Following is a new post from the Blueberry Moon by Rose, a seeker at Waabanong. A few more stories from this moon are at her website, metraylor.com.

Not-Doing

“How can my suns be so full of meaning, and yet I feel so purposeless?” I asked Chris as we watched children cavorting in the water, bathed in the intense golden light before evening. I didn’t expect an answer. It was the question I’d been asking myself the past few suns as in the still spaces –between gathering firewood, milkweed, boughs, playing with children, cooking, getting to know the people around me– I would suddenly wonder, But what does it all mean?

Squinting at me against the glare cutting across the tree line on the western shore of the lake, Chris listened to me seriously through the splashing and screams of laughter. With his wavy, graying hair down, the shape of his beard and the fine, aristocratic features of his face have always led me to imagine him serving some Spanish court. Or as a big cat, calmly watching, relaxed and always a predator.

Later in our conversation he told me, “Energy conservation. That’s really important for you. Every time you ask yourself, ‘Okay, what do I do next,’ don’t. The Toltecs called it literally ‘not-doing.’ It’s important that we stay engaged, and it’s also important that we have those spaces of rest to rejuvinate ourselves so we can give to our circle.”

The moon has died and her belly swelled with life again, and after three suns of closely packed meetings and relaxing in between, I’m ready to do. The sun is setting, yet I feel like I’ve done so little, I think, I still haven’t gotten my fishing gear together, or I could work on my tomahawk handle… or I could watch the sunset.

Meeting Joanna, our resident master of hook and line, I get a kit together under her supervision. The colors in the sky have faded and I wonder if there will be anything left to see as I pad down the trail to the swim area through a tunnel of fragrant zhingob saplings.

Settling down on the rock-shored beach, I prop my feet on the wave-worn log. My few framed by the sweeping branches of cedar and pine, I wonder how I could have possibly thought that these faded colors would somehow be less than their earlier glory.

Silhouetted conifer spires line the western sky along the shore of the lake, tipped with a warm rose that fades to beige. I’ve never thought of beige as a sensual color, the shade of prefab middle class housing developments and the pants of young urban professionals. But here, a swathe of color that fades to a shade I can only describe as dust, then to a powdery blue, all mirrored in the rippled canvas of the lake, it has a delicious richness I’ve never seen before.

I notice the globes of sturdy needles of the red pine bowing over the water, each spine etched against the sky. A fat-bellied spider wends her way from one puff to the next, as if walking on air. I feel myself drawn into the flow of photosynthesis, imagining for the first time in conscious memory drinking in the sunlight from such a narrow, tough surface, feeling the bloodstream of the tree flushing from needle to trunk, then breathing out again, releasing oxygen, which I drink into my lungs.

The following is a post from Rose, a Seeker staying at Waabanong. She has a few more stories at her own website, metraylor.com.

“Okay, Andre. Ant traps. Let’s do it.”

We’ve been talking about it for suns, each trip delayed by another soggy thunderstorm. Jason tags along, and I watch his nutshell of a canoe skim the waves, prow a fingerlength above the water as Andre and I steadily paddle across the lake.

“Blueberries!” Jason exclaims as we haul the canoes up the steep bank of the landing on the northwestern corner of the lake. “Dey are ready!”

“They look like they could ripen a little more to me,” I tell them, wincing as I imagine all the bushes stripped while the berries are still green. A few are blushing a tempting purple, but nowhere near their final dreamlike blue. I’m feeling anxious to get the kids moving; taking children along on my foraging trips tends to cut them short, and I have yet to give myself graciously to the inevitability.

“Nooo, dey are ready. Dey are blue!”

“You’re bonkers,” Andre informs me, elbow deep with Jason in blueberry bushes. I manage to coax them up the hill, over a valley in the sweet forest and through a waist high meadow of feathery bracken fern and stocky milkweed to the first trap. Lifting the layers of bark stacked on the anthill one by one, I’m not sure what to expect. But nestled under the last layer we find a pile of creamy capsules, rapidly swarmed by their guardian sisters who clutch them in their mandibles and scurry down tunnels.

“Get ’em, get ’em!” Andre says, reaching into the pile.

“Let me try one!” Jason says. “Ow! Ow! Shit! Ohmygott! Ow!”

I could never have imagined myself sticking my bare hand into a swarming nest of red ants, but there I am, stuffing my mouth with fistfuls of ants, larvae, and debris. This particular variety of ants is sharply lemony, the rich, juicy larvae popping between my teeth, the satisfaction dimmed by the grit. The air is perfumed with vinegar so thickly it almost burns my eyes as the ants spray their alarm signal.

Stirring up the nest again and replacing the stack of bark, we climb the bank to an overgrown logging road strewn with ant empires, the flight of tiny grasshoppers heralding our coming.

“Did you set up this one?” Andry asks, pointing to a nest with more square footage than my tent, a mountain of sawdust under a fallen red pine riddled with a labyrinth of industrious galleries. “Fridolin and I got so much here. Like, hundreds.”

Scraping away the surface layer of the hill, we hit gold.

“Does anyone have a bandana?” Andre says in his frantic mumble, looking around wildly. “Get a bandana, get a bandana!” I have a bandana and I’m not sure what he wants to do with it as I belatedly fumble it from my belt. “Put the eggs on there!” He keeps calling them eggs and as I follow his urgent direction I keep wanting to tell him they’re not eggs, they’re larvae.

