About Refugia Village Mystery School & Dream Temple
Refugia Village Mystery School & Dream Temple is where the learning arts of magics and the pursuit of wisdoms meet and are brought into dreamtime & waking ritual.
No dogma, only guiding values, principles, and visions.
No coercion of belief, only voluntary association through consensual compatibility and affinity.
We present ourselves toward loving and responsible relationships with clear agreements, boundaries, and pathways for clearing conflict and reckoning: with ourselves, each other, the ancestors, and all beings.
We commit to our best efforts as reputable, reliable, and resourceful accomplices in the struggles for collective liberation, and to exemplify solidarity and embody relationships of mutual aid.
We aspire to extricate ourselves from the bondages of all systems of oppression, to emancipate the stolen power held hostage within them, to heal the harms wrought, and nourish the generative desires of bequeathing a living world to our descendants.
We commit to transparency and honesty, to learning over achievement, to reviving the love of the body, to giving attention to the realms of the spirits, and to supporting each witch learning their own way with magic.
We gather to blow over the bones, call in the supernova, and infuse the spells of resistance and resonance for alliance with, and allegiance to, the beyond human life of this world.
We call councilway to dwell in contemplations of our power – immanent as well as unearned – and become agile and responsible with and for it, as we bring the fortress of empire down.
We befriend shadow, find companions in good deathing, conjure blessing-offering, believe our magic is real, and enspell holy questions to compel action.
about rain crowe
short bio
rain crowe (she/her) is a neurodivergent, animist, queer witch who offers ancestrally-nourished online and in-person coursework, facilitation, counseling, mentorship, and ritual grounded in earth-based wisdom and magic to support collective liberation in perilous times.
long bio
I belong to a cadre of magical-cultural artists dedicated to serving the descendants of Life by supporting a spectrum of communities in growing their resilience, imagination, and intimacy.
I belong:
• to a clan of web-weavers, shape-shifters, and edge-tenders who continually aspire to co-create emerging earth cultures.
• to a multiplicity of pathways, rooted in the re-membered, regenerative, relational practices of our ancestors of blood and affinity.
• to a lineage of experienced educators, facilitators, activists, and story-tellers. Also to all the beings with whom I share abode, at a radical land project in Portland, Oregon.
• to the ongoing story of colonization which includes how I came to inhabit the ancestral lands of the still-living Cowlitz, Kalapuya, Cayuse, Wasco, Umatilla, Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians.
• to those who serve justice and healing in the continuation of this story of place and peoples including the salmon, cedar, camus, huckleberry, acorn and so many more.
• to the source of creation, as I work and play in strategic visioning; focusing on how a Great Spell: the all-encompassing, uncompromising collective liberation that is our birthright, may continue to move through the vessel of me and my kith and kin.
• to the spirit-spoken call of unequivocal commitment to ecological interdependence and decolonization. And not least of all, I belong to keeping temple in the woods behind my home, where I am held in the company of Mystery.
Of blood, I am most recently from the Midwestern lands along Lake Michigan, born and raised on the ancestral lands of the Miami and Calumet peoples. And before them and there, through hints and memories, the lands and ways of Poland, Croatia, and Ukraine.
I belong by adoption to the Briton and Germanic peoples, and I’ve been learning about my bloodlines and chosen lineages and heritages for over a decade.
I live as a third and fourth generation person to this continent. Positioned by birth, to witness the assimilation without understanding it as a phenom of trauma. Hearing the ancestral languages, not learning them. Watching as my parents, their siblings, and their children fully embraced the ‘American life’.
I inhabit a tiny home on the edge of a woods with my wyld neighbors where I share land-tending on a seven-acre project aspiring to embody a rewilded, radical accountability. Here together, we tend gardens, goats, and each other, through the efforts of learning how to enact solidarity and work through patterns of oppression.
Over the last thirty years I have studied political movements, comparative religion, cultural anthropology, systems thinking, trauma-counseling, group and interpersonal conflict transformation, histories of oppression, survivor advocacy, witchcraft, magic, and ritual.
My learning path includes formal university, Bolad’s Kitchen, the Reclaiming Tradition, continuing educational programs, and life as an out cisqueer-femme, raised working-poor, white-bodied, and disabled edge-walker. I am most grateful for all of my teachers with whom I’ve studied. I learn from every person (human and beyond) I meet, and am committed to a humble wisdom path.
Currently I earn my livelihood as an ancestral connection guide, group process facilitator, conflict worker, ritual anchor and guide, rite of passage officiant, spiritual advisor, consultant, and educator through a series of courses, programs, trainings, and mentorships about content at the intersection of radical political history/engagement and animist spiritual connection.
I have learned so much from rain crowe's offerings over the years. As a teacher/facilitator myself, rain inspires me deeply. I've never known a teacher to make their offerings as accessible and in so many ways-- from pricing to all the different ways to engage with the material. Find the reading too academic? No worries, there are summary notes one can read instead. Have executive functioning challenges and can't easily read right now? No problem, you can work with symbols, dreamwork or ritual. I also appreciate that ritual is central to every class she offers. Because of rain's own complex identities and life experiences, she is comfortable and willing to engage with the complexity of who we are as humans and the complexity of the times. rain has been deeply engaged in this work for many years and I'm grateful that she is taking so many of us along for the ride. – Kai Wu, CSC, SEP
I have taken almost all of rain’s classes and I feel her work is central to being able to think well and plan for the survival of communal based witchcrafts. With every passing year I see the increased usefulness of rain’s vision and foresight. It is true, “The Burning Times Never Ended.” The classes rain teaches are a foundational step to participating consciously in “The Great Turning.” Blessings on rain crowe and her work. – Reverend Teri D. Ciacchi MSW