Well, y'all, today was my first day of school in the Anake outdoor program, a primary offering of the Wilderness Awareness School (WAS) based in western Washington state. Upon arrival at the WAS campus and land, my 32 classmates and I joined our three core instructors and a team of WAS apprentices in an opening circle around a fire. Richie, one of the instructors, inaugurated the gathering with one of the most deeply affecting invocations I've ever experienced -- a series of simply, care-fully expressed statements of his gratitude for our presence, our safe arrival, the sun, the moon, our ancestors, the sovereign human Nations whose presence here predates our own, the plants and animals around us, the water, and more besides. (Included with each statement was a question to the group: were we thankful for this too?) As my heart leapt and soared and did crazy stunts, I fought back the huge gushy sobs that wanted to emerge into the space (but I let the tears come freely). Thanks to what other people and my own experiences have taught me about such moments, I was able to breathe through it and stay more or less composed. However, as you might imagine, I sure hadn't expected to be totally beside myself (internally, at least) for the first fifteen minutes of the first day of school. So it goes.
Since that's probably not the first hidden expectation I didn't know I had that will bite the dust in the coming days and weeks, I'm not going to make any forecasts about how things will go for me in Anake from here on out...other than to say that, in a broad sense, I'm very optimistic, and quite excited.
Along with sharing that experience, I'd also like to ask you, my readers, a favor. A constellation of things, including my move to Washington, has kept me from posting in the past few months. It's certainly not for lack of interesting things to write about! And that is where (I hope) you come in...
To help make my next post happen, I've put together a list (and a pretty juicy one at that, I daresay) of some of the stories that I've imagined telling on this blog. Would you be willing to visit the poll and vote for the top two or three topics that especially catch your interest? I won't make any promises about how soon I'll be able to compose it, but I expect that having a specific topic in demand will help me get the story out of my own head and heart and into the world. (Note: The poll may ask for your name. Knowing the names of respondents isn't a priority for me, but it's a default setting that I can't figure out how to change...so I hope you will put down any sort of thing in that box that you want...some punctuation mark, the dish you had for dinner, your name, a pseudonym, whatever ;-)
Thanks!
Since that's probably not the first hidden expectation I didn't know I had that will bite the dust in the coming days and weeks, I'm not going to make any forecasts about how things will go for me in Anake from here on out...other than to say that, in a broad sense, I'm very optimistic, and quite excited.
Along with sharing that experience, I'd also like to ask you, my readers, a favor. A constellation of things, including my move to Washington, has kept me from posting in the past few months. It's certainly not for lack of interesting things to write about! And that is where (I hope) you come in...
To help make my next post happen, I've put together a list (and a pretty juicy one at that, I daresay) of some of the stories that I've imagined telling on this blog. Would you be willing to visit the poll and vote for the top two or three topics that especially catch your interest? I won't make any promises about how soon I'll be able to compose it, but I expect that having a specific topic in demand will help me get the story out of my own head and heart and into the world. (Note: The poll may ask for your name. Knowing the names of respondents isn't a priority for me, but it's a default setting that I can't figure out how to change...so I hope you will put down any sort of thing in that box that you want...some punctuation mark, the dish you had for dinner, your name, a pseudonym, whatever ;-)
*Click on the skipper caterpillar (or here) to visit the poll*
Thanks!
