Dear Dreamers,

Over the years, I have traveled from continent to continent meeting and gathering students. Most recently, I traveled to the Gold and Sunshine Coasts of Australia where an Aboriginal dreaming culture and its extensive legecy permeates. It has expanded my view of dreams a great deal. However, I have come to realize that dreamers aren't that different no matter where they live. The themes emerging at this time revolve around our liberation from patriarchal suppression and towards embracing more feminine archetypes.

Dreams reveal our attempts to evolve out of the split between subconscious and conscious, masculine and feminine. The sacred lovers have been separated, leaving masculine and feminine as strangers to each other. The most recognizable result of this split is what too many individuals report, an inability to remember and utilize their dreams. Our emotional intelligence and intuition linked to the subconscious seem hard to grasp for the masculine conscousness who goes about moving toward its goals with little appreciation for the images, visions and elements of a dream language to guide its way.

Dreams offer keys to wisdom and information to resolve this split in consciousness. By recording our dreams, whether we attribute much meaning to them to begin with, we will eventually be helped to embrace the feminine aspect within our souls and heal the split.

. .....Ariadne Green .... Click here to read previous newsletter

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Pearl of Wisdom

    As a child, I lived outdoors all summer long.   Each morning after rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I ran outside the backdoor before anyone could stop me. Not that my backyard was anything spectacular, no more than the average California garden of the 1950's.    Certainly not anything like the backdrop of the Amazon jungle or the woods of Nottingham Forest, for that matter.   However, it was still my 'Secret Garden'- a place of magic, mystery, fantasy, and earthly delights

   My backyard was filled with an array of strategically planted fruit trees, apricot, plum, fig and peach, the fruit from which I feasted on from morning till night.   There was an organic garden that my grandmother plowed, cultivated and harvested with her own two hands, some snap dragons and flowering peas lining the south side of the house and a grouping of rose bushes in a variety of striking colors and fragrances greeting the eyes and noses of passersby.  

   Everyday, I would climb the branches of a huge old fig tree and it would put me immediately at ease.   Everything was right in my world in Grandmother Fig Tree and nothing seemed as important as straddling her branches and contemplating just about anything my innocent mind could imagine.  

  My fig tree was a world unto herself stimulating the world of a child's imagination. Whether I was high up as far as I could climb, imagining she was a space ship taking me to the moon and beyond the stars or sitting below at her roots with my Barbie dollhouse pretending Barbie liked to be shaded by her leaves as much as I did, she was my adventure.

Grandmother fig tree was a familiar safe haven, and if I had anything to say about it, I would have insisted someone build me tree house so that I could sleep there all night.   As I recollect, in fact, I did try with my pillow and blanket on several occasions. But my mother put a stop to that. 

Nature has a frequency that a child often senses more easily and welcomes naturally. Maybe it is because their head is focused closer to the ground than an adult's and that their innate intelligence has yet to be conditioned. This sensitivity to the frequency of nature represents a powerful communion with a creative spiritual force, an alchemy of elements that manifests out of its basic and unique harmonies producing works of art beyond the imagination. The senses catch the magnificence and wonderment of God through conscious contact with nature's elements.      

The spirit in nature is healing to the senses, the mind and the body.   It offers a its dimension of reality as a familiar playground for the soul, initiating the individual into remarkable mythic experiences of the soul's memory and to its innate and intimate connection to the natural world.   One is catapulted into the great mystery- the reality of God's creative beauty.

Last Newsletter

Purchase Ariadne's Book of Dreams, Warner Books 2001.

Magdalene's Rose- An inspirational card for all occasions.

 Pearl of Wisdom_____cont.Shamans in every indigenous culture understand nature's frequencies and possess a language, which describes their relationship to nature as familial. Trees that we prune to make them bare more fruit, they pray over and call Grandmother or Grandfather. They recognize their bond with nature as necessary to their survival, not only their physical survival, but to the survival of their relationship to the Creator.     

Nature, for the shaman becomes the mediator between the ordinary world and the spiritual dimensions. Shamans initiate into nature's mysteries and gain spiritual power, 'medicine', from their journeys into the many worlds and dimensions of spirit. Their rituals sanctify nature, ceremonially enact nature's cycles and collaborate with nature's power in an extraordinary ritual communion.  

Communion with nature offers us an appreciation of a dimension of spirit that is perhaps more valuable than the light of enlightenment witnessed through any mindful meditation on other dimensions of God.   Nature is a university of beauty and emits a power that ignites an innate intelligence within us that is purely God.   This creative intelligence is what the Native American elders call the Great Mystery.   Kabalists call it the dimension of the Shekinah, the Great Mother aspect of God, positioned at the bottom of the Kabalist's Tree of Life.   It is considered the most important aspect of God to be touched by any initiate of the Kabbalah.

Links

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Visit Animal Tribe-Curriculum for children 7-12 all about animal totems.

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Pearl of Wisdom_____cont.   "The whispers from the wood", a phrase formulated out of an image from a dream that was once told to me by one of my students, reveals the hidden voice of nature.    The dreamer found herself scientifically trying to document the voices coming out of a piece of wood that she had stumbled across on a forest path.   Although no one else could hear the voice, she could.  

   Nature does speak to those who are awakened by her call.   Contemplation on the whisperings of nature begins an inner dialogue with the spirit world.   For shamans, this dialogue becomes a daily ritual through which they receive the messages from their spirit brothers/sisters and animal allies.   From daily practical guidance to other-dimensional visions and revelations, the wisdom derived from these experiences and conversations with guides is imparted to members of the tribe for the benefit of their spiritual evolution and for healing.

     Nature offers us pearls of wisdom at times.   I remember while taking post-graduate courses on shamanism and dreams at Saybrook Institute in San Francisco feeling a bit disenfranchised and disinterested with the emphasis on research of the phenomena of spirit, the soul and spiritual personality of the shaman.   The head logic of a research orientated approach to understanding the healing dimensions, known to cultures who traditionally passed on their healing knowledge from one shaman to another and through tribal elders, offered students little in the way of direct experience.

    A fellow student approached me one day on the campus after we had been in seminars most of the week.   He told me that he had had been thinking about dropping out of the graduate program.   He had prayed and asked the Creator what he should do, knowing he would be given signs.   He told me that he took a long walk in the park and contemplated the decision all the while looking for a direct message to help him decide.   As he made his way through a grove of trees, he noticed a tree that had something unusual stuck in the bark.   Moving closer to examine it, he saw that what was stuck in its trunk at about eye level was a long old fashioned hatpin with a pearl on the end. He said that he immediately thought of me and knew I would be able to interpret the message. After all, I was known by most of the students by then as the urban shaman and wisdom weaver of unusual happenings on walkabouts in dream reality.   I laughed and said, "Of course, I know what it means."

Ariadne Green