Interview With the Naturalist
So far in my explorations of attunement and metaphor in the estuary, my process has been almost completely of my own design. I have been influenced by reading environmental literature, but this is at best a mimesis of an author’s end-product rather than of their process itself. To branch out from this, I sought someone more trained in ways of sensing and being in the wilderness. I had recently learned of a program called Wilderness Awareness School (WAS), an organization that operates out of Duvall, Washington. At the school, students learn a mix of various naturalist practices, largely centered around survival skills. Through mutual friends I was able to connect with someone who had gone through the program and I set up an interview. My interview with John allowed me a glimpse into the process of a trained naturalist. Insights gained from this conversation will undoubtedly influence my own explorations of my environment.
John, currently a student in the Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Study at Western Washington University, told me about his history with this type of study. He had been involved with multiple teen survival skills programs growing up and had also completed an intensive wildlife tracking course in addition to his time at the WAS. In these programs he learned about animal tracking, bird language, and building shelters, among many other things.
When I pressed him a little more to explain what he learned at the WAS, he told me a “mix of survival skills and nature awareness”. John explained the concept of ‘nature awareness’ as maintaining awareness of what’s going on in the landscape around you while going about whatever you are doing, whether it be walking through a park or building a shelter in the mountains. This level of cognizance is partly achieved through exercises to expand sensory awareness, much like the experimentations with different modes of attenuation that I have been conducting.
John is also currently in the process of completing the Kamana Naturalist Training Program. Aimed towards “learning the language of nature”, the program recommends first establishing a ‘sit spot’ when exploring an environment — a place reserved for focused sensing — and then going through a series of mappings. These mappings progress in the order of a trails map, a vegetation map, a topography map, a hydrology map, and then a soil and rocks map; they are geared towards identifying the various resources available from a survival standpoint. Although it isn’t necessarily included in the Kamana model, John’s personal interest lies especially in animal tracking.
John, currently a student in the Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Study at Western Washington University, told me about his history with this type of study. He had been involved with multiple teen survival skills programs growing up and had also completed an intensive wildlife tracking course in addition to his time at the WAS. In these programs he learned about animal tracking, bird language, and building shelters, among many other things.
When I pressed him a little more to explain what he learned at the WAS, he told me a “mix of survival skills and nature awareness”. John explained the concept of ‘nature awareness’ as maintaining awareness of what’s going on in the landscape around you while going about whatever you are doing, whether it be walking through a park or building a shelter in the mountains. This level of cognizance is partly achieved through exercises to expand sensory awareness, much like the experimentations with different modes of attenuation that I have been conducting.
John is also currently in the process of completing the Kamana Naturalist Training Program. Aimed towards “learning the language of nature”, the program recommends first establishing a ‘sit spot’ when exploring an environment — a place reserved for focused sensing — and then going through a series of mappings. These mappings progress in the order of a trails map, a vegetation map, a topography map, a hydrology map, and then a soil and rocks map; they are geared towards identifying the various resources available from a survival standpoint. Although it isn’t necessarily included in the Kamana model, John’s personal interest lies especially in animal tracking.
I learned from John that there is a distinction between animal tracking and trailing: tracking is only concerned with the identification of animal markings, whereas as trailing involves actually following the animal’s tracks to find the animal. John had interesting metaphors tied to the idea of animal tracking; he thinks of it like a treasure hunt, seeing marks like a deer’s antler scrapings on the bark of a tree as clues. This was encouraging for my own project to be able to see a clear example of someone else developing new metaphors for their cohabitants based on new modes of attunement.
