I had the opportunity to attend Great Lakes Bioneers in Detroit, October 14-15, 2011.  It was a real pleasure to experience Bioneers without having any responsibilities, and especially enjoyable to connect with people we’ve worked with through the Great Lakes Bioneers network.  Cleveland and Detroit share so many similarities; it was great to see how much they care about their city and how proud they are of strides forward.  One highlight was seeing the new “Green Garage,” a beautiful restoration of a Model T showroom that had fallen into disrepair.  The restoration has been done to make it into a zero energy and zero waste building with lots of insulation and some solar water heating.  Wood and brick were reused to great effect, and a formerly derelict alley has been transformed into a garden-like atmosphere.  Even more exciting, the building is being used as a green business incubator using an innovative “One Earth Patterns” concepts, promoting good design that is attuned to our relationship with the earth, minimizing our impact. Check out: http://greengaragedetroit.com.

The other impressive part of the conference was the involvement of 100 middle and high school students in a full day of tours and special workshops.  Their energy and interest was rewarding to see.

Nancy King Smith

Watch the 2011 National Bioneers Speakers at http://www.bioneerslive.org/vod.html

Sue Blouch’s incredible drawing capturing the live presentations of the seven Fast Track Project ideas presented the opening morning of the Bioneers Cleveland 2010 Conference.

Elizabeth K. Lindsey & john a. powell: The Challenge is Great! from Bioneers on Vimeo.

Hear Elizabeth K. Lindsey and john a. powell share their inspiring wisdom about the challenges that we all face.

2010 Bioneers National Plenary

Elizabeth Lindsey: Navigating an Ancient Future

Elizabeth Lindsey: Navigating An Ancient Future from Bioneers on Vimeo.

Elizabeth Kapu’uwailani Lindsey, Ph.D. is an award-winning filmmaker and anthropologist committed to ethnographic rescue and the conservation of vanishing indigenous knowledge and tradition. Indigenous science and TEK have a key role to play in planetary restoration.

The first female National Geographic Fellow and a descendant of Hawaiian chiefs, English seafarers and Chinese merchants, she was raised by Hawaiian elders who prophesied her role as a steward of ancestral wisdom. She will describe her 2010 186-day expedition by amphibian seaplane to access some of the world’s most fragile environmental and cultural regions, and present her findings about the interrelatedness of poverty, education, cultural survival, biodiversity and health.

Donna Mazzola is going to be giving a workshop she’s named, Unlocking the Wisdom of Our Dreams on Saturday morning at the Conference. Intrigued at the title, and wanting to discover more, I wrote and asked whether she had time to spare for an interview. Happily it worked out that she was able to stop by my house the other afternoon. I was struck by the gentle, open way she responded to my questions. We began by talking about how her dream work got started:

Donna in Ireland

“My background is varied. I taught elementary school for thirty years. I just left that career last June. But for the last five years I have been doing my own personal work, and one of the ways that I’ve supported myself to do that has been to become a student at Wisdom University, which was formerly known as the Institute for Creation-Centered Spirituality, which came out of the work of Matthew Fox. It has a collective of wonderful teachers, people who are pursuing wisdom. So, it was there, during my studies, that I came upon a course with Jeremy Taylor. He’s been doing projective dream work for over forty years and founded the Marin Institute of Projective Dreamwork. At the time, I was simply wanting to get a certificate in Wisdom Spirituality but then, when I took his class, everything clicked into place. And I thought, “This is why I’m here”.

It isn’t that I only began to think about dreams with his course. I’ve been doing my own dream work intensely for six years. And off an on through my life – since my twenties, I suppose – I’ve kept dream journals. In the 80’s, I was influenced by people like Morton Kelsey and his writings. The main thing for me was that I had this sense that dreams were not just some arbitrary way of us processing our day, that there was more to it than that. Could it actually be that it was a personal way that Spirit could communicate with us, about our ‘stuff’, about our issues?

Because everybody dreams.

“Right, we all dream. And my dreams are different from yours. Yet, there’s also this pool that’s beyond us which has this collective imagery. We all can say, “Yes, I had a dream about a horse running” or, “I dreamt about my pipes leaking”..So there’s this level of universal archetypal unconscious that we all kind of dive into, and then there are our own personal symbols. I’ve been very influenced by Jungian thought. I probably was attracted to Jeremy’s work because he also leans toward the Jungian perspective. In fact the course I took from him was called, Jung as Mystic.

