If you’re coming to the Creating a Culture of Nature Connection talks in Southern Ontario between March 4-7, 2010, you might enjoy engaging in some of the material I will be covering in advance. How cool is that?! A chance to try some exercises out before you even get there! Even if you’re not coming, check this out and see how you like it! Tell your friends about it.

If you don’t have time, you might just want to read this through. It’s up to you. Enjoy!

Each day between now (Friday, February 26) and the talks I will add to this post another way to connect with nature. These can build on each other or you can grab on here or there. What’s important is to have fun! Each post has something to think about, a new way of looking at things, as well as an optional activity. My intent is to gain some interaction between you and I before the talks.

A Few Ways to Engage:

1. Read one or all the posts before you come to the talk, send me your comments.
2. Try one of these ways and tell me what difference it made for you that day.
3. Try all of these activities and share with me the impact doing all of them had on your primary relationships.

4. Interact with others participating in these exercises and talks around Ontario on the Art of Mentoring Facebook Group

5. Please send me questions and comments about what you are wanting in your life right now. I will do my best to incorporate those into my talks. Categories to consider: How is your connection to yourself? Nature? Family? Community? Personal purpose?

See you soon!

Mark

Introduction to the Exercises:

Give up Something.

Most of the time what’s stopping me from nature connection is me. Habits I have that disconnect me. For example, Internet time (read cell phone, twitter, facebook, email etc.). No Internet before 9 am. That would be a start. Or no internet after 6pm. Omigod! What am I going to do with all that extra time?

Quick ! Make a new Daily Habit. (outdoors)

I am going to recommend something tiny here. The smaller the better. Otherwise the large commitments end up being a clever form of sabotage.

Two practices that will support the 7 ways to Nature Connection:

A. Create a sitting place no more than 1 minute from the front door of your dwelling. Agree to go there every day for 7 days. Minimum 10 minutes each time. (notice how measurable this is)

or

B. Walk around your dwelling at half to quarter speed every morning. Stop 4 times in each of the cardinal directions for 1 minute. Make the loop no more than 10 minutes in duration.

Okay, here we go…

Day One:

Eyes: We, as humans, are a visual animal. We have a bias towards the visual. Breaking that habit will require a new commitment to your other senses as if they matter. Practice peripheral vision on your walk or at your sit spot. This means imagine that you are an owl and that you can’t move your eyeballs (glued in the sockets), so you put your attention on the edges of what you are seeing, up and down, left and right. It makes your focus go a little fuzzy, but it’s a good trade for how relaxing it can be. Imagine you are giving your brain a chance to relax out of focused attention to natural awareness. This is your only task today!

Day Two: (Eyes plus Ears)

Ears: Listen. Listen beyond the close sounds. What is the farthest sound you can hear? Include natural and man-made sounds. How many airplanes went by? How many different bird sounds can you keep track of? Notice that the wind blowing through different tree species makes different sounds. Close your eyes for while.

Day Three: (Eyes plus Ears plus Touch)

Touch: Have you ever ran your hand up and down the bark of a tree and imagined the texture that it has? It is so reliable as a tree id tool. Close your eyes and rotate very slowly, feel the whispers of wind on your cheeks and the heat of the sun on your skin. Does your nose change temperature as the moisture in the air changes? How? Allow yourself to touch things with your hands, when you normally wouldn’t. Grab snow. Place your cool hands upon your face, breathe.

Day Four: (Eyes plus Ears plus Touch plus Smell)

Smell: My nose is so small compared with my large eyes and ears. Imagine what a Dog can smell! Perhaps 100 times better than us. Hmmm. Does that mean I could smell an apple pie, inside my neighbors house, a block away ? Or detect the smell of bacon from the pantleg of a person that ate it that morning in a bacon infused kitchen, that brushed a twig, yesterday ?

Expand your mind, expand your awareness on what you can smell. Salmon smell their way back home, 100’s of miles. What is the home you are smelling back to ?

