Scarlett and Davies both decided to stay with us for the day instead of going to the Home Ed group. I was secretly pleased, both because I’d miss them gone all day and because we were due a good day today with Ollie.
After breakfast we headed up right to the edge of the woodland where we were helping to prepare an area for a course Ollie is running in a couple of weeks time. We needed to create some camping spots for people’s tents, a camp kitchen and some benches.
The kids and I did some leaf and branch clearing and then Ady and I started working together on the kitchen which we built with Ollie using a couple of pallet wood doors and branches from the woods. Must get a picture actually, it looked fab 🙂 really rustic and part of the woodland.
Tea break was interesting with Ollie telling us about a sweat lodge initiation ceremony held here and a regular men’s meeting where they pray and smoke pipes together. There is no real spiritual consensus between the community with various of the group having various personal beliefs – none of them your typical Christian stuff 😉 but there is a real deep connection to nature and the woodland running between everyone and most of their religious beliefs and ceremonies seem to fall into those ways.
After tea we finished the kitchen while others did various other tasks and then it was lunchtime. Lunch was fab, cooked by Chris who we have spent most time WWOOFing with, a lovely pasta and sauce and we were tipped a wink to head over to Chris and Owen’s where Owen had cooked up some bacon to add to it. Delicious 🙂 Carried us all through the rather lentil heavy dinner which the kids and I didn’t eat.
We returned to work early as Ollie promised us all a taster of his course, usually he gives WWOOFers who are interested a condensed version at weekends but he is not here this weekend and we’re heading off on Saturday anyway, so he spent about 90 minutes covering some stuff with us all. He is following the teachings of Tom Brown Jr and learning about bird language, tracking skills and other naturalist things and has been studying himself for about 2 years and is now running course to mentor others. He is definitely the resident bird expert here and has plenty of stories to tell about sightings of deer and birds in the woodland here.
Some of the stuff he showed us the kids and I have covered before at Forest School and the Campcraft Sleepout Davies and I did but Ollie is a great coach and had us all using peripheral vision (owl’s eyes), cupping our ears to hear better (Deer’s ears) and walking barefoot and gently (fox’s feet). We talked about the five levels of bird language – four at ‘baseline’ when the woodland is at peace with no threats or outside influences and birds use calls for; bird song, conversation from bird to bird just checking where the others are (pairs, families or flocks), juvenille calling for feeding and territorial or mating calls. The fifth is alarm call to warn of danger. I’m explaining it really poorly in writing but it was fascinating and Ollie has offered to put some stuff on a usb stick for us to learn more but the best way of learning is observing the actual birds. When I am not on limited online time I will find some better links too as it’s something all four of us are interested in finding out more about so I want to try and hoard some links to come back to.
Next Ady and I dug in some logs to make some benches which was hard work and when Becky, Ollie’s partner came up to see how it was all going she made the very accurate observation that they were too close to the fire pit. Some head scratching ensued before we dismantled them again and they are planning to consult with Becky’s Dad when he visits next week as he is a joiner so can probably construct something more sophisticated.
We called time then as we needed to light the bathhouse although in the end the kids were so tired we’ve headed up to the tent early tonight without a bath. We’ve been lent the community bat detector which we did take down to the glade to use but we ended up with a small posse of boys who all said they wanted to bat spot but then got all rowdy with sticks and the batteries died on the detector anyway. We did see three though and are planning to creep down just the four of us tomorrow evening having charged the batteries up again.
We spent some time talking to Seth & Mel about solar power and Seth has offered to help us wire solar panels up to Willow if we get hold of some so we may well take him up on that in a few weeks when we’re back this way.
My personal big news is that I climbed our personal hill to our tent twice today without having to pause for breath. I was making noises like a sealion by the end of the climb and I certainly took it slowly but I couldn’t have done that two weeks ago! 🙂
Really pleased that it has been such a positive start for you all. I bet I wasn’t the only one really worried about a veggie community where you are all in a tent for your first stop!
The course taster sounds really interesting – you’ll have to show us when we next see you 🙂
Comment by Kirsty — 16 March 2011 @ 9:16 pm
Just amazing! You’ll have no trouble climbing the hill at j&j’s next time then :-). Xx
Comment by Michelle — 16 March 2011 @ 9:39 pm