Wild practice

I am off to the woods for my yearly pilgrimage to sit with trees, practice in the open air, and challenge myself in both mental and practical ways. When I am not busy making my shelter, getting water, foraging or cooking, there is, strangely, enough time to do T'ai Chi, standing or sitting practice. I hope you will think of me and send good luck, as rain and cold are forecast!

See you at class when I return. Tooting class will be covered by Kevin this week.

This week I will mainly be doing T'ai Chi while wearing a woollen 

homemade Viking hood. Thanks to Alison for the fabric, it's cosy!

Also, no sword, but plenty of atlatl practice. 

Human learning

We are not machines, despite the archaic music joke: 'What's the difference between a drummer and a drum machine?' (Answer: 'You only have to punch the rhythm into the drum machine once.')

When I first had a go at knapping flints I spent a day mainly making artisanal gravel. After a good night's sleep in my cosy tent, I woke up strangely able to make decent knives split off the flint core.
Human learning: practice / sleep / refine / repeat.
Then perhaps one day you will indeed have a subtle knife, and be able to wield it.

My first spoons, knives and an unfinished hand axe, an antler tool,

 (plus 3 very nice pressure-flaked arrow heads made by a friend.)

T'ai Chi and nature

Over many years I have found out by doing, that the famous 'correct touch' for T'ai Chi as spoken about in the Classics, and the correct touch for making things with natural materials, are so similar as to be the same thing, just in differing contexts. Both require sensitivity, joined-up-ness and the ability to change moment to moment, rather than imposed fixed ideas upon the situation at hand. The correct mind for T'ai Chi and working with nature are also the same: expanded open awareness, concentration, connection, absorption, and importantly, humility. Ah, the last one will get you anyway, the bop on the nose, the ungainly trip, the bruised pride: as likely in the woods as in the T'ai Chi Class. Also, sudden moments of grace and natural movement, something ineffable glimpsed, a great push, surprising groundedness, an application settling into the body, also common to both realms. I am very lucky to be able to work in both these arenas, and sometimes simultaneously.

Here's a couple of photos from Joe's FB site. He's such a great wilderness skills instructor, go have a look at his site. There's an ever-present theme in my life since I was 5 years old: great teachers. I'll never stop being grateful for that, or aspiring to embody the same range of beneficial qualities in my own teaching.

Atlatl target practice last Thursday morning.

The Hunter Gatherers return to a slap up breakfast.

Back from the wild

Just to let folks know I am back and in one piece... Thanks for all the messages of encouragement, which were greatly appreciated on my first cold night rekindling the fire at 3am after zero carbs all day... I am home, thrilled to have risen to the challenge, been in such incredibly beautiful woods, made a home with just a knife and folding saw (and coats full of leaf litter for bedding and thatch). My boat feels like a palace! I don't have to walk 10 minutes to a 'pond' to collect a billy can of water to boil three times a day. If you wonder why I will be eating as much as I like at the Scottish workshop next week, it's because I have to regain the weight the woods took away. However, what I got in return is incalculable. More on this soon. For now two pictures.

My home this week, in the wild embrace of a fallen oak tree.

Yesterday morning, atlatl in hand, just about to hit the target and win a huge potato for my evening stew, hurrah! Also eventually earned the Snickers bar, a Baby Bel, a corn cob, a stock cube and a banana, true delights after only burdock, dandelion and silverweed roots for carbs all week.

Into the wild

In a moment I will be sharpening my knife and prepping some deerskins to soften... Must mean I am away for a week to the woods. I will miss folks at class, but will get some great teaching on posture and naturalness from the trees, no doubt, as I do my practice in the Great Ridge Woods. Wish me luck. From Monday first light until Friday morning it will just be me, in the clothes I stand up in, plus billy can, knife, folding saw and a cloth water filter. Thank goodness it doesn't look like there will be much rain, if any. See you at class and at the workshops after 7th October, perhaps with a few bites, and maybe weighing a bit less. I am praying the hazels and chestnuts are still around...

