My first fire

When I was first learning how to make a bow drill fire it was a long and painful process. I would practice in the backyard but I would always hit a dead end and give up frustrated. I practiced nearly every day for a long time and I would learn a little more about how to make it work better each time I failed. A year went by and I felt pretty confident with bow drill despite the fact that I had never gotten a fire.

One day, after another frustrating practice session I went inside and saw a blog post about a guy who wanted to learn how to make a fire with bow drill. I read his blog and saw his pictures and criticized everything he was doing. His drill was way to skinny and his form was terrible. It was obvious that he had no idea how to do bow drill. However, after three days of practice he was able to get a fire.

I was pretty torn up about the whole thing. I had been trying for a year and I probably did know more about bow drill than this guy and yet he could get a fire and I couldn't. I left the computer and drove over to my friend's house. As I was driving and thinking about this whole thing I really got upset at myself for being so critical of this guy and then this word hit me: Arrogance. Immediately chills ran down my spine and I knew that if I went back home right then I would be able to make a fire. I didn't know why but I knew something had changed in me and that I could do it now.

The entire evening hanging out with my friends I was distracted and couldn't wait to go home and see if this was true. When I got home around 1am I went upstairs to the third floor where I would sit and practice hand drill (hand drill is more difficult than bow drill - generally people learn hand drill after they have gotten a fire with bow drill). I could practice on the third floor because there had never been any risk of me actually getting a fire. I rarely ever made smoke for that matter. Well I sat down to practice and I got a coal, blew it into fire and had to throw it out the window. I was overwhelmed with adrenaline and amazement that it actually happened. The next morning I went outside and got a bow drill fire on my first try.

This experience could be easily written off as coincidence or some little psychological thing. But to me it was magical. It felt like I was given a gift from a different world. And also a story that I can share with people as they are struggling to get their first fire.

Ropes to God: the bushman spiritual universe

I've been reading a book about Bushman spirituality and it has reminded me of my own spiritual life which I don't think should be something that I keep to myself. Even if its misunderstood or dismissed I think my own experiences were given to me with the agreement that I would pass them on to other people. So I'm going to make an attempt to share more of my "spiritual" beliefs and experiences.

Whenever I read about indigenous spirituality I see trends and similarities to stories from other native people and also nature connected people. For instance in this Bushman book they talk about the trance dances and that when they are a strong dancer they start to see lines of different colors that connect things. One of the lines connect them to the animals and they run all over the ground to different animals and when they need meat the "Big God" shows them a line to an animal and they follow it to hunt. I've heard trackers in North America talk about these lines that they follow and the feeling of being pulled along a trail of an animal even when they can't see any tracks.

There is something about all of the primitive skills that makes me feel very spiritual. The reason that I do them isn't because its fun or because I want to be an indian. It is because they make me feel like I'm growing closer to God. I don't know why they do this and it doesn't really matter to me why it makes me feel that way but it does. And all of those feelings kind of get stuck if I'm not passing on what I learn to other people. That's something the Bushmen talked about too.

My next several posts will be about some of my "spiritual" experiences. I put quotes on spiritual because I don't want my experiences to be lumped in with some other definition of spirituality. To me they are just things that happened that seem to be connected to things greater than what goes on in every day life.

Nature defined

I think humans are strange in many ways. One of the strangest things to me has to be the fact that humans (an animal on Earth) one day forgot that they were an animal on Earth. They seem to think that they stopped being like the plants and animals and rocks and became something totally different. I think it is a result of being able to make such neat things. If a bird makes a nest, the nest still looks like mud and grass which is obviously nature. But cell phones and planes don't look at all like nature. The truth is that they are natural. They are just things that an animal made. Of course an airplane doesn't biodegrade like a bird's nest does but there are lots of natural things that mess up an ecosystem if its in the wrong place.

There are some natural laws that humans ignore. But the laws are still there and these are the things that I'm most interested in tracking. Economics for example has been around long before humans. Feathers on a bird are a huge energy investment that pays off through flight. Just like the way we pay lots of money to fly places, as long as its worth it. Animals get fat just like we do if they have the same food surplus and sedentary lifestyle.

Another natural law is evolution. Evolution creates perfection. Or as close to it as possible. Once something stops evolving then its practically perfect. The bicycle for example. Its not going anywhere. Its a super efficient, fun way to travel. The evolution of computers is really cool and the evolution of our culture is very interesting to me. Its when things are restrained from evolving that I see problems occur. Religion, politics, and education come to mind. They all evolve eventually but it feels like they are treading in molasses sometimes.

All of the pure truths of the world can be found by tracking nature. This is a very comforting thing for me because society is a confusing place sometimes.

Tracking defined

I'm always trying to define just what exactly a tracker is. My best current definition is this:

A Tracker is someone who searches for the origins of things.

Tracking definitely isn't about footprints because I spend plenty of days tracking without seeing footprints. I see feeding sign, scat, trails, beds, etc. And often I'm tracking things that aren't animals. Like seeing lines made from grass or leaves blowing in the wind.

