Time was created so that we could be together
And other messages from my Teacher Tree
During the week of the Summer Solstice, I was in the remote mountains of Northeastern New Mexico at a place called Eagle Bear Ranch in what could only be described as a reality-reformulating experience.
And it involved zero psychoactive substances.
I was there to attend a cross-cultural retreat facilitated by two elder couples who are lineage carriers of Toltec (Mesoamerican) and Celtic (Irish) wisdom traditions. They united to impart practices, teachings, ceremonial experiences, shamanic healing techniques, and much more from their respective ethno-cosmologies. Despite emerging a vast ocean apart from one another thousands of years ago, the resonance between them was remarkable, and caught even the facilitators with delight and surprise in both subtle particularities and broad-strokes profundities.
All over the world, cultures reflect a sacred mystery of co-emerging and co-evolving coherence without any possibility of interactivity. Echoes ripple along ocean currents, reverberations sail on wind swells, pollination dust migrates on bird wing and concurrent sparks of knowledge defy logistical and physical constraints, or maybe, it’s the trees talking. But I’ll come back to that at the end. ;)
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In the most transformative experiences of my life, reality bends. (Again, I’m speaking specifically about sober experiences.) Time seems to layer onto itself, multiple timelines seemingly coexist, certain rigidities somehow become slippery.
Dejá vú and other phenomena are examples of this, but for me those tend to occur as a tiny blip, like when I’m traveling in a new place or in more mundane moments like casual conversations. But when they occur more densely, I feel I am in touch with the heart of the universe’s mystical choreography that asks us to see without eyes, hear without ears, know beyond knowing, and not remain so fixed on the three-dimensional manifestations of what the human mind has defined as “real”. We become obsessed with performing and achieving in this version of reality architected around certain “rules”, and those are important to know and survive, but there are other stories, other truths, that beings like the trees are more concerned with and it is vital that we know (we remember) how to connect with them, how to live there too.
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During the course of the week, such occurrences were the new normal. The material our facilitators guided us through seemed to leap out ahead of us. On the second day, several of us shared about dreams we had about serpents and snakes and sea dragons the night before. (I was one of them, and I don’t think I’ve ever even said the word “sea dragon” in my life before June 2024). We buzzed with excitement, each person eager to share about their encounter with the slippery, slithery ones. Our eyes bounced around our little cluster, gathered on prickly pine needles encircled by towering ponderosas, widening our gazes at each other with awe in total disbelief.
How is that we all dreamed of snakes spontaneously, serendipitously? It was far outside the territory of anything discussed on our first day and night together.
We paused, waiting for our facilitators to intervene. They looked back at us not with mutual surprise, but with knowing expectation as they launched into the morning’s teaching on Tonantzin, the Toltec snake goddess, and Manannán mac Lir, the Celtic sea god and his Oilliphéists (sea dragons).
“Ah, they visited you in dream time, did they? Gave you a little preview of today?” Karen winked, and we all felt them sliding and swimming alongside us even if we couldn’t “see” them as they accompanied us through the lesson and the rest of the retreat.
Reality bends. Time layers. Lineages converge and share sacred symbols despite never interacting. Synergies shatter what once seemed stubbornly separate.
It’s a feature, not a glitch: we are an expression of organismic intelligence.
We sailed “beyond the ninth wave” and we learned to understand dream time as they do in Toltec tradition – the time when our bodies go to sleep and take our constricted conscious human minds with them, and our uninhibited spirit wakes up. We learned to greet each other in the mornings with a dream-sharing circle because transmitting the kind of intelligence gathered in those subconscious journeys were seen as sacred information and insight-seeking quests. “The morning news”.
We were gifted with a breathtaking number of practices. They all seemed surprisingly simple (one of which I actually shared briefly about in this post) – but they were startlingly intense. They were only offered to us after hours and hours of teaching and strongly-spoken admonitions and firm guidance to help us slash through all that was tethering us to pre-conceptions and conditioning that prohibited us from delving alongside our facilitators into the otherworlds and the other-wise they invited us into. They were only offered to us with layers of instruction on reverence for the bigness we were dancing with – cultivating humility, respect, and responsibility when communing with the more than human world, not only the other living beings (like plants and animals) but the great forces and mysteries of the universe (which is really happening all the time, but in our modern world it is so challenging to remember this.) In other words, this was a weeklong immersion on waking up from the numbing trance of the default world. The other worlds can become so much more alive to us, can make this world easier to digest in its difficulty and to transform with healing, but we need proper tools. Otherwise the addictive/compuslive tugs make it far too easy to drift into the trance and think that this is all there is.
With each offering, they also told us stories. Stories that clarified the significance of what we were being guided into. Stories that connected us viscerally to the potency infused in each invitation to practice. Stories that demonstrated that on day three when we were guided on ‘Finding our Teacher Tree’, we were not simply going to sit by a tree, and… simultaneously… we were very much simply going to sit by a tree. Both were true.
For this practice, the story they shared was about a tribe’s ritual of initiating young boys into men by this very act — finding their Teacher Tree. The boys were sent out by the tribal elders into the forest in the early morning. Sporadically the forest would light up with the excited call of a boy, one after another after another – something happened. The boys returned from their Teacher Tree with delirious exhilaration. They understood it. They were changed.
