The Milky Way traces its path across northern skies, seeming to bridge worlds. On the eve of Twelfth Night, when the Wild Hunt is said to lead spirits across the sky along that wild road, we will delve into the role the Milky Way played in the cosmologies of animist ancestors and how we can make meaning of those mythic understandings in our lives today.
The idea that the heart is "just a pump" is a dangerous deception that separates us from some of the most important ways of connecting with ourselves, each other, and the living world. The heart is the drum that plays the rhythms of our lives. And the heart is the organ of perception that allows us to experience what Stephen Buhner called "the touch of the world upon us." In this class, we will speak of the mysteries of the heart and how to cultivate heart-centered awareness.
Beauty invites us to fall back in love with the world, to come into deeper connection with life. On the day after the Winter Solstice, as light begins slowly returning to the world, we will speak of the ways in which beauty itself is medicine, and how understanding this can guide us in our work with plant medicines.
The oldest Irish stories speak of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the shining ones who came from the north where they had learned the great mysteries, and how in the face of the coming of civilization they descended into the síthe, the ancient burial mounds, taking their magic and their knowledge with them. On the Sunday before the Winter Solstice, the day when a shaft of dawn sunlight enters the most famous of the síthe, Síd in Broga (Newgrage), we will speak about the nature of the realm these people entered and its relationship with the hidden places within us and with the healing of the world.
There are gods of mountain and forest and earth and sea far older than civilization, far too wild to be contained by it. We will speak of some of these gods and their wild nature and what it means to engage with them in these times.
Hope can be hard to come by in these times. But there are plants that can help us rekindle the fire of hope when it has burned down into cold embers. Join us as we explore medicines that can help bring hope blazing forth again.
These are plants whose natural habitat is the place where disruption has occurred, whose ecological gift is helping to usher in new worlds amidst the ruins of the old. All of them are also potent allies for us in the wake of personal and cultural events that disrupt our "normal" way of life. We will explore the gifts these plants offer for individual, collective, and ecological healing.
Psychedelics have a profound ability to help us reimagine and redefine ourselves and our relationships to all of life. We will explore the neurobiology of how these plant medicines aid in shapeshifting identity, and the importance of our other-than-human kin in helping to create a healthy "set and setting" for this.
Ecological destruction, storms, fires, war, and strife – these are tremendously difficult times. In this class, we will explore plants and mushrooms that can help our troubled hearts in the midst of it all.
Red Deer came to Ireland in the early Neolithic along with the first people to reinhabit the land in the wake of the last Ice Age. Only small remnants of those original herds remain in the mountains of Cork and Kerry. In this class, we will explore the mythic, magical, historical, and ecological significance of the Red Deer and their survival.
People familiar with the ancient Irish festival of Samhain, forerunner of our modern Halloween, usually associate it primarily with honoring the dead – which is not wrong in any way. But when it is Samhain in the world, it is Bealtaine in the Otherworld, so Samhain is also a time of love, blessing, and fertility flowing between worlds. Join us for an exploration of Otherworldly love at Samhain in Irish myth and folklore and its implications for modern people working with the Irish Otherworld.
