Mind of Mentoring and Village Builders Training

The new year of Native Eyes kicked off with a Tweeker – a two-week training retreat, the intensity of which may tweak participants out by the final day. The first week, entitled Mind of Mentoring and Nature Connection, was awash in flip charts and lecture. The second week, entitled Village Builder’s Training, was much less structured.

The first week appealed greatly to my analytical, logistics-preoccupied mind. We sat in lecture most of the day, watching various people draw various versions of a circle with eight radiating lines, and writing various words about these diagrams. We hung the charts together on the wall. Toward the end of the week a visitor remarked that it looked like we were designing the Death Star. The name stuck – I still can’t help but think of Darth Vader when I look at those diagrams. But I did learn a great deal about the ideas and structure behind this 8-Shields approach to mentoring and culture building.

We had a free weekend between the two weeks, in which some of the other Native Eyes crew, some Cultural Mentors, and some other attendees got some unstructured time together. We went to the beach and skinny-dipped in the chill ocean at sunset, played tag, sang songs and told stories. We hiked around the woods near Santa Cruz, found beautiful manzanita and huckleberries to eat, climbed trees, and goaded complete strangers into running around like kids with us. Though the people we met on the trail started out intimidated by the mere thought of eating wild berries, they finished the day with tongues nearly and purple as ours, grinning, climbing trees, throwing stones, hiding, seeking, and chasing each other like 8-year olds.

We launched into the second week still exhausted from the previous one, and it showed. The Acorn (our support team who managed and executed the event) still had bags under their eyes. This week had been planned as an exercise in village culture, rather than an educational program with lectures and flip charts. I think that varying interpretations of what that meant, along with the evident fatigue in the leadership group, and the ambitious project we had set for ourselves, made this week much rockier than the previous one.

Essentially, we took 60 or so humans from Western urbanized, individualistic, capitalist and technologically-dependant cultures and attempted to create a communal earth-based village culture using consensus, peaceful action, and positive words, within one week. We fell into many pitfalls. We also built beautiful, supportive, and regenerative relationships among our temporary village, which will continue to build independent of that retreat. On this week, we lit the embers of many future village fires.