Spirit in Action

Clan in the Woods - The Teaching Drum Outdoor School Family Year-long

At that age of 76, Margaret Moore took part in the Teaching Drum Outdoor School family year-long, living naturally in the Northern Wisconsin woods for 11-months as an intergenerational clan of 42 people. Without the niceties of civilization, like books, soap, clocks, etc, Margaret and the rest experienced a connection to nature and each other badly missing for most people today.

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 02 Mar 2014
Audio Format:: other

[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ I invite all my listeners, and that includes you, to contact me with potential guests and topics relevant to their local region. So places like Garberville, California, or Bellows Falls, Vermont, which have recently started broadcasting Spirit in Action, you're invited to share your local activists and issues with this national vehicle for improving the world. Just contact me via northernspiritradio.org. Today's guest, Margaret Moore, I found out about via the Quaker meeting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a source for three excellent guests over the past three months. Margaret is mother of one of the members there, though Margaret lives on an island off the coast of Washington state. There are a lot of islands out there, including Lopez Island, where this show is broadcast and who will be providing a couple upcoming guests. But the reason Margaret is here today is because of her inspirational role as a participant in the teaching drum "Outdoor School Family Year-Long." What that means is that Margaret and 41 other people signed up for an intergenerational 11-month outdoor wilderness living experience in northern Wisconsin. With very few of the niceties of civilization, like books, soap, clocks, or grains, Margaret and the rest have had an experience of an original nature-based community. Just think about it. Every day, all day, outdoors in the woods, including winter, and as a clan. How would that transform you and how would it transform our culture to have lived that experience? We welcome Margaret Moore today, by phone, to share her experience of the teaching drum "Outdoor School Family Year-Long." Margaret, it's great to have you here today for Spirit in Action. Well, it's good to be here with you also. I'm looking forward to this. I've never been on the radio before. Well, it is about time, if I understand, you're 77. Last year, in the course of the summer, you were part of this family year-long, sponsored by the teaching drum "Outdoor Schools." Are you just saving up all your best exploits for the later years? Well, I don't know about best. I've had some really good ones over the years. But you know, at my age, if you don't get out there and have an adventure, it's not going to happen. So I'm definitely wanting to have a few more while I can puddle around. This must have been at least a little bit daunting to you. The thought of going out, living in the wilderness, living without all of the conveniences that we've come to take for granted. What made you do it? It's such a good question because I keep thinking about, hmm, why am I doing this? This seems like a fairly crazy thing for an old lady to be doing. And yet I was just compelled to do it. I grew up in Northern Michigan, so I'm somebody who grew up in the woods. My father was, I would call him a naturalist. So I felt like this would be an privilege to be outside in the woods for three whole months. There's all that fresh air and all these amazing creatures that are there living. And I was really pretty excited about the privilege of being in a supportive environment that was just an ongoing natural world. That seemed like not something you get to do very often. I don't think, in fact, I don't think there is another program quite like this in the whole world. Now I only went for three months, but this whole thing of the others going for 11 months, I know that's unique. And I perhaps should have been even a little more daunted in terms of what it was going to be required of me. But I had this ideal picture of just communing with nature and being out there with the birds. And there were moments when it wasn't like that at all. But I was just drawn by my own wonderful fantasies. And my daughter and grandsons, two grandsons, were also doing the program. So the opportunity to be a three-generational family, which then never happened before, was also a drawing card for me. Talk about the mix of people who were part of this family year long. I believe you called yourself the seekers, right? What were the ages and family arrangements, dispositions? What was it like as a group? Well, that was part of it too. Once I found out who all was going to be there, it was like, oh my goodness, this is kind of a great diversity. Now there were no Asians or no black folks. I was really eldest, in fact, they never had any an old person before. The next oldest was 48 years old, a fellow. There were 42 of us all together. And I'm not sure, I've never counted, but I think almost half of the group was European, Austria, Germany, and three people from Sweden. And then the rest were from scattered around the United States. There were maybe six families. I know there were 17 children initially. Mothers, fathers, in some cases, just mothers. There were two single mothers that had seven children between the two of them. So there were a number of moms that were really taking on the responsibility fully of their children. Although this was a clan. The model was that we were all in some sense responsible for everyone. And there was emphasis on co-parenting, which is pretty tricky since I'm not so sure that you're going to treat my child the way I might want you to treat my child. You know, that kind of dynamic. There were also a group of single young men in their 20s, I think. Maybe seven, eight of them, and one young woman who were considered guardians, who often did a lot of the grunt work. They maybe made some of