Seeing Every Track
23rd October Posted by Tony Deis on Oct 23, 2009 in Tracking Many people start start out looking for animal tracks in sand or mud. Its absolutely critical that a tracker move beyond that simple substrate, finding sign not only in clear ground but through salmonberry, oak leaves, hemlock needles and meadows. Its easy to attune your eye to perceive patterns over moss, leaf debris and other more common ground. Now I'm not talking about some magical sight that causes the concrete to radiate a fox print like some fairy touched glowing golden compass. Training your vision takes a long time, hard work and literally getting to know one square patch of ground like it was your best friend (literally your best friend). I once had a student do the following exercise as part of a monthly tracking course. After one class he went home and proceeded to diligently practice this in his lawn. 4-weeks later, at the next class he shocked everyone including himself. No one could keep up as he not only chased hard deer hoofprints through the meadow but seemed to find and correctly identify every soft footed animal from raccoon to skunk. He didn't develop some magic superpower overnight, it actually stemmed from directed study and focus. Here's how you do it...
See if you can find the column you made the day before. If not, you might want to note each column and row with more sticks. When I first tell folks that's what it takes, they often can't fathom how. Why can't I just give them some kind of trick or new piece of wisdom that instantly changes how they see the world? Well, in tracking there are no tricks, there are only ever evolving relationships. Tracking is understanding and moving through the natural world in an intimate way. Its building a deft connection with that one piece of earth. Its like your courting dirt. Its saying, "I give you my time. I sit down and really see who you are." Maybe this sounds goofy to talk about leaves and grass as friends but the ramifications are profound. Tracking is always embracing the world by turning off judgment, hopes and wishes to always be cultivating healthy perception of needs. It means starting by simply seeing. BTW, this exercise is great for also learning how to age tracks. Free taster days... Learn more about our full-time immersion programs. Join us for a day with Tracker instructors. TrackersTEAM Immersion Taster October 25 Ride the Umiak on the river and learn about our TEAMS Immersion or Master Degree Program. Trackers Permaculture Taster November 1 Work with author Toby Hemenway and designer Leonard Barrett to learn more about the winter garden and our 1-year program beginning in January. Tracking the Dunes
16th September Posted by Tony Deis on Sep 16, 2009 in Tracking Frank Herbert wrote his famous sci-fi novel Dune after researching an article about the ecological wonder of the Oregon Dunes. The piece was never published, yet the book it inspired was a hit. While the 80's movie version did have Patrick Stewart (aka Captain Jean-Luc Picard) as Gurney Halleck, it never came close to the novel in scale and intelligence. This may only be the rantings of a sci-fi fanboy, yet I'll still attest to the many layers of awareness to be gleaned from Dune's text. Many concepts in Dune just seemed to click with me and my buddy David Jacobson as we explored the world of (wildlife) Tracking in our formative years at The Evergreen State College. Ironically this was the same town of Olympia, Washington where Frank Herbert rooted himself to write his epic opus. Dune was populated by characters that practiced nerve-muscle control, minutiae awareness and even poignant tribes of hunter-gatherers to whom every moment was about survival in concert with a seemingly barren yet diverse landscape. Still, the guild of characters that seemed to most resonant with our own meditative practice of tracking was a group of strategists called Mentats. Mentats were people who seemed to flow through information and systems awareness like they were sailing the ocean and its winds. The author was a layman expressing concepts we believed were unique to us wilderness skills nerds. In tracking, you don't "think" through things, nor do you rely on a false sense of ESP or intuition. Instead you soak up the world around you as layered details. Your memory and thoughts become a sense, absorbing every bit of possible data. Though this description may sound like some human calculator, I assure you the experience is wholly organic and even ecstatic. Your perceptions and awareness add to an ever refining map of the world around you. Once you see, no feel the synthesis of the interlocking and moving relationships, the invisible parts take on a shadow-like form, eventually revealing themselves in even more detail. The gaps in the map naturally fill in. Then, in another seemingly thoughtless moment, vital wisdom reveals itself congruent to the evolving questions you have about the world around you. The book calls this ah-ha moment "prime projection". I still jokingly use the term when I teach tracking. Its important to understand that this way of "surfing your world map" may have results that seem magically guided but they are definitively rooted in real boots-on-the-ground experience. Unfortunately this aspect of nature awareness is often confused with whatever is fashionable in dogma or spiritual questing; philosophical paint by numbers that require little effort and care. Its like the scene in fight club when the leader of a support group has people meditating in some convention hall for their spirit animal and all Edward Norton ends up with is a penguin. By letting gurus or books interpret our connection to what's wild we often get irrelevant, ungrounded results. Instead tracking is an art, craft and relationship of articulate intimacy with the world. We find connection by actually feeling the sinuous curve of a cougar track, appreciating the shear weight of an bear, watching a squirrel build a winter nest, lazily sitting in the ferns watching deer feed and even becoming entranced by the office worker on a break who grinds their cigarette into the sidewalk. The goal is to see everything as both an individual and a player in a greater moving puzzle. Synthesis with nature and the world