Our Online Village Events

Mycorrhizal Mystery School: Slow Time Dreaming with Lichen and Stone

Equinox to Equinox: September 21, 2026 – March 24, 2027

Do you remember the first time you met Lichen? Or maybe you have passed Lichens countless times without making their acquaintance.

Maybe as a child you were drawn to the bright colors on rock: neon green, rust, ochre. Or allured by wispy beards hanging from trees, or turquoise scallops of something mysterious on bark. Perhaps your fingers reached for textures neither rock nor paint nor plant.

They are still here. On the wall by your door, on the headstones at the cemetery, on boulders by the shore. Growing where almost nothing else will, living on air and cloud and stone. Growing at a pace that the minerals in our blood and bones remember. Dreaming with the frequency of stone.

Join Sage Spider Gater and Night Lion (Marta Gaunt) for six months of dreaming and listening in slow time. Our village will be served and supported by a devoted team of dream tenders immersed in apprenticing to the art of Wild Mind and soul initiation guiding. We are honored to host inspirational guest collaborators Bayo Akomolafe, writer and philosopher, and Rima Staines, mythic artist and storyteller. Several Animas guides, including our founder, Impossible Dreamer (Bill Plotkin), will lead sessions designed to challenge and trouble us in the best, most disturbing ways.

Last year our soulcentric village dove into the realm of mycelium, spores and fruiting bodies. We wandered and dreamed abundantly with fungi. This year’s mystery school will continue to engage with fungi, and we will turn with curiosity toward the symbiotic organisms called lichens, which are collaborations between fungi and algae or sometimes bacteria. These organisms are so intertwined that scientists long mistook the many for one. Some individual lichens are older than the oldest trees. Fungi provide the structure for the lichen to thrive. Algae provide the capacity to make energy from sunlight. What might we learn from lichen about soulcentric villaging, collaborating, and participation?

Our village is a place of co-creation and imagination, where we can be weathered like stone, dissolved at the edges, and become fertile ground for our collective dreaming. Lichen slowly makes soil on bare rock, creating the conditions for other life to take hold. Here on the Commons, in the improbable meeting place of the screen, a village has been growing… This village does not just welcome your participation but is made of it.

How We Will Gather

We gather as a whole group four times each month for 2.5 hours, from the September equinox to the March equinox. Two gatherings are at 9am Pacific Time (friendly for Europe and Africa) and two at 5pm Pacific (friendly for Australia, New Zealand and Asia). All four work well across the Americas. (See below for specific days and times of whole group sessions.)

Between these whole-group gatherings, there will be weekly dream groups, drop-in circles for movement and art, and unique groups formed as we discover our desires. We will use a private space on the Animas Valley Commons to share dreams, poems, images, recordings, and stories from the land. And there will be many invitations to leave the screens behind and wander in our local watersheds, entering deepening relationships with the more than human world.

This is a permeable container. Come to as many or as few gatherings as you wish. Sessions are recorded, so you can watch any you miss. We will continue and deepen the practices of last year’s Mycorrhizal Mystery School, and new explorations will emerge from our encounters with lichen, stone, and the particular dreams of this new village.

Those who dreamed with us last year are warmly invited to return. New dreamers are equally welcome, and no previous experience is needed.

Cost

To participate in Mycorrhizal Mystery School we are offering a sliding scale of $500-$1100. If the low end of the scale is beyond your means, your presence is still most welcome. Please write to Spider Gate to discuss your needs:[email protected]

Our Six Months of Dreaming Together

We will:

  • Meet dreamers from all over the world, and find out what happens when we make art and music together, inviting mystery and mischief to play across the distance
  • Go out onto the lands where we live, wherever in the world we are, to find and enter conversations with lichen on stone
  • Practice the slow attention that lichen asks of us, learning to see what we have walked past all our lives
  • Listen for the ancient dreaming beneath our feet, and ask what stone remembers
  • Create ceremonies, collectively and individually, and be witnessed through the soulcentric passages of our own lives. Perhaps you will enact a solo fast, a ceremony, a threshold crossing of your own making — and our village will welcome you and hear your stories when you return
  • Bring our bodies into slow time through movement and somatic practice
  • Play in wild never-before-seen Zoom experiments, discovering together how to increase the vital sense of connections between numerous more-than-human Earth communities.

Come place your body against the skin of stone.

Come into the dreaming of the many that is lichen.

Come listen for what grows slowly at the edges of awareness.

Come help us discover the village we are becoming.

When We Will Gather

All times Pacific (as in San Francisco). Wander days are for going out on the land — no gathering online.

