Prior to the start of Summer Quarter, 2009

Prior to the start of Summer Quarter, 2009

I have been living near Meadowbrook Pond for seven years now and up until the spring of 2009 I think I have only visited the area twice and on both occasions I only stayed very briefly.
My first visit to Meadowbrook with the intention of surveying the area for my study in the Kamana Naturalist Course was in the beginning my Spring Quarter of 2009 at Antioch. I was to choose a personal practice for my Transformative Leadership course and after a few different attempts I chose to make Meadowbrook Pond the spot for my personal practice and place of daily reflection.
I returned the next day to photograph the area for my Transformative Leadership reports and to send to Dan Corcoran, my future advisor at the Wilderness Awareness School. Above are the photographs that I took that day.




Below is my Personal Practice report from Transformative Leadership back in my spring quarter.


Assignment 2: Personal Practice
Intention: To increase insight and self-awareness: to develop reliance on intuition: and to increase the ability to stay grounded in who you are.
Background: Our intentions are often sabotaged when a lack of awareness of our own assumptions, beliefs and patterns of thinking distort our perception. Likewise, in the hustle of every-day living, and external pressures to conform, we may find it difficult to discern our own inner wisdom. We often become mechanistic, relying on our mental, conceptual ability and excluding other sources of knowing. Adopting a personal practice for the duration of the course will provide an opportunity to experiment with one way to stay grounded and aware, and to access more of your personal resources.
Strategy: Select one practice that you can commit to, on a daily, or at least several-days-a-week basis, for the duration of the course. A practice may be meditation, a daily walk, exercise, inspirational reading, journaling, gardening, etc. On the day of your team’s completion of the assignment below, please be prepared to discuss your journey with the class.


Kamana is:
The Kamana Naturalist Training Program is a four level home study course that covers the naturalist background needed to engage in the wilderness arts, including tracking, bird language, survival and native living skills, traditional herbalism, and naturalist mentoring.
It is the ultimate blueprint for a student's time spent in the field and in conducting nature-related research. Students become confident naturalists, melding modern field ecology with the skills of a native scout. Naturalist and tracker Jon Young, who uniquely designed it to model the process in which Tom Brown, Jr. mentored him as a boy, wrote it.
Kamana is completed "at your own pace and at your own place." It may take one to four years total to complete all four levels of the program.

Since I already have had previous experience with courses like this, Dan at WAS is starting me out at Level II
A two large parts of all the Kamana levels are

Field Exercise One: Finding a Secret Spot
This is an area you visit on a regular basis where you will practice exercises that expand your awareness of nature and knowledge of place. You'll discover it's much more that just picking a spot to sit in the woods. All future exercises will stem from this searching and mapping experience
My "secret" spot (no longer a secret, is the Thorton Creek Greenspace located in Meadowbrook Park.
http://www.seattleurbannature.org/Resources/NEmaps/ne-7.html
You are supposed to pick a space you can easily get to on a daily basis. Meadowbrook is a 5-minute bike ride from my house.

Field Exercise Two: The Sense Meditation
Learning to overcome that little "voice" that prevents us all from really tuning into the language of nature. In other words, "Lose your mind and come to your senses!"
This is really the Personal Practice for Transformative Leadership. I know I will be continuing this after this quarter, I thought I would utilize this assignment to get in the habit.
Deliverables for this assignment and the Kamana course will be journaling, personal and field notes.

There is a lot more to Kamana II, which I will get to in my summer course.

This is also a personal practice that serves my assignment from my monthly men's group. I have been assigned to take better care of myself.
I had a physical exam shortly after my daughter was born and right before I started grad school here at Antioch. It was an extremely thorough. I even had an Echo Cardio test done by a cardiologist. The results of my exam concluded that I was healthy as a horse. My blood pressure was just below 120 over 80, which is a normal blood pressure for my age and condition,
Two weeks ago my doctor told me my blood pressure is now 139 over 89. 140 over 90 is considered high blood pressure. She said that the second I get onto a crowded I-5 my blood pressure will elevate to well over 140 over 90.
I haven’t checked it since then, but I am hoping that my personal practice will help bring it back down.