So, that’s kind of how it all started. And I then found out that Jeremy offered a certification in projective dream work, so, in addition to the work I was doing at Wisdom University, I chose to do an apprenticeship with Jeremy and become certified as a professional dream worker. It’s the work that I want to do with the second half of my life.

So, that’s what the workshop is going to center on?

“Yes. What I will offer is an answer to what Projective Dreamwork is. There are a lot of ways to work dreams, and this is one of them. It’s a way that I feel is rich. It draws upon the wisdom of the group, and actually uses something that we’re all saddled with – which is our projections.

Absolutely.

“Right. So, if I’m coming at everything from the way that I see it (or project it), why can’t I use that to make a contribution to someone that might shed a light on a piece of their dream that they maybe hadn’t considered before?

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Carolyn Hart is going to be giving an introduction of sorts (“a teaser,” she says) to an Awakening the Dreamer Symposium on Saturday afternoon at the Conference. She and I spoke on the phone , while outside, here in Cleveland, the strong winds swirled and pulled the leaves from the trees. Evidently, it was windy in Boulder as well.” Very rare,” Carolyn said,” that we have the same weather.”

I wanted to speak with Carolyn because she represents organizations – maybe a better word might be movements – that I’d only vaguely heard of. So, for anyone who might be feeling similarly, here they are, along with the mission statements on their extensive websites:

The Pachamama Alliance

The two-fold mission of the Pachamama Alliance is to preserve the Earth’s tropical rainforests by empowering the indigenous people who are its natural custodians and to contribute to the creation of a new global vision of equity and sustainability for all.

AwakeningTheDreamer.org

Their mission is bringing forth an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling and socially just presence on Planet Earth.

FourYearsGo.org

Four Years. Go. is a campaign to catalyze and empower a fundamental shift in the direction of humanity, inspiring collaborative action, connecting individuals and organizations, and amplifying best practices and successes.

How did Carolyn, a Clevelander of 54 years, end up in Boulder on such a windy afternoon? She retired as a special education teacher, then sold her home and most everything in it. Freed, she set out to travel and experience the world. One year of travel would turn into four, “because it was so sweet.” It was at Esalen that she met a woman who was going to travel into the Amazon on a Pachamama Alliance voyage. As she says, “Up for any adventure,” Carolyn went along. As it turned out, she voyaged with people who were deeply involved with sustainability and awakening others to the possibility of a better life for all. So inspired by the Achuar way of life, and the deep experience the Pachamama Alliance provided on the trip, Carolyn became grounded in what was hers to do in this time of the Great Turning.
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Gather 'Round Farm, photograph by Marianne Eppig

The more you become involved with the various environmental and community-building projects in Northeast Ohio, the more you hear about other great people and projects filling niches you had never even considered. It’s a nourishing, uplifting experience that reminds you your work is not in vain and that you’re not alone. Yet much of this great work goes unnoticed. Often you don’t learn about something until you meet that person who heard from her sister that the co-worker of an old neighbor of theirs is involved in this wonderful project that….

A large part of what Bioneers Cleveland is about is bringing people together. We strive to be a group that fosters inclusiveness and connections. As part of that, we are launching a “Stories From the Field” page on this site to keep readers apprised of various efforts being made to better life in our area. Our volunteers hail from many different locations and backgrounds; they have their hands in a wide array of projects and know of many more.

Still, we’re sure there are a lot of good things we’ll miss. That’s why we’re hoping that visitors to our site will jump in and share their stories too. Are you involved in a community arts project? Tell us about it. Planting an urban garden in your neighborhood or even your own backyard? Let us know how it’s going. Want to shine a light on a new education initiative in a local school? We’d love to hear about. In short, if you know of any project, event, organization or person that’s working to make a positive difference in Northeast Ohio, please write something up about it and send it to us at: info@bioneerscleveland.org.

We’ll post your story to the “Stories From the Field” page and invite others to comment. Or, if you’d rather, simply submit your story, links, etc. as a comment to a post that’s already on the page. Together, we can create a vibrant community discussion and help to spread awareness, participation and pride in Northeast Ohio’s web of creative and meaningful energy!