Seven Generations Outdoor School

www.7generationsoutdoor.omei.net

Reconnecting adults and children with 

Mother Earth...

Finding that personal connection with the Earth deepens one’s love of nature and enriches life.

Children are the future, and without children rooted in the earth and nature, there can be no future.  An old Native American saying tells that when a decision is made, it must be made on behalf of seven generations to come.  Having such a  deep personal connection to the Earth gave the Native American the sensitivity to know if the actions they were taking made for positive change for their people and  all life.   If it did not, no action would be taken.  And that is why we call our school Seven Generations.

By replanting our feet back in the earth, we bring hope and promise of a brighter future. 

Seven Generations Outdoor School offers the making of tools and skills that will fully connect you to nature, like primitive shelters, friction fire, baskets, cordage, bowls and utensils, animal tracking, throwing sticks, tanning hides, camouflage, flint knapping, awareness, fishing spears, bows, arrows, and vision quest.  It is these ancient skills and tools that will create the personal connection to life and Earth, enriching at the same time as they teach.

It is our responsibility to hand down these great gifts, and here they are, in the form of  classes.  These skills and tools are the true teachers, and we just the facilitators.

Reconnection on this primitive level, brings out an understanding, a personal relationship with the Earth that can only be felt by this type of full emersion in nature.  Planting one's feet back in the earth in this way will make the future a brighter place for our children and grandchildren to come.

Seven Generations Outdoor School invites you to come join us, see you soon!

Mikes Field Guide: Buried Alive

Mikes Field Guide: Buried Alive: We are digging a hole, Stan, Josh, Maria, and I.  A hole to spend the next 4 hours living a slow death.  Death of the old Mike and birth i...

Love of Life

It was a cool spring day.  A stiff northwest breeze was blowing up in the foothills.  I had just finished all my early day duties and decided to sit outside the entry booth of the Elena Gallegos Park.  It is a wonderful view that contains a vista that runs some 150 miles across, on an average clear New Mexico day.  You can see mountains, volcanoes, mesas and buttes across the entire horizon.  The Rio Grande river snakes from north to south, and the entire city of Albuquerque is laid out before you like an aerial road map.   

The Elena Gallegos Park is run by the city of Albuquerque, it is a multi use facility, with about 700 acres of hiking, biking and horseback riding trails.  There are also picnic and barbeque areas and in all sees about 150,000 visitors a year.  At the time, I was a park attendant at the park, taking care of cleaning, and maintenance of the park and facilities.

I had sat down right next to a juniper that sits just north of the parks entry booth.  No sign of any one around until a man in full biking outfit came cruising along trail 365.  This trail runs in full view of where I sat and crosses the road to the park just some 70 feet in front of me.  This cyclist crossed the road and kept riding until the trail takes a slope down into the south pino arroyo.  He got off his bike and stopped, looking back for someone.  About 10 seconds went by when a second biker rode into view.  This cyclist was much smaller, and wearing a pink and blue outfit and pink helmet. The cyclist slowly crossed the road, and just before she got to the other side stopped to walk her bike over a large bump where the trail continued.  Or at least that is the reason I thought she had stopped for.  She stood there straddling her bike, looking straight down on the ground just in front of her bike.  She would not move.  She would not take her eyes off the ground.

The first cyclist now yelled out loudly, “What are you waiting for?!”  No answer came from the small pink biker.  Now noticeably upset the first cyclist yelled again, “Get on your #%&! Bike and get going!”  The pink cyclist then said rather softly and with a frightened tone,” but there are ants.  I do not want to hurt the ants.”

I will always remember this next statement, because it so puts into reference what motivates, and controls so much of what most people think in today’s, 21^st century, American society.  And that motivational control is fear.  Fear of the unknown, Nature, and the fear of oneself. 

The pink clad cyclist’s father then yells, “Get on your bike right now, the hell with the ants…. Do you want the coyotes to get you and kill you?   I sat there in complete shock.  Here is a 6 to 7 year old girl, I am guessing, one with such sensitivity to life around her, life itself and she is yelled at, her feelings ignored, and fear instilled in her to boot.  She got on her bike, rode off and disappeared into the arroyo.