This year, with not enough time spent in the woods, I have realised that 'nature deficit disorder' is indeed a real thing. For me, regular time in broad-leaved woodland is essential, and no amount of parks or even the coast can take its place, though these too are vital to my peace of mind. If we love nature, it is time to protect it, can we make time to volunteer? In the Autumn I plan to get involved with organisations who remove plastic from river, marine, and other natural environments. More here when I have been along.

For now, do get outside when the weather allows to do some T'ai Chi, nei-gung or meditation, or just go for a walk. If the weather doesn't allow you to do this, get better waterproofs... and enjoy the autumn colours, sounds and smells.

Barefoot shoes workshop

I have just been on a workshop making a wonderful duffel bag from leather in the woods in Wiltshire, with Joe my regular bushcraft teacher. In the past I have also made some great moccasins and shoes with natural materials on his courses, and later at home. Joe is half way through making a few great pairs of stealth shoes, in the barefoot style, so that the feet are protected but not at all constricted. He is planning a workshop making these next spring, over two days. Myself, Jon and a couple of pals are already up for this, so I am inviting you too. Lots of us wear shop-bought 'barefoot' style shoes for T'ai Chi, and they are a great improvement for me over traditional cotton shoes as my feet are free to wriggle and move, standing on one leg postures feel much more settled and stable. I plan to design and make a nice pair of leather shoes for T'ai Chi, possibly based on my 'Tudor' shaped buckskin shoes. Anyway, here are a few pictures to tempt you along. There would be one night camping in the woods, a wonderful atmosphere around the fire, beautiful trees all around, and plentiful tea. As soon as I know prices and dates I will post them here, but do let me know if you are interested. The principles are simple, the shoes will be made to fit your feet perfectly, and walking silently through the woods in these, or indeed doing the Form, really feels like you have magic feet.
This year's course is here.

Beginning the duffel bag.

Some of the awls and needles we used.

The finished bag, ready to be waterproofed for the Hunter Gatherer Challenge, using a creme I made with beeswax and almond oil.

I had time to add a leather strap to my rawhide sketchbook satchel.

Joe's new mocs.

Joe's camouflage feet! These are made from very soft leather and have a thicker leather insert in the sole, making them more comfortable and still flexible. I expect my T'ai Chi shoe experiment to be a bit like this, though possible not in camo print leather...

I have worn both of these at class, warmer boot style shoes with a needle felted wool insert, and the Tudor style slippers which are very lightweight.

The classroom.

Skill

For many years one of my true hobbies - something I do purely for the love of it - has been bushcraft, or what is called wilderness or earth skills in most other countries. It has fed into my art, my crafts, my practice and my sense of being a human in the greater web of life. Everyone I have studied with has been good, thankfully. I have learned more with Joe O'Leary than with anyone else and been on perhaps 10 of his courses over the years, some of them a couple of times or more. This year has been a bit tight financially so I had to forego courses of any kind, but I have decided I can't bear it any more and need to get back to the Great Ridge Woods again. I'd like to go to this leather bag making day course, but it is easier to go with other people in a shared car than head on my own by train. Let me know if you'd like to come. It's easy to get to from London and is near Stonehenge.

Also, it will be a year since my transformative fast in the wild woods of Carpathia, Romania, so I am hoping to complete a challenging year by stepping mindfully back into the woods with my wits about me for the Hunter Gatherer Challenge. I will hone my skills again later this August. Unless you have been doing lots in the woods, you won't be able to join me on this one, but I will happily accept your wishes of good luck and for a plentiful hazelnut and porcini harvest to coincide with the course.

Joe will travel to teach crafts courses and I can host them here at the island studio and woods, so if there is something on his site you'd like to learn, let me know as we could do it here, and still have a fire, trees to work under and the river, but in travel zone 6!