the bridges across the bogs. They were there to help somebody like me put up my tent. They were often off learning how to run through the woods in the dark or run through the woods blindfolded. They were really picking up all kinds of amazing skills. So they added to the mix. So let's talk about what you were doing. You're in the wilderness. You're living as a clan here in the wilderness in northern Wisconsin. What were you doing? What did you go in with? Could you take your iPod with you? What could you, couldn't you have? What was the experience like? No, you could not take your iPod. You could not take a book. You could not take a calendar. You could not take a watch. You couldn't take any of those civilized items. So you were there to be experiencing a nature-based pre-agriculture way of living. So you were there learning all kinds of skills and also just all kinds of crafts. You were there cooking your food and gathering your wood and doing all the things that one needs to do on a daily basis to make life continue. And then, of course, you were getting to know each other. That was a huge thing. And you were also there to have some wonderful fun and adventures, bill hiking and bill canoeing and swimming, harvesting rice. There were lots of different activities. On the other hand, you could stay in your sleeping bag in the morning. If you didn't want to get up, you didn't have to. There was a certain quality of life in the slow lane. There wasn't a rush. There was a once-a-month trip to the main support center, NED META-winning. I did not do this. I was brought to the support center in a car. They spoiled me a little bit. But the rest of the group usually went in groups of five or six each day. We'd walk seven miles to the main camp and then spend 24 hours on the three computers or the three telephones. And then when 24 hours is up, they walk seven miles back to their camp. And what about food? I mean, did you have to forage all your food? Did you bring it with you? Did you cook all your own food? What was your relationship to food? That's the thing that I would imagine most of us would be scared to the depth of our soul about that. We're not going to be able to find food, have sufficient, whatever. Well, we were definitely taken care of. This was not an actual real experience. This was an attempt at living as a nature-based culture. But we were definitely taken care of by the main staff, what we called the guides and their helpers who were in the support camp. They delivered food to us. Initially, I think it was daily. We had what we call a food drop. After a while, it was every other day. And when I was there just recently, the food drop came every three days. We were on a paleo diet, which meant we had no grains, no sugar, no salt, no dairy. And otherwise, what we were delivered was root vegetables, fruits, quite a bit of fruit more than I usually eat, like three a day, eggs, and bear fat, which was our source of oil. It was a very big item in the paleo diet. And plenty of meat. We had road kills at a cinema, probably almost half the time it seemed like. And then, otherwise, we had good-sized fish. So those were all delivered to us, also including nuts. And we had to cook things in our own various ways. We did primitive cooking. We buried root vegetables underneath our fire at times. We lined root vegetables up next to the fire, and we did a lot of spearing of both fish, meat, and vegetables over the fire. We grilled fish green sticks over hot poles. Now, we began to fish on our own, probably about three weeks after we were there. We got little wooden sticks, and we had actually a plastic line and a metal hook. So those were not something we made out of the wild. With that rudimentary kind of fishing pole, we went out on our canoes, and some people would come back with a whole string of 40-50 smaller fish. And some folks got big mouth bass, I think, good-sized fish. So there's a period, particularly in July, June and July, when it seemed like we had a surplus of fish, and I really enjoyed that. And our whole program began in May, and in May we started gathering spring beauties and fiddleheads, and we usually ate those raw. Later on, we gathered milkweed, and we cooked it very fiddle-y because it has that white gooey kind of liquid that comes out of it. You would not want to try to digest without cooking. The woods were full of hazelnuts, and there was also a fairly good crop of raspberries. There were a few cranberries, and I understand, because of the drought, there were no cranberries this fall, which was like really sad. And I mentioned earlier that people not during the time I was there, but later on, like August and September, it was a racing time. And there were several trips where people did some ricing. They had the experience, which I think was really good for them, because it's how life often is. Of this one group going to this area to rice, slogging their way through mud and bog and difficult terrain, finally getting there, setting up camp, but it was so late in the day that they didn't rice, they just ate and collapsed. And then during the night there was a hail storm, and in the morning they found out that the hail had knocked all the rice off of the stalks into the water, and there was no rice for them to harvest. So that was a real lesson of how Mother Nature isn't always supporting us. We ate all kinds of strange foods. When we had a deer, we would eat the brain, the liver, we would eat everything except for the GI tract. When we ate a fish, we would eat the fish head, the eyes, supposedly were delectable. I didn't quite get that, but we would take the spine of the fish and cook it over coals. We ate ants, which I thought were a little tricky, because I couldn't figure out how to get them dead. You know, I didn't want live ants in my mouth, but my daughter said they were lemony and really good. And we ate antlava. We had a method of disturbing the ant hail and putting layers of bark, and ants would come up onto those layers and lay their eggs, which