“Stewards of the Oaks”
16th December 2007

10:00-10:30
Opening

10:30-11:15a
A-Team Camp (Tony)
Storyteller’s Roundtable (Willem)

11:15-12:00p
How can we, the human people of the Oaks, become productive members of the ecosystem (Gabe)
What About the Space/Scout Pit? (Tony)

12-1pm Lunch

1-1:45pm
Specific Native Food Forest PRojects For Oaks Bottom (Thaddeus)
What did the Portland area look like before ‘we’ came? (Laura)
“Natural” and other processes What processes are going on now? (Bruce)

1:45-2-30p
Connection to Place (Rayne)
Why do we let cars into our cities (Laura)
Cooper Mountain Nature House and Salmon Festival (Deb)

2:30-3:15p
“Ken Smith”/Walking Stick Man (Deb)

3:15-4:00p
Closing

Tonight Tony and I spoke to a crowd of 15 or so at the Scout Pit, our audience arrayed on our flotilla of enormous plush couches.

Tony surprised me with what we can do with a powerpoint presentation - it looked pretty good, and inspired me to rhapsodize somewhat about my favorite subjects; concentric rings, awareness, dead space, and the modern epidemic of narcissistic ruts! Tony riffed on his favorite stuff too - the dance of deer and hunter, the conversation with the land, chaos and complexity.

Too much fun.
I told my buck-crawling-through-the-brush story, Tony told about his bird-language bobcat expert encounter.

Rob, one of our visitors, told about his cougar-cave-in-the-snowy-canyon story too.

It surprised me that no one had any questions at the end; although sometimes we just want stories, not Q&A.

I get that.

See you next time for story hour at the Scout Pit!

Last weekend the Bow-hunting Camp wrapped up, with Thaddeus, Tony, Shaun, Billy, David, Paul, and Arden (did I leave anybody out). It culminated in a brown-eyed deer lady getting a thigh shot by Thaddeus. Then she took off running, the arrow fell out, and two days of looking for her have come up for naught. Problematically, the arrow only went in a couple inches.

Poor thing, she’ll need to rustle up a raccoon to give her some stitches with his nimble little black hands. Hunting works this way though - barely controlled chaos, and the forest chooses what happens, especially when you use a bow.

Will the brown-eyed lady recover nicely and have a bit more wisdom about sneaking and awareness? Will her minor injury hamper her enough for a cougar mom to claim for her young?

Who knows. Out there, I can sense her living out her story. Sorry we didn’t give you a neatly-wrapped up ending, Deer lady. Maybe next time.

Today we had a sampler day for 10 interested folks:

Lucas, Sara, Melanie, Betsy, Brandy, Minda, Gabe, Nathan, Michelle,  and Laura (hope I spelled your names right guys - I did that from memory).

Thaddeus, Tony and I ran it, and we had a lot of fun hearing the stories that folks told about their backgrounds, paddling to Elk Rock Island, and then doing some down home trackin’, before a Q&A at the Marsee Baking Cafe on Bybee and Milwaukie.

Lots of good questions, open minds, and excitement rolling around. I look forward to seeing these folks at our other programs - Monday night SHIFT, Wednesday Movie Night, monthly Open Space Gatherings. Yadda yadda yadda. Busy year, eh?

We set up our DVD projector last night at the Scout Pit, and watched ‘the Labyrinth’ play against one of the large white walls in the space. What a different experience to see a movie on the big screen! We had a blast. All the little details you catch when you have a huge screen (like milk bottles sitting outside the Goblin King’s castle, as if he gets daily deliveries). Tony made popcorn too. I think these movie nights will rock. Next week: ‘the Princess Bride’.

So much going on.

We (Tony and I) brought Jon Young, tracker, mentor, and speaker, to Portland to talk with select Metro employees (including a Metro councilor!) about deep mentoring, and the possibilities inherent in  facilitating profound and ongoing relationships with the natural world.  It went well! Some Oregon Zoo folks attended (a Metro-run organization, as you may no) and it reminded me of my days tending the Insect Zoo.

We had our first session of SHIFT at the Scout Pit, our brand-spankin’ new HQ on the edge of Oak’s Bottom. Tony shot some great video, Mike did some bangin’ instruction in boxing skillz. Mike and I talked about our differing teaching styles - he comes from the school of thought where you drill for hundreds of hours until you “just get it”. Really, an ideal if you have the time. Me, having gotten on in years, and no spring chicken, I always look for the secret short cuts when learning new skills. I can’t help but pass these on to my students, for better or worse. Sometimes I wonder if they understand how much time I’ve saved them, and how quickly they will progress in comparison. I also wonder if it makes it easy to take it for granted. But I see some folks really clicking and perserving with the skills, so, what the hell. If they’ll go there with me, I’ll keep it up. Meanwhile the weight of Mike’s experience and his old school training balances it out.