comes from actually being out in it. A Tracker doesn't arrive at relationships through leaps in judgment, because a book told her what wolf medicine means or by formulaic technique (now sweeping the tracking world). A true tracker actually lets discernment find her as she casts herself out across the ocean of life. It was the backwoods of Olympia following red fox where David and I refined this quality, yet reading Dune taught me that this awareness is innately human. The next blog will be about what wisdom we gained while eating pizza and watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer in lieu of working on our independent study projects during our last year at Evergreen. Featured Course... The Water Village: Full-Time Winter Term January 3-March 20, 2010 Learn the ancient art of skin-on-frame boat building, crafting both a grand and epic 26-foot sailing vessel with batwing shaped sails, then hew your own seafaring kayak. We also go beyond bushcraft, elevating all our work to fine folk craft. This is the term we work with our hands, creating function, beauty and value from local materials. Take 9 months to 1 year Begin any season Experience full-immersion and save per term Also on the Calendar... 4-Seasons Permaculture Design Certification January 15-September 23, 2010, every Friday Taught by the best in the Pacific Northwest Toby Hemenway, Marisha Auerbach, Leonard Barrett & more. The Earth Village: Full-Time Spring Term March 28-June 12, 2010 Receive your 2-week Permaculture Design Certification. Apply it to in-depth study of tracking and wild edible and medicinal plants. The Fire Village: Full-Time Summer Term June 13-August 21, 2010 Our 10-weeks of overnight expeditions and intensive training will change your life forever. Winter Village Skills Share: Boat Building and Folk Craft January 4-8, 2010 9am-6pm 5-days of boat building and sharing traditional skills. $20 per day or $80 for the entire week Rocking with the Seasons, new 3 month program
4th August Posted by Tony Deis on Aug 04, 2009 in Tracking What is nature immersion? Is it learning a lot of new skills, becoming good at a craft? Is it becoming a better person? More aware? To me, all that's secondary. What's more important is the relationship between one another, the land and the village. That's it. Much of contemporary wilderness skills training is about "becoming better", "healed" or more "bad ass". Its treated like a martial art, where there's white or black belts. In reality there should be no system of levels, or graduation with tenure. That way of thinking is for failing schools that only perpetuate the fear that there's something wrong with or missing from us to begin with. Trackers is not here do that. Instead our mission is to sew you and all of us further and further into family and the land. We need people that feel support with their bones. We need people who's pantry is stocked with foods borne from harvesting by Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter. We need village's that live and breathe by the day length and individuals that more then simply journal when the salal berries are in harvest. Instead, they can feel it coming! We still have our 9 month program, in fact we added an option for one full year that includes a grand summer series of expeditions and rites of passage. We also made each season stand on its own so that people can also take courses in 3 month increments. The goal is to increase program access to individuals with families and other community commitments. It's even less about getting "schooled"; starting just in September and going till June by the clunky, conventional school year. Now its about doing "what's in season". And that's infinitely more hip then relying on a monochromatic curriculum. Nature's cycle's are the only fashion I give a rats rear about:) So without further adieu, we introduce the Wind Village, the Water Village, the Earth Village and the Fire Village. They turn with the harvest of Fall, the darkness of Winter, the new growth of Spring and Summer's rites of passage. Remember, Trackers is here to rethink learning. We're don't exist to make anyone "better". We already know we're all human. All we can do is to rediscover empathy, holding that eloquent, human conversation with the life, the Earth and how the Sun rises each day. Join the New Village of TrackerTEAMS, now in 3 month terms...
Fall Term The Wind Village: Wilderness Survival & Bushcraft
And introducing The Fire Village, Summer Term 2010... Join a collaborative team of naturalists, expats, artists, sailors, trackers & primitive skills experts on the expedition of a lifetime. Your elite team embarks from the Pacific Northwest; one of the most beautiful regions in the world. Learn about wild edible and medicinal plants, sailing and kayaking, primitive shelter, travel by the edge, stealth and invisibility while making friends for life. From dunes to ocean, mountains to rivers, urban wilds and rural permaculture farms; learn the skills of survival, shake of your domestication and walk away changed. Class takes place every day with rest times during expeditions and intensives. Teaching hours are varied depending on the expedition and intensive. While all camping, lodging and food is provided for the entire 10 weeks. A 1 week Nature of the Village both begins and ends the term (June 13-19, August 15-21) and nearly each month we include a 3 day overnight at the Trackers Homestead or other location. Nature of the Village Week Longs... • June 13-19, 2010 and August 15-21, 2010 Expeditions across Cascadia...
• 4 day kayak journey
Intensive learning...
• 1 week primitive skills and bushcraft intensive
Rites of passage...
• 1 and 4 day solo sits
Tracking Poem I
2nd February Posted by Trackers Teams on Feb 02, 2009 in Tracking I was at the edge of a track on the forest floor in the black dirt into the Earth.
of a Fox foot gliding on the ground.
as it pulled itself, up and out. I walked in that cave I found craters and mountains. A whole other land connected by valleys and ridges. Sprawled across the Earth.
under floods and drought. freezing and dew. under my all my wanderings in it.
I saw it come and go. Behind the fox. Into the black. Back to the Earth. |
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