In 2019 I would like to return for the third time to this crafts week. It is truly superb, if you'd like to know more just email me, as it is great to go with friends. You'll come home with a carved cup, spoon, bark containers, buckskins, a leather bag, and so much more. More than anything, you'll get to be in woods of incomparable beauty which normally you may not enter, as in England one does not yet have the right to roam, as in Scotland. These courses will probably not run again, as Joe, like many of my friends who teach real skills, finds that folks coming along now just don't have the staying power for long courses, and that their attention spans are shorter each year. Is the ubiquity of the internet making us all stupid and distracted? Discuss.

The three or four most important internally transformative moments of my life have taken place in the forest, while hungry, at some risk and usually slightly under the weather or recovering from injury. I always get more than I bargain for when I pay attention to nature, ask sincere and simple questions, such as 'I wonder if ceps grow under these oak trees at Derwent.' Or 'I wonder if spruce trees have resin on the bark that I can collect, as with pine trees.' So, rather than struggle for ever in the dark where we are, (though the dark is an important phase and must be endured), at some point we have to pick ourselves up and mindfully put ourselves in the place where we feel life can reveal itself to us again. Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes superbly about this in her book 'Women Who Run With The Wolves', as part of the life/death/life process. (It is also written of in Robert Bly's 'Iron John', in relation to men's psyches.)

One of the ways out of the mire of self is by exercising one's hard-won skill. That may be a craft, a quality in one's daily work, a hobby, an inner practice. This is not about being good at something for the sake of it, or indeed making anything that another person would recognise as a product at all. It could be tending the garden with great care and attention. It might mean finishing that tapestry or carpentry we have neglected. It is risking singing aloud, reading that poem out, sleeping out in the autumn woods alone with little kit and no tent. When I was younger I used to think freedom was being able to 'do what I want'. Now I feel it is more often being able to have the time and space to practice what I love. This can be my art, writing, T'ai Chi, earth skills... it changes according to the year and to life, as to what feeds me. Right now it's Heart Work and writing poetry. Who knew?

May you find what you love to practice that feeds your life, and if you already know what that is, may you have time this summer to practise it.

Good things for Beltane

Thanks to the folks who came to the inaugural Short Form study group, it was great. We did the warm ups, two Short Forms, lots of application study, questions and then formally looking at the first three postures of the form.

In the studio

Just past full moon tonight.

Finally finished my buckskin skirt to teach in next week at Wild Twins.

Into the woods and beyond

Happy New Year all!
I hope 2018 brings nature, love and friendship into your lives. Oh yeah and obviously, lots and lots of T'ai Chi!

Over the next few days I will post a few links here to things I have loved over the last year, things I am hoping to do, and general Very Good Things. There have been many, in a sometimes challenging year past...

I have just been in touch with my excellent bushcraft teacher Joe O'Leary, and have noticed he has revamped his website. If I get any spare cash, I will be there again asap. I cannot recommend his courses enough, what I have learned there has become part of my everyday skills, and also contributes to my art and craft, whether for myself or teaching others.

And this weekend I will be joining the British Pilgrimage Trust walking and drawing on a one day Wassail pilgrimage. Toasting strangers and apple trees with drink and old songs, walking with good company on old paths, and ending up in a pub. What more could a Dorset woman wish for New Year? I'll share some drawings I make next week. Maybe I will forage some materials on the route, I hope so. there should be flint, chalk, oak galls and willow bark at least.

Next good thing...
The Unthanks, oh yeah! I am late to this party but they are superb. Particularly Mount The Air, the best thing I heard all year. Also, The Bairns.

Ewart-Park Leaf Sword

I am incredibly chuffed to have finished making the handle for my cast bronze Ewart-Park Leaf sword. I made this blade with Will Lord 4 years ago at a wonderful workshop called The Blade run by Woodsmoke Bushcraft at Dave Budd's forge down in Devon. After two days making flint knives with Antony Whitlock, mainly creating artisanal gravel, Will taught us to build a furnace using cobb, and the following day we cast knives and swords from bronze we made from copper and tin. Some of the copper was extracted from malachite which we smashed up ourselves. The final two days were spent forging steel knives with Dave in his outdoor Iron Age set-up, and hafting the blades on the final day. (That's now the neck-knife I posted here earlier this week.)

