Fathering and Fiddleheads

Sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by books, bookmarks, and notebooks. Enjoying the silence, except for the hum of the old freezer. Everyone but my oldest son sleeps. He's sitting out in the woods somewhere listening to a myriad of birdsong I imagine. The other day he returned from the woods with some fiddleheads. He boiled them in a pot along side a frying pan of scrambled eggs with chopped sweet-white violet leaves and flowers. I begged some fiddleheads off him. My first time ever having them. After a lot of butter, salt and pepper were added they weren't too bad. 

Yesterday, while going for a barefoot run in our yard, I noticed broken robin egg shells. Something about seeing them lifted my spirits after delivering over 400 boxes and 100 miles of mostly junk mail yesterday. Days like this I wish everybody would sit down and write a love letter sealed with a kiss, drop a postcard to a friend, write their representative about something that really pisses them off, or you fill in the blank. Anything to help people get in touch with their soul, elevate people above products, and make my job a bit more satisfying and worthwhile. 

We're headed south to Bloomer this afternoon. It'll be the 4th baseball game this week I will be attending in the capacity of fan and proud father. I will most likely see about half of it or so. The rest of the time will be spent playing catch with whatever kid wants to play catch, and there's never ever been an instance where this wasn't the case.  I pretend that it's a chore, but it's really not. The only time I can focus in on a game is in the capacity of coach or player. I like to keep moving I guess.....

Spring just keeps springing along.

Plans and Pocket Prairies

I started a phenology journal this morning. Daniel (17 yrs. old) bought it for me the other day up at the Cable Natural History Museum before his cross country ski meet. I returned the favor this Friday when the kids and I ventured up there (Cable, Wisconsin) while mom was off delivering mail. Now we'll both paying attention -- philosopher Jacob Needleman calls this a free gift--to Nature a bit more, atleast that's the plan anyway. I also bought Hayden (7 yrs. old) a childrens book on planting pocket prairies and Sophia (4 yrs. old) one on the night sky.

Since then I've been hearing about Hayden's plans of turning our piece of land into a prairie. It involves, cement trucks, helicopters, bridges, steel cables, rock quarring, and John Deere back hoes, to start with. Once, after close to a half hour of half listening to him, and hoping to slow him down a bit, I patted him on the head and remarked we're going to have to take this one small step at a time. And while we're at it, I added, we have to keep the collapse of industrial civilization in mind. That didn't phase him. He proceeded to beg me to grant him permission to run the familiy's Dewalt compound miter saw by himself.

What if our children are simply adults trapped in little bodies hoping much of the time to do one thing: Make a contribution.

Monday on County Road M

The kids and I moved a dead fox snake (Elaphe vulpina) yesterday. It was lying dead on County Road. M where the south fork of the Bean Brook flows under. My grandpa, while we were driving to a logging job one day, told me when he was a kid there used to be a lot more that would cross and die there. This particular snake now rests in the forest facing west covered with grass. At least until the crows that were picking at it on the road find it.

While moving it five Washburn County dump trucks passed by. Four going south and one going north. I didn't notice which way they were going loaded and vice versa. I did notice that I felt uncomfortable. Why? I had three school aged children moving a roadkill during school hours on a Monday morning. This time of day and week fathers are suppose to be at work providing for their families and kids are suppose to be in school.

Oh well, not this father on this Monday morning. There's room for both ways of being, at least in my book.




　

　

Will There Be Whippoorwills?

News from home: We sit down to the dinner table last night. May's full moon rising above the tree tops in the eastern horizon. We say thank you for the pork chops and the rest of the food we're about to eat. And Daniel (16 yrs. old) asks if anyone has heard a whippoorwill yet. None of us have. 10 minutes later we hear the whippoorwill's song through the screen of the storm door.

This morning, while everyone else is sound asleep, I open up the book titled, Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save The Planet for inspiration. Here's how chapter 6 starts: "What is at stake? Whippoorwills, the female so loyal to her young she won't leave her nest unless stepped on, the male piping his mating song of pure liturgy. They are 97 percent gone from the eastern range." (Pg. 239)

I want my children to grow up hearing the song of the whippoorwill. This is why I support a Deep Green Resistance and Direct Democracy.

Dilemnas and Deer Hunting

I don't know if I should take my rifle or my chainsaw with me out in the woods this morning. Most of the people that I've talked to around here are saying they're seeing little or no deer. The other day walking down the trail I noticed an old, dead red oak that had blown over and pinned down a young white oak. It was still alive but bent over in the shape of the St. Louis Gateway Arch. So instead of sitting on my stand waiting for deer that aren't there I might just save this white oak since it produces more acorns than any other oak tree around here. Hopefully then my kids and their kids won't have to sit around and talk about the deer they aren't seeing because the deer will have something to eat. Plus, running a chainsaw is warmer than sitting on a deer stand when it's only 15 degrees out there.

