Well, did you finally finish reading my last post?  Egads!  This one will be shorter .. much shorter.

It is coming down to the end of the year for me at the Wilderness Awareness School.  A couple of more weeks, and then I'm off to a 5 day scout camp intensive, then a 5 day survival intensive, and then a 5 day intensive wrap up with the instructors, school elders, Jon Young, etc.  During that time I'll only be home on Sat/Sun.  This means I only have a little bit more time to complete my Kamana homework!  It seems my current rating system for doing anything is this: is this thing so great that I'll give up my Kamana homework time for it?  

Several things do fall into that category of worth-more-than-Kamana ... my family for instance.  Saturday and Sunday were days of a wee bit of Kamana, and the rest Family Time.  I love spending time with my wife and two boys.  In fact, I need to .. for my health and theirs!  My time here would definitely be out of balance if I put all of my focus on learning outdoor living skills at the cost of intimacy with my family and friends.  Of course, some times I am able to combine the two!  Yesterday, after reading Kamana for Kids with Aiden, I sat with him at his sit spot and we put on our 'dog noses' and smelled everything we could smell!  Tomorrow my family is going to meet up with an old college friend that Matty and I haven't seen for 13 years!  She's a mom now, and works at a great environmental non-profit in Seattle.  I look forward to talking with her about how she keeps balance with supporting the health of our earth, and supporting the health of her family.  It can seem like these things are opposed sometimes ... yet were they ever that way in our deep past?  

Tomorrow I also give up some Kamana time to go to the planning meeting for Roots & Wings, the program for 3-6 year olds at W.A.S.  I love supporting this program, and learning more about how to bring nature-based education to children.  Matty and I are working on opening a nature-based preschool in Eugene, OR in the Fall of 2007, and so I am excited to put myself into anything related and soak up what learnings I can.

And then there's that little thing of actually just spending time outside!  Oh yeah!  Such a balancing act it all is.  There really isn't enough time in the day to do the things I want to do ... and yet we have what we have and must choose what we do each day.  

So here is my blog.  Sorry it took so long.  Only now (at 2:47am) did it finally rate above Kamana time .. please take no offense.  YOU rate higher as well, but this blog was a bit further down the list.  :D  

Talk with you soon.  .. uh, soonish.

May 9, 2006 21:27 - Modern Warrior

In many of my posts I talk about Kamana. OK Rees, what the heck really IS Kamana? I'm glad you asked. I've clipped the section below from the school's Songline, part of the Kamana program.

KAMANA NATURALIST TRAINING PROGRAM

The core program of the school is called the Kamana Naturalist Training Program . Offered as a mentored, four level correspondence course, this program is introductory to everything we teach at Wilderness Awareness School. Its substance is our "core curriculum." So, by understanding it, you can glimpse the seed of everything we teach.  For more details, read an overview.

The word "Kamana" is actually a Kikamba word. It comes from the Akamba Tribe of Kenya and translates to "the bearer for the Warrior," and I decided that the name "Kamana" fit well for this program. Here is our reasoning.

The Warrior, or Anake, was not an aggressor, but a defender. In the Akamba tradition, the warriors protected the people against threats, especially those who could not care for themselves, namely the children and the elders. The Anake faced threats to survival by using their deep knowledge of their land.

What threatens today's people most is ignorance. So today's warriors must face the environment's more troubling issues, find ways to solve them, and then succeed in leading our people out of ignorance. The modern warrior, to be effective, must address our cultural ignorance about nature and how our human interactions affect it with a full arsenal of fact, compassion, and creativity.

The Kamana were the bearers for the Anake. In this way, they became apprentices to the warriors. In a sense, by carrying the burdens for these protectors of the tribe, a Kamana is demonstrating his worthiness to bear the knowledge of the warrior society.

Certified Kamana Training Program graduates possess skills that benefit the communities they serve, for they will have a good basic understanding of all aspects of the local bioregion they have trained in. They will know the true hazards, the important species and ecological features, the watershed resources, the native history, the land-use history, and the current status of wildlife and plant populations. These people will know the important topics for local restoration ecology and will represent good, sound leadership in these efforts. Therefore, they should all be recognized as belonging to a network of experts with similar skills and knowledge across the land. This is the purpose of our first level certification. Nationwide, many individuals and organizations already recognize the quality of our students at this level, and their skills and knowledge are in demand.

May 29, 2006 09:05 - Hello again!

A couple of weeks ago we went out bear tracking. We found tracks and sign, and just had a great time wandering around. Take a look at how huge the skunk cabbage is! Where I live it is a little bit higher and the cabbage is smaller. It is a shame skunk cabbage isn't edible, but it sure would make a great shelter shingles! I'll be praying for them next week since my class heads out for a week long survival trek!

I just returned from a week long scouting trip to the Okanagon (think: capture the flag on 160 acres under a new moon). It was incredible!! It was like a weeklong sit spot. When we were in the game area (which was much of the time) we had to travel silently, listening to the language of the birds to determine where others were. After the second day I felt I no longer needed my compass to get around. It was really only a short time that I was there .. and yet I was able to really connect with the place. I'm sure it helped that I hardly slept, spending almost all of my night hours scouting around. The last night it rained long and hard as I was defending our flag. I found I could quiet my mind and tune in to the ambient sound of the area around our camp .. and then any human made noise, even the tinyest, really stood out. I could tell which direction it came from and how far away it was. At the beginning of this year I would never have been able to quiet my mind for even a second .. always a jabber blabber happening inside. So many elements of my school's teachings came together for me out there. We played many games and pushed the limits of our 'edges'. Good stuff!!

I'll be pushing my edges again tomorrow as I head out with my class to parts unknown for a week -- with only the clothes on my back and the shoes on my feet. We don't get a lighter, no compass, not even a knife! When Friday rolls around, the instructors come back to pick up whoever makes it through the week. ;-)

I'll then be on another week-long session with my class .. this time it will be on the school land. It is our final week wrap up where all of the teachings and learnings come together. Jon Young with be there to impart a few more nuggets of wisdom. I am torn .. I am excited to have completion of this fun and challenging year, and yet I am sad that it will have come and gone. This has been a transformational year for me.

Following the final wrap up I fly with my family to Italy for a week. Then when I return I immediately begin teaching at Wilderness Awareness School's Summer Youth Camps. You can expect to get updates on what I learn about coyote mentoring during those couple of months.

And then?? And then I move back to Eugene, OR where I'll be ... oh, that's too far away for me to think of right now.

It will probably be two weeks before I am back at a keyboard. Please do check back in!

April 2006 «  » June 2006

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