This back-dated entry is a rough transcript of my notes on a workshop I attended. It's mostly for my own purposes -- but if you have time to read it and comment, I'd love your perspective.

I was interested to hear Jon Young speak at VBC on Friday, because I was interested in tracking for a while before I went traveling. I learned about the regular last-Sunday 9am trackers' gathering at Oxbow Park, and never did manage to get out for it... but kept it in the back of my mind for months. May yet attend it, someday...

Anyway, I made a point to attend Jon's speech that night. (There was good live music afterwards, too.)
Jon Young spoke slightly about tracking -- or "nature awareness" as a more encompassing term for what it takes to become a good tracker. He spoke more about the origins of American democracy, and peacemaking as a cultural heritage, and about the means by which a society might regain an indigenous sense of place and avoid a warlike end, over the next two hundred years, due to a combination of current efforts, legendary gifts, and intergenerational cultural mentoring.

The ideas and the presentation intrigued me. I cancelled my plans for Saturday, and went to a 6-hour workshop.

During this workshop, Jon said a great deal, and I wrote only a few notes. Here they are, fleshed out a little, and with most of the references for future study -- these are intended for me, to preserve them before I lose the three little scraps of paper they're currently on... make that two, oops...
I would also like to hear the thoughts of my own elders about these concepts. The ideas here resonated with me, but I wonder how they'd work in the context of my family and friends. I've got a few more grey hairs to earn before I stop asking for advice. And if, as the notes say, I'm to begin practicing peacemaking "at home," it seems like those closest to me deserve to be let in on this intention.

Among Jon's skillsets, which I was eagerly absorbing:
Tracking, meaning understanding what's going on around him from subtle traces the rest of us might miss: scents, sounds, and feelings as well as visible signs.
Teaching, meaning opening others up to the expansion of their own abilities and knowledge
Cultural Mentoring: his term, for activities including passing on stories or "programming" designed to foster the "upright mind" and cultural survival.

Four Keys of Learning
(qualities of a natural learner / things that lead naturally to learning):

Curiosity,
The Edge / Observation
Storyteller's Mind,
Sensory input

Curiosity ... accelerates learning faster than anything but near-death experience. And since insurance companies tend to frown on using near-death experience as a teaching tool, we rely on curiosity.
(Another problem with using "fight or flight" adrenalized awareness as a learning tool: It's almost impossible for any teacher, especially in wilderness techniques, to precisely judge his students' comfort boundaries. The closer you get to fear, the sharper your memory and learning -- until you get just past it, and the reptilian responses get triggered, and the human part of the brain shuts down. Instead of learning, you get shock and trauma, and "teach" the student to avoid any future experiences that remotely resemble the day's "lesson.")

The Edge -- Fear is a great place to learn, but it's not a great place to take students. So we use something a lot safer, the place where most indigenous elders do their teaching. We call it "the edge." It's the area between the known and unknown, seen and unseen. When you are comfortable on the edge of your awareness, you enjoy not knowing. [Watching someone else cross the edge of their own knowledge is fun, too.]
Animals are masters of the edge. They can operate on the edge of your awareness -- some mountain lions and coyotes spend their whole lives in suburban areas, almost undetected. Each will see thousands of humans in their lifetime, literally choosing which humans will ever see them. (Usually not many). Humans who know about them (wildlife researchers, local sherriffs) often don't disclose their knowledge to the rest of us, because people would panic and demand extermination. Yet the whole point is that these creatures are already living their lives across ours and doing us no detectable harm.
Cultural mentors are edge-dwellers -- finding and using the boundaries of their protegees' knowledge, sometimes opening a window in it, and other times, saving the lesson for another day. Sometimes laughing, sometimes sympathetic.
When you go out hunting, the stories you bring back are as valuable as the meat. The other hunters will want to hear about your experience -- that's how the body of knowledge is built, [how the culture passes from generation to generation, slowly refining and re-adapting to include the most applicable, the most memorable, experiences.]


