Dream Gifts

May 22, 2012

I am apprenticing and teaching simultaneously – there is a mentor overseeing me, though I am mostly on my own.  As I learn, I must offer – almost simultaneously.

I am facilitating a rite of passage.  Though usually intended for young people perhaps in their teens, I have a group of mostly adults that I am working with, as none have ever walked a rite of passage.

We are in a magnificent building – marble floors, enormously wide open space, with a ceiling higher than one can imagine.  All walls and the ceiling are glass, and the building is shaped in what feels like an organic shape – not quite circular, though close to it.  At the far end are redwoods – tall and majestic.  Down the centre, leading to the redwoods, is a thin red carpet.  

We are seated in one small cove, and I am asking my group to begin their inner journey.  I will not tell them what they will encounter next, beyond this step.  Allow the mystery to unfold...

As they are journeying, they are to meet an animal with whom they will merge or shape-shift.  It does not feel like mere imagination.  In every way it feels embodied and real.  What the students do not realise is that they have met this animal before, and have already merged with him/her as well – they simply do not remember.  Here, we are recalling that Dreaming reality.  I do not tell them this fact -- that is for them to discover.

I pose a question [one which I do not remember upon waking], and as the students are journeying inward with this question, I am carving a white root, crisp and moist like a carrot.  As I carve, there are paws – real animal paws – emerging out of the root.  Mole, or mouse or shrew – I am uncertain.  My animal helper is being revealed to me, in the roots.

Later, the students will need to find a plant – fruit or root or trunk – and carve their animal helper into reality as well.  It will not come with ordinary sight.  Only other-sight – heart-sight – will reveal it.

I become aware that they are mostly complete journeying with the questions I have asked them, and they are ready for the next step to be revealed to them.  I ask them to gather items to support their next tasks.  As they are doing this, I cue up a video.

I want to show them a video of a ceremony – the first that I ever attended.  It is a rite of passage of a young woman to whom I was somehow connected spiritually.  She was in her early 20`s, and there was a group of 6 who were passing through the rite together, all having completed the long preparations that were necessary to get to this point.

The group of 6 were walking down the centre of the great hall, along the carpet, and when they reached 1/2 way, they stopped to recite words of prayer and gratitude.  Then they jumped/ flew very very high, to a landing in the redwoods.

The camera view of the film shifts to capture them from a new angle, closer...  In fact, only the upper torso of a few in the group is visible, and the trunk of the great tree behind and above them.  This is the part in the film I want to show my students – the young woman jumps up, and as she jumps, feathers spring from her head and shoulders – slowing the film down, we can witness her body growing the feathers.  In the next shot in the film, the entire group has jumped to a higher platform in the trees.  Some of the graduates have partially transformed -- a claw on one, a few feathers on another, new vision for a third...  The young woman is the only one completely transformed into an eagle.  She has shape-shifted and merged.

I rewind that part and watch her jumping a few times – the part I most want to show my students.

Deep gratitude fills my heart upon awakening.  The visceral sense of the shape-shifting stays within my body for quite some time.  And, even more, I feel the intense thirst that all people’s share – for ceremony and rites of passage connected to nature. We must know ourselves as one within nature…