Introduction

Reading time: 8 minutes

Happy Earth Day! This email contains the first of many bi-weekly releases of chapters from my Dreaming In the Real manuscript. In other future Substack posts, I will explore self-awareness, being highly sensitive, and cultivating wholeness with nature's profound wisdom. Plus, observations and sharing on the healing secrets of flower essences, dreams, creativity, Siamese cats, gardening, and the wild of Montana.

My hope is that sharing my awakening journey can serve as a beacon of hope and inspiration for those seeking deeper self-awareness. Nature, with its transformative power, has the potential to support and guide us all.

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"I sincerely believe that for the child and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to know as to feel when introducing a young child to the natural world. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil.” ~ Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder

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GARTER SNAKES, BABY RABBITS, inchworms, grasshoppers, and butterflies of the South Dakota prairie made gentle companions for a deeply sensing young girl. I crawled on hands and knees through mazes of flattened summer wheat, wearing a braided crown of blue flax flowers. Dodging the sporadic leaps of tiny green grasshoppers, I pushed the flower crown over my pixie haircut and smiled at the mottled grass imprints on my palms. Flying colorful handlebar streamers accentuated an exhilarating taste of freedom as my short legs pedaled a purple Stingray bicycle down long dirt roads. Sore fingers shucked dried popcorn, and my knees and elbows turned red with scratches as I scrambled up the tall haystacks of family farms. Strong arms and hands clung onto nippled milk bottles as new lambs instinctively tugged and pushed. The leaves of tall cornstalks scratched against my face and arms as I hid from cousins in cornfields, and my legs sprinted as we teased solitary bulls until they rushed and turned, and we scrambled through fences to safety. I felt embraced and enlivened by the fertile earth.

When I was eight, we moved to a small goldrush town in the foothills of northern California, and a tall girl with long brown hair discovered the treasure of the Sierra Nevada. Low-hanging branches of old-growth live oaks became hideouts, and the smooth bark of century-old wild fig trees were jungle gyms for my long arms and legs. Keeping my eyes peeled, I sidestepped perfectly camouflaged diamondbacks sunbathing on dusty trails. The shade of Deodar cedars was perfect for lounging and eating the sweet nuts from their rose-shaped cones. My mouth puckered with the mouth-watering tanginess of sour grapes growing wild near abandoned goldrush homesteads, and sweetly fragrant, colorful, wild sweet peas came home to brighten my mom's dining room table.

As a teen, the turbulent rapids of the American River carried my buoyant body through steep canyons, and powerful currents guided me through underwater tunnels made from boulders. Plunging into deep, cold pools below secluded waterfalls took my breath away, and the deep heat of summer felt glorious on my skin while floating on inner tubes through the narrow, winding Bear River canyon. My strong legs bounded over alpine granite to the ancient bristlecone pines and chilly mountain lakes of the High Sierras.

In nature, my worries took a backseat to my thriving senses, and my relationship with the earth became a fundamental way of knowing myself. Energized, nourished, and renewed, the natural world carried me through the solitary, complex, and painful circumstances of home.

DREAMING IN THE REAL reveals a spiritual connection between human beings and the benevolent healing forces of nature that lie beyond our everyday awareness. It shows the wisdom and healing I found in the natural world after my adult life crumbled in a delayed response to inherited trauma and unaddressed childhood adversity.

When violence disrupted a long-standing denial, forcing me to admit something was deeply wrong with my life, I immersed myself in workshops, self-help books, and therapy. I learned about vibrational essences—remedies made from the healing qualities of plants, minerals, and natural environments. Using essences intensified my intuition and self-awareness, turning my days into a grand inner adventure. They worked with my focused intent to help me regain equilibrium, taking me as far as I wanted to go, but it wasn't far enough.

Ten years later, my body and life broke down in devastating ways. While navigating an avalanche of health and financial disasters, desperation and intuition led me to engage more deeply with the unseen realms of nature. Co-creating essences with nature, I found love, support, and immutable intelligence in Montana—the land of the shining mountains. Within five years, I wrote twenty-four chapters covering the making of twenty-four transformative essences to address unresolved trauma.