Storyteller's Mind / Sensory Memory / Imagination / Experiential Memory / Mind-Focus
(** anybody know a good single word for this concept? **)

The common term for this technique is "visualizing," as popularized by sports trainers who use it to cultivate athletic success. But it's multi-sensory, far more than visual. It's a fully dimensional memory, even an experience, of the original experience.
Young calls it "storyteller's mind" because a skilled storyteller can call forth this kind of mental focus at will from his audience: the re-living of memory, or the experiencing of a secondhand memory as if it were real.
Examples:
-A study showed that when you say the word "screwdriver," muscles in the subjects' forearm spontaneously fire a tiny burst, a microscopic twitch, as if they were turning the tool.
-Imagine -- Even if you're not a visual person, you can have this kind of imaginative re-creation. E.g. bathtubs... Proof was given in the following class exercise:

Now,
Whatever you do,
_don't_ imagine
the sounds, smells, and sight of
your toilet flushing.

How did it go? Anybody succeed in _not_ experiencing that particular sensory memory? (no hands raised)
And I bet some of you remembered [other sensations] along with it!

Sensory Input: [not much was said about this, perhaps because its relevance is obvious, perhaps because it was touched upon in the discourse above. Sensory experiences would include observation by all five senses, bodily healing or hurting, most kinds of surprises, and perhaps the meaning-making and emotional inputs as well: a loaded sensation-pattern can be a serious asset or obstacle to learning.
This area was emphasized in my education in both art and science: the evidence of the senses is fodder for knowledge and expression.]

Final note on discussion of learning:
The process of adults working out what's "true" or "how things are going to be" fascinates kids. Multiple perspectives, even a little disharmony, is much better for learning than a school that unanimously follows a single teacher's way. [It creates an environment in which others get curious and apply their own intelligence. ] It might be embarrassing, but students who watch their teachers try to work something out between themselves are going to go (gestured "Hmmm") [take that home with them to think about] and remember it long after you're out of their lives.

Closet Organizer:
We need a "closet organizer" for all the teaching tools we gather, because otherwise it's really easy to throw them all in the box, and just use whatever's on top.

Peacemaker / Hodenasone: sixnations.org
In the Friday talk and on Saturday, Jon Young described a story passed down from a group of elders. He refers to them as Hodenasone -- Ho Den uh So Ney -- and as I recall they're connected to the Mohawk and Iroqois nations. The story of the Peacemaker is from a time about a thousand years ago, when someone brought together five nations that were about to go to war with one another, and enabled them to join instead into one nation. The principles for peacemaking and for a democratic government by consensus were worked out within this arrangement, and passed down and refined over the following generations.
The Peacemaker was a legendary figure, who upon departing his earthly existence (he didn't say he was going into the woods to die, his words were "to wrap himself in bark) left a number of prophecies -- including descriptions of automobiles, etc. These prophecies were added to in the 17th century by another elder, at the time when he led the Hodenasone to take their culture "underground" to avoid persecution and cultural destruction by the incoming European peoples.

The White Roots of Peace:
There will come a time when these people come, and they will find the white roots of peace, and they will not understand what they are. They will hack at them and pull them up, and the tree of peace will lean and begin to fall. At this time the fifty chiefs must hold their arms like this (gesture of hands locking around wrists, forming a sturdy hoop of inseparable arms) and keep the tree from touching the ground.
There is a ceremony that you will perform at this time, while the elders are holding the tree off of the ground. And the next generation will be born with extraordinary gifts, and they will raise the tree with those gifts.

This ceremony was passed down over the generations, but not used until during the Cold War when the fifty chiefs agreed. The generation in question would have been born [starting] in the sixties, according to this retelling.

Now that the work is beginning, somebody quipped, This is great. Keep at it, and we're definitely going to see a real difference in about 200 years.

That's the story.

Principles of peacemaking that accompany this story: )

1) (inner) Peace
2) The Good Message
3) Exchange the Good Messages until the discussion stabilises: consensus.
4) When this process fails, it indicates there is grief unresolved. invoke the fourth principle (something like healing, or "baggage handling" -- direct translation is difficult.)