I still have to get some more bark to finish tanning the roe deer skin that will hopefully become the scabbard for this blade. With luck and a following wind, it might be done in time for the summer workshop. 

If you search online for Ewart Park Leaf you'll find out about how these British swords were made, as several have been found, including the one from which my sword-mould was cast: pulled from The Thames at Isleworth in the nineties. These swords came from the Brithonic Iceni tribe, to which Boudicca belonged. The people defending their families with these bronze swords were defeated by the professional legions of Romans and their steel. 

Originally the swords were decorated with finely cast dot designs in a leaf shape, sadly lost during polishing on mine. Also, the handles often had a V shaped profile where it met the blade, whereas mine is shaped internally and cuts across in straight line externally, for simplicity. I have used brass rod to secure a sandwich of ash wood either side of the full bronze tang, and used 5 rather than 7 rods as I won't be using this in combat soon, at least not outside my dreams. I have just this minute finished wrapping the handle in bucked rawhide twine which I made last night from offcuts from my latest satchel. This provides a very nice-feeling grip and completes the rough and ready look of this particular project. If you look at other recreated leaf blades you'll see a great deal of skill and a high level of finish on handles, usually topped with a rounded pommel. I like to think mine is what you might fashion in the ash woods of south-eastern England when your fancy handle got wrecked falling in the fire when you'd drunk too much mead, or added to a salvaged old sword where the handle had rotted away and needed making simply fit for use. I am a total beginner at wood and metal work, and an improver with tanning and bucking skins, so this is just right. Thanks so much to Chris Jackson for his generous help in getting this done in his workshop. We used a few 20th C tools to save time and I finished shaping it by hand with whittling knives and glass paper. I'm not going to oil or varnish it as I doubt those materials were widely available, maybe only linseed oil (flax). Grime and skin-oil would not have been in short supply!

Ewart-Park Leaf cast bronze sword with simple ash wood handle, wrapped in twined rawhide. 

Detail of wrapped handle.

Solstice eve

Home late after work which meant I sadly had to miss class. Lit my lamp, new wick and oil needed, candles have taken over duty. Litha tomorrow: Midsummer day. For some it's the middle of summer for others the start. How it feels to me: midday of the year.

   Speaking of midday, the heat has been too much for me for the last 4 days, to be honest, and there's still another day or two to go. In the mornings I have taught T'ai Chi in our shady hideaway or done chores but I spend the afternoons mainly spraying myself with a plant mister full of water and only trying to do small things. My neighbours jump in the river to cool-off but I've seen the huge jaws of the many huge healthy pike...

Here's one small job done: the knife I forged three years ago now with the full-tang pear-wood handle cut down to the perfect size. Now it can hang on a neck strap of twined buckskin. I was given the bark tanned leather to sew the case. Hilariously found a good set of photos and instructions on art of manliness dot com. If only they knew how large is the intersect in the Venn diagram of my set of (wo)manly arts and interests and theirs. 

Alder tree against the sky just now. 

Fire and Shadow

This Spring and Autumn I will be teaching on Fire and Shadow, an eight month long Dark Mountain course. We’ll be making archaic materials out in the wild, and taking as much time in making them around the camp fire as using them. So much contemporary response and communication is instant, it’s like a running commentary. These materials slow us down, in the best way, we become absorbed in the moment: communication at a walking pace.

Making a swan feather quill.

Let me know if you'd like to come as I may be able to arrange a discount.

Round the fire at Carrying The Fire 2015

Pouch

Finally finished my first little lop-sided salmon skin pouch, sewn with synthetic sinew and fastened with a shell and some buckskin. It's currently full of mussel shell pallettes and a a buzzard bone pen. 9/10 pre modern - as I couldn't face licking and hand-laying cordage for an hour with deer sinew the other day. Some people may not consider these natural materials very appealing, but they are wonderful to work with and to my eyes are beautiful to look at even when not in use. 

