From HerbMentor.com, this is Herb Mentor Radio.
Good evening, everyone. We got a lot of people out there tonight.
Once again, this is John Gallagher from LearningHerbs.com, and welcome to part three of the herbal teleconference series.
We are doing this in celebration of Wildcraft, an herbal adventure game, our board game, which, will go on sale later this week, Thursday midnight.
That doesn't mean that you need to, line up outside my house at midnight. You can actually just go online.
But you might wanna listen to the Susan Weed call because we, might have something going on ahead of time. So hopefully, you'll be there with us on Thursday night to the grand finale to finish it off.
As always tonight, we're giving away a cool prize at the end of the call. So hang on to the end, and, I'll and now to one that.
So tonight, I have the honor of having with us tracker and naturalist John Young.
So why the heck is a tracker and naturalist on an verbal teleconference call. Right, John? So we'll we'll find out.
So just so you know, see, I'm I'm thirty six, and John entered my life at age fifteen, when he led a group of high school kids on a religion retreat out into the woods to teach them awareness skills.
We actually had to read the book, The Tracker, that year, as required reading, which was pretty cool. That's by Tom Brown Junior.
And at that point, John it was about that time John was starting Wilderness Awareness Club, which, was run-in, in as part of my high school, actually, but I wasn't involved in. That's the club that become Wilderness Awareness School, and I did my thing from age fifteen to twenty one. Wasn't really involved, with John and this and the and the club. But at about twenty one, I met up with him.
And, this time, I was here to stay. And, and, since the early nineteen eighties, John has been directly and indirectly responsible for, reforging a connection for tens of thousands of people in the natural world. And he's done this he's done this with no best seller, but with his passion is for tracking, teaching, nature, children, helping people, the earth. And, he just really has a knack for showing people how they relate to the national world and how natural world and how they can bring their personal gifts out.
He founded Wilderness Awareness School in the early eighties, wrote the colossal yet, well, I feel incredible, come on in naturalist training program, home study course through Wilderness Awareness School. And he's recorded audio CDs and inspired dozens of schools around the world to start and worked closely with some of the very respected native elders and leaders in our country. He's author of a a book that will come out in two thousand seven, co produced with Wilderness Awareness School. It's all about connecting kids to nature, practical practical activities and games and activities and and kind of the philosophy behind all that.
So, let's give a warm welcome even though you can't hear him clapping, John. They're they're they're clapping.
Hey, John. It's John Young. How are you doing tonight?
Good. Doing great, John. Thanks for having me on your I feel like I'm on a radio show.
I know. Well, either the merger or dreamer, I used to be a DJ.
Oh, you know, you sound like a DJ. I have to tell you.
I know. I used to I worked in the the WCNC in Haslet for a little while and worked with radio and on. This is kinda reconnecting me with all that, and I kinda feel a little like, Terry Gross from Fresh Air too.
Well, it's it's a good thing you're doing. I I appreciate it. And I I just heard from, Ruby, who works with the Regenerative Design Institute here. She's one of the instructors for in Nature Awareness Regenerative Design, programs here in this area.
And, she said, oh, you're doing that herb conference. I heard about that. I'm really excited. And, I get I get the their newsletter.
It's really neat. They get recipes and everything. So she's just very excited about what you're doing.
And, you know, I think I better get your newsletter too.
Well, it all comes it all stems from I will tell everyone who's on the call tonight. It all stems from working with John, and he started it off where I'm really There was a there was a, just the the foundation and philosophy of where I come from in approaching all this and how I got interested in all. It's it's so vital when learning about this stuff and learning about anything in the natural world to have a a a good solid foundation and a and a center that you're coming from.
And so that's what, you know, where that that all really comes from, working, you know, working with you all these years.
And who who would have thunk that, you know, six you know, if you could rewind sixteen I don't think either of us would have thought we'd be sitting here on a phone call with all these people.
Yes, that's definitely true.
But I also just I remember, I mean, for everyone's amusement out there when you were running the Joseph and the amazing Technicolor, you know, and started your own production company competing with your own high school, and I figured if if anyone would do something like this, it would be you.
So no. It's good. It's I think it's nice to it makes me feel a little bit old, you know, to hear you talking about it this way, but I'm glad that I'm really an honor to just be on this and to support you and what you're doing and to support the important work that's going on with, Learning Herbs. I think it's great.
So Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm I'm excited because I see different people who have been involved in in wilderness awareness community going out and following their passions and bringing them into the world. And, that's really the place that we've really come from.
You know, when we all started out here, you know, in the early days of working with you, you always said, you know, it's not about me. It's about all of you and and everyone and what we bring into this world. And so there have been people who have been, you know, touched by teachings that you've done in this wilderness awareness and have gone on and started schools and written books and and, all kinds of things. It's amazing, what, you know, we've been very focused on that saying, hey. You know, you gotta go out and bring your passions into the world.
And, so I'm just kinda following the formula here.
If if it's working. And, you know, we have to give credit to Ingway also who passed on November thirteenth one year ago as you know. And, you know, I I really I think that the stability and the pattern that gives the foundation that you referred to earlier is he deserves as much credit in that as anyone. And, also, of course, Jake and Judy Swamp and and, my mentor who started this whole mess for me is Tom Brown. And yeah. Yeah.
What's a little bit about your background in training and all that? Because a lot of people here, you know, they just kinda signing on, and this is, I think, for a lot of people, the first time they've ever heard you or heard of you.
So let's, let's let's a little bit about, that background and Okay.
