In this issue:

• TrackersNEWS
• Taylor (a year long program student) reports on how difficult TNW staff can be
• More Excerpts from The Rewild Guide by Willem Larsen

And new on our YouTube channel...

• Video Dasan- Year Long Student, His Hunting Bow
• Video Ernie- Rocket Stoves
• Video Adult Immersion Outdoor College- The Trailer

TrackersNEWS

We had a weekend with our yearlong program. Dasan has video about his cherry barked backed bow with rabbit fur silencers. More videos of this weekend to follow.

Plus, registration for our $10 Adventures is now happening. $10 Adventures is one hour nature based adventures.

The price is right and all the weekly activities tie together for long term mentoring in wilderness skills. We have three options... Saturdays Youth Sundays Adults Mondays Home School

We are also excited to announce that we starting our series of natural building workshops with Ernie Wisner. For February we have an intensive Rocket Stove Workshop in one weekend and then an Earthen Floor workshop the next. These learning experiences will be thorough instruction by both Ernie and Erica in two critical natural building skills. I mean, a rocket stove actually emits cold "smoke" (which is basically steam). If every home had one of these stove we could heat our winters at a fraction of the fuel cost. Plus you get a free book with the workshop:)

Free book with class

Taylor- Year Long Student, Part 1

by Taylor

	A year ago, if someone had suggested participating in a program involving monthly camping trips and weekly martial arts classes, I would have laughed. I had always been one to appreciate the outdoors through pictures and such. I could deal with tent camping as long as said tent was in a campground with a bathroom.
Taylor at tracking weekend. It snowed, cougars were out hunting deer and life was cold and good.

After my eighth grade trip, I was hooked on TrackersNW. I quickly agreed to join a yearlong mentoring program that Trackers was constructing for students at my high school. Making a bow the first weekend was a lot harder than expected. Generally, I don't enjoy woodwork but working on my bow was fun. One thing that I wish could have been different was that I didn't feel connected to the wood enough. I am not comfortable shooting a bow so making one was worse. There were times when, while testing the flexibility of my bow, that I felt almost afraid of it. The testing part ended up being it's doom. My bow cracked in half. I actually think that the people around me reacted more than I did. I was just sort of in shock.

The next weekend was when a door opened for me. We spent a morning following deer trails. I loved this because even though I was alone, I had the company of all the deer that had ran the trail before me. Then we found an amazing set of cougar tracks ascending a mudbank. Tony sent me up to investigate, not telling me what I was following until I was halfway up. The tracks disappeared at the top but we felt the presence of the cougar for the rest of the weekend.

This was the weekend I was introduced to tracking. As I told David and Billy, tracking felt comfortable, not easy in the sense of automatically finding all the information right away, but easy in that it felt like an ancient connection, something residing deep inside of me.

The Riddler's Way

The upcoming Rewild Guide is meant to help people discover the mystery of and wonder of the natural world through fun, play and excercises that increase your everyday awareness. If you are interested in the Rewild Guide, please contact Willem.

by Willem Larsen

Developing your spoken tradition skills means developing your Riddling skills. Achieving skill at solving and creating will change you into a different human being. A riddling animal. This of course describes our ancestors, for each one of us, if you go back far enough - the original questing, riddling beings. Seekers of holy places, plumbers of mysteries, never satisfied with answers that don't open up further questions.

The Question Everything in the world has a voice, and tells its stories over, and over, and over….everything. Challenge yourself to open a vaccuum, a pulling space, in your mind, in your senses. Embody a constant wordless question. The great Riddlers of old would fade away to nothing more than a human ‘?’, invisible ghosts upon the land,. Stretched out to the horizon, they knew everything that happened the moment it occurred.

It all begins with a question. Nothing more. Pick a single object, the more mundane the better. Once a day, for a week, ask 50 questions of this object. Pick a new object every day, if necessary. Count off the questions with your fingers. When you reach ten, touch your head with that finger, as a marker. Starting with your fingers again, count until the next ten, touching your left shoulder to signal twenty. Then the right shoulder. Then the left hip. Then the right hip. You just marked off 50 questions. Does 50 questions sound impossible? Good. Find them anyway. Cheat (and if you can, you’ve probably discovered some foolish limits anyway, that you’ve imposed upon yourself for no good reason). Ask simple, obvious questions at first. Ask questions that a martian, or a visitor from dimension X would ask of that object. Start very basic. You do not have to answer any of the questions, though you may find yourself curious about them. Later on, do what you like with the answers. For now, just the questions.

The Web Much like a spider’s web, you now weave a map of connections, everything leading back to the center, that object upon which you asked the 50 questions. Once a day, find 50 links back to that object, 50 ways it connects to other things in the world. Count off the same as before. Links can consist of links-of-links, as far removed as you like, as long as they lead back to the center. You can consider the links in the web as relationships, metaphors, or associations, or poetic allusions, if it helps. Find those kinds of connections.

The Chronicles of the Dreamtime Every night, when you go to bed, one part of you sleeps, while another remains awake. This one will teach you to master the riddling world, if you learn to speak its language. When you wake up, you have two options. Immediately tell the story of your dreams, or what momentary snatches of them you remember, to the person next to you. Or, write them down. It amounts to the same thing. Some cultures honor the telling of dreams, and make space for it. In ours, you may find your best audience in the pages of a journal. Write down all the details that you can remember, even the stupid, foolish, unpleasant, inconvenient, embarrassing ones. Especially those. More layers exist for this, but essentially, take nothing for granted in the dream, and begin your mapping web on it. 10 links for every detail you can single out. Results don’t matter at this point, but the practice does. You don’t want to find out what anything ‘means’ - you want to see what connections you can make.

The ‘Aha!’ Having said results don’t matter, you may notice every once in a while, you get an ‘aha!’. Something clicks. Something makes sense. You accidentally decode a little piece of dream language. Good for you. Write it down. But don’t let it suck you in…focus on the practice, not the results.

The Waking Dreamtime If this next notion doesn’t turn your world upside-down, I don’t know what will. Because before you now lies the task of treating your waking world like a dream. Take one short interaction, between yourself and the world and treat it like the dream. Find the connections, 10 connections to every element you can single out. How short? Make it short it enough that it seems effortless. Then make it a little longer every time you practice anew.

Making Riddles To actually create a riddle, take one of your webs-of-links about an object you choose, and use that to write a short poem that captures your sense of that web, without mentioning outright the subject of the poem. Poems don't really differ from Riddles. To some people this comes as news, to others not so much.

Solving Riddles Do the riddle crafting in reverse. Take the details, weave out a web, and see what it all adds up to.

The Door Has Opened A Crack You’ve just learned the most rudimentary practices of Riddling - rudimentary, but unspeakably powerful. Any single one of them could turn a life upside down, if practiced consistently. Consider that, if doing them all seems like too much. Start with one piece, one practice. Then add more practices, slowly, one at a time. And the door will slowly open, inch by inch…you’ll hear the hinges complaining, but pay them no mind. Uncared for, abandoned, rusted with old grief, they have the right to complain, the Riddlers of Old (that took such care of them) having long ago disappeared into the maw of the machine that eats beauty and excretes despair. Make yourself indigestible to that machine. Keep the door opening, and oil the hinges with your Riddling mind.