A Story to be told...
We are each following our own threads,
our own journey toward wholeness,
our sacred gifts revealed within each step.
Preface
We set out from Washington state driving across the country to create a school connecting people, place and planet. We both spent a year at Wilderness Awareness School practicing ways of being in relationship with the earth, learning about community and the gifts we each have to bring to this world. When our year-long immersion programs ended we decided to follow these threads into something bigger - creating Wilderness Outdoor Wisdom School (WOW School). We lived as the question, asking the universe for guidance on a place to call home. This is when Forest Echo Farm entered our awareness and a conversation began around the opportunity to be caretakers of the land and the possibility of creating programming to invite others into something bigger too.
"There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread."
The Way It Is by William Stafford
Characters
Co-Creator/Guide
Wild Rose Richter
Rose is someone who loves guiding people into mystery using nature as a co-creator. This has looked like guiding young women on rights of passage from childhood into adolescence, to leading young ones on wild adventures though summer camps. Sometimes it is teaching naturalist skills like tree ID, animal behavior, wildlife tracking, bird calls etc. or it may look like wilderness skills including knife safety, navigation or backpacking. Often it involves relationship with the land by calling in ancestral skills (sometimes called survival skills) like creating a fire by friction using materials off the land, cooking wild edible foods, tanning animal hides, practicing stealth and camouflage, building shelters, and sleeping overnight. Though these practices there is also space to work with personal development though mentoring, team building challenges, council space, re-creating culture, and more. She’s learned many of these skills over the last 10 years working for places like Wilderness Awareness School in WA, Earthworks Inst. in NY, Primitive Pursuits in NY, Cummings Nature Center in NY and more. She’s led programing like weekly forest schools, weekend workshops, summer camps, after-school groups, school field trips, backpacking trips, and hands-on lessons in City Schools. These opportunities that involve bringing people into relationship with place, nature, and the outdoors, those of self, psyche, and personal growth and relationship with the greater community, wholeness and culture bring her alive.
Co-creator/Guide
John Scott Campbell
Scott is a wizard! (according to Rose but you may have first hand experience of this too) Scott seeks to offer his passions and love as an invitation for both the human and more than human worlds to regenerate a deep relationship that has existed since time immemorial. Firmly believing that these ties than bind us to the Mother Earth can be remembered and strengthened, he brings his knowledge of Forest Therapy, energetic healing, mentoring, coaching, wilderness skills and shamanic healing to all that seek to enter the reciprocity of our gifts and our receiving.