Well, the the part that might be interesting to people, when I was a young kid, I grew up I was born in nineteen sixty at at a time when television hadn't really gotten its feet under it as it has today. So it was much more of a, I don't know. It was like television, you could you could boil it down to a few shows a week that you didn't wanna miss, and then everything else was sort of so so. You just you turned it off.
And nowadays, when a kid turns on the TV, they almost can't escape it. It's so so potent. And, Yeah. So I guess for for younger people out there, they might not have remembered a a world where, you know, the opportunities in media and computers and video games and all that didn't exist.
But back in nineteen sixty when I was born, there were still kids running around in neighborhoods and, being free to, you know, pursue their own thing and just play outside as kids would like to do when they're given that freedom and, don't have anything to distract them. So I grew up at that time, and I you know, in that reason, a lot of people who have gray hair that, you know, that are my age or older remember this time, and I always see a lot of full body nods around the time when actually parents had to go out and find us and drag us back in when the sun went down. And how neighborhoods, the grass around people's houses was worn out from the kids and the way they played outside, and there was trails in the woods that kids made.
They didn't go out with their loppers and cut trails. The trails formed because kids were always out there playing. And, you know, in that sense, I I I'm not different from other kids, but I did have a grandmother who was from Ireland, couple generations back. Her her grandma was from Ireland, and they was they settled in a little Irish community called Irishtown, and they they were close to the land.
They were farmers. And my great aunt and her sisters came over from Poland.
She was born in Poland and my grandma was born in America, but, that family was one generation and they all spoke Polish. And both, my paternal and maternal families were, farmers, and they they had remembrances, I guess, of ways to keep kids interested in nature. And I call it today cultural mentoring as you know, but for everyone else, we just call it cultural mentoring. These techniques that, you know, I don't think my grandmother ever thought of them as techniques, and she certainly didn't look at any books at night, you know, on how to cultural mentor. You know, she just she just went on the pattern of of her grandmother, and my great aunt went on the pattern of her mother. And they just they knew how to keep us kids, all the cousins, busy in nature, so we were always going on errands. And I I think a lot of you can probably remember back to when grandma sent you out to get apples or pick berries or something.
That's exactly what Wildcraft's about. Grandma sent you out.
Yeah. Exactly.
Exactly. And I think that's, that's, you know, that's my background. So when I was ten years old, I think, I was at that age where all the other kids nature was becoming less of a draw for us at that age. You know, you could still get the odd kid in the neighborhood to go out and do stuff, but I think, you know, the frog catching was wearing off on the neighborhood kids that were my peers by the time we were ten.
And I think I was beginning to move towards baseball, like, okay. I'm gonna do after school stuff. I guess all the other kids are doing baseball. I'm gonna do baseball.
And Mhmm. I remember right at that that key moment where my after school time would have become absorbed with after school activities like all the other kids, it was right then where as a little naturalist, you know, I already had lots of fish tanks in my basement with turtles and frogs and fish. And I had a pet, wild meadow vole, which is kinda like a mouse.
And I, had a bunch of stuff in my basement that was really kinda neat, for me, but it was getting boring because I was the only kid that was down there playing anymore. You know? But then right when I was ten, I I must have been calling for that next kind of a teacher in my life. And I guess it's the classic age kinda right of passage wise for a kid, to meet, you know, that older character that takes you on adventures.
And it was right then on, you know, after just before I turned eleven in June of nineteen seventy one that I I met Tom Brown Junior on a street corner. And, if if anyone's read any of Tom Brown's books like The Tracker, The Search, or any he has about eighteen books out there now. Mhmm. He runs a school called, Tom Brown's Tracking Nature Wilderness Survival School, changed later to The Tracker School.
He's he's pretty well known in, you know, nature education circles as somebody who had an upbringing that was, highly special, in that he he met an elder Apache who had never gone into the reservation system, but who had come to New Jersey, for family reasons, and ended up babysitting, Tom Brown and his best friend, which was his own grand grandson, since Tom was seven years old, and the elder would take them in the forest. And, being that he had such close roots to his own ancestors' ways, he was extremely good at, getting those kids completely involved in intensive nature relationship. It it was far beyond environmental education. It was, a whole another class of education. And so Tom, from the age of seven till about the age of eighteen, was mentored by this elder, who's called Stocking Wolf in the books.
The, name was changed to protect the privacy anonymity of that family. But when Tom was eighteen, which would have been nineteen sixty eight, he was left alone when his elder left, and he had spent eleven years being mentored by this guy in the Pine Barrens on every aspect of nature awareness that you can really think about, and herbs and herbal medicine and healing was even part of that because, grandfather was a healer, and he spent a lot of time with a Lennie Lenape healer in the Pine Barrens in New Jersey. And, yeah, there's some neat stories from that from that part of my life that I I haven't really told those stories much, but I was gonna share one or two tonight. But the the, the story with at that time, Tom, this was in the nineteen fifties. Tom was born in nineteen fifty.
And then so three years, but one of the last things his elder had told him was that he should be looking for, his first student, you know, Tom's first student, and that he would know the student by the sign that he carried, and this is the story that I was told. And that from nineteen sixty eight till nineteen seventy one, Tom was looking at kids and checking them out and trying to figure out, you know, is this is this the kid that I'm gonna mentor? And, eventually, gave me a little test, met me on a street corner one day when I had a large snapping turtle that I couldn't move by myself. And,
he saw me with this turtle and saw the turtle as a sign and began to ask me questions. And, I apparently passed the first, you know, test. And the the thing I have to say is that, you know, at that time, I didn't know I was being tested because it wasn't, you know, Tom is a a classic Coyote Mentor, meaning that he dwells on the edge of your perception. He doesn't really engage you the way a teacher does in the classroom.
