Dreaming with Willow this month
join me in a USPS gathering with the Urban Tree Oracle and Willow
Its been a while folks. A long while of all the dark things and all the bright things. You know. We all know. I’ve been working on so many things in all of this, trying to offer service to making a more just, loving world, in my teaching, my studio, my community, my family, my home, my land, my heart. I held a beautiful gathering on the winter solstice with Hemlock and will share about that in my next newsletter…
Today I want to share a little about an upcoming gathering at a distance. On February 24, 2025 I’ll send out packages to those who sign up to join with Willow, me, and a small community of dreamers through the US Postal Service. You’ll get a link to an audio invitation and guiding narrative, some willow ink in clothlet form (more on that later), and a template oracle card.
The invitation begins:
“I invite you to join me with willow in this gathering this month that takes place across time and space with a group of people who hope to commune with willow. This short audio recording shares a little orientation to this gathering to begin and then guides you through an experience of getting to know and dreaming with willow. I invite you to find a willow friend and sit under their branches for a time, sensing into their movement, voice, and being. Or perhaps you can call up in your mind and senses a willow friend you have known. Can you feel the willow boughs as they shiver, bow, and flow in the breezes? Can you imagine their fibrous, vigorous, spreading roots so close to the surface? Can you sense their watery, light, supple bodies?
Lets take a deep breath in, and a deep breath out….“
The score for willow invites us to whisper our dreams to willow. There’s more in the invitation to guide you in the process, but that’s the core of the experience. The longer set of guidelines or suggestions are created to give us all some clues to how to communicate with our more-than-human kin, willow trees. What does it mean to listen to a plant? How can we be open to other voices, other ways of being? Is it possible to find small fissures in the smooth shell of our colonial imaginations? Can we put aside our rational western logic? Can we open our hearts in love to a vegetal being? Can we be porous in our bodies and senses to sylvan ways of being, knowing, communicating?
It takes time to unlearn the sensory gating cultivated by high capitalism. It takes time to reattune our bodies, senses, spirit, mind to our local ecologies/beings/time. It’s mysterious, stepping into unknowing, hard. But it is also healing, expansive, radical even…
I’ve been wandering and wondering in and through these questions for the last three years of this project. Drawing on the wisdom of so many: my own celtic ancestors (the Ogham!), scholars and poets of animism (David Abrams), spiritual traditions (Sufis), and so many more brilliant thinkers. Likely it would be useful to share a bibliography of the project at some point. But that bibliography would be so so incomplete. Because the most challenging, vulnerable, and slow learning has come through just being with the trees.
This morning I lay under a white ash tree in a fluffy snow drift as they sleep through the deep winter. I’m just getting to know ash, so I had few facts to clutter my brain and configure my expectations. I simply lay there, trying to open every pore, every sense, become like a cloud, or a sponge, or lichen, slow and absorbent. To put aside assumptions. To let my thoughts and questions drift in and out. And to peer at the edges of my consciousness for what was lurking there: images, sounds, colors, stories…. I found my imagination traveling deep into the tap roots of this 79 year old tree (check out this cool site on how to determine the age of trees), which are likely (I now know after looking it up later) 10-15 feet long and maybe 25 feet in diameter. I could feel a rumbling, like a loud very old furnace in an old New England house. A source of powerful, potent energy. An engine or source of power. I now can imagine the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi absorbing this energy and traveling it along their networks. I could imagine it coiled and waiting in this deep winter moment as the tree has slowed their growth and is protecting themselves from the cold. This is all to just share a process, which is taking steps into unknowing, into a beginner mind. Or trying to…
So, what does this all have to do with willow and a USPS gathering of Urban Tree Oracle with Willow? What could you expect to do, be, learn, know, share, sense? The Urban Tree Oracle gatherings create community, shared experience, linked knowing, through unexpected, sometimes unfamiliar, invitations. They take the form of scores, like recipes for doing something, like cooking, but weirder. All I can say about this invitation is that it has to do with dreams. You are invited to dream with willow.
From the story of Willow I shared with the score…
“Willow is fast growing and short lived. One of the earliest woody plants to leaf out in spring and last to drop leaves in autumn, they are a constant companion. Their tough roots spread wide and love to live in watery places. Along streams and creeks, their interlaced roots hold fast the soil of the banks, preventing erosion. Long, slender, drooping branches seem as if they are bent over in sadness, giving Willow the association of mourning and loss. They are pioneers, often one of the first to appear in a disturbed site, remediating the soil by drawing up toxins through their trunk. Their graceful, slender, pliable branches have been used for ages in all kinds of housewares and crafts, including boats, baskets, rope, wicker, and more. Because of their magical ability to regrow vigorously when cut and how they can root when just stuck in the soil, they have been used to make living hedges and homes. Their sap contains salicylic acid and has long been chewed to reduce pain and inflammation, a natural inspiration for the chemical form of salicylic acid, aspirin. Native Americans have often included willow in their tobacco blends because it is thought to be able to carry messages to the Great Spirit. Thanks to their love of water, folklore has long associated them with the moon, the feminine, and cycles. Divining rods are usually made from willow, allowing them to be a portal or amplifier of intuition and magic. In Europe, people have long whispered their dreams to the willows.”
The second part of the process is to create an oracle card using a template card printed with an image of willow bark that I am sending along with some willow ink in the form of a clothlet. The ink is made from fallen twigs, branches, and bark of a black willow living in a stream bed in Boston (specifically the streambed of Bussey Brook in The Arnold Arboretum). The pigment is infused into the enclosed clothlet, a small piece of cotton, which was commonly used in medieval times to allowed pigment to be easily stored and transported. The ink can be used by placing the clothlet in a small bowl and adding a very small amount of water (try a teaspoon to start) until the ink releases from the cloth into the water. I learned of this process from the incredible work of Artist and Wild Pigment Project founding director Tilke Elkins. If you don’t know her work, check it out here.
I’m sharing bits and pieces of this project over these newsletters, so you may be left with a lot of questions. What is an oracle card? Why urban trees? Etc. Subscribe to learn more as I share a couple times a season about the project.
So, this invitation is open from February 10-21. I have limited space for this, so reach out soon if you can. On February 24, I’ll send out the packages and invite you to join the gathering at a distance sometime between March 1-15. Let me know if you want to join by emailing me at janemarsching@gmail.com. Send me your address, phone number, and a hello.
See you with willow in our dreams.