is the larva. And evidently that's quite nutritious, and my grandson thought it was quite wonderful. We did try grubs, and we tried worms, which I didn't think were a big success. We're very frugal with our eating. Very careful. We didn't throw out much of anything when we ate squash. We ate the skin. Our compost had very little wasted food in it. It was really kind of a pleasure for my frugal soul to see how well we consume things. Of course, people who are listening are going, "Yeah, this is all very interesting. This is, in fact, bizarre. Why would you do that?" As we said earlier, I'm sure you questioned yourself several times during the whole event. Why am I doing this? Was there a good reason I wanted to hang out here? Or maybe you didn't feel that way at that point. Yeah, well, that particular, my value in life is to not waste, and so that particular way of eating really pleased me, even though I was not into some of the more exotic things. I think we tried worms with strawberries or something, which I thought was very strange, so I had my limits. But to see that you could utilize all kinds of food that we otherwise turn our noses up at was really refreshing to me. We had become so particular and fussy about what we eat. I just thought of a statistic the other day that Americans waste something like 40% of the foods it has grown and produced, which to me is just quite shocking. You know, I don't know how that can be. It seems so wrong when people are starving. So I really appreciated this approach of utilizing and eating what most everything that you could that was half reasonably good for you. And we lost weight. And you lost weight? How much are we talking about here? I lost 25 pounds. Were these pounds you wanted to get rid of, are these pounds that you regret the loss of? I didn't even know I was losing weight. I was a little hefty, maybe, a little solid, you might call it, but I wasn't fat. But I really was impressed that this weight was just kind of fallen off of me, and I think it was when it was a lean diet. However, I think the other pieces that I was exercising a lot, I was moving my body of great deal of the day. I think I'd probably walk between three and four miles at least every day. And that's just daily activities. And maybe that might have included a canoe ride and a hike across the lake to gather some more water, some berries, but not necessarily. I think just getting up, going off to the lake, drinking, and we drank our water after a while we drank water from the lake. We went through a regime where we slowly put lake water into our empty stomachs first thing in the morning. And then before we had our lunch also, we would begin to have a couple of flowers of water and before our supper. And each day we would increase that, so by seven to ten days our bodies were really quite used to the kind of bacteria that was coming in on the lake water. So, you know, walk to the lake for water. You had to walk out wherever you needed to poop. You would walk a good long ways when you went to get your food. You walked a mile almost for the food drop and a mile back. You were walking over logs and under logs continuously. And then you were sitting down on the ground and standing up, which is something we just don't do at all in our modern world. So, lots of exercises, I think, was very big in losing weight. Everyone lost weight. So, how is this different than a forced march? You're in a concentration camp in Germany. You know, I mean, why did you want to do this again? You know, is there something that was calling you and why is the teaching drum out to our school? Why are they doing this just to, because they like to torture people, because it's good for you, would you say this was an improvement on your life? You know, why would you do this? It wasn't torture at all, but me, in particular, was absolutely delicious. I have never enjoyed venison. I mean, I grew up with hunters, but I mean, the meals were wonderful. And it was plenty of food, so we were not, like, in a concentration camp. We were not starving and taking our little bowls and getting a bit of broth. So, there was not an issue of any kind of sense of inadequacy. I think the main idea of teaching drum is that we have cultivated a life, a civilized life that has most of us, basically separated from each other. We've become so individualistic that we've lost our connections to each other. Yes, we have our families, but that often isn't a real great connection, either. And we're walking around, for the most part, quite lonely. And we've also lost not only our connection with each other, but we've lost our connection to the natural world. And so, here we were. In the middle of the night, we could hear the loon crying. We could wake up in the morning to various songbirds. We were eating all these wonderful foods that we were gathering. We were just surrounded by a natural world, and we were, I think, just so impressed with the abundance and the beauty. So, it put us back into a world that we had lost touch with. And most of us maybe go for maybe even two weeks if we're really lucky during the year on a camping trip or something like that. But many of us are just totally separated from the natural world. And I think one of the things I enjoyed the most was watching how things change from early spring to late spring to summer to see each of the different plants that kept coming up, the different trees that were blooming. And it was just an exposure that I have never had before because I have been, well, other than living near the woods, I have never been in the woods for that kind of a period of time. So, I think it's a whole process of reconnecting with the natural world where we came from, where we are part of. And then there's a whole spiritual orientation of life being sacred and the natural world being sacred. And there's no separations between our everyday tasks and some spirit somewhere, dwelling in some animal or tree or whatever. We were living in a sacred world, and that was a very precious