He instead kind of asks you questions and gets you to, you know, tell him what you know. And as you speak about these things, he begins to get a sense of where you know, how much you know about this, whether you're using your ears or just your eyes, are you using your sense of smell, are are you aware of trees and birds? Or are you just looking at animals? You know, he was able to essentially profile my knowledge base, based on the kinds of stories I told to him.
So he, began to show up, pick me up in the morning, and bring me to school, and then wait for me after school. And I'd you know, there is Jeep would be in the in the parking lot of the school, yard, and I'd jump in the Jeep, and he'd drive me home and send me on errands in the woods. You know, they were kinda like grandma's errands except they were up one notch. You know, he would be asking me really intense questions when he called me at dinner time.
You know, what did I do today? And, hey. I was out sitting by the fire in the woods and okay. What did you burn?
You know, I burned some, ash wood. Well, where'd you get the ash wood? And I'd tell him, what tree was it? You know?
Which way were you facing when you picked it? And, you know, these kinds of questions. And every day he did this until seven years later, I knew every plant, bird, tree, animal, track. You know, I was I was able to survive off the land and and live by my skills.
I could trap. I could hunt, I could, you know, fish, gather herbs, roots, you know, use them for medicine, use them for food, by the time I was eighteen. And he had done all that without me realizing that he was leading me. And the entire time, I never perceived that he was leading me.
I just always thought it was my own interest. But in looking back, I can see, you know, I guess when I got to college, I realized that I had I had been raised differently than everybody else because I knew certain things that nobody else seemed to know, one of them being bird language. There was not even the professors knew that it existed, and a lot of them even doubted that tracking was possible. So I I suddenly realized that something special had happened in those years, and, that's when I became aware, that I had been, I won't call it tricked because it isn't really tricked.
It's I I feel it's more like facilitated into a larger version of myself than I would have chosen for myself.
And that's the beauty of that cultural mentoring model.
So I went on to university to study cultural mentoring models to figure out how Tom did it, number one. Number two, to find out if any anthropologist had researched and discovered the same pattern, and I found very little about it. It didn't seem like it was on anyone's radar at that time. So I vowed to myself in nineteen seventy nine that, when I graduated, I would open a school based on the model.
And, in nineteen ninety four, I opened Wilderness Awareness School in eighty three. And in ninety four, I was working with Tom Brown when he introduced me to a group of people, and he said, which really raised my awareness, of something. He said, this is the only person I ever had the luxury to mentor the way that grandfather mentored me. And then that he encouraged me to teach that model to people. And so since ninety five, as you know, because that's when you joined me in Washington, that's what I became focused on. You know, how to get this model of mentoring out, not just the skills of tracking nature awareness, but also what you were calling earlier that foundation, building that strong relationship foundation.
And you have in your, I mean, you know, in the workshops, The Art of Mentoring, the Mind and Mentoring in the book that's coming out of EnDum, you know, this year in the Camana program, things that you teach now, your programs, which we'll talk about how people can find out about your programs and your websites and all later, that you know, you really fine tune the way that people can go about how to replicate this model of mentoring and connecting youth and adults even with the natural world. To be really effective about it is really perfected that. And there's all I mean, we could we could we could be here for a week on the phone and and and John could go on and on and on about, you know, piecing it all together and how to make that work.
And in fact, I mean, in the wilderness awareness school, there's a very holistic curriculum that that John developed, different shields, we call them. And each of these shields, like different seasons, holds different qualities.
And, and those of you in the KEMANA program or have done some of our things, you know what we're talking about. But, one specifically is we call the Southwest Shield, or the Imsafiri Shield, and it represents the Earth, plants, health, our bodies.
And so John, I was wondering about that and also, how it's important to have that, like a foundation in nature, and, you know, a foundation in nature, when coming about it. Because so many people get very tunnel visioned in, like, oh, I wanna learn herbalism, and and and I wanna know how to cure a cold, or I wanna be able to take care of this flu, or or I wanna be able to live better with this disease or something. And or I wanna learn about herbs, and they get, you know, dried herbs and they or they look in the book and they, you know, and they never really get around to the fact that this is all connected and all coming from the earth.
And that's something I really try to get across in the programs and products we come out with. But anyway, I want to hear your wrap on all that.
Well, the one of the things that crosses my mind when you bring that up is, the, you know, the elder, Gilbert Walking Bull, who is one of the, I think, the few people left in this country who had a what I would consider a a reasonably similar lifestyle to grandfather's stalking wolf, because he escaped the whole reservation, situation and, lived with his grandparents who were medicine people.
If you, you know, listen to what Gilbert says, and then I I was also cross referencing that with the anthropologist William Powers, in his work with Lakota's too, that the concept of a, medicine person, what they might call, which literally means medicine man, or, This is a a person who works with medicine, and when they say it that way, they really literally mean the plants, the medicines associated with the roots and with the herbs.
So this is the concept of Pajuta Wachasha or Wyan, which means man or woman.
And that that he was saying that most families when he listens to the elderly speak to him when he was growing up as a kid, most of the elderly in in his family, remembered that every family, you know, every household had what you would consider a medicine man or a medicine woman and often both. And it was considered, more or less a household skill. You know, like, you you learn to make a home, to heat your home, to gather food, you know, gather roots, get water. You know, there's basic household things that everyone needs to know how to do.