My Secret Spot:
Thornton Creek Greenspace located in Meadowbrook Park
* The “Secret Spot” is not necessarily a place where no one else can find out about, but more so a place that is special to me, or a place that “feels” like home. It means “special to me alone”. Jon Young has recommended a book by Forest Carter called The Education of Little Tree. In the book you will find the meaning of the Secret Spot that Young is referring to.

The Resource Trail

Response to The Resource Trail, A required reading in the Kamana II Naturalist Course- Introduction by Jon Young

Jon Young has an excellent way of communicating to potential or new students. Although is an expert in his field as a naturalist, has studied under Tom Brown Jr. and has founded the Wilderness Awareness School in Duvall, Washington, he still has the sensitivity to not intimidate those who have little to no experience with the natural world.
The majority of Western society these days has had little exposure to the natural world. Individuals cannot be blamed for their lack of exposure. It is simply the conditions in which they have been raised. Our entire Western infrastructure is designed to go against nature, not to be apart of it. One can go from a well insulated, airtight and air-conditioned house to their air-conditioned car in the garage of their suburban home to the parking garage in their office building, which is also sealed and air-conditioned. Then they can reverse the whole process at the end of the day. Exposure time to the natural world for the day: zero.
Chances are they will have a meal or two of packaged food from a grocery store that was processed at an unknown location (maybe not even in the same hemisphere). Ask where their chlorinated, fluoridated water comes from and chances are they will tell you that it comes from either the sink, the pipes or the city.

How can we remove the blinders from the people around us? According to Young, the first step in approaching an individual is to help them realize how unaware they are. An excellent tool that was developed by Young and is used by the WAS is what is called the “Alien Test”. I took the Alien Test when I began Kamana 2. It is a one hundred thirteen question test, followed by a written reflection on the experience of taking the test. The one hundred thirteen questions test your knowledge of native plants in your bioregion, what type of ticks is in your area, hydrology, local wildlife etc. I failed the test miserably, which only tells me that there is a lot I need to learn.

“Why do we despise the planet which gives us life?”
-The Last Winter (2006)

The planet we live on is sick and in danger. Why do we not treat it with the same empathy as if one of our family members were sick? Instead we have created a society that separates us from what provides us with life. And we treat that provider as a “natural resource” and we have done are best to consume as much of it as we can, as fast as we can for the sake of economic growth and progress.

How is progress measured? What are the indicators?

Tuesday, July 28, 2009
I rode my bike down to Meadowbrook a little later tonight. It was sunset when I arrived. I changed my anchor point from last night to a spot on the edge of the pond, which was only about 20 feet from where I was previously.
The temperature hit 95 today, and at sunset it was still sweltering hot. I really wanted to jump intot he pond to cool off, but that would be a sure fire way to scare off any wildlife that I was hoping to see.
I sat down on the edge of the pond and poured my self a cup of tea from my thermos. I unloaded my backpack and began paging through some of my field guides in hopes of being able to identify at least one plant or tree. I am pretty sure that I've successfully identified Poison Ivy (pictured). There are a couple other plants and trees that I have photographed but not identified yet.
There was a bit of noise coming from the other end of the pond. I took a walk down there to see what I could see. Fish were jumping out of the water all over the pond. Dragonflies buzzed around everywhere. And then, all of a sudden an animals heads pops up out of the water and starts swimming right toward me. It was a beaver bigger than my dog (I have a 50 lb Staffordshire Bull Terrier). I video taped the beaver swimming around in the pond. Check out the video I have posted.

I have allot of work ahead of me. Tonight, I came down to my secret spot with very little agenda, aside from trying to feel the place out and decide where my anchor point will be. The first place that seemed to feel right was on the side of the brook and underneath the footbridge. The bridge would provide me with a cover for when the weather was not so nice. I thought that being creek side would give me a chance to view more wildlife and the bridge would give me a little privacy without seeming creepy.
After spending twenty minutes there I explored more of the park and settled down in the sculpture area by the main pond. The is a covered bridge here, a view of the pond and overall a wider, more open space. Here I opened up my backpack and got out all my feild guides.
My attempts to identify the two different types of grasses ( or are they rushes?) right in front of me failed miserably.
There is a bit more human traffic over in this section, but overall it is really peaceful.
There is so many different types of trees , flowers, grasses and rushes that I can probably spend all week sitting here trying to identify them all. But right now if I look up I don't think I can define a single one of them with certainty. This is humbling and exciting. This is my new classroom.