message. Well, along with that was that whatever we did, we did have utter respect for the trees and the flowers and the animals. We gathered things, we were very careful how we gathered them, we didn't pick too many of one variety. If we took bows off the balsam for to sleep on, we didn't take too many bows from one tree, et cetera. We just were continually being reminded of how precious all of life was and how even though we needed to eat some other creatures, we needed to do that for real gratitude. Was the spirituality about it? Was it provided to you explicitly? Was it implicit? Were there lessons in the spirituality as well as all the skills that you needed to develop for living there? I think it's more implicit, although there was, the word respect was a word that was used quite a bit, and there was often a lesson like when a child killed a rabbit one day. We had some small animals that began to kind of hang around our camp, but the rabbit had been, in some sense, tamed. Then a young boy killed it, and there was a whole discussion of, well, that really wasn't, but the rabbit had become, in some sense, a friend, and we didn't have, somehow, the opportunity there that took too long to take advantage of the fact that we had courted it, so to speak. We had created an environment that encouraged it to be not particularly wild, so we took advantage of that, so that was talked about. Things were looked at quite carefully in terms of our habits, our attitudes. I think often it was implicit, but then there was an awareness, an actual knowing that, oh, yes, this is how we want to live now. So those sentiments and principles were just woven through our daily life, kind of in a natural way. So nobody gave a sermon. These are the 10 commandments here, guys, we need to listen to this. We did spend some time with Ojibwe language. We spent some time looking at how we refer to the directions, also how we look at the seasons. So there were native ways that we became more aware of and had some workshops, but I guess, I just said, it kind of flowed naturally, but a lot to learn also. We just had a lot to learn, so there were numerous workshops and handouts to read. So you got handouts to read. You couldn't have books, but you got handouts. Does this mean you had things that you could write yourself? What did you do during the day? So we did have pencils, and we had notebooks, and we wrote letters, and we received mail every, oh, maybe every 10 days or something like that. So people would be writing letters, and we would be reading their handouts. We had quite a bit to read. So we had a book called Truth Telling because there was a whole way of being in the Klan and speaking our truths. So, you know, we started out in the morning, as I say, just doing our basic hygiene, and then we had our breakfast after we went out and got our food and carried it back to our hearts. And breakfast, in fact, meals took a lot of time. It seemed like we did a whole thing with eggs where we would put a little hole in the top of the egg, and then we would set the egg in hot coals. This took a while to cook that egg. It's not like being in a frying pan, turning on the propane and just, you know, almost a meal or fried egg. And the same thing with roasting your nuts or cracking your nuts with rocks, that took a while. So breakfast was often, I don't know, we didn't have watches, but breakfast was a meal time, we would call it, it was probably a good hour, maybe an hour and a half. It seemed to me that sometimes we spent something close to two hours eating our food, preparing our food. And the same with our supper. We ate our lunches. We just kind of pulled the wheels left over from breakfast and things that we might have salvaged. But our eating meal, which was usually 4.35, was a lot of food to eat, and we also had announcements and some discussions and sometimes some singing. So during the day you'd have your workshop, so you'd be learning how to, maybe your workshop had been on how to make a basket, so you might be working with how to make your basket. You might be learning how to can a hide. With all the roadkill that came, we had a lot of deer hides to work with. People had to gather wood for a bow drill kit. And it took particular hard wood for the base of that, and so that was something that people were off looking for the right kinds of woods. People, as I say, were foraging. People might just be out canoeing. There was a fair amount of time for recreational space just to go and wander. We sat and talked with each other a lot. There was a lot of conversation. We had all these people to get to know, and we had 4 or 3-year-olds who needed a lot of attention. The children played games continuously, it seemed like. And then, of course, preparing our food was a big one, you know, cutting up bare fat and rendering it before the meal. And that was all part of the mix, so we had plenty to do. In case you just tuned in, you're listening to Spirit in Action, which is a Northern Spirit Radio production. And we're on the web at northernspiritradio.org. On the site, you'll find seven and a half plus years of our programs. You can listen and download. You find the stations where we're broadcast. There's also connections to our guests. You want to follow, for instance, to the teaching drum outdoor schools, teachingdrum.org. You'll find that at northernspiritradio.org. We're speaking today with Margaret Moore, who, with the next couple generations of her family, were part of a year long, a family year long, teaching drum outdoor school. It's an experience of wilderness for 11 months. Margaret was there for three months. At the age of 76, she was doing this in the northern half of Wisconsin. So, Margaret, you mentioned also that there were 42 people to start, I think, 17 children at the beginning of this program, but there was something kind of ominous in what you said, because it said like we had 17 children to start. Now, I knew you left because you were older, and because I think you didn't want to stay