10. Nature as Mentor: Wilderness Rites and Tracking — with Jon Young and Darren Silver
SYNOPSIS:
**Season finale!**
You’ve heard from many voices in previous episodes on how they’ve learned to listen deeply to the world around them. Today, as a fitting closure, we’re going to get into the HOW of all of this, so that you can embark on your own journey.
Our two guests are wildlife trackers, wilderness guides, animal language experts and nature connection mentors. What they’ll share is that lifeworlding starts in the body. It starts with core skills that were central to human cultures across time. These are ways of being that our modern world has rendered practically extinct, or perhaps all rather exotic and primitive.
There was a time in which the land spoke vividly to each and every one of us - a snapped twig on a trail, an odor on the breeze, every utterance from a bird’s beak, would be harboring a message, guiding you through the undulations of a savannah or a steep canyon, the stakes here being your survival, your family’s meal for the week, your escape from the jaws of a toothed predator. Imagine the heightened electric body of yours that pulsed through that land. This is a world I long to come home to, again and again.
These are the very things that keep me alive. Something visceral and untranslatable happens out there. When I peel away distractions and shed domestication, life becomes crystal clear. There is a sheer simplicity and poetic resonance to everything.
Our first guest Darren Silver is going to explain what quests like these entail, and why our culture so desperately needs them. For two decades he’s been working with teenagers and adults in initiatory practice, rituals and wilderness skills. After Darren, you’ll hear from Jon Yong, a renowned elder and pioneer in nature-based education, wildlife tracking, bird language, and – I can attest firsthand – a master storyteller... Jon’s two books How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World and Coyote's Guide to Connecting to Nature sit proudly on my bookshelf, tattered and dog-eared, having guided me on many an adventure. He’ll bring us delightful tales from his time with the San bushmen of Southern Africa, his love for bird language, and his friendship with a turkey named Pete.
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Nature as Mentor
QUOTES:
Jon Young
Every child is raised with the understanding that when they're out on the land, that information that they're gathering from the land, does not belong to them. It belongs to the village.
When we first make a relationship, there’s a thread that forms. The thread over time becomes a string, becomes a cord, becomes a rope. Imagine you had that bond with all things all around you. The bushmen say the ropes are made of love. And I think that's really what it is.
When you're working with an adult, you can talk theory about nature connection all day, and it doesn't do a thing. The trickiest part is to get an adult to go back and relive the childhood they didn't get — because you can't skip that. There's primary nervous system relationships that form a neural network. It has an emergent property that you can’t fake.
The children that grow up with this mentoring model are wholesome. They are vital. They're very much themselves, full of spark and life and interest in things. They are empathetic. They have this extraordinary capacity to listen.
There's no such thing as disinformation or misinformation or even interpretation. What that black headed grosbeak is saying is pure. And it's true in the spirit of that bird. The birds do not lie. They don't fabricate. They don't interpret. They express purely, and your nervous system nourishes from that like a vitamin.
There's only two creations — first creation and second creation. First creation was here on the Earth, the stars, the sun and the moon before humans showed up. Second creation is anything that comes through a human mind — belief systems, tools, clothes. They say that all the troubles we experience as human beings come from second creation. Second creation plays tricks on us.
Darren Silver
The natural world is always mirroring and reflecting back to us what is. The layers that stand between us and our true nature begin to be revealed.
The purpose of living is not to get what we want. What we are being invited to is to participate in life as a generative force.
To be in relationship with mythology keeps the story alive - in the same way that to be in relationship with a place keeps that place alive.
What we need is courage, and people who can go out there and surrender themselves to life.
Mythologies help us travel the landscapes of our interior.
We have to get real humble and go back to listening to the songline of the river, of the juniper, the cottonwood.