And one of those things that every household needed to know was medicine. And, and when I say it that way, I mean it literally in the sense of the way Learning Herbs is teaching it. That, I feel like the gift of, you know, the Learning Herbs concept is that you're empowering people to recover those household skills. You know, that every person, you know, has that ability, that need, that gift to be able to work with the plants as both food and medicine.
And, you know, this was definitely something that caught my ear because then as I I got to know Gilbert a little bit more, he said, well, yeah, the the more advanced skills of healing, the the more the what you would consider, the more the powerful versions of the healers. You know, like in in some sense, I I would liken this to a chi gung healer. That would be the best way to explain it to our listeners now.
That, you know, learning to work with basic Chinese herbs in the household would be one level of it. But to be a a Qigong healer or, you know, like a five element practitioner would be yet a higher level of the same, pathway. And Mhmm. But that the foundation is that that everybody has a deeply connected relationship with all of the plants of their area in season, you know, and that that was household back in the day.
When I'm over in Germany and communicating over there with people, I've had the opportunity to to talk to a lot of different kinds of folks, and and I've heard a lot of stories about that, that, you know, that the country people have that relationship with the plants. And that, you know, most households in the country are self sufficient with respect to understanding plants through different seasons.
And that they have a basic understanding of herbal medicine element. And, I've always considered that, a foundational goal, but I I I feel that the herbs themselves, you know, would never be looked at as something that you would pull off a shelf as an isolated item, but that if you looked at it as a more organic and holistic approach, an integrated approach into your family life, you already have relationships with with these plants. You know them, you understand them. Your grandmother used them, your grandfather used them, you grew up with them.
And I hope that, you know, through work like you're doing that we could inspire people to reclaim that independence again around the basics of herbal medicine, medicine, the things that grow around me, the things that I live with.
You know, I don't have to necessarily, you know, think of myself as someone who's aspiring to be a powerful healer within the herbal tradition. The things that I grew up with Tom, you know, the first thing that that he did with me when I was a young man was, first of all, to make sure that I had a basic understanding relationship wise with the things that grew around me, not just the the plants and trees, but also the birds and, the animals and things. But he wasn't really specifically after one thing or another. So everything led to everything else. So if, for instance, I got interested in a particular bird, eventually that bird would lead to its food source and because I'd have to figure out, you know, what is this bird eating and, you know, what is that seed and where is it coming from and, you know, what plant is in bloom right now or what plant is in fruit.
And so through my, you know, my interest in, one, keeping a fire burning through all seasons, you know, so I had to go out and gather a lot of things, move a lot of branches and sticks and, you know, inadvertently, you know, because if you keep a fire going year round, you know, a couple times a week in in the forest and, you know, you just have your little campsite and your little campfire going, you're always walking to new places because, you know, you're always hoping that the firewood would, always be there when you walk to the same place, but it always is gone after you harvest a few dead branches. You go back to that spot and there's nothing left, and now you gotta walk further. And I think that was part of Tom's way of mentoring me was, you know, encouraging me to manage my fire at my camp.
You know, I I had to go and see new and different places all the time. And I also noticed in the places where I went to, you know, urinate or whatever and or gather sticks and break them out that I was actually changing the way that the land grew.
And I was noticing that certain plants were growing around my campsite and weren't growing anywhere else. And certain herbs, for instance, were growing up around the rocks around my fire pit and around the edge of, the place where I sat. And because I was always moving the brush and branches around, I created space for other plants to grow that didn't grow there before.
And he would ask me subtle questions about that, and I I began to learn about wild crafting not from an intention to go out and replant native species or anything like that. It wasn't from that place. It was more from the place of, hey, when you disturb things in this manner, this is what grows. And when you move this stuff like that, and you wear the ground out at this level, then this is the plant that grows back there.
And I began, and he began to mentor me and get me to understand that certain plants love disturbance, other plants a he encouraged my interest in the plants. And I became totally fascinated with them, and more in their beauty and their, and their intricacy in the beginning, their edibility or the fact that they could cause me to itch and stay up all night like in the case of poison ivy. So I had to get to know certain plants because I had to. And other plants I became interested in because I just loved them.
I would be encouraged to watch plants through different times of year. So for instance in the winter he would ask me, Hey, what's this here? And he'd be pointing out a basil rosette or something.
And, you know, I'd look at it and be like, I I don't know. He says, well, look. It's everywhere. And suddenly, I'd look around, there'd be twenty, thirty basil rosettes in this one area that I walk through all summer, you know, and I'd be like he said, well, gee, what do you think this is?
And I'd say, I I'm not sure. He says, well, I think it it must be here in the summertime. Have you ever been here in the summer? Yeah.
Lots of times. What what grows here in the summer? You know? And he would do that kind of stuff to me.
So it got to the point where I'd have to notice what basil rosettes produced what herbs in the summertime. And I can't tell you how important that foundation was for me. I began to develop this intuitive link with the plants.
I don't think I got my first field guide to plants until I was probably fourteen or fifteen. And it was at that time where I got Peterson's Guide to Wildflowers and I began to just key out things that grew around me a lot, and I started to put names on a lot of things that I just had relationships with.
Mhmm.