there, perhaps, through the winter, or maybe you had a few other things to get done. But why are these other people leaving? Was this because it didn't work well, or had they planned to take off, too? Well, you don't know. I think everybody really, I think there was a pretty strong commitment to be there for 11 months. There was a requirement, if possible, to come here before an experience four or five or six days with the seekers from the previous year. However, if you lived in Austria, you were not going to travel over the United States for a five or six-day trial. But there was an attempt to let people know as clearly as possible what they were getting into. I think there's even a statement in some of the literature that partaking in this kind of thing isn't like being on another planet. So, you have people with all kinds of expectations and all kinds of fantasies about this kind of experience. There was a family with two mothers and seven children, and they were all Victorians. Tim rex saw, who's the director of the entire school, had said quite clearly that he would not cater to vegetarians. However, they came anyway, and I think that it got to be very difficult, especially if it began to get colder in the fall, that they were not taking in bear fat. And really, I think, they had lost too much weight, and they were really suffering diet-wise, that was part of it. Some people, I have a friend there who's there who finally left, who was somewhat claustrophobic about sleeping in wageworms with six and seven other people. It was very cozy at times, and it was too close for her. It was just too much energy-wise. People had different needs, and for some folks, you know, this just didn't fit. I think other than the family with the seven children and the two mothers, there have been one other small family, mom, dad, and little boy, who left. And no one has quite clear why they left. They left, I think, in August. So, you know, for some people it was just right, and for a few that didn't come through, and the way they were thinking or what they got that needed. My one grandson also came home. He's a 13-year-old, Andre. I think that on the whole, he had been in the public school system and had been told when and how, what to read and what to do. Just long enough, he was really having trouble motivating himself because, as I say, you can just get up and sit around the campfire if you really wanted to. Although, I think we'd all begin to have trouble if people didn't get out and gather wood or prepare the food. But Andre became, I think, vaguely deep somewhat depressed. The other children his age mostly spoke German initially, and that was hard for him. And a lot of the kids were two, three years younger, and I think that makes a difference. So, Andre went home in July. But now there are, like, five boys, including my six-year-old grandson, who's just having a ball there. And there might be, like, 18 adults. And they're doing very well. At this point, I think, you've gotten this far. You don't have only two more months to go. You're going to make it. Although, it's very cold up there. People are walking around with icicles, and they're beards, those who have beards. And, you have so many clothes on, you can just tiredly move. I went up for a week at Christmas, and it was quite an experience to be with everybody once again. And to see the kind of harsh conditions, and yet to also see the amazing kind of togetherness that has developed. Because those people all depend on each other. There's a certain level of interdependence that we don't have anymore around here. You know, if we have a need, we have some money, we can throw at it. It's not the same as saying, "Hey, we need more wood here. Who can go get it?" Or someone needs to pick out the compost, or, "I need some help putting up my tent," or whatever. So, lots of different reasons people love. But I think something like 24 people in all right now is a pretty good record for what they've been going through. When you talk about the difference in terms of how our culture has been trained to live, I mean, I think even the difference between former rural, small town, you had to depend on your neighbors. If you wanted a cup of sugar, you had to borrow it from neighbors. You had to be on reasonable terms with them. If you weren't, you had no one for miles, and you could be stuck without whatever is necessary. I even experienced that growing up myself, you know, 50 years ago. But did you find that people made that transition, or is our way of thinking in our community, which is so technologically focused instead of people focused? Did you find people having to go through hard lessons to make the transition? Yeah, there certainly were some differences, and there were people who, I mean, there were all kinds of reasons why somebody might not get up and be helpful. There were people who, because of that diet, lost energy. There was one young man who basically just laid around the first month. The diet put him in a place where he had no energy. We just took care of him. He eventually came out of it. Now, there were instances where some people would do a lot more than others, and I think you always have that. Now, in one case, there were a number of people who were ending up cooking and preparing the food of cookies way more than they needed to. You know, it was out of proportion to how often they were the cooks, and they finally decided to not cook. They announced that they had done enough cooking, and they were aware that some folks who hadn't maybe cooked hardly at all are never, and that they were hoping and expecting that they would take over, and that was said once, maybe, and people did. However, we did have our different rhythms. You know, as I said, there was one young man who often needed to be solitude enough and go off on his own. He found other ways to contribute. I was not somebody who did a lot of craft kind of things. That's not quite who I am. By contribution was often listening. I picked out three women who all had very