their nature lives beyond us, underscoring the essentially mechanical processes of life.

A traditional faithkeeper of the Tzutujil Maya tells the story that the Gods speak Poetry, which creates all life. That you embody the eloquence of a God’s language, along with all other beings. Saying the complex poetry of your name creates you; if the gods didn’t speak, and speak beautifully, you wouldn’t live.

Two storytellers telling essentially the same story; for one, it proves his point that the world has no meaning. For the other it fills the world with abundant, singing depths.

This has caused me to remember that the “adults” of the modern culture (its top intellectuals, no less!) resemble nothing as much as a coexisting community of abused children. For the abused, no amount of discussion or reason suffices to fill the gaping maws of their rapacious intellects (the pacman-like chomping of which purposes to excuse rather than resolve the ongoing weight of their petrified hearts).

Every year I renew my resolve to save my breath for those wanting to dream a new language together. Every year this sinks down to a deeper level, and changes in emotional texture; unfortunately this year (or perhaps quite healthfully so - I don’t really need to label it one way or the other I suppose) it feels and sounds like a healthy dollop of scorn for those who think the world belongs to them, rather than seeing that they belong to the world.

Some things I no longer offer up for debate; who belongs to whom stands as one of them. Humans don’t decide what has meaning; rather, the Land decides what Humans mean.

Harumph!

Robert Bringhurst reads a translation of a Myth told by Ghandl of the Quyahl Llaanas, a Haida Mythteller, as excerpted from Bringhurst’s book “Nine Visits to the Mythworld“.

I’ve gotten hooked on Robert Bringhurst’s book, A Story as Sharp as a Knife: the Classical Haida Mythtellers and their World. He attained some measure of fluency in Haida in order to study their spoken artistic traditions; in the book he translates extensive sections of 10 hour oral narrative epic poems, to prove the point that a handful of recorded Haida mythtellers (the Haida poets Ghandl and Skaay among them) number among the great poets of North America, of this or any other age.

In fact, he makes the case that myths never enter this world as a communal expression, but rather as an expression of an individual voice. An excerpt:

Swanton’s hope, as he has told us, was to transcribe every story, or every mythic episode, told in Haida Gwaii. but you can no more record all the stories in a mythology than you can write down all the sentences in a language. A mythology is not a fixed body of stories; it is an open set. It is a narrative ecology: a watershed, a forest, a community of stories that are born and die and breed with one another and with stories from outside.

What a brilliant little summation; if you think of your dreaming life, writing down all the myths of a culture essentially means writing down all the dreams ever dreamed by a people. A neverending task! Your dreams speak your personal native tongue in the same sense that your culture’s myths provide a communal mythic tongue. Your dream language creates stories, much like your myth language does. And both feed into and aliven each other. The term “animism” seeks to make such “aliveness” and relevance to the present moment more clear; dogma means the death of aliveness. In our culture, we define religions as possessing dogma. Mythologies (as natively stewarded) have no dogma, only a language that they provide to tell stories in, refreshed by the community of dreamers. Anthropologists tend to turn mythologies into dogmas, and thus you have books that purport to tell all the stories of Norse, Hindu, or Greek “mythologies”. But only a dogma could offer such a finite set of story; a true mythology never stops speaking. More good stuff:

The mythteller’s calling differs little from the scientist’s. It is to elucidate the structure and the workings of the world. Myths are stories that investigate the nature of the world (whereas novels, for example, more often look at questions of proprietary interest to human beings alone). A genuine mythology is a systematically elaborated, extended, interconnected and adaptable set of myths. It is a kind of science in narrative from.

Science too is an ecology of ideas. Science, in fact, is a kind of mythology in computational form. Where science is in fashion and mythology is not, it is widely claimed that science is “true” and mythology is “false.” This claim proves, on close inspection, less a theorem in science’s defense than a partisan slogan. Both science and mythology aspire to be true, and both for that reason are perpetually under revision for as long as they are alive. Both lapse into dogma when these revisions stop. Where they are healthy, both mythology and science are as faithful to the real as their practitioners can make them, though it seems to be an axiom that neither ever perfectly succeeds.

Any persistent reader of the College of Mythic Cartography will know how close this lands to my heart; this resonant understanding of both science and myth by the author really surprises me. I would only clarify that whether or not Science aspires to “truth”, I would say more accurately that Mythology aspires to talk about the world in a useful way, to reflect it so that we can interact with it in a more effective way. It inextricably weaves both waking and dreaming reason together into a seamless tapestry of useful story, that affirms and increases life.