But one boy struggled. He kept returning to the village elders in dismay. For him, nothing was happening. They sent him out again with the same instructions. More and more boys screamed through the forest with joy and ran back to the elders humbled by this teaching. But the other boy kept struggling. Evening was approaching and the boy was getting anxious. He returned again and saw everyone else circling around the fire eager to share their Teacher Tree stories. Dinner’s fragrant intoxication wafted into the flames. The boy’s belly rumbled. He was exhausted. But the elders sent him out again, and he walked with heavy-hearted footsteps back into the forest. Hours passed. Boys drifted to sleep with full stomachs and wild dreams and content hearts. The elders kept their gaze fixed on the fire, listening to the forest. And then, just before dawn, a scream louder than any before woke all the boys up. The elders looked at each other with knowing smiles. The boy came running back, changed.
And with that, we were sent off on the same mission. It seemed quite simple at first, but it was indeed something unbelievably disorienting and world-shattering and everything that led up to it was preparation for the bigness of such an experience, the tools we needed to receive the other world. As we opened up to the guidance our facilitators offered, our experiences with our trees was that much more profound – prompting heart leaping, soul dancing, scream / cry / sing / yell / laugh / shout / whoop / holler / yip / howl-worthy returns to the circle to share our stories.
So, what did my Teacher Tree tell me? Here is a brief segment of the transmission:
We know everything. We have access to all information. There are trees everywhere, even in the oceans, since the beginning of time.
Time was created so that all things can become manifest. Time was created so that we could be together. Do not fear time, you are already the tree. What you know about anything is from us. We speak to you in the seed that becomes the fruit.
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Stop cutting us down. There are other ways. What you have is irrevocable. Ancient knowledge. Elder trees reach deeper to older parts of the formation of the Earth. We don’t have time to teach the new trees if you don’t give us a chance.
That was directly from my Teacher Tree unedited, and I have so much more I scribbled into my journal straining to keep up.
Trees are our ancestors. Trees are the longest-living life form we know. And communing with trees with a degree of receptivity and reverence like that which was guided by our elders on this retreat is not only available to all of us, it may be one of the most important actions we take in this most precious and precarious moment. You need not be a scientist, you need not be a conservationist, you need only to rest your spine on the trunk of the tree and listen without ears. And I would love to share this practice with you in more detail, keep reading.
This retreat changed me and it also affirmed me. Even now, as I reflect on it, I feel the exact same stirring in my cells that sparks tears in my eyes that I did months ago. One of the four facilitators, John Cantwell, said this: we all have indigenous marrow in our bones and it matters that we remember it.
Our ancestors were killed for this. Our ancestors burned at stakes and survived famines and fled wars for this. For this knowledge of something else, some other way of being on and with this Earth that is dangerous to imperial, hierarchical, supremacist-oriented ideations.
I’ve been on a long hiatus from facilitating my course, Cultivating Culture - a 9-week journey of ancestral repair, reclamation, and renewal, and I didn’t know why I felt like I couldn’t offer it despite countless tugs to do so. And now I understand. It needed time to undergo another revolution.
The course is a similar immersion like the solstice retreat with a rigorous intention, fortified within me by John’s words: it matters that we remember our indigenous marrow. This has always been the guiding light of the course experience and the practices have already challenged the normative and prescribed ways of connecting with lineage to bend time and allow us to access information through practices, rituals, and exercises quite like what I experienced at Eagle Bear, but, it has been almost two years since I offered the last CC. And I haven’t just sat here. I have devoted the last two years to apprenticing with elders, teachers, lineage holders, and leaders who have devoted themselves to retrieving and nurturing ancient cross-cultural wisdom and this knowledge is critical to living more lovingly with each other and with this Earth, to revitalizing and co-creating a transformative paradigm rooted in mutual thriving, by reaching backward and stretching forward to find ourselves in the family of beings.
This two-year pause has supported me in advancing the course material but also in growing my own capacity to facilitate a journey that exceeds what has been possible in the past, infused with the guidance from the many souls who’ve poured into me so generously.
I can’t wait to share the next iteration of CC with you.
The course will begin on Wednesday evening, October 10th, and 9 weeks of Wednesday evening meetings will carry us through to mid December.
And in case you want the link separately, here it is: www.wideningcirclescollaborative.com/cultivatingculture
If you cannot meet on Wednesday evenings but are still interested, please complete the interest form and share that information with me. It may be possible to shift depending on responses. You can also use the interest form to ask questions.
I look forward to sharing the full Teacher Tree practice, as offered to me, with course participants.
More information on the retreat facilitators:
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Hello Rachael, I love this! The nature spirits started intensifying their communication with me during the lockdowns, it's expanded each year. I never thought of myself as intuitive as I don't visualise that much, my dreams are mostly very mundane.... however, the plants, the trees, the fire and Life Itself, finds a way to get the messages across - though felt sensation, symbols in the manifest world and words that appear like your guidance from your teacher tree. Truly it's a re-enchantment of the world, and you are right: - no psychedelics are needed these days, we are already in the dream.