What does inner peace mean? Participants submitted parts of the definition -- one good one was, you're sitting beside the river, and the river is your mind. It still flows and churns, but you are able to decide when to jump in or not to jump in at all. Another was, No-thought. My contribution was physical symptoms -- a relaxation from tension, an ability to avoid speaking from emotion or out of turn.

What is The Good Message? It's speaking from this internal place of peace, and choosing your best words.

Consensus is not necessarily complete agreement -- you speak back and forth using your best Good Messages, until the conversation stabilizes. When that happens, you know what the common ground is, and where you will agree to disagree/ to not know.

The Fourth, the "baggage handler" -- described above, it's difficult to translate. [It seems like this is where the cultural crossover is most critical -- if we don't even have a word for this kind of healing, or grief-processing, how do we work with this system? This seems like an essential starting-point. Even knowing it's needed, and a word for it is needed, probably helps. But how can the lesson be complete when this fourth thing is not fully handed down? Maybe it's a specialized skill -- like the medics to an army of soldiers, the grief-handlers would be to this model...]

These are supposed to be the guidling principles of good government.
The litmus test of a good decision is: Does this bring peace to me, to us here in this room, does it bring peace to my family, does it offer peace to the seventh generation?

As leaders, we have the responsibility to hold a plan of abundant life for the seventh generation. We may fear that thigns will be otherwise -- but we act from our best visions, and take the actions most likely to bring our hopes to pass.

In the dictionary, the definition of "Sacred" is a circular set of synonyms having to do with religious practice.
An alternate definition, using this principle of inner peace:
Anything that brings people to this place of peace, is sacred. That's what sacred is. In different cultures, it may be the inside of a church, or a sacred grove or waterfall, a physical practice like hula or meditation, or any art. [aside: Another definition I remember, is "something sacred is worthwhile for its own sake, its worth does not depend on any ulterior purpose."]

In one previous workshop, Jon asked if anyone was familiar with any activity or practice that produced all seven symptoms of a person at peace [his tone was open and curious]. One participant suggested "Surfing." Then he said, Except for the "being helpful" part. Yet Jon remembered seeing the same guy automatically unloading and waxing his guests' boards while they were getting ready for a lesson, so that made surfing a candidate for all seven.

Where do you suppose is the most difficult setting to practice peacemaking? At home. Therefore, a proverb / maxim:
If you cannot practice peacemaking at home, don't try it in public.

Quips and asides: Proverbs are interesting -- one from a Kenyan elder goes: Never walk over your own footsteps -- It means death.

Our DNA is a living record of the whole journey of our history. (One possible significance of being among the most recently-evolved species on Earth, is that we can sympathetically enter into the experience of almost all the other species. We have the ability to relate. Our embryo goes through most of the phases of life on earth -- and our DNA goes back even further than the first cell, it includes the mineral history before that.)


Back to the main stem:
Jon has now referred several times to the "Seven Symptoms" or "Seven Signs" of a person who has inner peace. We are all becoming very curious to know what they are...

Jon dismisses us for lunch.

After lunch, he makes it clear that he knows we are curious, and will tell us after another set of activities.

We number off into five groups, and head outdoors. There are something like sixty participants; we briefly enjoy being evenly divisible by five. Each group is led by at least two assistants from the Trackers Northwest group, who had met with Jon before lunch to finalize plans.

Activities include:
"Becoming animals," moving our bodies in imitation as we imagine a succession of animal and even plant existences. We flap, crawl, roll, and run on the wet grass.

We are encouraged to take off our shoes if we like.

Sensory Immersion: we proceed, follow-the-leader style, to a particular corner, which is awkwardly still occupied by the previous group. After some quiet back-and-forth by the guides, we move back a little ways and get our next instructions: we are to use all our senses to experience the plants on this corner. Touch, smell, taste if we like. Bury our faces in them. Love them. (and if any of the rose petals happen to want to come off into our hands, one of the guides has been thinking of making a rose-petal cordial. But no plucking is necessary -- just experience the rose, and see if it has any petals it's ready to give.).
Once the other group has moved on, we gather on the corner, still exploring the plants, and the guides group us into a circle.
"Owl Eyes"
They give us an exercise: fix your eyes on a distant point, and let your peripheral vision take over. After a few instances of this, keeping our eyes fixed, we are encouraged to notice other senses' contributions -- sounds nearby and in the distance, smells and sensations coming on the wind. We shut our eyes to concentrate on these.
a little, mosquito-like sound circles the group - one of the guides, providing an aural panorama....