My thought bend toward our next TNW Open Space Gathering, Sunday December 16. We plan to do these monthly. Our overarching theme, “Stewards of the Oaks”. I imagine we’ll develop specific sub-themes for each month if necessary.

Make sure to check out all the new videos on our bios page. Heck, do a youtube search for trackersnw.com and I bet you’ll find all kinds of stuff now.

Later,

Willem

As you may or may not know, the folks here at TNW stand on the verge of signing on the dotted line for a HQ of sorts, a club-house, a nest, with the working title of “The Scout Pit”.

“What?” you say, “you don’t already have an office or bunkhouse or whatever?”

“Ha!” reply we. “Ha! Strike when the iron is hot, and not a moment sooner!”

We’ve cooked up all kinds of strategies for staying lean, so we can pay instructors and staff humanely, and still charge low tuition for our camps. One of those strategies, up until now, has consisted of keeping our office on laptops, surfing from coffee shop to living room to car to campsite.

But the downside of this has started to wear - we really need a central space, with enough room to SHIFT in, near greenspaces,  with a nook for our company library and a place to chug our favorite hot drinks during the chilly damp winter months.

And boy have we found a prime candidate!  We won’t divulge until we sign on that dotted line, but we ‘fess up with all the photos and descriptions when we make it official.

And of course, don’t forget the inevitable Open House/Grand Opening of the space, and the inevitable first Open Space Gathering (that all seemed a mite repetitive) we will hold there in January!!

Hold your applause please, until the end of the movie…

-Willem

Today, in the Estacada woods, I sat there with a group of teens in our year long course. All of our instuctors call them adults that no one gave the chance to be an adult. And that is where we have our work cut out for us.

Sometimes its shock. Like Billy said when I made it past the potholes and first drove up, “I don’t know how people get to this, always needing approval, never asking their own questions. They don’t care to know how deep it goes.” We worried it was about dedication, we worried it was about commitment, we worried it we set our goals too high.

I said to Billy, “Just say whatever you want.” He did, I leave it someone else to write about that, I was getting my coffee cup from my car when I back, jaws had dropped and where still there. Billy tends to say things, people tend to listen because they are raw.

I was annoyed. Deer tracks and trails were all over the ground, like a lattice. So many fresh trails, so many new stories. No one was caring, no one was tearing through the ground on fire with their questions. No, everyone just looked to us and seemed to say, “What’s the next exercise and will this make me a good tracker?”

Hell, I didn’t know. I’m a high school dropout. You ask me for answer, you ask me to school you, I am incapable of it. I had my freedom as kid. I made my three quarters of an acre permaculture garden and tended to it 4 hours a day. I was sixteen walking hundreds of miles through the crest of the cascades with my dog Rusti. No one was there to tell me if what I was doing was right. Thankfully, all I had was consequences.

The deer weren’t following defined trails, they were all over the place. Avoiding sinks and boxed areas.

David, Billy and I tracked a cougar while the crew was just getting back from tracking deer. A momma and her boy. Taylor was walking up the hill, I called her over ther and she spent a second looking at the track.

“What does it mean.” I was fishing.

“I never seen this track before,” intense frustration that she wasn’t getting it right.

“So,” I replied. Not much for the art of questioning, not much to be a mentor. It was the only honest answer I had. I could try to pull her in, pretend I don’t know, try to sound smart that I could ask a fancy question. Or I could simply cry for the fact that so many people expect kids to have the right or wrong answer, to pass or fail. It’s not her fault. It’s not my fault.

I needed to grieve about that for a second, then I went to look at it her. It was beautiful.

Gray clay sand mixing, with douglas fir needles turning yellow, orange brown, still green made round toes and heel pads slinking up into the hill.

Finally someone got sucked in. In a moment I saw Taylor was the first one to “really step throught the looking glass.”

In that moment I saw what our mentoring really was. A witness and a collaborator.

Talyor headed up hill. I left her as she followed it

“Hey Taylor,” I called out.

“Yeah,” she owned her voice this time.

“You know you are following a cougar.” I wasn’t playing a game, I wasn’t trying to scare her. I was sharing.

“This is?”

Gutsy girl headed up the hill. Gusty not because a cat was still there, gusty because she went to go find questions where no one would be there to answer her.

Later, as we both admired the tracks we could barely see on the hard packed ground gravel road, I realized I could finally joke with her. “Fake it till you make it.” Was all my response when she exclaimed that it was hard to separate out the tire tracks.

Not having the answers, but having better and better questions is a safer space for me. I wonder if that makes me weird.

-Tony

PS Thanks Taylor, I am still learning.