But there was already plants that we were eating and using as, you know, things like plantain. We were using the leaves of that for things like bee stings, which of course I tried to avoid but occasionally needed it. The Jewelweed, because I couldn't stay out of the poison ivy like it or not because I was always going places, but the Jewelweed was an amazing plant and then the seeds of the jewelweed were so good to eat. And, you know the shoots of, I loved eating the dandelion greens and, and, you know, there was things that we were interacting with regularly that we were eating and and we were harvesting roots and we went for things like cattails from time to time for fun.
And he taught me about some of the plants in the pine barrens which were really, really, terrible to eat if you didn't prepare them right, and I learned a few things the hard way. But I developed this this fundamental practical relationship with them. They became part of my everyday experience, you know, walking and picking chickweed and and eating it and, you know, noticing things like, my energy level when I was eating wild edibles and and what it did for me. And he brought that to my attention a few times just like when we really needed energy when we were on these, crazy adventures in the Pine Barrens, you know, how certain plants would give us that little boost.
We roasted pine cones around the fire and popped them open and got the seeds out of them a lot and gathered acorns. And, I mean, we were working a lot with plants and, using the byproducts of the plants for more than just food, a little bit of medicine. And he began to teach me when I was about just before he opened the tracker school, he began to teach me some of the more what I guess you might call esoteric teachings around the plants. But I wouldn't call it that because it just seems like the next natural step for me.
It was an intuitive communication process with plants, And it had to do with working with a particular kind of a sweat lodge ceremony and working with the plants and, you know, seeing which the plants were that were beginning to grow around that lodge that were basically healing herbs that were really good for all kinds of, ailments and in internal conditions.
And he began to teach me about, how the plants essentially talk to different parts of your body. And and we had already learned about, for instance, how tracking a raccoon, if you looked at the tracks and and if you if you tracked and imitated a raccoon long enough, your body would naturally dance the raccoon. When when you looked at the and you know this is interesting because I can point to science now and talk about this really directly.
Every one of you out there, when I say the word screwdriver, referring to the the tool, and the action of of turning a screw with a screwdriver, all of your bodies, if you had micro electric sensors, would register a slight twitch in the muscles, which basically would imitate the turning of a screwdriver.
Mhmm. This has been proven by science. So now I can speak to this directly.
When you look at raccoon tracks and you have enough experience with raccoon tracks, it's just like the screwdriver phenomenon.
The the your body will subtly imitate the trail that you're looking at, and your brain will interpret that information. So your body becomes a portal for communication with nature in, in more ways than just information. Like there's a form of data that is very dynamic that has to do with body messages.
And the whole Learning Herbs journey, the whole Southwest Shield as we call it at Wilderness Awareness School, is really about that understanding, a body based relationship, a body based form of communication with the plants, with the animals, with the trees. With the plants, your body, you know, and I don't know that this would happen the first time out. Like, if you went outside for the first time and, like, picked up a piece of dandelion and and tried to figure out what part of your body it's talking to, without much experience, I'm not sure that you'd get the kind of response that I'm talking about.
But because I had so much body based training, I was able to start to accurately guess what plant was good for what medicine, what part of the body it would serve. And Mhmm. You know, this is this was, you know, that that next level of communication. And at that point, his school opened, he got really busy.
I got really busy at university, and I I just played with it a little bit on the side, and I didn't follow-up with it much more. But it came in handy a lot of times in my life, later on. And when I met Ingwe in nineteen eighty four, and I brought him to the Pine Barrens for the first time, he he'd never been to Pine Barrens before. He was from Kenya, East Africa, and South Africa.
So he'd never even been to the Pine Barrens, and he said, show Ingri, he always talked about himself in the third person. Show Ingwe a plant that, that you know the the medicinal use of, and Ingwe will tell you what it's good for. And he was doing exactly that. The Akamba had taught him the very same skills.
Wow.
And he was able to identify very accurately which plants were edible, which ones were poisonous, which ones were medicines. He was able to tell me, you know, what areas of the body the the plant could be used for and that kind of thing. And I know now that, Tom Brown has healing classes where around herbal medicine where he actually teaches that skill. But I've also heard him complain that if people don't have some grounding in basic nature awareness and relationship with nature, that it's difficult for them in the beginning, but that everyone can develop that skill. You know, it's not it's not esoteric really. It's just it's only lost on the modern life, you know.
No. And then that's exactly why you we, well, you know, we got Come On Naturalist training program going because a lot of people wanted you to teach them how to be expert trackers. And you found out that, hey. They didn't even know what Robin sounded like. So we needed to go back a little bit. We needed to come up with a program that that taught people, you know, the basics of all that was either growing or living around them. Exactly.
And and then, there's someone, well, seasoned commando student, Nick, emailed here and just wanted to wanted to know, like, some ideas of moving beyond just looking at and identifying plants and how to know them on a deeper level. And I think that you just hit it right there. It's a it's if you're gonna track, coach, you wanna be a tracker, you go out tracking. If you wanna learn about plants, you have experiences with plants.
Right.
And there's endless information out there.
I mean, that's what we focus on in LearningRx. Once a month, we send a newsletter out, and it gives you an experience. And you just go and do it, and you'll you'll get deeper with the plans.
That's the way to do it. That's definitely the way to do it. Yeah. I just call I just I simply I now call it just building relationship, you know. And I think everybody understands the concept of making relationships with people, you know, with our pets.
And so, if you just think about the same kind of qualities that emerge from any really solid relationship, if you have that same relationship with a handful of common plants, I think a lot of this would come home to you very quickly.
