Always Asking Questions

AWE Season One Episode Three: Opening the workbook

When I began to plan this idea—of investigating how we can achieve a sense of empowerment through deep interaction with nature, especially as seen through the eyes of our hunter-fisher-gatherer ancestors—I knew I wanted it to be more than a series of essays or personal musings.

For this reason, the format I have chosen is to share an essay, or musing, then follow this with a post with questions for you, or ideas of how to pursue and acquire your own knowledge and learning. These posts will also have more photos.

Being a naturalist and an ancestral skills advocate is all about different scales. We learn to look at a whole, then focus more closely, above, through, below. It is entirely possible to see both trees and forest.

With time, I intend to also include detailed, highly specific tutorials on a range of topics, whether ancestral fire lighting skills—from identifying the wild materials, through processing them, to actually lighting and maintaining a fire, or making a bow—along with the arrows, decorated quiver, and natural cordage bowstring, similarly from the very start to the finish, just to select two examples I am working on. There are others. This is such a vast, vast topic, I’m certainly not going to run out of material.

I am even tempted to run polls, to see what people want to see first. Watch this space (and also my Notes, I’ll keep updating things on there).

Once the season is complete, I shall also compile and make all of the posts available together, as a downloadable book/workbook, with added space for your own notes and observations. I really like this idea.

For today, however, this post is illustrated with a selection of photographs of different facets of nature. As ever, these are all my own work, taken over many years of being a naturalist—but all from the west coast of Scotland.

Questions, Always Questions

To take steps on any path of learning is to ask questions. Without asking anything, you will never acquire the knowledge you need. How you frame these questions, and how you proceed with asking them, whether asking yourself and seeking the answers in literature, through direct study of an object, or asking someone who might already know the answer, is entirely up to you. I would suggest a mixture of all of these.