Drifting on the subtly rippled surface of the lake, I toss out a slug on the end of my line and take out my notebook to write.

I have just returned from eating an irresponsible quantity of raspberries.

Again.

I thought I had found a reliable metric: When they stop tasting good, stop eating them. My body sends me a gradual but clear signal– Stop, I’m sated. But some primordial urge keeps me plucking berries so ripe they look bruised, trembling pendulously from their drooping vines.

I hear Fridolin and Andrea calling to each other, trying to find their canoes on the peninsula. Fridolin sings a shamanic chant from his heart, echoing through the bog and across the water.

I haven’t intended this as a serious fishing trip. I’m borrowing someone’s slugs and it’s more a way to multitask. But bass are breaching all around me, and I spy a fat worm in the slug pile.

I’m not considered a squeamish person. I’ve dealt with any number of open wounds on humans, dogs, and horses, and I started giving my mom injections of multiple sclerosis medication when I was nine. I still squirm in empathy with the half worm I’ve cut with my thumbnail as I push the hook through his body, imagining an echo of a barbed iron spike being driven through my ribcage and belly.

No sooner do I toss him overboard into a bed of rushes off the tip of the peninsula than the chip of red pine bark I’ve wound the line around bobs under, and I haul in a lovely medium-sized bass. She flops for her life as I carefully hold the rest of my line out of the way to keep it from getting tangled. Wrapping my hand around her supple, armored body behind the gills, I silently thank her for her life, and acknowledge the pain of the death blow I’m about to deliver.

I’m always sad when I kill. I don’t try to stop the sadness. I embrace it, accept it. It feels right. I am ending a life in one manifestation so that it can continue in another– the life of my people, literally, as the bass’ flesh becomes our flesh; psycho-emotionally, as we honor our relationship with the bass by celebrating their wonder and hunting them respectfully with regard to their needs as a species; and spiritually, as the spirit of Bass becomes the spirit of Human. Human blood becomes mosquito’s flesh becomes dragonfly becomes bass.

The Hoop of Life, the food chain, it’s all the same thing.

Stuffed full of two dozen little crispy fish and the good fellowship of my campmates, I slowly pick through the brief stretch of woods between the trail and the tiny lake we discovered near camp. Leaving the needle carpeted pine highland behind, I step into a calf-deep sea of soft, bright green grass broken only by our meandering trail to the water. The fragrance of mint drifts up around me as I walk through their soft leaves and tiny purple flowers, the warm firelight of the setting sun saying farewell to me. Only an elbow of the lake is visible here, so that this bowl of water and grass and mint seems embraced by the pine highlands.

I am so filled with gratitude that I start to choke up. I could easily hold it in, but I release my feeling into the world and let myself sob.

So many have cared for me in these nine suns. Every hazelnut bush who gave me her children, every sunfish who gave himself to the hook, the sickeningly abundant blackberries, the grasshoppers and frogs and ants, the oxeye and evening primrose flowers, the strawberry and dandelion and basswood leaves, my campmates. So many beings who have given me their lives, their children, their guidance.

“Thank you,” I whisper under my breath, wet tracks dripping down my face. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Suddenly I am overtaken with the sense that every living thing in the embrace of the lake –the pines, the water, the leeches, the birds, the frogs, the grass, the breeze, the clouds, the sky, the mosquitoes, the fallen logs– is welcoming me back. As if I’ve been prodigal my entire life, or for the past twenty generations, but my place has been saved for me and all I have to do is step back into it.

It’s as if I’ve been here for these four moons, but I wasn’t here until I gave myself to this direct relationship with the beings who sustain me. There is no farmer between us, no store, no exchange of imaginary numbers or meticulously designed paper, not even the food drop from the support center. I give to them of my body and my spirit, and they give to me of theirs.

Nine suns of doubt, fullness, revelation, hunger, excitement, weakness, satiation, bliss, discomfort. Standing there in the soft, bright green grass under a burning sky, I cry like my heart is broken, and maybe it is, just broken open.