Meanwhile back in the Middle Ages...

I have been working and studying hard the last couple of weeks so today I have been mostly making iron gall ink and oil-tanning salmon skins... Got my chores done early, and all my admin that was urgent. Everything else can wait as I am spending a day in the past.

Oak galls from Wales and Epping Forest plus rusty nails from the boatyard. 

Iron gall ink after an hour or two, nice and black. Will add gum arabic tomorrow and adjust the colour and consistency. May also make a new swan or goose quill or two to celebrate. 

Ian, my 3rd generation family fishmonger (at Kingston's 800 year old market) is putting aside any unwanted fish skins from filleting for me to try tanning next weekend, in return for a jar of damson jam. Top trade! After he skinned and filetted the salmon I bought today, I scraped, scaled and soaked the skin. This evening I will work it until it's soft, in between cooking and eating the fish. Tomorrow: fresh wet walnuts were in the market - so walnut shell dye, Dorset Apple cake to make a dent in Frances' apple mountain and perhaps a jaunt up river. 

Hope you too are having a peaceful if wet weekend.

Vessels

Finally finished my sycamore spoon and birch cup, nesting here in my first birch bowl. Next I plan to learn to turn wood, as I need a bigger bowl and a plate. 

September photos

Dark Mountain Basecamp at Embercombe. Wonderful people and place.

Little house boat on the lake at Embercombe, one of the few places I had a moment of home-envy.

...but then I came home.

The Pre-Norman art basket is in full swing, I will blog about it when it is finished.

Teaching in warm sunshine this weekend in Aberdeenshire. Wonderful work by all and good atmosphere - thanks to all who came and to P and D for having us again.

New partnerwork exercise, looking forward to sharing this one.

Annual fungi foray...

...always a delight to find comedy mushrooms. This is a rather cheeky orange birch bolete, next to unidentified 'lbj' (little brown job). If it's not edible, medicinal, useful or poisonous, sadly I probably haven't learned it over the years.

Lots of chanterelles, plenty of ceps, orange birch, brown birch and bay boletes, some deceivers and a bowl of brambles. We dried the boletes and processed the chanterelles for frying in butter and freezing. Some also went into a pie which was very tasty. Real thanks to the woods of Aberdeenshire for their bounty.

Some July and August Photos

View from the Summer workshop venue.

Keeping the wolf at the door.

Sword Form during a break at the workshop.

Lee Bay.

2 days' fishing in Dorset, plenty of mackerel to share.

Smoking our buckskins over the fire in the round house.

Basket nearing finished...

End of the day.

Traditional Crafts

I have just returned from an excellent weekend in the woods assisting at a Deer In a Day and Wild Food and Foraging. This summer will see the last opportunity for some time to do lots of beautiful traditional crafts at Joe's School before he buckles down to write his second book, meaning some courses will not run next year. If you love making things, or have friends who do, please get in touch so I can pass on a discount code for courses this year. In August will be going to this course to make buckskin, birch bark boxes and bowls and spoons. I plan to make lots of gifts and have more time with good folks in the woods. The teaching is great and the atmosphere is wonderful, much like The T'ai Chi Centre but with radically different footwear, added sticks and wood smoke! (...and occasionally mud.)

Some of the things I made over the last year, that may feature in the Wilderness Crafts course.

Thanks and pictures

Well done and thanks to all the Scottish students. We did some really good, deep work last month, whilst observing the sun/snow/wind/hail/sun game the weather played. See you again soon.

Bushy Park on May Day, full of bird life, dappled light, snogging couples and grazing deer.

This weekend's little birch bark box, sewn with rawhide, with hazel base and lid. Currently full of chalk from Climping beach and a lump of Sanguine (red earth pigment) from Italy - pre-modern drawing materials.