painful dynamics going. I mean, there is a huge adjustment to be out there with a bunch of strangers. You bring your baggage, your emotional baggage with you. And I sat and listened to all three of them over the three months. They came quite close to them, and I think I provided a real service. And it didn't look like we were doing any hard work. We were sitting over among some trees talking. But in the end, I think that the health of the community shows up in terms of people are then willing to contribute in terms of physical work, if they're not depressed, or spherical, or frightened, or whatever. I don't think it was a huge problem. It just became so obvious if you were not pulling your weight. You know, you can get away with that in some situations where it's not really noticeable. But it was, if you were smoothing a lot and not really ending up doing much. There was also a piece about how to listen to children. There was a real emphasis on hearing them without scolding them. Like if a child ended up pooping his pants or something like that, or having an accident and not getting to the latrine and time. There was no scolding. It was just a lot of empathy and how hard it is to always make it to the bathroom and this kind of thing. And let's go and get things cleaned up. And a lot of kindness, and I was really impressed with that. We didn't scold our children's army at all. And that felt very different than how we often do it in this world. Do you think that's because this was a wilderness experience or, I mean, is this staff's point of view? Why do it differently there? I mean, scolding doesn't work in the woods. I think it was a staff's point of view to begin with. There were some wonderful stories. There was a whole lot of emphasis about hearing the truth underneath. And there was a whole lot of emphasis on empathy that was just there. And it was modeled by the staff and it was refreshing. So I liked it. I became less of a crabby grandma and more of a kinder grandma. So maybe that's why you really did this to learn some generosity in that respect. Yeah. I remember putting your grandma to begin with, but there are times when I would like to just shake a child with him. What would be 80? But I really began to be more patient at observing and listening to what was going on with a child. And I felt good about that. What about boredom? I'm imagining most people. You can't have your iPod. You can't have a book. Most people in our society, we're lost at sea if we don't have anything to do. I know this personally because I was a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa. When we travel between cities in these cars, we call them taxis. When we do that, the total ease could just sit there waiting for things to happen. For hours, without having a book, without looking, not particularly having a discussion with anyone, they could just sit there. For me, that was almost unbearable even though I think maybe I adapted a little bit. What about for you? Was this boring? It was hard. Now, there was enough to do that there wasn't a lot of that, but there was, you know, and I like some solitude. On the other hand, I'm an extrovert and I'm somebody who's into lots of activities. There were times when I just, I wanted so badly to get my murder mystery, my Louise Kenny latest wonderful book, and have my glass of wine or my chocolate bar or whatever and go off and get lost in a fictional world, rather than to have to keep looking at the green trees. I mean, in the blue lake. Yes, the loon was wonderful and I really enjoyed the heron, but there were times when I'd seen enough of all that. So, yeah, I realized I was accidentally civilized and I didn't really like it. I didn't like would I get myself noticing that I wasn't very good at meditating for hours, not even for even an hour sometimes. I wanted some action. I wanted a telephone to ring. So, it was hard. I think that was probably almost the hardest part was not only the lack of stimulation when one is used to a life full of stimulation, way too much probably, but the lack of familiarity here by friends people I know, people I love, the violin I live on, and right now I've been back for five days and I just went off to an errand and I met four people I know. Each one of it is interesting and had something to tell me. So, there's a new information coming in all the time. Now, that's true also the natural world, but it's far more subtle and one has to be quieter or more observant to take that in. And we're not very skilled in that. We've lost those skills and that's really I think it's sad. My guess is that the people who are staying for eleven months are learning and picking that up and I'm serving that different way of being. But three months was really not nearly enough to make those changes. Although I think even there I came out somewhat quieter, a little bit quieter, a little bit more sensitive to my surroundings, so a little bit slower maybe. So there's some changes, but you know it was just the beginning. Again, we're talking about the three months that Margaret Moore spent at the age of 76 as part of the teaching drum outdoor schools. Their website teachingdrum.org will give you more information about them, but one of their projects is the Family Year Long, which Margaret Moore and her next two generations of her family were participating in. So they are out there in the northern woods of Wisconsin, roughing it, living wildernessly somewhat. How much of that somewhat should we be qualifying? You mentioned having tents. You mentioned canoeing. Is this a Grumman aluminum canoe or is this have you cut down a tree and you made your own canoe? How wilderness, how civilized were you? Oh, we bought our own tents. Initially we had our own tents and we had our own sharp knives and we had our own paper. I think if life had continued on maybe we would have, no we didn't have any soap and I think we would have learned how to make some soap eventually because that was a challenge. Our canoes, we did have one aluminum canoe. I