Finding Bones with Riekes

Native Eyes was off this week for the Thanksgiving holiday, so I'm again posting a Story of the Day from the Riekes Nature Awareness group that I lead in Huddart Park. Once again, no photos for this one.

This Friday we scouted the woods near our Super Secret Hideout.

We started the day with games and work on our primitive shelter, and then welcomed the afternoon hours with scout sit spots. We went quietly and stealthily to our sit spots, to find out what cool things were around and bring news of them back to the group. After sitting, we gathered up in our primitive shelter for a repotback from each scout location. One of our number had found some beautifully articulating animal leg bones at her sit spot that hadn't been there last week, so we decided to check out that location further.

On the way, we found and followed animal runs that had been worn-in to the forest floor so well that there wasn't a crumb of leaf litter left on the packed, almost shiny earth. Following the run, we accidentally uncovered a Pacific Giant Salamander hiding in a damp gully, and everyone went utterly hyper on Pacific Giant Salamander energy. Yelling, dancing, silly faces and general tomfoolery ensued.

After many, many minutes of loud and gleeful celebration of the salamander find, the raucous atmosphere began wearing thin and people started yelling at eachother rather than with eachother. We broke that feedback loop with a spontaneous game of camouflage, put the salamander back where we found it, and continued on the trail of the bones.

We finally arrived at the small clearing where the bones lay. Everyone's energy was still scattered and loud. We circled around the bones on our knees and brought the energy down to Earth with a sense meditation.

Everyone in the circle placed a finger on the bones. Using guided visualization, we consciously checked in with our senses of touch, taste, smell, hearing, and finally sight.

In our meditation we related our senses to that of the animal, a deer, that had passed and left it's bones for us to find. We recognized that this animal had sensed the world much like we now do, had eaten, breathed, and had a family. We considered the animal that had eaten the deer, where it could be in the woods at present, how it had felt when it ate the deer, and the energy that was added to it's life from the deer's own life. Everyone was quiet, still, and focused on the present moment.

"How do you feel when you think about this deer?" I finally asked.

"Sad," came the reply.

"How do you feel when you think about the animal that ate the deer?" I
next asked.

"Happy! ... Um, that's confusing," was the unanimous conclusion.

"Isn't it?" I said.

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.

Food and Medicine

This week we were at Venture again, and spent the day with the RDNA crew. Our focus for the day was herbs, herbal medicines, and local and wild foods. The day was so creative and varied that I think this’ll have to be one of my longest posts ever. Apologies for the unbalanced text-to-photos ratio.

(We found the snake while wandering the grounds. He doesn’t have much to do with the day’s activities, but I thought he was beautiful enough to share anyway. I think his Latin name translates to “fierce bush snake from Hell.”)

We started the day with a blindfolded string walk. The Cultural Mentoring group strung a string down paths, around obstacles, and ended at a group meeting point. We were blindfolded and allowed to guide ourselves along the string using touch.



I found that I was far more comfortable going without shoes than with, and given the extra tactile connection to my environment, along with the string guide and the other sensory information from scent and sound, I felt totally comfortable, safe, and happy walking the landscape blind. With sight deprived, textures and temperatures, rather than sights, furnished the beauty in my landscape. Even the clammy grass and sharp gravel felt good on my feet, as it gave me that much more information about the world.

The one source of frustration I found was with negotiating my path in the presence other people. I found it easy to tell when the person in front of me had stopped, but harder to tell when they started up again. I didn’t want to bother the person in front of me by touching them if they were still there, but sometimes there was so much shuffling going on that I couldn’t tell if the person in front of me was walking or just fidgeting, or if an instructor was moving in front of me instead. I found myself worrying and fretting about holding up the line by waiting too long, and anxious about annoying the person ahead of me by poking her too often. This social worry was so strong that by the time I got to the end of the string, I was fuming about the bad design of this exercise, and how the presence of other people ruined the sensory immersion experience.