Exactly. And, that's pretty much what it is with with our family, you know. And I started out, I was exploring a lot of different plants and what was growing on me, but there's always and it's different for everybody. You come back to a handful that that are becoming your friends that you use again and again and again.
And, for, you know, for for my family, we probably use nettle or dandelion or burdock or plants like that every day in some form or another.
That's the way to do it.
Yep. That's the way to do it.
So, John, some people were also wondering how this all fits in with, because we're talking about a holistic view of of it all. You know, keeping it simple and also, yeah, having a it's about relationships with the plants, relationships with your the environment around you, relationships with with each other. And if you're gonna talk about natural health, that's really what it's about, having these healthy relationships in a lot of different areas in your life. And, I know you've been doing a bit and studying a bit about permaculture.
And how does that fit in with that?
Well, the permaculture, really when we talked a lot about in the early days of basically kind of reinventing people's relationship with nature again. You know, our Western experience, you know, accomplished a lot, I guess you could say, you know, through technology and and whatever. We we gained a lot of benefits in our lives today.
And we also during that history, lost a lot of things that were treasures really to humanity.
And I think when the first people came to America from Europe and perceived what the native people were doing here, they I don't think they really understood that what they were looking at was a giant eco forestry project. I mean, it was a giant permaculture project.
The Eastern Forest Bioregion especially, you know, as an example, that particular bioregion was so, so productive. It was supporting so many people and and was so regenerative. It just it really it just like when scientists began to study the way forests were regenerating on their own, they realized that the beech trees came in at a much lower percentage. And, of course, the chestnut trees were killed off by a disease, but the, the oaks didn't come in in the same percentage that, they were when the early settlers first perceived and the first naturalist headed into those forests.
And same thing in California, the coast live oak for instance, when it just grows on its own, it just grows straight and tall. Whereas the trees that are older than a certain period of time, grow like spiders. Their branches spread out like octopuses on the landscape. And it became evident to some forest ecologist that there must have been human intervention maintaining the forest and the conditions and the compositions that that were seen both on the east and the west. And, now there's a lot of books out on this whole study. But, it's clear that if we were going to go back to the roots of indigenous wisdom living close to the land, you know, which Learning Herbs comes from, tracking comes from there, a lot of even pharmaceuticals, of come from there. A lot of the formulas that are used today and taken for granted as healing drugs were, you know, first learned from native people in various parts of the planet especially in the jungles.
So I was, I was just then explaining that, you know, with with the eco forestry skills of the native people of this land, all the skills that we talk about, the tracking, the mentoring, the herbal medicine, even the land care skills are all basically what I'm now calling indigenous technologies and they belong to all of our ancestors.
They're programmed into our our DNA, if you will. In other words, our instincts as human beings, cause us to make choices around this, that we are naturally drawn to want to understand these things. And so the Permaculture Movement represents the work of Bill Mollison and a lot of other really brilliant people who have gone out into the world and researched a lot of these indigenous technologies and put them into action, in a systematic way basically. Essentially taking native tools for caring for the land and regenerating the plants and the animals and the food systems, and other systems permaculture movement is representing that.
And Bill Mollison got his start around the same time Tom Brown got his start. And I think it's interesting that they were both drawing from indigenous technologies. And then I went and did a lot of research on the mentoring and village technologies, how to weave the human parts together, how to get people's relationships strong with one another, with nature, with themselves.
And I saw that as as I got to understand the permaculture movement, Wilderness Awareness School was born out of an organic farm. I'm not sure how many people are aware of that. But I was aware of permaculture way back when and said, Josh, this is something I really want to get back to someday because it's highly related to what we're doing. I just don't know how yet.
And then years later, I began to work with Penny Livingston and James Stark at the Permaculture Institute in Northern California. And I began to realize that we were working on the exact same vision from two different points of view Mhmm. And that we had very, similar goals, very similar aspirations, but we were covering an entirely different set of skill set. And it seems like our skill sets were very much needed one by the the other. So like the tracking movement, for instance, really had an understanding of the cultural mentoring elements and how to work with the animals and the bird language and things.
John?
Yes.
Yes. There we go. Sorry about that, everybody. Let's just pick that up again. We'll do some winter schools, start on the organic farm and whatnot.
Yes. So So basically when I saw that the permaculture movement had a lot of skills that the tracking movement didn't have and vice versa, I realized that what was happening was that these two, indigenous rooted pathways were coming together where they actually have belonged with our ancestors since the beginning. I mean, it was it was kind of a homecoming.
And it was also interesting that the permaculture movement was populated with something around seventy percent women, and thirty percent men, and the tracking and awareness movement was populated seventy percent men and thirty percent women.
So we saw this immediate gender balance thing happened too when the two, programs merged, which I, you know, highly just greatly appreciated. And I I think everyone else did too. So it was, you know, in in some sense, a a marriage destined to happen, you know, no pun intended. But, you know, the the permaculture community is highly rooted in indigenous arts and skills as is the awareness, you know, and and tracking and bird language movement.
And the herbs movement is much more on on the side of what you would consider the permaculture skills. But when you look at it, when you step back and look at all of it, you see that it makes one complete picture of what we would just call village life, you know. And remembering that humans, emerged out of the natural world, you know millions of years ago as a village species. You know, like the human pattern has been the village since, you know, since the beginning of our existence. And, for as far back as anyone can remember, we had very key relationships that we tended. You know, we we as human beings were in relationship with our families.
We were in relationship with our friends and village members, we were in relationship with the natural world, we were in relationship with ourselves and with our ancestors.