Jason stomps away, arms flailing. “AHHHHH! Dey are in my pants!” I can feel a few scurrying through my leg hair, unaware that they are scaling their predator.

We bundle up the bandana, more than a fist sized ball, briskly brushing ourselves free of incensed, battle-ready ants.

The last trap is in a little meadow thick with milkweed and raspberry. As we push through the thicket between the meadow and the trail, Jason drops into a crouch and disappears.

“Strawberries!” he exclaims. “Dey’re not done!” Andre disappears next, and I hear them crawling through the brambles.

“Remember the Rule of Three, guys. If we see three of a plant, we take one. Same for berries. That way the rest can go to seed and we’ll have more berries next Turn.”

A pause.

Andre: “What?” He says it as if it is the most bizarre and unbelievable thing he has ever heard in his dozen Turns of life.

Jason has not nearly the passion for ant larvae that he does for fruit and keeps busily harvesting, but Andre loves them enough to pull himself away from the call of the strawberries. This trap yields only a palmful of larvae that I offer to an enthused Andre, who starts eagerly popping them into his mouth.

“Okay, guys, that’s the last one. Let’s head back ho–”

“More strawberries!”

“I want to eat these eggs,” Andre says.

“Can we go sit in the shade, then?” I ask, resigned. I’m tired, and I can feel the heat pounding my head. We find a shady spot to lounge while Andre tries to winnow his larvae from the debris with a thin stream of breath. Jason, who I can’t ever remember touching me, settles into my body like a couch, giggling. I smile, wrapping an arm around him, using the other hand to snatch at a deerfly. Andre resorts to picking out larvae one by one, and Jason lays across my middle, scouring those five square feet for every strawberry.

By the time we reach the canoe landing, the stiff wind that feels so refreshing on my skin has turned the lake into a gauntlet of waves. Andre and I can barely make it away from the shore in our two person canoe, and Jason is rapidly being blown into a cove. We manage to drag our canoes together by hauling ourselves along a fallen tree, and Jason and I lash his canoe to ours with a shoelace to tow him back.

“Heave!” I shout, as if we are pirates on a galley behind our oars, and Jason laughs over the wind behind us. “Heave!” Each stroke feels like I’m paddling something the consistency of pudding.

“We can’t get stuck in his cove,” Andre shouts over his shoulder. “My mom and Gio got stuck there when it was really windy and they couldn’t get out. They had to portage.”

“Keep paddling!”

We inch our way across the lake, and as we wind our way to the water of the swim area, I see Chris and Kerstin talking. Then I watch them watch us, bemused, as we literally get blown backwards.

“Heave! Heave!”

This quarter moon (the first of the Raspberry Moon) we have updates from the Seekers again! The following is a post from Dakota, and we will be updating tomorrow with stories from Rose.

Following is a post from the Rainbows.

One moon has gone by since we left to be on our own. Two moons since we have been part of nature.

We don’t have a clock–we have sun and the moon.

We don’t need shampoo–the lake makes our hair so soft.

We can drink wild water.

Our nails we cut with our knife.

Toilet paper has grown since our first moons. Leaves, sphagnum moss.

We realize how interesting every day tasks are here! Sometimes if I sit under a tree for a little bit out in the wilderness, a bird, who doesn’t see me, sits close to me and I can watch it while I sit there. Or a little spider comes to say hello.

We don’t miss salt–our meals taste so good without it.

In our heart we are so thankful to be here–to have the possibility to live one turn of the seasons in the wilderness.

We have time to look to the sky, the clouds.

I have time to climb trees, how long it has been since the last time I’ve done that. It felt so wonderful to sit at the top of a big tree!

We cook on open fire. The eggs, too. Or we cook with hot stones.

A few of us have made spoons and bowls that we use now.

We sharpen our knives with flat stones.

With roots, we make rope.

We dug deep holes for our food-pit, to store food in, and it stays really cold in there.

We enjoy this primitive life. We have all we really need. This is luxury for us. This is, for us, modern life. We are so happy to not have to sit in front of a computer or in a car or use a phone. Don’t have to go shopping, or hear the news.

Migwech

We want to share a little about our time. For one and a half moons we have lived in the wilderness, and we are getting more and more wild. We enjoy being outside the whole sun in nature and living in the natural rhythm. Drinking wild water, cooking with fire, eating greens from the woods–all these are a part of each sun.

We have been lucky with the weather. Not a lot of rain–warm, sunny weather. The children and us parents love canoeing.

We are still vegetarian and don’t feel a need to eat meat, bearfat, or fish at all.

We are surrounded by many noises–birds are singing, frogs, sometimes we hear coyotes or wolves. Our neighbors are porcupine, squirrels, and some unknowns.

We love to be in the woods! Right now, for about more or less 14 suns, we have lived on the other side of the lake–without the clan. Something was happening that we could not support and we needed to take a stand–and that was that we leave the clan. We are not able anymore to stand with our heart, soul, and our Whole Person, in the Family Yearlong, but we want to have a yearlong in the wilderness. So we are looking forward–greetings from the other side of the lake, from the wilderness.