A common pastime of outdoor enthusiasts is collecting edible mushrooms. This endeavor must be pursued with great caution since mistaking a poisonous mushroom for one that is edible can cost you your life. There are many old wives tales that would have you believe that there are easy ways to avoid poisonous mushrooms through blanket […]
“The art of questioning is one of the highest arts we can practice.” -David Spangler, author of Emergence, Rebirth of the Sacred There are many, many things that you can do to increase your awareness. The good news is that you will always have room to improve, and you will never be bored again! Sounds […]
Imagine a wonderful story you’ve been told. Where were you? What was the place like? Who were you with? Was it night or day? By a fire? How did you feel when you were hearing it? And now consider…what did the storyteller do that drew you in and captured your imagination? These are elements to […]
Sitting in the cold: Why would you want to do it and how you can make it work… If I were to suggest to most people that it’s a great idea to go outside even in the thick of winter and sit on the cold wet ground for half an hour… they might think I’m […]
Venomous Spider: The Black Widow When considering venomous spiders and spider identification, the first one that comes to mind is the Black Widow. In North America, there are around five species of the Black Widow spider. You can easily identify the black widow, especially the female, because of it’s round, bulbous belly. The female Black […]
Once humans developed a need to travel on water in order to fish, trade, and explore, cultures worldwide created lightweight boats consisting of the skin of an animal stretched over a light frame of wooden poles or strips. One such boat is the coracle. This is a boat of the British Isles and is varied […]
The North Star Points True North Knowing how to find the North Star in the northern hemisphere is one of the most basic survival skills. Those of us in the north are fortunate to have the North Star as a handy survival tool for determining direction without a compass. Visible from the surface of the […]
A good story has a way of getting inside you. It can reveal something about where you are in life. Stories also give us a cultural context and sense of continuity. They teach us how to live. In many Native cultures there are stories of the First People, or the Ancestors, that show how people […]
I find it amusing that I’m sometimes labeled an “urbanite.” It’s amusing because I’d never label myself that way. Why? Because not two days before writing these words, I was sitting on my back deck at dusk and a white-tailed buck sauntered across my yard within 20 feet of me while in the hollow oak […]
I was on the first week of my field biology job in the mountains of North Cascades National Park when I got a message from the trees. I had been doing Wilderness Awareness School’s naturalist training series for a few years, but it still took me by surprise to hear trees talking. Or maybe it […]