A family (mother, father, and three children) considering the Wilderness Family Guide Program recently contacted Teaching Drum Outdoor School to learn more about what it’s like to live immersed in the wild. We invited them to meet the current Wilderness Guide Participants to spend some time asking them questions about their experience with the program so far. Though the Wilderness Guide Program and the Family Wilderness Guide Programs are slightly different from one another, as the latter focuses on natural child rearing, the programs are still similar in that they both offer an 11-month community immersion experience in the wild.

This is an excerpt from of their discussion. 

For those who are new to this blog, there are five participants in the Wilderness Guide Program, an 11-month nature immersion program that began May 1st, 2016. They have been living in a primitive camp in the heart of the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest of Northern Wisconsin. 

Family: You’ve been here for 3 months now, please tell us some of the things you’ve learned.

Squirrel
The experience of living out in the wilds is interesting, especially having guides to teach us. It’s a different kind of teaching. When I think back to what they’ve taught us, it was more in the showing and then having us learn more deeply on our own. Learning this way has been a much deeper experience, one that helps us truly understand what we’re doing.

Brave Woman
I remember the first time we butchered a deer. I had never done this before. The first one was also our first night out here. We heard loons in the distance. Because we don’t have loons in my home country, I wondered if they were wolves.

Knowledge Keeper
That night was so mystical. I felt so welcomed. And then I met the porcupine, who is also an amazing creature.

Caretaker
We learned to butcher the deer by doing it. The guides brought in a fresh roadkill deer, told us how to do it and then said “take your knives and start!”
That’s how we’ve been learning – just do it.
And if it’s not working one way, you find out the other way. But there is no real right or wrong, only what works, or what doesn’t work.

Family: What would be the most important piece of advice that you would give to someone who wanted to have this kind of experience?

Knowledge Keeper
I would say that one really important thing is that when you live in a circle, that you realize that your own needs are also especially important for the circle. You have to cover your own needs, because otherwise you cannot give what you have. And that’s what we are here to learn. We learned that we needed to take into account our own comfort points. I think we spent the first moon here learning how to make more comfortable bough beds, to sleep better.

Medicine Woman
For me, my advice would be to stay open, to give yourself to this experience. There’s so much you get out of here, it’s abundant…it’s wow. And every second I close myself, I think – ahh! You missed the opportunity to get more! So practice, practice being in the moment to grow.

Caretaker
Everything is more intense. Like every up is more up, and every down also is. There’s also being homesick. But then you realize – okay, how much in these three moons have I and my awarenesses changed? How much will it be after a whole turn of the seasons? And this is the motivation. It was also a dream come true from childhood. After my father told me the story about Robinson Crusoe, I thought “I have to do that!”

The family asked about their sense of community, how they’ve built community, especially not knowing each other before the program.

Medicine Woman
We’re still working on this. It feels like we’re still at the beginning of our circle consciousness. It think it takes a while to change our patterns. We are used to being individuals and egoistic. This is not what works, and we are still there, still working on it.

Brave Woman
I think we’re at the point we should be in this experience. But it’s different than outside (back home), because we stopped being only friendly (laughter). This is also the funny thing with truthspeaking – it’s not always easy to really say what you’re meaning. But you realize that truthspeaking makes it much easier, there are fewer secrets…

Knowledge Keeper
I think we were all so happy at the end of the first moon when some of us were getting annoyed and started speaking up. Finally – we let it out and the things are all out in the open. I think it’s quite good that things can be communicated right then and there.”

Medicine Woman
Yes, we’re working a lot on this.

Knowledge Keeper
I think this is true with ourselves, so that we in the circle get this feeling of flowing. Until recently, it was seldom. But it suddenly happened that we are all really in this flow…