think we called it the Tim Can. I guess there were beautiful little solo canoes, canvas, I'm not sure exactly what they were made of, but very, I mean they came from a factory. We didn't cut down trees. We already were having a profound effect on the environment and I think the woods is going to, that area will be the five release when everybody leaves. Next group will not be a family year long. I think it will be a small group of who knows six to twelve people, but we were having a profound effect on those woods even though we were not cutting down trees. We were possibly cutting off some branches, little live branches off of a tree here and there. And we were removing birch bark from birch trees that were going to be lumbered. Ham Rack was notified ahead of time when there was going to be some cutting of lubber and he had maybe six or eight people go for the day with ladders and climb up the birch trees and carefully cut large swaths of birch bark off of them. That birch bark went into building wigwums for the summer and the fall and winter, which is what people moved into in August and September. That was how we obtained some natural materials, but we did not destroy things. We lived pretty much in the natural world without disturbing it too much. We had our knives. We had tomahawks that we were able to chop with because they also built a pretty extensive lean-to for the winter where some of the young people, mostly the single young men and maybe clear the single woman were sleeping in their sleeping bags kind of tucked under the lean-to, but it was not a wigwum with an entire cover, so that was pretty harsh exposure, but they were doing okay. One of the things that is kind of a social difference between the group of you that were there is that the staff, the helpers who have a certain role, have certain knowledge, and I guess some ways prestige and control because of that. Was there a loss of difference in terms of wealth? I mean, I think that even though American society has lost strict rules of social class, there still is the difference where some people are richer or poorer, have more money can pick up the check. I'm assuming that kind of disappeared in that society. You couldn't even know if one of the people was rich and the other people weren't. No, you really didn't know who had what in the way of in their bank account or, you know, some people bought some very beautiful, our clothes were mostly woolens or cottons and some people came with some very fine quality clothes, especially some of the Europeans. But no, we were pretty equal. Now and then somebody needed to have some additional money put in their bank account to satisfy the immigration people or something, and people were very generous with saying, you know, I'll loan you a couple of five hundred for now or whatever you need. So it felt like a very equal, a lot of equality, no sense that anybody having any status or power, other than, you know, the staff had a program, there wasn't a agenda, there were things we needed to learn, and they were our guides and our teachers, so to speak, or our mentors. So they had knowledge that was, to some extent, power. They could teach us things and we needed to listen so we didn't get lost or drowned or they taught us how to brush our teeth with some kind of bark or twig from a tree or they taught us to get a cut. A lot of us got cut initially because we had these knives that are cutting our fingernails with, and we're not used to using a knife, and it was a good sharp knife. I really liked my knife. I felt like a real woods woman with my knife and my belt. Consequently, we would go around these little cuts and we were taught how to get some sap from a balsam tree, and it was remarkable how it helped to heal that cut. I think there was only one real infection about the whole group during the year that I'm aware of, and there were lots of cuts and burns to speak up there. They just happened, you know, if you have enough eggs exploding or enough people using knives, you are going to get some accidents. But through a sense of social equality and very little status. You've already talked a little bit, Margaret, about how this experience with the teaching drum outdoor school, the family year long, how this affected you. Can you say in your daily life now? I mean, you're in Washington state, you're living the life of luxury and modern civilization. Is there anything about your life that you can say is different now because of having had those three months with the teaching drum school? It feels like it's a slow process that I have been affected by it. I mean, I don't want to watch these days and I'm keeping track of the moon. I'm very excited about being back here and noticing what's happening in my garden, and I'm hoping that I will be spending more time. I'm going to be talking to my plants in a way that I've never had. It's not quite clear to me how this has affected me. A month ago, I went north again to the Nikolay Forest and rejoined the seekers for all of five nights and six days. And that week was so rich with togetherness, with sharing, with I would even call emotional intimacy. We had two nights where 19 of us crowded into the wigwam and we had storytelling. Now with this wigwam, you have a tunnel under the ground that comes up in the middle of the wigwam so that air is able to come into the wigwam and you can build a fire inside. And then there's a hole in the top of the wigwam so that the smoke can go out the hole. So, 19 of us all snug in a bucket of rug in this very rusted, rough, barked, huddle wigwam telling each other stories. Now the stories, one of the fact that first night was the end of the Trojan War, so it's not exactly a story about Pocahontas. It was a great story. And the second night we told stories, I started to tell some stories about tricks I had done to my mother when I was a little girl. And then I encouraged other people to talk about tricks they had played on their parents. And we which had some great stories, really funny, lots of