Dilemnas like are common place when I finally make it out to the woods. Things could get out of control if I spent any significant time out there.

Practice

"It's very important to distinguish between a practice and a task. You can succeed or fail at a task. This is a practice, you can’t fail at it, you just keep doing it. That's why we call it practice. It’s not about success and failure." ~ Ken McLeod

This resonates given my relationship with Buddhism and baseball.

Nature In Extremis

“It is possible that the world is in extremis because we don't know how to go to extremes”.--James Hillman

The Golden Thread

In the evenings we usually go for a big ride. Sometimes only for a mile or less, and sometimes up to five miles. Lately, while on the ride, I have been finding myself identifying wildflowers along the roadside. The beauty of the flowers is hard to resist. I bet you I've learned well over fifteen plant names in the past two weeks. Plants that I've walked and driven by hundreds of times but paid no attention to.

When this first started I was surprised, but then I decided to just go with it. And throughout this process there has been this voice inside my head saying: you've got to check out The Lost Language of Plants, you've got to check out the The Lost Language of Plants. I let it be. I'm reading another book anyway. Then this interview with the author made its way into my email inbox.

This paragraph out of the interview caught my attention:

I never have been happy in a box. Life is not a box (nor a box of cherries either). Life is some living thing that all of us are involved in. So, I dive in to whatever captures my attention. I immerse myself in it, learn to think through that field of knowledge. I have a sense of the book that is calling to me to be written. There is a feel to truth and I follow that feeling, what the poet William Stafford called the golden thread that all writers must follow for their work to be real. That thread, that feeling, leads to everything I study, often through processes that are not linear and that defy rational explanation. I just happen to stop to get gas at this gas station rather than that one and someone there just happens to drop a book in front of me that just happens to be related to what I am immersed in at that moment. I always know something about the topic I am going into but what I know and what is ultimately true are often different. I always learn as I go. Following golden threads is the most interesting kind of education I am aware of. There are no discipline boundaries with golden threads, interrelated data streams from diverse fields are the norm.

I will be checking out the The Lost Language of Plants soon

Internet Inspiration

A few months back Filip had mentioned that my blog had inspired him to start a new blog. It's called: The World Is As You Dream It. It's full of great writing, wisdom and stunning photographs that were taken by him. I highly recommend checking it out.

Teaching and Building

We're in the process of building a cordwood house right now, and I'm interested in the methods of teaching tracking and nature awareness through mentoring. So, I think this quote by Ran Prieur is absolutely essential to keep in mind for both of these activities.

In hindsight, it would have been better for my hut-building project if I'd never read any books about building, or accepted any technical advice... because instructions destroy motivation. The best teachers understand this, and don't instruct their students at all but seduce them into figuring things out on their own. How-to books, nine times out of ten, are not an aid in doing but a substitute for doing -- the spiritual energy gets burned up in the imagining. And now I'm almost at a dead end, because so many ways of building have been killed for me by reading about them. The only way I can proceed is to do something that (as far as I know) is totally new.

Reading This Morning

I usually wake up around 5:00 AM in the morning. What I usually do before everyone gets up is read, journal for the Kamana program, and sometimes go sit quiely in the woods to listen to the birds greet the sunrise with their songs.

This morning I ran across a few interesting things that I know I'll eventually use. So I want to write them out here for future use.

Right now I'm reading Animal Tracking Basics , by Jon Young and Tiffany Morgan. This is really an amazing book for anyone that wants to get started in tracking and naturalist skills. It's full of exercises, stories, quotes by experienced naturalists and trackers, and neat facts like the one I'm going to post below.

Here is the fact by Daniel Gray: "Did you know that kestrels can spot voles while flying over a field by using an infrared scope mechanism in their eyes to pick up the lines of the animals' urine along their most used tunnels."

And also this quote by Tom Brown Jr. out of Animal Tracking Basics: "Not only is an animal a instrument played by the landscape, but the landscape is an instrument played by the animal. Thus the spheres of animal, plant, and land come together to form a whole."

While journaling the Nightshade plant family for the Kamana program I ran across this little tid bit of information out of Tom Elpel's book, Botany in a Day: "Our European heritage of witches flying on broomsticks comes from these hallucinogenic plants. An ointment containing Atropa and Hyosyamus was rubbed on the broomstick then absorbed through the vaginal tissues by 'riding' the broom"(Emboden)

REWILD.info

UrbanScout just started a really cool website called REWILD.info.

Here is the description of it:

REWILDinfo: study, teach and converse. This brand new site has two parts, the first part contains a forum for rewilders to talk about rewilding, the second part contains a wiki serving as a free online field guide to rewilding. Come start a conversation at the forum and add your knowledge to the field guide today! Please tell all your friends to check it out too.