September

Monday, September 21, 9am — Opening Day

Tuesday, September 22, 9am— Equinox

Wednesday, September 23 — Wander

Thursday, September 24, 5pm

Friday, September 25, 5pm

October

Monday, October 19, 9am

Tuesday, October 20, 9am

Wednesday, October 21 — Wander

Thursday, October 22, 5pm

Friday, October 23, 5pm

November

Wednesday, November 18, 9am

Thursday, November 19, 9am

Friday, November 20 — Wander

Saturday, November 21, 5pm

Sunday, November 22, 5pm

December

Sunday, December 20, 9am

Monday, December 21, 9am

Tuesday, December 22 — Wander

Wednesday, December 23, 5pm

Thursday, December 24, 5pm

January

Monday, January 18, 9am

Tuesday, January 19, 9am

Wednesday, January 20 — Wander

Thursday, January 21, 5pm

Friday, January 22, 5pm

February

Wednesday, February 17, 9am

Thursday, February 18, 9am

Friday, February 19 — Wander

Saturday, February 20, 5pm

Sunday, February 21, 5pm

March

Saturday, March 20, 9am— Equinox

Sunday, March 21, 9am

Monday, March 22 — Wander

Tuesday, March 23, 5pm

Wednesday, March 24, 5pm — Closing Day

CLICK HERE TOREGISTER

Council In The Commons

The Animas guides invite you to a series of Soulcraft conversations. Each week one or two of our guides will lead a journey through the territory of Soul Canyon. We might sit on a ledge overlooking a vast serpentine chasm of deeply carved redrock or dabble our toes in the cool rushing waters of the River of Dreams or perch near a portal to the Underworld. Perhaps we’ll gather beneath the branches of the World Tree and listen for Earth’s deep imagination pulsing through the roots.

Every week we’ll host a 90-minute online conversation. Anyone may attend free of charge. We will visit a variety of landscapes and offer a compendium of resources for living your largest conversation with the world. Meetings may include deep imagination journeys, soul poetry, councils, mirroring, and individualized suggestions for deepening your journey with a variety of Soulcraft and Wild Mind practices. These gatherings will be opportunities to taste the enchantments of the terrain in the vicinity of soul.

Once you sign up, you will receive a weekly email reminder with the guide for the week, the topic, and any suggested preparation prior to the gathering.

Presented on Zoom, alternating weekly – Saturdays (6:00-7:30 pm MT) and Sundays (10:00-11:30 am MT) – with occasional announced changes to this schedule.

By signing up, you agree to the Terms and Conditions listed below:

Animas Valley Institute, PO Box 1020, Durango, CO, 81302 ~ 970-259-0585 In consideration of the services of Animas Valley Institute, their agents, owners, officers, participants, guides, employees, apprentices, volunteers and all other persons or entities acting in any capacity on their behalf (hereinafter collectively referred to as ”AVI”), I hereby agree to release, indemnify, and discharge AVI, on behalf of myself, my spouse, my children, my parents, my heirs, assigns, personal representative and estate as follows:
1. I acknowledge that hiking, camping and backpacking entails known and unanticipated risks that could result in physical or emotional injury, paralysis, death, or damage to myself, to property, or to third parties. I understand that such risks simply cannot be eliminated without jeopardizing the essential qualities of the activity. The risks include, but are not limited to, slipping and falling; falling objects; water hazards; exhaustion; exposure to temperature and weather extremes which could cause hypothermia, hyperthermia (heat related illnesses), heat exhaustion, sunburn, dehydration, exposure to potentially dangerous wild animals, insect bites, and hazardous plant life; accidents or illness can occur in remote places without medical facilities and emergency treatment or other services rendered; consumption of food or drink; equipment failure; improper lifting or carrying; my own physical condition, and the physical exertion associated with this activity. Furthermore, AVI employees have difficult jobs to perform. They seek safety, but they are not infallible. They might be unaware of a participant’s fitness or abilities. They might misjudge the weather or other environmental conditions. They may give incomplete warnings or instructions, and the equipment being used might malfunction.
2. If my program is an online program, I acknowledge I will be invited to participate in self-led activities – both indoors and outdoors – that cannot be supervised by AVI. Depending on my location and circumstances, such activities may involve intrinsic hazards. I accept full responsibility for my safety and hold AVI harmless for anything that might occur. I expressly agree and promise to follow all risk management guidelines, protocols and instructions – both written and verbal – from program guides and understand that it is my responsibility to raise concerns, ask questions and seek clarification as required. I also agree to follow all public health and other directives that apply to my region.
3. I expressly agree and promise to accept and assume all of the risks existing in this activity. My participation in this activity is purely voluntary and I elect to participate in spite of the risks.
4. I certify that I have adequate insurance to cover any injury or damage I may cause or suffer while participating, or else I agree to bear the costs of such injury or damage myself. I further certify that I am willing to assume the risk of any medical or physical condition I may have.
5. In the event that I file a lawsuit against AVI, I agree to do so solely in the state of Colorado, and I further agree that the substantive law of that state shall apply in that action without regard to the conflict of law rules of that state. I agree that if any portion of this agreement is found to be void or unenforceable, the remaining portions shall remain in full force and effect.
6. By signing this document, I acknowledge that if anyone is hurt or property is damaged during my participation in this activity, I may be found by a court of law to have waived my right to maintain a lawsuit against AVI on the basis of any claim from which I have released them herein. I have had sufficient opportunity to read this entire document. I have read and understood it, and I agree to be bound by its terms. If you wish to sign this form with an electronic signature (type in your name below) and send it back to us via email, you agree that your electronic signature is your signed acknowledgement that you have read and agree to all of the stipulations listed above.
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