laughter. So the kind of togetherness there was really profound. The night before I left, I said I wanted to have a sing and I asked people to bring a favorite song to you to teach us or just sing to us. And we sang around two fires, two hearts, for at least two hours and maybe more. And we could hardly stop. We ended up with Leonard Cohen's Alleluia and Lullaby's. It was just very, very wonderful and jolly. It was great sharing and funny songs. There were a couple pirate songs. It was just so delightful. And besides those three evenings, not only their five evenings, besides that during the day we had circles, gatherings. Now if you have a need, an emotional deed or need for support, you can call a circle and everybody is required to show up. And we had four circles during those six days. And one of them was simply, it was led by my daughter, who asked people to express how they were feeling about being part of a planet this time without using sentences, but maybe an occasional word or two, but also making sounds, physical expressions. And it was fascinating what people did and said. I ended up crying and just saying words about missing them all because I realized how important they had it all become to be. And then there was a circle that a young man called because he was really puzzled about some patterns of his relationship with his fiancé, who lives elsewhere. And he wanted some feedback about how other people might work with that. So you had these kinds of emotional, psychological sharing. Probably not that prevalent or that frequent when we were first together because we had so many basic survival things to learn, but seemed to be far more frequent when there was a lot of darkness, a lot of time to sit around the fire. I just found that very very touching. And I think that there is a desire to really work at creating more community in my life here, not in the woods. So we don't have to go in the woods to do this, but we do need to find ways to be helpful, kind, listening to be there for each other because we do need each other. Even though we may not be maybe throwing money at a lot of things we need, whether it's that cup of sugar or what, but we do need to be with each other and listening. And so I think I desire to just pause a little bit more, to listen a little bit longer, to be more curious about people, to be more social, but in a not a real big pressuring way, but in a more casual but infinite way. But feel like I've moved into a slightly different level of relating to people that is coming out of that experience of being a client. If not losing your individuality, it's how to be an individual in a group. Was there anything in your religious spiritual upbringing? I mean, what was that? And was there anything that predisposed you to want to do this or to prepare you for it or to not prepare you against it? I mean, you know, you can't have that kind of experience because that would be pagan or that would be, you know, I'm saying. Yeah, well, I grew up with my religious upbringing with the Presbyterian Church, which I have a Calvin and his doctors did a whole lot for me. I've always been interested in Christianity to some extent. However, I think what Valerie was more profound was my father, who was this individual who would be the first one in the world. The first one in the lake in the spring, or the first one to find a wildflower underneath his snow, that's probably in Arbutus, who had a real joy to leave. He was just a very alive person, and his aliveness was partly from the fact that he really was connected with the natural world. He grew up at a small town in northern Michigan. Had a great story to tell about the woods and the fields and the flowers and the bears. And he took me to cranberry bogs, and he took me smelting. So those experiences, I think, were probably quite profound in my loving and natural world. And then, of course, I became more and more civilized and spent less and less time in that way. But I think it was my childhood and my father. And my mother was a great gardener. But I think those particular experiences probably were what drew me to this time in the woods. And if more people had this experience lived out there for 11 months in the wilderness without our modern American conveniences, what do you think the planet would be like in terms of the differences you might see? Oh, I don't know. But it was fascinating to find out. Yeah, I'm not sure. I just think the experience, the communal experience of coming to know each other in a new way would probably be. But I think that the folks coming out of this right now are going to go out. There will be a ripple effect, but there will be more openness to being in smaller communities and more connections with each other. I think the whole piece around community, that people so long to be connected with each other, and yet we've become so separate at our houses that we don't know our neighbors. Many of us have very few friends, or if we do, they're all so busy to find time to be with each other. I think that would change drastically if people had this experience. That would, I'm sure, put a different spin on how what we would find is important and what would be our priorities. Well, it sounds like an amazing adventure. Again, we've been talking with Margaret Moore at the age of 76, along with her daughter and two of her grandchildren. She was part of 42 people who were doing a family year-long wilderness day under the direction of the teaching drum outdoor schools. You can find them on the web at teachingdrum.org. It's an amazing experience of community, of connection with nature, of finding ourselves and what society has trained us into, and maybe which we want to break free of. Margaret, I'm so inspired by what you did. I'd love to do this. Of course, and I can't do my radio program. I'm not sure which one's going to win out for me, but I do so much thank you for joining me for Spirit in Action. Oh, you're so welcome. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing. [MUSIC PLAYING]