Day Five: ( Eyes plus Ears plus Touch plus Smell plus Taste)

Taste: This is a good one. We eat all the time, but how often are we really slowing down to taste? Imagine the difference between a rushed meal on your way out the door, and tasting your food the way a Sommalier, or professional wine taster would savour each mouthful. How many times have you looked down and found your plate empty? Whoa! I wish I could accuse someone of stealing but the only person here, is me! Taste your food without salt. Skip sugar for a day. Outdoor option: expand your sense of smell the way you expanded your vision days ago. Put a couple of pine needles in your mouth (they are edible, but be sure it’s a pine). Chew and experience one of the most potent and free sources of Vitamin C ! (a handful is 5 x the vit C of an orange) Spit out roughage.

Day Six: Combine Them All!

All Senses: Combine them all for a minimum of 1 minute. Sounds easy? Tell me how long you went afterward. Focus on how you felt before you started and how you felt after? Note that with intense scrutiny. Write a poem or a song. Imagine that wolves spend 24/7 in this state. If they didn’t, they would die. Is that true for all animals? Is that true for us?

Day Seven: Intuition

Intuition: Ask yourself an impossible question, like “Where around my house is a natural mystery right now?” Then return to all the senses, adding one at a time, until you have all of them going. When you get to that Quiet Mind, Start walking straight towards that Natural Mystery.
Often people report all kinds of amazing experiences when they use all of their senses, and allow themselves to follow those senses. I’d love to hear your story, big or small. Please share if you’re willing. Thanks so much!

That concludes: 7 ways to Nature Connection.

Mark Morey is a nature connection blogger, international mentor, and father, from Southern Vermont. He will be visiting Ontario the first week of March to speak about the Art of Mentoring: Making healthy connections between Nature, Children, Family and Community.
www.IfNaturalLearning.Com/blog/

We didn’t travel too far on our feet, but our knowledge and awareness of the natural places found in the middle of the biggest city in the country grew perceptibly. We tracked raccoons to a den in the base of an oak tree, imagined the story behind a feather tangled in a bare shrub, dissected coyote scat, and hunkered down like miniature dinosaurs in order to interact with the two-foot-nothin’ named Ashton who spent the entire afternoon in his imagination and spoke almost solely in T-Rex roars.

Andrew was especially good at connecting on a physical level with our little dinosaur, who despite his uncoordinated hurtling through bush and branch was successfully prevented from falling head first into the den of a now-fitfully slumbering mammal, whose warm breath had condensed to form a tell-tale ring of hoar frost around the mouth of its hole.

Three hours passed quickly, frozen toes be darned, in child-led socratic discussions about animal prints frozen into the mud, tree species, and what our coyote might have had for lunch.

Perhaps my favourite moment was turning from an involved discussion with one of the pink-clad girls about a snail shell to see Andrew shimmying up a tree, channeling his primate ancestry. He broke off a couple of dead twigs, dropped from the tree and cracked them afresh, handing the halves to us to smell. The aroma was sweet and perfume-y — a bit like Eucalyptus — but it was in fact the secretions of the rare carolinian sassafras tree, for which High Park is only one of a handful of habitable enclaves in the GTA.

It was a satisfying way to spend a Sunday afternoon. I kept a twig of sassafras in my coat pocket to take out and smell the next morning when I was back in my cubicle at work, and daydreamed of foxes curled in their dens awaking to the roar of a T-Rex in a blue snow suit.

Tracking Club Participant

	Presenters
Mark Morey	and	Dan Gardoqui
Mark Morey is a creative artist, visionary educator, cultural engineer, and consultant who designs regenerative holistic communities with timeless native principles. He founded or co-founded three transformational organizations in the last 12 years: Deep Wilds, Vermont Wilderness School, and the Institute for Natural Learning, sparking a nature and community awareness movement in the Northeast impacting 5,000 adults and children today. He has facilitated wilderness survival and spiritual passages for teens and adults since 1997, including over 35 week-long Art of Mentoring passages for adults, and 5 years of Sacred Fire rites of passage for boys. Mark feels inspired by the hero’s journey model and the oral history of his ancestors and native people around the world. Mark’s passion for environmental healing and consciousness has gained him wide recognition as a leader in earth centered learning.		Dan is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of White Pine Programs, an organization dedicated to nature based learning for all ages, located in Southern Maine. Dan also serves as science faculty at Granite State College, where he teaches natural history and winter ecology. He has been studying naturalist skills, wildlife tracking, and mentoring since 1990. Dan has spent over 20 years in a mentoring relationship with Jon Young, founder of the Art of Mentoring, and has been facilitating Art of Mentoring courses for over 10 years. Dan holds a Master’s Degree in Natural Resources, is a Certified Wilderness First Responder, Certified in Wildlife Track & Sign (level III), and is a Registered Maine Guide. Dan likes to spend quality time hunting, tracking, and being a dad.

