Deep Imagination: Into Earth’s Dreaming – June, 2027

A shifting, leafy canopy casts shadows on the forest floor. A creature appears: tall and upright, hair braided, body draped in earth fibers and green silks, human-like but not tame. She turns your way and perhaps you shudder, recognizing that she may know you better than you do. The trees lean closer. In the distance, furry ears twitch and nostrils flare, and no one would fault you for fleeing. But perhaps you send imaginal roots even deeper…

The exuberant, inter-species conversations that animate our planet are nearby – very near – as is the mysterious terrain of soul, where we might encounter strange, alluring, cryptic, unbidden images, creatures, or impressions. At Aldermarsh Retreat – on glacial-formed Whidbey Island in the Salish Sea, where we will gather for an extended Deep Imagination immersion of 5 days and nights – we will tune in to an especially rich inter-species conversation:  old cedar and big maple, moss and fungi, pileated woodpecker and human being.  The place itself – both the wild and the human-made atmospheres – will arouse our imaginations and stir us to greater porousness to psychic depths.  We’ll be time-blessed, too, with some unhurried sensing and tending of Earth’s dreams.

Deep imagination is a portal to the terra mysterium of soul and to participatory relationship with the wrenchingly alive, sentient, ensouled world. Recovering our innate awareness of an intelligent Earth (populated with both seen and unseen presences) and reclaiming our relationship with our deep imagination not only re-enlivens us as individuals but also erodes the outworn Western worldview of a meaningless, disenchanted universe, a worldview upon which life-assailing business-as-usual depends.

‘If our lives interpenetrate not only with human creatures but with the wilder others as well, then how we enact our lives – how we participate, how we engage our relationships with the Earth community – may matter more than we can imagine’ 

                            — Geneen Marie Haugen, from The Mystique of Rain. © 2018.

Suppose a practice of intentionally and repeatedly opening outward through our deep imaginations, bodies, and hearts renders us increasingly permeable to embodied participation with the Earth Community? We might wonder whether an image, idea, knowing, song, or story fluttering on silent wings (or crashing) into our awareness, seemingly from nowhere, is “ours,” or belongs to the larger world—or both. What if the sentient Earth, the ancestors, and wilder others are bidding us to participate through the zinging current of deep fascination, awe, love, or an erupting howl of grief?In our time together, if so blessed, we will attempt to resist shrugging off such happenings as inconvenient or too weird. Instead, we will summon the courage to let these mysteries ripple through us, eventually blossoming into a response. What if even a spontaneous gesture—our trembling voice echoing a line of song—matters, enlivening the world beyond measure, proof, or profit, and necessarily shaping us as well?

In this immersion, we offer inter-connected, multi-layered experiential practices – including deep imagery journeys, dreamwork, solo wanderings on the land, stream-of-consciousness writing, conversations with other-than-human beings, and poetry – that shift our consciousness toward the depths, toward the wilder, mythopoetic current that streams beneath everything else.

There is a significant difference between intellectually recognizing that Earth is alive versus directly experiencing an ensouled world. Through the wild window of deep imagination, we might experience the soul of the world in intimate relationship with our mysterious human soul, which is the psychoecological – or mythopoetic – niche that each of us occupies in the larger community of Earth/Cosmos.

This extended Deep Imagination immersion, among the wild beings of Aldermarsh, is a potent portal.  We hope you will consider joining us.