During those pivotal years, I discovered how trauma silently passed from my grandparents to my parents, me, and my children, like our hair, eye color, and bone structure. And how this inherited trauma, combined with childhood adversity, impacted my thinking and adult life. Digging into childhood memories, I learned how neglect and a lack of nurturing and connection later sabotaged my relationships and ability to make healthy decisions.

In the book's first section, I revisit my origins and some pivotal experiences that shaped who I am today. Since trauma devastates linear reality, I relied on my imperfect recall to blend passed-down stories with fragmented and unreliable memories and inference to create a comprehensive and logical background—the truth as I know it. In the process, I learned that memories are not hard and fast snapshots in time but mutable impressions of moments and emotions. Each time I replayed them in my mind, they became altered by my present experience and my growing understanding. The mutability of memories allowed me to transform a painful past into gratitude for who I am today.

Deeply connecting with the natural world is inherent to our human experience. Join me as I connect with the wisdom and healing of flowers, trees, meadows, and mountains, where nature can deliver a person from shattered to whole. We don't need to look far to see that our ancestors' survival relied heavily on nonverbal and unseen messages from their environments. I hope my story invites you to converge with the earth in unexpected and magical ways.

DREAMS AND NATURE always reveal what I need to learn and understand. When I was five, I dreamed I was sitting on the springy leather bench seat of my dad's 1963 GMC pickup. As dreams sometimes go, I was also far above watching the blue and white truck raise a cloud of dust as we sped past grain and cornfields on unbending dirt roads.

My dad worked for the USDA, and part of his job was inspecting the state's agricultural storage bins to weigh, sample, and grade the grains. Arriving at a cluster of round house-sized galvanized bins, I spied a rope and board swing reaching so high I couldn't see where it was tied. My dad lifted me onto the notched board nestled into the rope. When I was ready, he gave me a big push. As I swung forward, my long hair flew behind me like the tail of a racing horse. Riding the wide arc back, my hair blew and tickled my face. Pumping my legs to go even higher and smiling so big it hurt, I thought to myself, "This is the best swing ever!"

The blue and white pickup and the round grain bins far below grew small when the swing carried me so high that I couldn't get down. Crying out to my dad, I watched the truck speed away, disappearing into a cloud of dust. He didn't hear me. I was alone.

Then, somehow, I realized I was dreaming. I remembered that in some of my dreams when I know I'm dreaming, I can influence what happens, even when it's scary. I smiled and jumped off the swing, floating safely to the ground. Singing, I walked toward home without a care in the world, picking flowers and chasing butterflies.

DREAMING IN THE REAL is living life forward. It balances dreams with reality to conjure something new and extraordinary. It refers to lucid dreaming in waking life, reframing the past and present to reshape the future—making personal mythology sacred. Like lucid dreaming, I learned how to guide my life with the power of thought, intention, and belief. But with the effects of trauma at the helm, engrained survival patterns strangled my free will intentions. To build a new foundation, I needed to demolish the old structures holding me together. This revisioning demanded truth-telling. Unfolding my sacred myth required unearthing and retrieving discarded pieces of my heart, mind, and soul.

So began my heroine's journey—an inner passage to the essence of me.

TODAY, AN OLDER and wiser woman meanders off the beaten path of Montana's forests, investigating the nooks and crannies of the woodland floor, where fairy-like fungi and lichen thrive on fallen trees among decaying leaves. I am slower now, listening, observing, and feeling. My senses overflow with smells that are fresh and alive and textures soft, crumbling, cool, and moist. I envision the vast microscopic web of fungi connecting and binding living organisms like the threads of a tapestry, joining the growing plants and trees to one another and the soil's microbes and nutrients. The sweet and sour sensations of wild raspberries, thimbleberries, and huckleberries delight my senses. I thrive within this healing and magical kingdom, where I make healing remedies, and the unseen realms of nature continue to mend the broken threads of my life.

NEXT: Chapter 1: A Dangerous Road Home

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