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If you’re like us, you know that kids need to spend more time in nature (there is plenty of research showing that the same is true for adults too). You’re likely already hearing about the Children and Nature Network, and about Nature Deficit Disorder. And yet the problem grows.

Quotes such as:“I like to play inside because that’s where all  the outlets are.”are spelling out the dangers associated with a childhood disconnected from outdoor experiences and free play. Its undeniable: children have far less free play time today (or freedom in general) than older generations enjoyed as children.

Think back…what was your childhood like? How did you spend your time? What did you love doing most, and when were you happiest?

For many, these questions elicit stories of treehouses and forts, roaming wild and turning over rocks to see what lay underneath, or just playing with friends out on the street or around the corner.

This post is a shout out to some amazing places out there today, working hard to get kids back to being kids, to playing outside, unplugging, and just letting “nature take it’s course”, so to speak. Much of this work is having a profound impact on children, yet we must do more. This initiative is fighting against an entire culture leading children and adults into ever more structured, ever more technological lives. It’s everywhere. It’s what’s cool. This must change.

At some point we need to create space for time outdoors, playing, being creative in our own ways. We need to make time for wandering and imagining. We need to be able to have adventures so that we have stories to tell.

If we’re to be successful at reconnecting children (and people in general) to nature and the environment around them, we must create a culture around this goal that is powerful. This isn’t easy, but there is a way. Join us to find out more about how you can create a culture of nature connection in your life, your home and your community.

Create a Culture of Nature Connection Speaking and Workshop Tour

Tour Details: click to reserve your seats!

Check out these links for others doing great things with getting kids outside and active:

and a little song to send you out!

Wow, what a day!!!!

I’m not sure what else to say… so I’ll just tell the story.

The morning started as I met Emma, one of the wonderful PINE volunteers in the Park. We talked about some questions that I had asked her previously, about how she had become connected with nature, and what mentors she had in her life.

On our way to our chat spot, we had picked up some seeds from leftover plants, standing as remnants of the vibrance of the 2009 growing season.

Goldenrod and burdock, along with some seeds from avens were on our hands, closely followed by a series of chickadees, buzzing back and forth to check out our offerings. They weren’t that pleased, but very curious.

As our first of 9 Coyote Pups (the home school program for 4-8 year olds) arrived, we went off to greet and hear their stories. It was nice to see them after time away, and they had plenty to tell.

As the third one arrived, we were gifted with what looked like a Cooper’s Hawk or a Peregrine Falcon (what are ways to tell these two birds apart?) swooping down to hit another smaller bird, and then landing on the ground about 40 yards to the NorthWest of us, beside a set of stairs, under some brush. We became quiet. We snuck up for a closer look. Slowly.

Imagine a 1 grown man, 1 grown woman, three 4 & 5 year olds in puffy snowsuits, and a host of parents (and smaller children in tow) sneaking up on a very aware bird of prey. Are you laughing? The swishy sound of snowpants drawn out over a very slow and deliberate sneaky movement is something that always kinda makes me laugh.

Anyhow, the bird of prey moved once (to a better spot for us to view) and then took off after a few minutes to enjoy it’s breakfast in peace.

We went back to meet the others having had this adventure, asking questions such as: I wonder what that bird had to teach us?

We discussed. We met the other five young pups that would join us the day, and circled up with parents and siblings to prepare and mention a few things we were thankful for. A warm winter day was one of them. Birds were definitely another.

Setting out on our adventure (and saying goodbyes to moms and dads) we roared off to the South, and told stories of the birds landing on our hands earlier in the morning. Everyone went searching for seeds. The boys were pretty amazing at getting burrs on pretty much everything, and finding plenty of seeds along the way.
We stood still and watched as chickadees, nuthatches, and even a downy woodpecker came and checked us out. Two birds landed on hands, one being the woodpecker! Amazing!