I sat there, having witnessed an answer to a question I have beaten myself up with time and time again.  Why or how does this society, feel so removed, so uncaring for our mother earth? 

We are born caring.  Love is part of us from the start.  Just like that pink colored cyclist.   It is nurturing, or lack of it, it is society, or lack of it, that strips this love from us. We also view nature as wilderness.  Not natural, but wild.  Wild is to be tamed, that is the stance this society preaches.  Ants on the ground are natural.  That little girl had enough love in her heart to feel for those ants.  

Nature is pure love. Nature is part of us.  Deep in our genes nature lies.

Buried Alive

We are digging a hole, Stan, Josh, Maria, and I.  A hole to spend the next 4 hours living a slow death.  Death of the old Mike and birth into a new. 

This will be new to all of us.  Never in my wildest dreams would I think being put into a hole, alive, and being completely buried up till  my mouth and nostrils were the only thing exposed, .change my life forever. 

Generations of indigenous experienced this right of passage, now it was my turn.  As I lower myself willingly into this ‘ hole of life”, I call it, a pulse of adrenalin pumped into my head, like I was about to bungee jump from the highest bridge, but with no cord for my safety net. Now laying flat on the cool, sandy soil my fellow Questers began to slowly cover me.  Starting at my toes, then slowly moving up my naked body, except for a bathing suit to protect my privates, every cell of my flesh began to tingle.  Breathing slow and relaxed, the way my elders advised me to do.  With each breathe the dirt and sand around me readjusted and tightened its embrace upon my entire body.  The last thing I saw was the tree limbs and canopy of the near by pitch pines above my head and the sun to my immediate right peaking in and out of the cotton ball looking clouds.  Maria laid a bandana across my mouth and nose to stop any dirt from getting in my way of breathing.

My mind has to be free of distraction not worrying about my next breathe.  The last hand full of dirt were placed around my head and now my friends slowly left me there to die my little death. 

My mind needs to be clear, but it is a tough struggle.  Relax, breathe, stop thinking about 80 pounds of dirt piled on my chest!  Relax, relax…. stop it Mike.  As I started to relax, I started to feel a tickling on my stomach.  What is that?  It is driving me nuts.  I know it’s a small bug, but it had power over me.  I can not remove it.  Just let the feeling pass out of you Mike, and it did not bother me anymore.  Well, actually, I think the bug just moved on. 

All of a sudden I heard a low, muffled, deep sound rumble.  It started at my left ear, went across my whole body to finish at my right ear.   Then it happened again, only I felt it first in my feet and it past to my head.  Just then I got really worried.  It is a huge truck coming through the forest and I am going to be squished!  Then I remembered my friends were out there in the vicinity and they would stop any truck. 

What seemed like a long time went by.  But I really can not be sure.  You lose track of time, and it could have been two minutes for all I know.  I also could not be sure of was this new, unexplainable but exciting sensation I was experiencing.  I just could not figure out where my feet and hands were.  Now, I know they were still attached, but for the life of me they could have been two feet away from my body or twenty!  I felt that I was almost melting, losing the physical sense of my body itself. 

And then, the most incredible 5 minutes ( or not) of my experience began to happen.  I felt one rain drop hit my nose threw the thin bandana.  It then began to sound like pork was sizzling in a Wok.  ALL AROUND ME!  In front, behind, left and right, then a drop of water hit my mouth.  It was raining.

But as the ground began soaking up this moisture, the most incredible feeling came over me.  I actually felt in my body the roots from all those pines around me begin to draw up that precious moisture.  I felt it in my body and I felt it in my soul this water being drawn through me as if I was becoming part of the soil, part of the rain and then my felling of becoming part of the pine tree drawing up the life force into it.  I had no sense of the physical boundary that was my body.  We are energy, we are the life force.  I feel part of things around me!  This notion came crashing into my head like a tsunami.  For one second I became one with everything around me.  It only takes one second to change a life. 

Just then my friends began to unearth me from my grave.  And back in my body I was, looking up at the canopy of pines in which I was one second earlier, a whole new Mike.