Mycorrhizal Mystery School: Slow-Time Dreaming with Lichen and Stone, 2026-2027
September 21, 2026 - March 24, 2027
With Sage Magdalene and Marta Gaunt, M.A.
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
[Program Photo Image by Rain Song (Robyn Rosenwald)]
Guides
Sage has a gift for hearing and reflecting the deep stories of many beings. She invites people to thresholds and opens gates between worlds. She has been an educator, artist, dancer, and gate keeper in many ecosystems. Her greatest joy is to hear and converse with the wild others: moon, spider, frog, human, river and stars. She brings a light touch and embodied wisdom to the serious work of transformation.
Learn more about Sage Magdalene
Marta has been drawn to the fecund, fruitful dark places since childhood – to mystery, myth, night, and the wild intelligence of the more-than-human world. As a soul initiation guide and mentor, she is particularly called to the territories of the underworld and to creating ceremonial space for profound transformation and soul encounter. For Marta, the body is a primary portal to soul. She brings years of somatic practice – including 5Rhythms, contact improvisation, and Dance Healing – into her guiding, alongside her training in wilderness education and nature connection with Alderleaf Wilderness College and Wilderness Awareness School. Her work…
Learn more about Marta Gaunt, M.A.