Deep Imagination: Into Earth’s Dreaming – February, 2025

A shifting, leafy canopy casts green shadows on the forest floor. A creature appears: tall and upright, hair braided, body draped in earth fibers and verdant 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 in, listening.

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. 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.

Discovering or deepening a relationship with soul can serve as a compass to guide us as we learn to reinhabit a wildly alive, participatory Earth and Cosmos.

We will tend the possibility that it’s (also) Earth’s dreaming that courses through us electric as a deep fascination, or that howls through us in love/loss/grief. Suppose it’s by virtue of Earth’s dreaming that an idea or image, a knowing, song, or story flutters on silent wings into our awareness, as if ‘from nowhere.’ If we didn’t shrug off such happenings as inconvenient, nonsensical or weird, we might find the courage instead to listen and feel; to let such mysteries ripple through us, eventually blossoming into a response. What if even the spontaneous gesture of our trembling fingers, or tender voice echoing a song line matters, enlivens the world—beyond measure, proof or profit— and, necessarily, shapes 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.

ARAVAIPA CANYON RANCH

Nestled at the foot of Brandenburg Mountain, Aravaipa Canyon Ranch invites you to a quiet getaway for reflection, healing and spiritual renewal. Miles of secluded, ever-changing terrain in the midst of natural, pristine beauty unfold to the accompaniment of the singing waters of Aravaipa Creek, one of Arizona’s all-year-round streams. For more information, go to http://www.aravaiparanch.com/