Following is a story from Rose. For the next three suns, we will be running a series of her posts from Hazelnut Camp and then back at Wabanong.

“When I was walking through here I saw so many hazelnuts it just boggled my mind.” Dakota guides us down a National Forest road west of our new camp, a manic gleam in her merry eyes.

Peering through the hazelnut bushes lining either side of the two track road, eyes straining, I do not feel encouraged. I’ve been to an abundant hazelnut area about an hour and a half away via a box on wheels that feeds on noxious fumes, and what I’m seeing doesn’t even remotely compare. My search image is not refined yet, and I can only pick out a handful of fuzzy green bells. I’ve heard from people who have lived here for years that we don’t have a lot of hazelnuts and it’s almost impossible to wrestle them from the squirrels.

I didn’t exactly believe Dakota at first when she returned from her walkabout and enthusiastically proposed a spontaneous Hazelnut Camp to take advantage of the mountains of wild foods she was finding. We would form a separate camp about three miles away from Wabanong and live entirely off the land, no food drop from the support center, basically for as long as we could stand it.

“I realized I could drop off the face of the earth, or I could take half the clan with me,” she laughed. “We’re going to go out for a quarter moon! Maybe even half a moon!”

Uh-huh, I thought.

On my morning scouting the area with Rab, high on an irresponsible volume of blackberries, I allowed myself to get excited. If there were enough nuts we could live off them and send them back to Wabanong to cure and put up for the White Season. But I’ve lived with people who have gone out on eight sun trips into these woods with no food, people with a decade of experience on us, and listened to their stories of how hard it was. But here I am, dedicated to trying.

“We’re gonna be out here half a moon,” Rab says with his typical mellow confidence and a small nod, all square framed glasses and surfer hair.

Three suns, I think, maybe four, and we might be fasting the last two, and we’ll be back at Wabanong.

In the westering light I heft my pillowcase and start plucking. The soft peach fuzz is deceptive, and my hands rapidly fill with tiny spines.

“I’m leaving the little ones,” I say to Dakota as she cruises by me in green army wool and graying curls, enviably efficient, her search image already fine-tuned.

“I’m taking them all,” she tells me gleefully.

Thinking of the squirrels and future generations of hazelnuts, I’m torn: There’s not a lot here, and we’re going to need everything that we can get. When gathering plants we generally have a Rule of Three– take one third of what’s there and the plant or area will be able to recover and reproduce. Should I only take one in three hazelnuts when there are so few here?
The question nags at me as I pick everything I find, my hands rapidly desensitized to the needles.

Finally, I ask Hazelnut, What should I do? How much can I take?
And she says to me, Take it all. You’re the only ones doing this in this time and this place, going to this edge to relearn how to live with us. Take what you need.

“There is somuch food here,” Rab enthuses, eying our dinner feast spread around the hearth through his square frames. A pile of beaked hazelnuts, a pyramid of fish, skewers of grasshoppers, bandanas full of greens, a handful of frogs. Culinary quality and variety we lack not.

“I know!” Chris says, stripping a toasted grasshopper off the skewer, still looking after four moons in the woods like he stepped out of a city gym in a sleeveless hoodie. “It’s amazing.”

My estimation of our calories is different, but I don’t say anything. I know we’re not getting as much food as we would on the food drop, but many people don’t feel hungry. They’re being filled by something other than food, filled with the empowerment of independence, of being able to do something about being hungry instead of just waiting for the food drop to magically arrive at the trailhead.

“I was thinking, ‘The Mother provides,'” I tell them, “but can we keep up?” I crack another hazelnut, hull spraying lemony juice, and pick out the white meat to add to my pile. I’m pretty sure hazelnuts are our best source of bulk fat right now, the one thing our diet is really lacking, and I’m hitting them hard. All sun every sun we gather food, and the rest of the time we crack hazelnuts and sleep.

Claire nibbles on a leaf across the hearth, ever quiet, notebook out and ready on her knee to record her many thoughts.

“More berries,” Fridolin informs the after-dinner-glow, attempting to finger comb through the snarls in his shoulder length hair, a cherry stuck in his beard.

