This weekend, a gathering of frequent fliers will assemble on a mountain in the New York Adirondacks for our 15th year together. The heart of this mountain is garnet fire. The ancestral spirits of this land are of the branch of the Real People, the Onkwehonwe, known in English as the Mohawk. This is a place where dragons are often seen, and the energy of the Deer for healing is strong. 

In past gatherings, we have practiced group telepathy, by invitation, with the shaman-priests of the Kogi; there is a summary of the group log we kept in my Dreamways of the Iroquois. We have journeyed inside the body and across time to test the possibility of changing cellular structure and ancestral history through interactive imaginal work. We have contacted master teachers in non-ordinary reality through a series of portals, and developed working geographies of the Imaginal Realm. We have staged sacred dramas and shamanic dream theater using sacred stories including Dante’s account of the Gate of Purgatory, a Buryat tale of a female shaman who braves the Lord of Death to rescue a soul, and the Iroquois legend of the Peacemaker,as well as our own fresh dreams and visions. We have test-flown new techniques for everyday dreamwork, soul recovery and the exploration of how quantum effects work on a human scale.

Through all these adventures, the Deer of the Mountain has been our constant ally. Indelible, for me, is the memory of how the Deer brought healing for a woman who had been diagnosed with MS in our very first gathering; I wrote about this in my book Dreamgates. The Deer knows how to turn off the killer in man, and in the immune system, when that becomes necessary.

In the Mohawk language, the word for antlers, oskennendon, means the “living bones”. The antlers are a sign of spiritual connection, because they rise above the head. They are also a promise of regeneration, because they die and grow back. Shamanically, girls get to wear the antlers too, and in our gatherings we have shared deep experiences of what this means.

Here is a poem I wrote, to invoke and to celebrate the blessings of the Deer: 

Deepheart, mountain guardian

who harries the hunter

and knows what belongs to us

and what does not,

give us your speed,

your ability to read the land

to see what is behind us and around us.

 May we grow with the seasons

into your branching wisdom

putting up antlers as taproots into the sky

to draw down the power of heaven

reaching into the wounded places

to heal and make whole,

walking as living candelabra,

crowned with light,

crowning each other with light.