I think tracking is a essential part of being a human being and I think that the happiest people are the ones that track the most. They seem more engaged, curious and satisfied with life. Doctors track their patients, comedians track their audiences, authors track whatever they are writing about, coaches and athletes track everything about their game and so on. I think its important for people to track themselves too. I know I'm always searching for the origins of why I feel a certain way or why something is hard or easy for me. One pattern I definitely see in myself is that I'm happiest when I'm tracking nature. But I have a pretty broad definition of nature.

Update

Well I had an excellent road trip through NYC, North Carolina, a bunch of other places, topped off with a hotel stay on Bourbon street in New Orleans before we made it to Austin the next day. Many thanks to my first mate Chris Galis and our excellent gps lady, Bandy.

Next I went to San Diego and met Barry Martin who started the San Diego Tracking Team. I'm hoping to move out there in March and do some work with him. I also took another eval with Jonah Evans as our evaluator. I squeaked out the highest score with a 96. I do a lot better when I'm not attached to the outcome.

Jonah invited me to come out to Big Bend in a couple weeks and take answers for an eval out there. I'm excited for that. They have a bunch of weird animals out there.

For now I've got a moose hide that needs softening, flint that needs knapping and lots of animals that need to be tracked. Here are some pictures from San Diego: Kangaroo rat tracks, big male bobcat tracks and my moose hide.

Vermont Art of Mentoring

Well it was another powerful week at the Vermont AOM last week. Below are some pictures of the event. I'm always struck by the teens that return every year- some of them since they were little kids. They are such uninhibited, powerful people. They speak in front of the entire community with total confidence. And they are always well mannered and offering their services to the elders or little kids or anyone else that needs something. Nobody tells them to act that way, they just do it on their own. I think this is a natural result of being brought up in a loving community.

A take home line from the AOM that better shows how I believe our culture should reflect nature: Highly resilient systems have short feedback loops from highly specialized parts that keep the whole in mind.

A short feedback loop in nature happens when song bird fails to hear the other birds alarming a Cooper's hawk. But a person might say something that really hurts another person and not hear about it for years, if ever. Short feedback loops are one of the things that they really encourage at the AOM.

Blue Jay tracks


Here is my friend Jay Gardoqui playing a song he wrote on Ukulele. The lyrics are as follows Listen listen listen to the bird song
Listen listen listen to the birds
They will tell you where your enemies are
They will tell you where your predators are
They will tell you where you are
.. and back to the chorus





Oidorne point at sunrise. I love living by the ocean.

Coyote Trailin'

I've been having some wonderful full days of tracking lately. Spending so much time in nature makes me think about how many ties each organism has to everything else. The fact that one individual grass species is growing at the edge of a swamp means so many things. It speaks to the process of evolution, many years of competition forced that grass to adapt all of the necessary traits to live right there. It is tied to the soil, the climate of the area, the winds or animals necessary for seed dispersal. The lack of grazers or voles coming by to eat that blade of grass. The beavers that created the swamp which opened up sunlight and enriched the soil for that grass to grow. So many things are connected to that single clump of grass. Everything in nature is interacting and participating with everything else.

Tracking forces a person to acknowledge all of these connections and interactions. I find the way mammals shape a forest to be really cool. Squirrels dispersing acorns, moose browse altering which tree species grow where, moles aerating the soil, and so on. And then there's the way predators shape the territories of herbivores with their daily routes through the forest. And how birds and chipmunks report on all of this as its happening. Unfortunately most people don't get the joy of interacting with this incredibly complex and beautiful system. For me, tracking brings me into this system on a daily basis. I get to see many of these processes going on as well as my own impact on them. Survival treks bring a whole different level to the experience. Where tracking is fun, insightful and often profound, being in a survival situation closes the circle and makes me a total player in the system.

Yesterday we had some afternoon rain so when I went tracking in the evening, it was easy to tell the tracks that were REALLY fresh from the ones that weren't. I came across some really fresh coyote tracks and decided that I had to try and follow the trail. Trailing is very difficult but also exhilarating. After trailing an animal for even a short time I feel a real connection to that animal. Like it is a close friend and I can feel its hunger, the spring in its step, its fear of humans, etc. I was having a really fun time trailing this coyote for a couple hundred yards when the trail turned back on itself and headed into a thick brushy area. It was getting late so I decided to abandon the trail and go watch the sunset on a hill that looked over the entire area. Ten minutes later the coyote came trotting out of the brush and back along the trail that I had followed. It stopped every 20 feet or so and looked back over its shoulder like it thought it was being followed. I had a perfect view of where it was going and got to watch it trotting and loping along for several minutes. Another magical experience as a result of paying attention to the little things in nature.

The human world is so different compared to the natural world. Everything in nature has its place and makes sense. Everyone plays by the same rules and gets a fair chance at survival. When something dies, every cell gets used and is returned into the system. At some point we stepped out of that cycle and stopped following those natural laws that have worked so well for the past several billion years.