When we debriefed the exercise, an often-repeated point about nature connection practices came to the fore again: the stuff that comes up in these exercises is the stuff that participants bring to them. Likely, the blockages one comes up against in nature connection are the same blockages that one repeatedly engages in life. Like so many other personal practices, nature connection brings one’s blockages out of their familiar context and into a new and different light. I went into the next exercise musing on these thoughts and hoping to erode my anger with new understanding.

(Unlike other personal practices like martial arts or meditation, practicing nature connection allows for more feedback than that provided by one’s individual point of view and that of the mentor. Nature connection brings one’s blockages into an environment where not only mentors and students can reflect them to you, but where birds can shout at you about them, fox and mink can honor you for your progress, and trees can offer comfort and grounding in a crisis. And practicing nature connection with others on the same journey offers that many more eyes and ears and hearts and minds to perceive that feedback, push you when you’re unwilling to push yourself, and help you incorporate the feedback into your development.)


(Photo from CalPhotos)

The next exercise was a simple plant sit. We were told to find a plant, sit down with it, and talk with it, aiming to get to know some of the plant’s “spirit medicine”. We were advised to begin with a question, such as “what’s your name?” or “what story do you have to tell?”

I wandered away from most of the group and sat down by a big, beautiful Scrophularia plant. My question was, “what’s your role here,” a variation on the get-to-know-the-stranger line of, “so what do you do?” After sitting with it for a time, spacing out and being distracted by very cool looking hoverflies, I was feeling a little unfocused and ineffective at my task. I reconsidered my question, and sent a wordless request for communication with the plant, opening this “conversation” to let it say whatever it needed to say. Quietly, I watched bugs crawl over it, saw the discarded skins and honeydew excretions of now-absent aphids on a young stem, inspected leafminer tracks in the newer leaves, and noted that most of the mature stalks and leaves were free of insects. I inspected the flowers and wondered about their pollination.

Holding the plant stalk between my thumb and forefinger, I realized that physically, the plant’s body and my body were part of a continuum of matter, that the divisions of individuality between human and plant were arbitrary and that in fact one body merged into another and into the air and the earth, and more, in a continuum of matter and energy. I thought that perhaps spirit might be similar, and wondered, with silence rather than words, about participation in plant spirits and the continuity of spirit between apparent individuals.

Then the coyote howl came to gather us back, and we moved on to another project.






After a fun communal journaling session and a lunchbreak that included more journaling, (I got to learn about the medicinal and toxic properties of Bleeding Heart wildflowers) we launched into the afternoon activity, a lesson on intuitive cooking from one of the Cultural Mentors.



We had each brought at least one food local to our homes, meaning harvested less than 100 miles away from where we live. I brought snow peas and fava beans from my former garden (I had to negotiate with the landlord to get in an pick them), winter squash from the last fall harvest in my garden, and duck eggs from the Eco House nearby. Others brought many citruses, greens, peas and other vegetables. One person brought some ground beef, another some kefir, a jar of dried huckleberries (yum), and the star of the show was fresh abalone from Bolinas.

Our challenge was to create an appetizer dish for the rest of the class using only these ingredients. We grouped into teams and selected our ingredients. My group wound up with the kefir, the huckleberries, and lots of veggies. We were frustrated at first with our luck, getting such an odd collection of ingredients, but we came up with a plan and created a dish. Vibrant, energetic chaos ensued in the kitchen.

Our dish, a sweet stirfry using greens, sugar snap peas, celery, and apple with a sauce of huckleberry kefir flavored with lemon zest, nettle, and lemon balm herbs turned out to be an improbable success. Others made equally delectable dishes: herb meatballs with dipping sauces made from fava beans, tomato soup, or mustard; toasted kale chips (delicious and simple creations that result from tossing kale with oil and salt and toasting the leaves in the oven); stuffed beet leaves; carrot and greens salad alongside abalone that was breaded (with locally dumpstered bread), seasoned, and fried in olive oil; squash, herb and dandelion flower fritters; and squash stuffed with an herbed duck egg scramble.