“Don’t talk to me about berries,” I moan. Even the thought makes me feel mildly ill, considering I ate a ball of them about the size of my head for breakfast.

“There can never be too many berries,” Rab informs me, popping to his feet and scrubbing hazelnut stickers out of his hands on the front of his pants.

“Look at this one!” I hold out a hulled hazelnut almost as big as the first digit of my forefinger. I’ve always heard that beaked hazelnuts are smaller than the wild American Hazelnuts I’ve gathered before, but these nuts rival or surpass any American Hazelnut I’ve eaten.

“Whoaaa,” Rab says.

“And look at this,” I continue, holding up what appears to be a small nut, still tightly encased in spiny hull. “Looks small in the hull, inside, totally average nut. The big hulls are all full of air space.”

It’s sun five of Hazelnut Camp, and I wasn’t even convinced we would make it to sun four. My mind opening up to the ever expanding universe of possibility, I realize that I haven’t been as a question. I always heard there weren’t a lot of hazelnuts, that they were small, so I didn’t believe they could be worth gathering. The people I know with Turns of experience were severely challenged by eight sun trips living off the land, so I didn’t believe we could do it. But I didn’t open myself to the potential of seasonal variation, a low squirrel population, or that my more experienced clanmates were giving themselves other challenges, like going into the wild without fishing hooks and line, or going in the White Season, or going in the Hunger Moons.

We have hooks and line, and thanks to Dakota’s scouting and Rab’s initiative to go the very next morning after Hazelnut Camp was proposed, we have had the incredible opportunity to go as incompetent infants into the wild and be consistently fed. Closed to possibility, sure I had the answers, I could never have been a catalyst for this experience. What Dakota saw as abundance I compared to my previous experience and wouldn’t have bothered with. But for five suns the hazelnuts have fed nine people.

“Berries?” Fridolin proposes, dusting off the thick wool coat he wears even on mild suns.

Chris: “Fer sure, man!”

Rab: “Ye-ah!”

Me: “Ughhhh…”

Following is a post from Dakota

In respect and gratitude I offer this:

The only real guidance we can offer to another (beyond the physical realm) is how to recognize

the voice of Spirit–our heartsong

This is all we can do…and it is enough.

If we hold opinion

and think we see the Truth

We are in danger of inhibiting that awareness

in those we wish to serve

The truth has infinite perspectives

No two of us share

exactly the same vision

and only our own voice will bring us home.

These many voices singing in harmony

are this person’s vision of circle-consciousness.

Migwech!

Dakota

The following post is from the clan elder, Margaret, who has completed her time here at the Family Wilderness Guide Program this quarter moon and is returning to her home.

For many reasons this 3 month experience has been impressively challenging; in ways I had not even imagined. Among them were loss of structured time: schedules, calendars, making plans or even knowing what time it was. This created some vague, insecure sense of being nowhere. There were suns (days) that dragged. I had to deal with my thoughts of escape; of counting suns (days). Until I left I had to bring myself back to the present with all that was so new and different. I had to adjust to suns with little structure (after drinking water, peeing, and pooping). I could eat breakfast whenever. Usually there was nothing I had to do although plenty Icoulddo and that needed to be done. MEETINGS were the exception–very important to be at.

It seems so paradoxical that we deeply yearn for leisure time–less stress and demands on our lives–yet when it is possible, we struggle against it. And so, I have slowly been learning to move through the suns in a more spontaneous way; trusting my needs will be met; trusting that I will learn what I came for, and trusting that I don’t need to impress the clan with taking on any more tasks than I have energy or desire for.

One of the gifts I have given myself in slowing down is a quick meditative time at the evening sunset. Watching the sun sink behind trees and clouds. Often the sky is bathed in brilliant afterlight. Sometimes soft pastels. The lake is reflecting the beauty of it all. The loon might be calling out its plaintive wail. Or a great blue heron flaps by squaking like a prehistoric creature. I will remember how precious these timeless moments were. And hopefully create similar times of just being with the beauty of our natural world.

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.