My Year in the Woods

So my year in the woods living living with twenty-five adults and seventeen children commences tomorrow morning. Guts and Sass is going on hiatus.

I'm sad I wasn't able to write more before I went out, and I also feel incredibly empowered. This is the most and the most consistently I've ever worked on a book. I am filled with gratitude for everyone who let me know how much they've enjoyed the story, and for all the lurkers I know are out there. Maybe when I start writing again in a year you'll have moved on, lost interest, or won't have the time. Nonetheless, I'm incredibly grateful for your readership, your presence, and your gifts of support.

I won't be writing on Guts and Sass in the woods. But once a month I'll be coming in to use internet, phone, and the library, and I'll be posting a story of my life in the woods. You can also keep up with our collective story at our blog. I write a ton of fiction, and now I'm going to be forced to live my own story without the distractions I've come to depend on, including, well, writing.

So, for those of you who'd like to know a little more: I live here. I've been volunteering at this school and editing for the director for the past three years, and I was finally ready to do what I originally wanted to do, which was take the yearlong wilderness immersion program. This year's going to be different, because the focus is going to be on families.

Twenty-five adults, seventeen children, eleven months, in the heat of summer, the dead of winter, living in the woods. We'll start out in tents and with matches, and graduate to bark and thatch lodges and bow drill fires. Our food will be supplemented with mostly organic fruits of agriculture, and we will have no sugar, no coffee, no processed foods, no media. We'll be learning how to forage, collect and prepare craft materials, tan hides, make fire, and most importantly how to work as a community. I'll be living a lot of what I write into Alan's culture of origin, and Efeddre and Toney's people, the ldridrisy and limdri.

The most challenging thing we're going to be doing is not pooping in the woods while covered in mosquitoes, or running around in -20 F temperatures. We're going to be facing a lot of things in ourselves that are easy to cover up with TV, reading, comfort foods, movies, music, sugar, caffeine, and drugs. We are going to be forced to look at how we relate to other people, food, the natural world, non-humans, and ourselves. We're going to be discovering our gifts and our challenges (and having witnessed this program for four generations of students, I know there's a lot of challenges) and how they all fit together. We are going to learn how to operate not just as isolated individuals, couples, and nuclear families, but as a community. We're going to be constantly reminded to take responsibility for our own feelings and our own actions that have put us exactly where we are in our lives. We're going to be examining and coming face to face with the unpleasant reality of the unspoken contracts we have with the people in our lives that allow everything to seem to run smoothly when there's so much more underneath.

"You don't do that, so I don't feel this."

"I give you this, so you don't feel that."

"I didn't tell you that, because I was afraid you'd do this."

We're going to be learning how to communicate consciously, how to listen to what's really being said underneath, how to say what's really going on for us. We're going to learn how easy it is to say we're saying what's really going on for us, when really we're not doing it at all.

Michel Scott, the director of The Horse Boy, is going to be doing a documentary on our experience. So. Movie. For real.

I am utterly terrified, and I know that I am doing exactly what I need to. This is the cliff, and all I have to is jump. I'll learn how to fly on the way down.