That these were the key relationships that were tended. And when you look at that, you know, that what we're about really, whether you're talking about learning herbs or learning tracks, it's really about tending relationship and understanding how we relate to everything around us, you know. So, I just see it as a natural, you know, a natural convergence of of skill sets, wisdom, you know, lineages and that sort of thing. And it's, it's just been a phenomenally interesting thing that since, I got involved with permaculture, I've been all around the world and noticed that all the other, nature schools are linking up with their local permaculture people.
We've all sort of had the idea at the same time. I'm not saying people were following my my steps, but I was finding spontaneously that it was happening in Germany and Vermont at the same time it was happening in California and and Washington. So it just seems like a a moment in time, you know, when these two movements are are finding each other and nurturing each other. It's, it's a really good sign.
Mhmm.
Very exciting too. I mean, just the resources that are being shared right now are just phenomenal, you know. In order to Yeah.
We we saw a lot of permaculture, places when we were in New Zealand hiking around. It was amazing.
Yeah. It's much bigger elsewhere on the planet than it is in the U. S. But I think it's a very, very important movement.
Very important movement.
So we, you know, it keeps seems to keep coming down to you've talked in these different threads. We've talked about permaculture a bit. We've talked about native wisdom, what you learned from Tom Brown.
And it keeps coming back with relationships.
And some of the and and I know what goes through some people's heads often is like, oh, where where can I start and what's a simple exercise or something? And and I was wondering if you could just talk about the sit spot for a minute and, and how that can relate to somebody who would want to connect with nature and learn plants?
Yes, you bet.
The sit spot is is one of those little gems that once it takes root, it it I think it's probably one of the most effective learning tools that I know of.
And, you know, if you if you if anyone out there is really listening to what I just said, I've been teaching mentoring and gathering mentoring, tools from around the world, and I've been mentoring mentors and coaches now for, gosh, now it's it's thirty years. And if if I'm saying to you that this may be one of the single most important tools for learning that there is, I I would hope that you'd remember that I said that.
And I emphasize it that way because even though people hear me say this all the time, very few people actually have the motivation, for some reason to actually go out and follow-up on this one. It's one of the easiest things to do.
But I think people just don't know what to do once they start doing it. So I guess we have to really, you know, Learning Herbs, you know, you have to provide support and I do too and through all the schools that are around the world now, this is what's happening.
Support people locally to maintain this routine because I think it's really vital.
The fifth spot is nothing more than, something that you probably did as a kid if you had, any outdoor time as I did as a kid where I found an apple tree in my yard. And I I just went out. No one told me this. There wasn't a book on it back then.
I just went outside and climbed this one apple tree, and I found this one comfortable spot to sit. And I I sat in that apple tree a lot by myself. I just just did it. And what did I do there?
Well, maybe I watched ants walk on the bark for forty five minutes straight just watching them go back and forth. And, maybe I just kinda daydreamed.
Or maybe I watched the yellow jackets flying around the apples on the ground below or just, play with the apple blossoms on the branches.
It didn't seem to matter what I did.
It was just about making time and space in my life. And forty five minutes, an hour here and there, you know, ideally every day, but if you can't, that's, you know, once a week is better than none. Or you just go and find a place and sit.
And a lot of you probably have mortgage mortgages or you have rent payments, and you're probably already living, some of you out on the edge of the country or in the country.
So you already are paying for your sit spot. So I always tell people, if that's your situation, then just go outside in the backyard.
You chose that place for a reason, you know. And when I was a young guy, as I indicated earlier, when I was was ten and I met Tom Brown, my FitSpot just moved up one one level of complexity in that it went from my backyard to a a five minute walk from my house.
And then it went up to slightly more complexity when he taught me how to make fire and and work with fire. So I had a little fire circle that I sat at, and I just tended fire for, you know, countless hours, thousands and thousands of hours.
And in that process of sitting and getting to know one place, like building a relationship with one place.
I began to know the trees and the plants and the birds and the animals as as an extended part of my relationships. It felt like family to me. And I spent seven years in that spot.
I'm not gonna say I went three hundred sixty five days a year, I didn't. But there was days when I went twice a day. There was times when I actually felt called to spend the night there by my fire.
There was times when I went in the night just to experience the night. There was times when I went, you know, before dawn and watched the darkness turn to day, and times when I stayed at sunset and watched it turn to night, and times in the heat of the day and all seasons in the rain and the snow. I got to know that place through all of its ways, its times, its feelings, its weathers, its, you know, its years, its successions, and watch that patch of land give birth to thousands of birds and animals, you know, because every year they were giving birth to their babies or laying eggs and hatching.
And, you know, I just watched the Earth give off life year after year. And I began to understand things that I cannot put into words to this day. I mean, there is no way to describe what you get from that experience, but it comes down to that body based relationship thing again. The form of communication that the human body is designed for that the sit spot can bring out like nothing else.
I mean, you can't read about a sit spot and get something from it. You know, you you pretty much need to do it. So that's the one half of these stories. The other half is that when you come back from your sit spot, it really helps to tell the stories of what you saw while you're at your sit spot.
So if there's no people to tell your stories to, I mean, that's the one challenge. I guess people get bored, you know, if they come home and no one's there to catch their stories. It's important to be able to tell your stories about your SIDSpot. So we teach people to journal, you know, to just keep a running journal.
And then the question always comes up, well, you know, why am I journaling? No one's ever gonna read this. No one really cares. It's just for me.