Storytelling: We open our eyes, and the "mosquito" guide goes back the other way, letting everyone see the joke. Then he tells a story, a borrowed legend explaining why we should be grateful to mosquitos, full of marvelous caricatures of Snake and World-Maker and the little humans just so big. (I will relate it at length another time, as this is going to be more than long enough already).

We move on. Throughout this process, the guides have been handing us off one to the next team.
The guides bring us stealthily creeping, follow-the-leader, to the next activity -- one takes a handful of raffia from the waiting guide, and hands it to each of us in little bundles. The waiting guide begins to twist it together in the middle, untwists a few times and repeats, as we watch and begin to do the same.
Then he begins to twist it further down, into cordage.
We emulate.
Then he begins twisting faster, with a practiced motion.
Some of us continue to emulate.
Then the other guide pulls his hat over his eyes, so he can do it blindfold.
I try it with my eyes closed, then open again, watching the precise motion he is using, trying it several ways.
[good glory, it's past 2am]
The other guide begins to gesture with her own hands, as she works on her cord, inviting us to lift our eyes to the treetops and birds around us instead of watching our hands. Then she indicates she is hearing something - birds - that way. We listen.
(this one was called Busy Hands; I would call it Silent Cordage)

Eventually, I don't remember how, we are moved on to the next place. After introducing the activity, we are invited to put our cordage away for later.

Birdplay
We act out a "play," in which several groups of birds undertake different behaviors as one guide narrates -- and then another becomes a hawk disrupting the behavior -- and we react and then all fall silent.

Nearby, we do "Deer Ears" -- we cup our hands around our ears, saying "These are my Deer Ears" (we are encouraged to imagine how adorable a herd of third-graders looks doing this) and tilting our hands akilter, forward, and back to experience the differences in the sounds we hear (both of our own voice as we repeat "these are my deer ears," and of the ambient sounds).
Then we close our eyes, listen for the nearest bird, move toward it a little ways, and send it a "thanksgiving greeting" or silent thank-you for being part of our day.

At this point, we return to the room where we have been meeting for most of the day.
As promised, Jon has written the "seven symptoms" on the board...
and wouldn't you know that's the page of my notes that's missing?

From memory:

The first, and pre-condition, is this sense of peace --
(Incidentally, that was what all of our outdoor experiences were designed to create -- and most of us did raise our hands when we were asked if we'd gotten to experience "quiet mind".)

1) (inner) peace, quiet mind.

The others, which can come in any order, include:

2) Health / Well-Being / Eats healthy, sleeps soundly
3) Vitality / Aliveness / Quickness
4) Helpfulness / Awareness / pro-active
5) Happiness / Joy / Childlike
6) Loves Nature
7) Loves People

These, according to the teacher, are not guaranteed to anyone indefinitely -- they are qualities we experience, moment by moment, and we are lucky to keep them for long.

One of the elders Jon had worked with believed that these signs indicated Those Who Are Chosen To Lead Us Into The Future. He had been observing people for decades, looking for these qualities, and was beginning to despair. Then he visited a particular school, where children were being taught in an experiential outdoor sort of way, and discovered these qualities in the children. They are Chosen! he proclaimed. Jon shakes his head, remembering, No, no, you don't _know_ these children. Most had a history of failures and misbehavior, and it was the pride of the school that the children had regained these qualities through a sort of "reprogramming..." using the learning keys above and a number of other tactics gathered from a variety of cultures and philosophies. -- a child's chart of misbehaviors, like a horse's faults, often reveals more about the adults around it than its own innate abilities.