We thanked the birds, and took off into the woods, soon finding some amazing trees to climb. Coyote pups turned into monkeys. We found signs of Raccoons and Squirrels in the trees, and played until we were hungry.
Two of our boys led the way to a cool stick fort they knew of, to find shelter for our snack. They helped others up and down steep hills, and also took off sliding down hills and rolling all over the place. We snacked and played in the fort, finding the remains of stinging nettle near by, a great plant for teas and a delicious spinach substitute.

More tree climbing and exploring, some snacking and some laughs later, we were ready to head back. Our path back lead us along a cool swampy area, and we even found the remains of a possum, that looked as though it had been killed by a coyote. We examined some of the ways which possums are different from other animals, and how they survive, thanked it for it’s sacrifice and for teaching us, and then ran back to see mom’s and dads. Just before we arrived, we got to identify one of our best awareness tools (poison ivy!) in the winter, helping us to stay safe and keep our awareness high.

Upon arriving back we had plenty of stories to tell, and some to hear from little brothers and sisters, and parents that had been off on their own adventures!

I’m so thankful for this day. I’m so thankful that despite all the work I do on a computer, there are little ones out there with the zest for life to go on these adventures, and make them so much more than they would be otherwise! Can’t wait to see you all next week!

-Andrew

Delicious, highly nutritious, and free! Yes, ACORNS make flour that you can use in a variety of different recipes, from pancakes to breads, cookies and more!
It’s been said that humans have eaten more acorns (by mass) over history than any other food. Oak trees grow all over the world in different forms, and their acorns are virtually all edible (some better than others). They are easy to collect, if you’re willing to go up against the odd squirrel   and they have tons of protein and good fats in them. They store easily, and are relatively large for your effort. Perfect winter food!
This past holidays, I made some yummy cookies using acorn flour that I had processed from local acorns, collected here in Toronto with a friend. The recipe I used was great, from a book called Extravaganza (spelled Extra Vegan Za… highly recommended) and all the kids and moms in our home school program loved it!

Eddie and Julie of Practical Primitive just came through this fall to teach courses on acorn preparation, storage and use. We hope to have them around again soon, but until we do, check out their website… there’s plenty of good content there and in the newsletter they put out.

Acorn Oatmeal Lemon Fig cookies:

Directions:
In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt and cinnamon.  In a separate bowl, mix oil, syrup, vanilla, lemon rind and sugar, whisking until thoroughly combined. Pour into dry ingredients and stir together. Fold in oats and figs. Roll small, stick balls onto oiled cookie sheets and back in preheated (375F) oven for 12-15 min.

Ingredients:
2 cups Acorn Flour or substitute
1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp sea salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 cup natural oil (such as olive or sunflower)
1/2 cup maple syrup
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 tsp lemon rind
1/2 cup organic sugar
2/3 cup large rolled oats
1/5 cups figs, chopped into small pieces

Tonight is the release party for the winter issue of spacing magazine. Come on out to the event, or pick up a copy of the best urban mag around, as it’s all about wildlife in the city. There’s even an article on the PINE Tracking and Nature club. Woohoo!

Check out the Tracking and Nature Club page, and past blog posts to learn more.

Thank you snow!!!

This past weekend p.i.n.e. ran a nature and survival skills workshop with a leadership class at Rosseau Lake College, in Rosseau, ON. We’re feeling really thankful to have had the chance to spend some amazing time outside of the city. Though our mission is to provide nature education in the spaces and places where people live, sometimes it’s inspiring and wonderful for us to get to more natural settings, and work with people in their backyard, rather than always being in our own.

We managed to fit in some great tracking time, finding 12 wild turkeys. We also spent a good chunk of time chasing and hiding on each other, tracking different members of the group. Some of the students loved the turkeys so much they chased them through the forest! Turns out turkeys are quick.
We spent time playing with three different types of friction fire (hand drill, bow drill and pump drill), and spent a good chunk of time inside working on some new winter mitts and other crafty projects.

Thanks so much to all who participated and joined in the fun! You guys were awesome, and hope you keep heading out and having adventures together throughout the year.

Many thanks and much love,

Jamie and Andrew

A second winter program info night has been rescheduled for next Thurs, Jan. 7th.

Please click here for more information and to book a seat.