With dinner over, three rounds of dishes done, and the sun setting low, we gathered in the main room for more herb work. Some of our musicians jammed with drums, guitar and mandolin while we milled about and waited for everyone to settle. Only settling never quite happened, and finally the energy of the music took over the room with dance and improvised song. Rather than fight the energy, our instructors began to sing their instructions for the next activity. Demonstration flowed into dance, questions came out sung in time to the beat, and spontaneous poetry erupted. We learned and processed herbs for the next hour with music fueling our motions. This was by far the most fun herbal class I’ve ever attended. My grandmother would be overjoyed to see this kind of learning going on.







Finally, we finished out the evening with a council circle, discussing sex and gender issues. The men asked the women’s circle questions, and vice versa. It raised many more questions, and opened new avenues of communication that I think will continue to be explored for these last five weeks of class.

Native Eyes and the Art of Mentoring

I’ve just come back from the Art of Mentoring, held at Commonweal Garden in Bolinas, California. It was quite an experience. I’ve tried to write my experience coherently, but it was such an intense one (the class was an intensive, after all) that I find I need to write it as a semi-fiction, to step back a step and inhabit a different point of view in order to communicate my impressions. What follows, then, is a travelogue from the point of view of a Western explorer visiting an exotic culture, one so different that they are named as a new species of humans.

Homo funis and the Ars Rector festival

I’ve returned from a different land. There are people there, but of an entirely different species than those I live alongside at home. The people are remarkable in their behavior, being social and independent at once, compassionate and welcoming, as well as stalwart in their maintenance of boundaries and rules. They are different enough to warrant a new specific epithet, and have come to be known by some as Homo funis. The land, too, is uncommon in its contradiction and cohesion, being a managed wilderness, wild nature worked like a tool but possessing diversity, complexity and resilience not seen in civilized life, and is sometimes called by the name Ortus Bonus Communis, or simply Ortus. This journal chronicles my contact with this people on this land.

First, some background: I initially encountered rumors of these people years ago, while at school. At that time the rumors were few and garbled, so I continued on my way and filed the information away for later. But as our body of data on Homo funis grew, these people seemed increasingly like a worthwhile subject of inquiry. My explorations then brought me to Africa, where I witnessed both broken and vibrantly vital cultures. The people there inhabit both at once. They do so with deep compassion and readiness to help, held forth from a simple and matter-of-fact understanding: life is hard, but people help each other so that life is possible. The children of villagers, who grew up hunting and farming with their elders, especially exemplify this understanding. When I returned home I vowed to learn my land as well as they knew theirs and to seek out and live from that same understanding in my own culture.

I remembered the rumors of Homo funis and their land, and set off in search of them, for if the rumors were true, those people would posess a similar understanding to the one I encountered in Africa. After much wandering and exploration, I met another explorer in my own country, and we decided to pool our efforts. We met travelers from Ortus, and learned from them for a time. We encountered more of the stories and practices of Homo funis, and through them began to learn more about our land. We joined others on similar journeys and learned from them, and more people saw what we were doing and some came to practice with us. Finally my companion and I received an invitation to join the people of Ortus on their land and learn from them more directly. The meeting place was only a day’s ride away, so we were eager to embark. We packed our saddlebags with three day’s rations and set out riding high in our saddles, ready to chronicle our discoveries and bring them back to our civilized community.

The first meeting would be brief, only two nights and a day. We rode along the coast through thick fog, up the faces of mountains and down again over their drizzle-slick flanks. We arrived at Ortus Bonus Communis, and there were greeted as friends. We camped for the night and made plans for our time with the Homo funis. We were told that we would be able to participate as part of the scout society at the upcoming festival and to seek out one of the elders. The name of the festival is untranslatable into our culture but I have chosen to identify it here as Ars Rector. We returned to civilized land two days after, and made preparations.

