Tracking Arachnids and Insects. If you had of asked me 3 months ago if this is something I thought Id be going out of my way to do I wouldn’t have believed you. However the more I learn about tracking the more you see the world in other ways.
In the last post I was making char cloth and while I was standing there waiting for the smoke to stop I noticed Spider Excrement or as we say in Australia Spider Shit, and sitting above me was a web. When you see those little black dots on a window sill look up next time.
The bad guys never thought of this to catch Spiderman.
This is really Part 2 of Wool Anoraks. I finally made the decision to purchase a Mackinaw coat over an Anorak. I did this for several reasons. One its not really cold enough in Australia for an anorak. It would be something Id only use one month out of the year, two I found a good price and shipping through Natural Man in the UK rather than going through an American store with their shipping costs. Like most bushcraft clothing the UK its much easier to import from to Australia than from the US.
rear view
I also thought a Mackinaw coat I could use throughout the year, therefore getting the most use for the cost of purchase. I really wanted a wool coat for using on bushcraft courses. I also saw many you-tube reviews of anorak brands that were stating the wool was very itchy. The Mackinaw Ive been wearing around the house for the past half an hour in a t-shirt and not itchy at all. Very comfortable and enough room for wearing a hoodie underneath. My only regret is that I didn’t purchase the vest to match at the same time. The temperature is steadily starting to drop so Ill see how the coat goes over the next few months. Shipping from the UK is currently taking around 20 days.
inside lining
Why WOOL ? Its cool when its hot, fire proof near an open fire and if it gets wet still keeps you warm.
“Tracks and signs are the letters, trails are the words and sentences. Nature is the book.”
Francis Collie must have delivered one of the most entertaining talks at the ITS on how to decipher and present a track to another person, using story telling.
With Rewilding, Nature Connection and Resiliency movements taking hold, I am wondering why the name Gary Snyder has never been mentioned. I came across the name today watching you-tube clips on how to build an A frame shelter of all things with a quote of his being used as the introduction and became intrigued. Several books listed below interested me, particularly Practice in the Wild.
Exert from Practice of the Wild
“The sky above the strip mall hung low and grey, which didn’t help the look of things. With the snow melting, the parking lot was filled with dirty cars and wet trash. People spilled into and out of the stores: a Subway; a Starbucks; a supermarket whose name I forget.
As I stood there, I was struck by how we humans are a strange lot, trading prairie, forest, fields and wetlands for these terrains of tar and concrete. It left me with a question. Why exactly is the contrast between these worlds so sad? What, specifically, is it that makes the parking lot seem so lost compared with the forest of trees or the field it used to be?”
Gary Snyder is an American poet (originally, often associated with the Beat Generation), essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Since the 1970s, he has frequently been described as the ‘laureate of Deep Ecology’. From the 1950s on, he has published travel-journals and essays from time to time. His work in his various roles reflects his immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. Snyder has also translated literature into English from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese. As a social critic, Snyder has much in common with Lewis Mumford, Aldous Huxley, Karl Hess, Aldo Leopold, and Karl Polanyi. Snyder was for many years on the faculty of the University of California, Davis, and for a time served on the California Arts Council.
Practice of the wild
The nine captivatingly meditative essays in The Practice of the Wild display the deep understanding and wide erudition of Gary Snyder in the ways of Buddhist belief, wildness, wildlife, and the world. These essays, first published in 1990, stand as the mature centerpiece of Snyder’s work and thought, and this profound collection is widely accepted as one of the central texts on wilderness and the interaction of nature and culture. As the Library Journal affirmed, This is an important book for anyone interested in the ethical interrelationships of things, places, and people, and it is a book that is not just read but taken in.”
Turtle Island
Describing the title of his collection of poetry and occasional prose pieces, Gary Snyder writes in his introductory note that Turtle Island is “the old/new name for the continent, based on many creation myths of the people who have been here for millennia, and reapplied by some of them to ‘North America’ in recent years.” The nearly five dozen poems in the book range from the lucid, lyrical, almost mystical to the mytho-biotic, while a few are frankly political. All, however, share a common vision: a rediscovery of this land, and the ways by which we might become natives of the place, ceasing to think and act (after all these centuries) as newcomers and invaders.
Mountains and Rivers Without End
When this landmark work was first published, Gary Snyder was honored with the Bollingen Poetry Prize, the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Orion Societys John Hay Award. Publishers Weekly named Mountains and Rivers Without End one of the best books of 1996. On April 8, 1956, Gary Snyder began work on a long poem entitled Mountains and Rives Without End. Initially inspired by East Asian landscape painting and his own experience within a chaotic universe where everything is in place, Snyders vision was further stimulated by Asian art and drama, Gaia history, Native American performance and storytelling, the practice of Zen Buddhism, and the varied landscapes of Japan, California, Alaska, Australia, China, and Taiwan.While a few individual sections of the poem have been published in literary magazines and a small bound collection, Snyders ardent fans have waited patiently through the past forty years for the completion of Mountains and Rivers Without End. The entire work appears for the first time in this volume.Traveling beyond its origins in the Western tradition of Whitman, Pound, and Williams, Mountains and Rivers is an epic of geology, prehistory, and planetary
The Back Country
This collection is made up of four sections: “Far West”—poems of the Western mountain country where, as a young man. Gary Snyder worked as a logger and forest ranger; “Far East”—poems written between 1956 and 1964 in Japan where he studied Zen at the monastery in Kyoto; “Kali”—poems inspired by a visit to India and his reading of Indian religious texts, particularly those of Shivaism and Tibetan Buddhism; and “Back”—poems done on his return to this country in 1964 which look again at our West with the eyes of India and Japan. The book concludes with a group of translations of the Japanese poet Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933), with whose work Snyder feels a close affinity. The title, The Back Country, has three major associations; wilderness. the “backward” countries, and the “back country” of the mind with its levels of being in the unconscious.
Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility.
Gary Snyder
Quote from Practice in the Wild
“The blue mountains are constantly walking.” Dōgen is quoting the Chan master Furong. — “If you doubt mountains walking you do not know your own walking.”
— Dōgen is not concerned with “sacred mountains” – or pilgrimages, or spirit allies, or wilderness as some special quality. His mountains and streams are the processes of this earth, all of existence, process, essence, action, absence; they roll being and non-being together. They are what we are, we are what they are. For those who would see directly into essential nature, the idea of the sacred is a delusion and an obstruction: it diverts us from seeing what is before our eyes: plain thusness. Roots, stems, and branches are all equally scratchy. No hierarchy, no equality. No occult and exoteric, no gifted kids and slow achievers. No wild and tame, no bound or free, no natural and artificial. Each totally its own frail self. Even though connected all which ways; even because connected all which ways. This, thusness, is the nature of the nature of nature. The wild in wild.
So the blue mountains walk to the kitchen and back to the shop, to the desk, to the stove. We sit on the park bench and let the wind and rain drench us. The blue mountains walk out to put another coin in the parking meter, and go down to the 7-Eleven. The blue mountains march out of the sea, shoulder the sky for a while, and slip back to into the waters.”
The Magpie is the dominant bird within the boundary of my sit spot. They’re coming more and more often when they see us. Several parents are bringing their young to feed and water here. There are 5 communication calls:
Songs — the signature sounds they use to defend territory and attract mates.
Companion calls — the sounds birds use to communicate with each other during feeding or travel
Juvenile begging — the “I’m hungry!” sounds that chicks and young birds make to get adults to feed them
Aggression — the sounds made by birds defending their territory against other intruding birds
Alarm — the sound made when expressing alarm about a threat.
Ive been reading “What the Robin knows” by Jon young and picked out the magpie to study as that’s the bird mostly available to me. After reading up on them Ive found out its actually the male that is taking care of the young and not the female and started to pick out the different calls. Songs and Juvenile begging have been quite easy. Today I picked out the companion call. The mother used an aggression sound on the young the other day however I still haven’t picked out an alarm call. They just seem to take off if something disturbs them.
Magpies live to 25 years old. I did a fishing course over 20 years ago in a local man made lake area and the primary fish we were targeting were Bream. The instructor told us that the Bream grow one centimeter for every year making a legal fish to catch and keep was 32 cm making it 32 years old. Older than I was when I did the course. I haven’t been able to eat a Bream since. Knowing how long an animal live for also changes the way you look at them.
I have also been watching where they fly to after leaving here and have a good idea where their nest is located. The field across the road is near a water way with waist high grass. I haven’t been able to wear shoes for close to a year. I did go into this area once after the local council slashed it using two crutches and it knocked the crap out of me . Very uneven ground. I’m mainly concerned about the tiger snakes in this area when I cant wear heavy shoes, very aggressive species.
What I’m finding now , is when the birds start their singing in the area. I’m now picking out OHHH that’s an alarm but don’t know the bird, or that’s a companion call. I’m picking them all out. My mind starts to become overwhelmed with the amount of communication that is going on around me. The songs are no longer background noise or lovely overtures but gossiping to one another.
You learn something everyday. Well at-least you should aim at learning something new every week. This week on the second session of Bird language with Andrew Turbill we found out that the worlds song birds actually originated with Antarctica, New Zealand and Australia and that Antarctica under all the ice and snow is covered with fossilized beech trees. Its hard to imagine Australia covered with trees and Forrest unlike the desert it is today. The song birds island hopped from Australia to Indonesia when the continental drift brought the land masses close enough to island hop approximately 23 million years ago.
The Bird species in Australia are much older in heritage than the ones in the northern hemisphere and now have more in common with the lyrebirds here than the same looking birds in the opposing hemisphere.
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As is my habit in the mornings, I sit outside in what I now refer to as my sit spot. Have a cup of tea, do my rehab exercises and watch the surroundings waiting for the bird life to arrive. Not much was happening so I started scanning You tube and came across an old Chinese story told by Shia Lebeouf and how it effected him.
Your asking well what has this got to do with bushcraft? Well I was sitting there not getting any bushcraft done. My knee aching, my back aching, my shoulders aching and not finding any motivation to train, study or write. Then I listened to the story and my attitude changed.
I’m still in pain but my mind reset and I wanted to write this before having any pills and I’m sick of having pills.. Ive been pushing myself to get back on my feet and came to that place where your either working flat out on good days, doing nothing on bad days and doped up to the eye balls but not focusing on what is happening. Which is what happens when you have more bad days than good days. I didn’t need to focus I just needed to accept this is where I am at the moment and chip away a little every day.
The Parable of the Chinese Farmer
Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.” The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”
The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.” The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”
The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad — because you never know what will be the consequence of the misfortune; or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.
The moral of this story, is, of course, that no event, in and of itself, can truly be judged as good or bad, lucky or unlucky, fortunate or unfortunate, but that only time will tell the whole story. Additionally, no one really lives long enough to find out the ‘whole story,’ so it could be considered a great waste of time to judge minor inconveniences as misfortunes or to invest tons of energy into things that look outstanding on the surface, but may not pay off in the end.
The wiser thing, then, is to live life in moderation, keeping as even a temperament as possible, taking all things in stride, whether they originally appear to be ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Life is much more comfortable and comforting if we merely accept what we’re given and make the best of our life circumstances. Rather than always having to pass judgement on things and declare them as good or bad, it would be better to just sit back and say, “It will be interesting to see what happens.”
Why not simply declare that everything is good and seek to find the good in the bad? The present is perfect.