I always say, well wait a minute. What if your grandchildren were to find this journal thirty years from now? You know, and they gave it to their kids.
And all of a sudden you could read great grandma or great grandpa's nature journal.
How inspiring that would be for a kid?
To feel connected to an elder in their community or their family, and to feel that love for the land coming through the family three generations down and and striking that child. It would be just immeasurably valuable.
And it would have such mentoring power for that kid. So if you think you're not writing it for anyone, write it to the unborn children you'll never meet.
Sincerely write it that way. And all of a sudden, it takes on a whole another dimension, and you begin to understand this at a whole another level.
And and the stories that you, that they that you come up with as you're working with the herbs.
Exactly. And your experiences, journaling those experiences, or if you were learning plants a week or plants a month, that, there's a lot of ways you can go about it, but just that, simple deep connection as you're going on.
Exactly right.
And, that is, the very first exercise in the Kamana Naturalist training program.
We do have a home study program at Wilderness Awareness School.
It's the foundation of all that we do at, at Wilderness Awareness and all that John does with his programs.
And, in a way, it's if I ever get around to doing an advanced program or an ongoing program, which we may in a year or two, will definitely be the foundation of that program too.
So we went I know we went a little over there, but because I wanted to make up for the five or ten minutes we lost.
We had technical problems.
Apologize for that. And, so I wanted you all to see the foundation and the philosophy that was at the core of our website, and that's why I was so happy to have John tonight to help. He just so eloquently relates that and and speaks to that.
And, as you know, it's and that's where Herbal Medicine Making Kid and WildCraft came from. And you saw WildCraft, John. What did you think of it?
I love that. I I'm excited. I keep asking you when it's coming out, and I heard about your Thursday release.
We're we're we're away, and it's, getting that that boat is getting getting ever closer to the Seattle floor. Yeah.
You know? That's an exciting idea. And, I hope that we don't have any, like, violence like we did when the new Nintendo came out or whatever that was. When your new herb game comes out.
Try to be calm, people.
But, seriously, I'm I'm really excited to get my hands on that and to play it. I'm I'm gonna sit around and play it as soon as I get it.
And, John, you have child number five coming any day now. I do.
A little young for the game, but that's okay. I'll I'll make sure.
You know, a few years will go by. Your your, your eight year old is right up his alley.
Yep. Nine year old. He's getting Nine. Nine.
Yep. Oh my goodness.
Yeah. You know, I bet you, you know, I never thought that, you know, we could get this many people to eavesdrop on one of our conversations.
We we used to do our best work in cars back in the old days. We created all our masterpieces and did our best creative thinking while driving. True.
So true.
Yep. So I, I wanna thank you, so much for joining us tonight. And if you wanna hang on a minute, I got a few announcements we gotta make here. But first, John, I wanna, ask you actually, how can people find out about what you are up to? Because you are the founder of Wilderness Awareness School. You're doing your own thing down in California. You come up and work with us every once in a while, but you kinda of you're the creative guy that goes out and keeps starting more and more new interesting things.
Well, I just want to say that, well, first, thanks for for having me here and and give me an opportunity to talk about the stuff that I care about too. And, you know, wanna wish you luck and totally congratulations on your new game. That's gonna be really fun. But also to say that, you know, there's now over a hundred little schools that have started based on the model that Wilderness Awareness School pioneered, with Ingui and I's help and, you know, and and that they're all over the world. People should know that. And I this is a growing movement that's pretty exciting.
I help to mentor school leaders around the country, and help them, you know, work on their techniques and things. And I also, piloted a program last year working with wild lore dot com, that actually is based on the way Tom Brown mentored me. You know, we're basically trying to use the telephone again as as as a means to inspire people, have them tell stories, things like that. And, there's a whole bunch of services coming out through that.
But johnyoung dot org, j o n y u n g dot o r g is where people can find out what I'm up to. That's the one it's not very exciting. It's kind of a boring website, but we'll fix that up pretty soon. But it at least links you to all the things that I'm doing and will give you an idea.
So that's easier than carrying a business And, and of course, you can find out about Wilderness Awareness School programs at wilderness awareness dot o r g.
And, check that site out, starting Friday, Friday, Saturday. We'll be launching a brand new look, a whole new way of, going about it, and, lots of new stuff. And also our store, lots of cool holiday products, wilderness awareness dot org, but related to wilderness awareness and whatnot. I know the Kamana program is on sale coming on starting Friday.
And WildCraft goes on sale this week. You saw the email I sent out today, so I don't have to go too into it. And we added some more bonus gifts, including the vitamin and mineral chart we saw for ten dollars, as well as written transcripts to all these calls. Tonight, it will all depend on whether that, whether the first two parts of this, actually, the recordings came through or not. We'll find out. It's gonna be a darn shame to lose those, but we can do what we can.
So, please listen to the Susan Weed, teleconference on Thursday. There's going to be some surprises on that too. And, tonight, we are giving away a copy of the the gifts. We I keep upping upping the, gifts here, John, every every time we had first time we had a pope a couple of herbal charts, and then we gave away a copy of Tom Alpel's children's book. And, now we have a copy of, From Crabgrass Muffins, to Pine Needle Tea, which is a Linda Runyon, an herbalist in New Jersey, where John and I were born and bred, wrote that book, and, we sell it for over thirty bucks on the site. And it's, we'll be interviewing Linda on a private teleconference that people who get Wildcraft will will be able to listen to.
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Thanks so much for listening.