We had received word of highwaymen on the coastal route and so rode to Ortus over the mountain instead. After a grueling mountain passage, we arrived in the mid-evening and all was raucous chaos. The village held many times the inhabitants that it had previously, most of whom appeared to be visitors like ourselves, come to celebrate the Ars Rector. My traveling companion and I were soon absorbed into separate Clans and Societies and were given new names, with the elder who we had met previously still nowhere to be found. We made camp and, feeling uncertain and still very bewildered, gathered around the fire.

The first few days it seemed that most of the visitors, including myself, felt a general apprehension and reluctance. None of us knew exactly what would happen here at the Arts Rector, only that we liked what we had heard of the Homo funis culture and came to learn more. Our first lesson came as the greeting custom of Thanksgiving and uniting our minds as one for the festival, a beautiful litany of things in creation with greetings and thanks for each part, and a final statement of unity of mind. Many of us loved the words, but still felt uncertain about our presence there.

Our second lesson came as an introduction to another of the tools of Homo funis culture, moieties. Each of us had been invited into a Society and a Clan. Each Society had a specific role to play, and each Clan had at least one representative from each Society. The Clans became the basic unit of the people for the duration of the festival, and functioned smoothly with different Society members performing different functions for their Clan. My Society held as its responsibilities greeting, welcoming, and warning, among other things. Each Clan also had one or more experienced Homo funis people, to help guide the newcomers in the Ars Rector. Though everyone participated in the activities of the festival, it was clear that some were more knowledgeable than others in these practices. Those who were more experienced took positions of leadership and guided the newcomers.

As the week progressed, most of our number let go of their trepidation and fully integrated into festival life. There was singing, storytelling, many impromptu childlike games, organized gaming, and feasting. Their finest cooks collaborated to give us the best food any human palette has yet encountered, much of it from their own lands but some imported from other villages as well. We were given permission to wander the land and explore beyond the village gates, and some of us adopted special places on the landscape where we felt particularly able to hear the rhythm of the land, and touch its spirit. We wandered to these alone in the morning or at dusk, and kept watch over the landscape. We also gathered frequently to hear the Elders speak, and they told stories and spoke deeply on the Homo funis culture. We stayed up late into the night around the fire, singing and telling jokes and stories. We rose early to listen to the land, and engaged in solemn ceremony. We laughed and cried together throughout the day.

Many of the participants came to love the village and the Homo funis people during our stay, but we all knew that the festival would come to an end, which saddened many. The greeting custom of giving thanks and bringing our minds together has another side to it, though, created to ease parting. This part of the custom consist of participants stating that they are now separating their minds. I have participated in other cultural gatherings of similar intensity, but never have I encountered as effective a mechanism to ease the inevitable parting.

Though the Homo funis claimed that the Ars Rector was an example of their culture in action, it was far more intense than everyday village life for these people. The Ars Rector is, more accurately, an initiation into Homo funis traditions and culture. The festival does not present their culture as it is lived on a day-to-day basis, rather serves as an intensive introduction to culture that creates new behavior in participants.

My traveling companion and I left late on the last day, having packed our supplies and readied our steeds. We made the journey over the mountain in time to see the sun set over the ocean, dipping quietly into a sea of summer fog that sat beyond the shining ribbon of water. The fog sat on the edge of the world with the presence of a Pleistocene glacier, gray and heavy on the horizon, waiting for the sun to sink before advancing to envelope the world. As we rode, we passed this landscape that now seemed to take on an intense animate presence, and at times we talked animatedly but at other times we rode in silence. As the light bled from the Western sky and the darkness enveloped the East, we mounted the bridge to the City. Creat golden girders and steel cables sliced between the coast and ourselves, and to the South we saw the glitter of countless lights piled up in concrete towers. We entered the City once again.