Parting thoughts:
There were a number of questions asked throughout, as well as some final motifs.
In the surfing discussion Jon remembered that surfing started as a sacred Hawaiian tradition, and that a Hawaiian elder he knew had expressed revulsion at the attitudes of competitive professional surfers. Someone asked what the difference was? because it can't be just the fiberglass and modern materials, those also get used by surfers who relish the sacred aspects.

Jon cited a characteristic pattern of narcissistic and competitive behavior -- put down others, "Amass and Control Advantages." (Where else do we find this pattern? It permeates a lot of our institutions.)

Arts and sports _can_ be sacred; they can in some ways take the place of wilderness, as an avenue to sacred experience for urban peoples. Humanity is a nature-based system, so there is nothing to prevent people from gaining these insights in an urban setting. But some teachers do find that people with outdoor upbringing grasp these insights more easily.

Another woman asked about the difficulties of introducing large numbers of people to nature, when they don't understand it and are likely to destroy and trample it --[ I had a talk with her, and another woman who sought both of us out, at the break. (false paradox, in my view)] Jon described working with kids on walking gently, and if that's all you teach them (walk gently, Owl Eyes, Deer Ears) they will be able to learn from there.

Jon cited a disturbing trend in children growing up without access to the outdoors, or who simply don't play outside. When I asked if that could be true -- it doesn't agree with my experience, but then I was also surprised to find that teachers don't use chalk in the classroom anymore, they use whiteboards -- he cited in explicit detail: the absence of childrens' trails and footprints near the New Jersay ponds of his childhood (while the fishermens' place is still cleared, and surrounded by tangled fly-lines: the chemically-treated lawns without beaten paths or scattered toys, the absence of bicycles in the yards.

Our brain is a record of where we've been, sensually.

Walking gently, we are a keystone species with a role to play in our surroundings.

The Eastern forests as managed by the first nations had an abundance of chestnuts and edible acorns which does not naturally occur in a people-free "climax" forest.

[The same is true, I understand, in our Western landscapes where wapato and camas harvesting practices encouraged regrowth.]

[How do we teach love of, not fear of, nature?
my personal vendetta is to overcome the "sterility" approach: We Can't Touch It Or We'll Hurt It. Touch is part of our right relationship with our "mother," with our world. We just have to learn how to touch gently.
We can't make it better by putting ourselves in a womb of concrete, fed by a placenta of farms, factories, fields, mines, and highways that interact deeply with the unseen "nature" of our calendar dreams.
There is certainly a place for sanctuaries, for sacred groves and protected breeding grounds. But we'll never be able to set aside enough territory to preserve "Nature" this way, and be free to desecrate the rest.
Far better to know it, become intimate. To know where and how it's appropriate to gather, use, deposit within it according to our needs.]



References:
Paul Raisinthes (Rayzendes?) -- "Tracking and the Art of Seeing" (first reliable resource on tracking, the previous ones being remarkably full of peoples' best guesses put forth as fact when known fact failed. Western knowledge of tracking has been a slow progression to regain and record knowledge that is often more widespread in indigenous groups. Also, Paul R. studied coyotes around the Quabin reservoir, which is near where I went to college.)

John Holt -- humans as natural learners

John Taylor Gatto, sharp critique of the Western educational model, mainly focussed on it being designed to perpetuate the factory/business world model. (produce good worker-bees & managers)

Hodenasone: sixnations.org

Jake Swamp, recording of the story "Peacemaker's Journey" CV4

Medicine Story, another reference for the story of Peacemaker

Pramod Parajuli (PSU) has a recording of "The Faithkeeper" with Bill Moyer

Jean Huston, "Manual for the Peacemaker"

Paul Wallace, "White Roots of Peace"

Mike McDonald -- Iroquois teacher -- people with nature experiences tend to grasp peacemaking more readily

The Last Child in the Woods: Nature Deficit Disorder...

Tending the Land: Kat Anderson

Tommy McKoy thmckoy at pdx edu contact for NW Trackers TrackersNW/ PSU PIIECL program (environmental and cultural leadership are the "ECL") who sponsored the workshop.