Everywhere you go, the plants are holding you.
They are the grandparents. The caretakers. The ones that make our lives possible. From the houses that we live in, to the fuel we pour into our cars, to the food we eat and the air we breathe. They are here for you.
And every time you are rocked by a force that comes into your life overnight, stripping you of stable ground, there is a world of quiet green giants, and of tiny tendrils both, that will see you and accept the storm within you— will love you exactly as you are.
The process of gathering objects for a space dedicated to dream meditation is not only a fun way to recalibrate our sense of equilibrium, but it also offers us the opportunity to reflect on how we engage with symbols in the waking realm before we descend into the hieroglyphic land of dream. If we practice working with symbols in our physical reality, we will be all the more prepared to harvest the potent imagery we find during the moonlit voyages of our minds.
Below is a framework for how you can craft and interact with your dream altar, based on my own ritual!
Learn more about using, identifying, preparing and growing herbs for yourself, for your family or to help others on their healing path. Connect with like-spirited women, laugh, sing, dance and be inspired by a great line up of teachers and by each other. Take the day to stretch your mind, enjoy the outdoors and get a rest from day to day stress.
Fireweed is the queen of the clearcut. It’s the king of the forest fire. This plant is one of the most widespread in the Northern hemisphere, and one of the first to show up in any disturbed area. As if by magic, fireweed takes over, helping to green these areas again and stabilize the soil.
Mid-summer, in all of its fecund splendor, offers the perfect climate to sharpen an environmental awareness which we can carry into the dream world, and use to explore relationships between these realms of the sun and moon.