I've added more pictures and text to my survival trip that you may like to see. There was so much I learned on that trip I may have to go back and add more. Hiking up a mountain in the dark for instance was a thrill.
My partner and I are taking a year-long tracking intensive with the Wilderness Awareness School. We just got back from the Oregon Dunes and I'll be adding pictures to this blog soon. Highlights were trailing a porcupine accross the dunes to a "tree island" where we found signs of it eating the lupine flowers and plants. We also watching a praying mantis dragging it's fat long abdomen on the sand with its legs making a fascinating track alongside. We would never have guessed to see one in the middle of the dunes, just as we didn't expect to see bright green tree frogs hopping and leaving trailes in the middle of the dunes.
The trails and tracks we saw were works of art-- like strands of jewelry wrapping around the landscape with a cadence and rhythm that told us about each animal and what they were doing: a grey fox galloping, two ferile dogs trotting in a side trot, a raccoon washing something in the creek, a great blue heron coming to a magnificent landing along the creek bank with his right heel touching first for five feet followed with the left, creating a 12 foot drag before coming to a full stop.
The details and the questions that a tracker asks to learn about what an animal is doing is so similar to the kinds of questions a Feldenkrais Practitioner asks when observing a client's movement patterns: Where, When, How, Why, What for?, When?
The teachers of our tracking intensive are careful not to answer our questions but get us to think more about what makes us so sure we know what we know? Are there more clues in front of us? Suddenly, details we had never noticed begin to pop out: the direction of the claws, the absense of hair in the scat, the width of the trail, the surrounding vegetation, etc.
When I look at how someone is moving, I think about their environment, where are they going? Why? What do they like to do? What do they want to do? What has influenced them to move the way they do? So much information.
I'll continue soon.
Mystery Pictures:
The pictures below are from a previous tracking trip last year and you'll see he is pointing at a piece of scat and what is found in the scat. The tracks were near the scat to give you a clue of what the scat is and where we were. The tracks are on dirt road. Perhaps those are enough clues to guess who made the tracks....
Annie Thoe is an Assistant Feldenkrais Trainer and Practitioner in the Feldenkrais Method with 22 years of experience in bodywork. She has taught numerous modalities of massage therapy, supervised students and practitioners, and teaches locally and nationally. She is on the Board of Directors for the Wilderness Awareness School in Duvall, Washington. In addition to her outdoor naturalist study, Annie has an extensive background in martial arts, sports, and music.
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April, 2007
