Thoughts on Woodcraft Mentoring

I am thinking back over these 18 months of doing this mentoring program and keying thoughts into the memory of this computer that will find their place out there in public view here on the WWS blog. 

An integral part of the thinking and keying is the process of processing … thinking through things … evaluating … not only evaluating the progress of these young guys in their woodcraft journeys … but … reflecting on my own progress in my own journey and evaluating my effectiveness as a mentor, teacher, and guide.

18 months.

A year and a half.

One Saturday morning each month.

Around 3 hours each month.

Let’s round it off and call it 60 hours.

60 hours.

Where a time-perspective is concerned … what we have is both a good bit of time and hardly any time at all. 60 hours. What we really have in this measure of time, in the big scheme of things, is honestly a miniscule increment.

One of the courses of thought meandering through the tangle in my mind concerns how the popular shows on television have a tendency to glamorize and romanticize this realm or dimension of outdoors doings. I think these shows have a positive effect in that they generate interest at all age levels. Interest in the natural surroundings provided by personally getting outdoors, especially outdoors away from established parks and off the well-worn paths, is a good thing.

There’s a world of wonder to wander out there that most have never experienced … a world that most will never experience.

The downside to these shows is that they are weighted heavily on the side of survival. They are weighted heavily on the side of enduring the adversities that Ma Nature can and will present. Not that enduring and surviving are unimportant. They are essential if you want to stay alive in a bad situation. A well-rounded repertoire of tuned survival skills ought to be a definite cache safeguarded by every individual.

Another downside to these shows is that their producers are bent on finding the most remote, dire, difficult, and hostile environments to film the shows … places where ordinary everyday folks will never wander … places that appear to be selected (at least to me) to destine failure in the efforts of the survival candidates. The shows make for good entertainment. I think though that a lot of people in contemporary society take a look at the shows on TV and instantly conclude that they will never be “there”. True enough but it’s a conclusion that leads to inactivity in other important areas of personal preparation and preparedness.

Developing skills and acquiring knowledge is a pursuit that takes time and effort.

I enjoy doing weekend courses. A lot can be told and shown in a weekend “crash” course. There’s a lot of value in these courses. Doing the short courses always leaves me wondering though.

A lot can be shown and told in a weekend. But just how much can be honestly caught in a weekend? How much of what is told and shown over those pitifully few hours simply fades away and falls to the wayside in the first moments and days that follow the crash course? How much time is invested afterward by the course participants practicing skills, enlarging their base of outdoor knowledge, and perfecting their woodcraft? These are questions that I am unable to answer.

A crash course is better than no course. It is, however, a beginning place rather than an ending place. The real work comes afterward where individuals have to allocate time to get some dirt and smut on their hands and on their clothes. Without the allocation of time and effort, something that involves working outdoors in the array of conditions and circumstances offered by nature, owning skills is not possible.

It takes work. It takes practice. It takes commitment.

Mentoring these young guys provides an entirely different educational environment … one far removed from a crash course. It provides an arena that we enter together on a regular schedule that allows me the opportunity to observe growth on an individual basis. It allows me privileged bites of time to study individual strengths and weaknesses. It is an arena where I can introduce new things, hone skills already in development, and, all the while, move the guys a little farther along on their woodcraft journey.

Teaching skills … and learning skills … is kind of a mechanical thing that involves showing, telling, and repetition. It’s really not that difficult. It simply takes time, effort, and place. It’s about a lot more than mechanically learning skills and teaching skills though. At least for me it is.

Somewhere, along the way and in the midst, there is the hope that people will discover a transition away from seeing the natural world as something to endure … as something to survive … as something to conquer … and begin discovering it as that world of wonder to wander. 

There is the hope that people will begin developing a love affair with the natural environment and begin understanding, appreciating, courting, and embracing it as a lover.

The thing about this transition is that it is something that cannot be taught. It can be talked about. It can be shown. It is something that can be seen in the lives of those that have entered into the love affair. We really don’t catch it though. Not like we do a butterfly or frog. We discover it surrounding us, touching us, wooing us, drawing us. And we begin yielding ourselves to its embrace.