Animal tracking is just one mode of developing nature awareness. There are many ways to “read the landscape” as John put it, a concept which I’ve come into contact with in ecocritical literature as well. Development of nature awareness leads to what John called ‘orienting’, a term coined by Peter Levine in his Somatic Experiencing approach to psychotherapy. Orienting is a means of situating the self within the external world, like creating a mental map of one’s surroundings. This is a crucial concept in the development of my personal model of sensing and being in natural environments. Orienting is achieved through attunement and the construction of metaphors to bring the cohabitants of a space into our own realm of understanding. |
John and I both found ourselves in the middle of a developing practice of pursuing nature awareness and got to talking about how that evolution was unfolding. He told me that as he has practiced new modes of attenuating himself to the environment and orienting, his interactions with his environment have evolved. Specifically, he said that reading field guides and other materials have made it easier for him to recognize a personal narrative rising out of a space, which was something that I completely identified with.
John also said something which I found especially interesting — that he had become more tactical in his movements. When I asked him to unpack this further, he explained that he tries to maintain awareness of the circles of perception maintained by all of the other living things in his space. He said that this way of moving through his environments was both conscious and unconscious; it usually takes a concentrated effort to accomplish this but it has become more habitual and natural for him the more he practices. He even referred to this as being “culturally transformative” for him, because he sees a stark difference between his interactions with the environment and those typical of what he referred to as “mainstream American culture”. We agreed that American culture is geared towards being laser focused, which is beneficial from a capitalist perspective, but that nature awareness stems from an opposite approach — one that embraces a widening of one’s field of attenuation.
One other important way in which I identified with John’s experiences is with a tending towards the scientific in the narratives that arise from the landscape. I increasingly find myself using scientific knowledge to inform my experiences in nature; when I see a tree I think of its ties into ecological systems, when I feel the breeze against my skin I think of the atmospheric conditions that move around the air. In discussing this we began talking about the environmental narratives employed by native peoples of this region, in that they vary greatly from a ‘scientific’ narrative. Native Americans, like older cultures all around the world, used metaphor and mythology to create maps and orient themselves within the wilderness. They would identify trees and mountains through imaginative stories rather than empirically gathered data. John and I agreed that both ways of forming narratives have their benefits.
Since my interview with John, I have already started to incorporate some of his metaphors and methods into my own practice. I have tried to keep more of an eye open toward animal tracking and looking for resources in a landscape, even though I still always try to think of the trees and such as more than just a resource to be used. This winter I plan to take the entry-level Kamana course to start becoming better versed in naturalist practices. I will also continue pursuing more scientific knowledge through field guides and other reading, but won’t abandon more traditional modes of employing metaphor as well, hybridizing the modern naturalist method with the more imaginative, metaphorical processes used hundreds of years ago. That John considered his development of new modes of sensing and being in his environments “culturally transformative” was the most profound moment in our conversation. It gives me hope that this work of exploring new metaphors and modes of attenuation can possibly lead to the kind of cultural shift necessary to remedy our current relationships with the environment.
John also said something which I found especially interesting — that he had become more tactical in his movements. When I asked him to unpack this further, he explained that he tries to maintain awareness of the circles of perception maintained by all of the other living things in his space. He said that this way of moving through his environments was both conscious and unconscious; it usually takes a concentrated effort to accomplish this but it has become more habitual and natural for him the more he practices. He even referred to this as being “culturally transformative” for him, because he sees a stark difference between his interactions with the environment and those typical of what he referred to as “mainstream American culture”. We agreed that American culture is geared towards being laser focused, which is beneficial from a capitalist perspective, but that nature awareness stems from an opposite approach — one that embraces a widening of one’s field of attenuation.
One other important way in which I identified with John’s experiences is with a tending towards the scientific in the narratives that arise from the landscape. I increasingly find myself using scientific knowledge to inform my experiences in nature; when I see a tree I think of its ties into ecological systems, when I feel the breeze against my skin I think of the atmospheric conditions that move around the air. In discussing this we began talking about the environmental narratives employed by native peoples of this region, in that they vary greatly from a ‘scientific’ narrative. Native Americans, like older cultures all around the world, used metaphor and mythology to create maps and orient themselves within the wilderness. They would identify trees and mountains through imaginative stories rather than empirically gathered data. John and I agreed that both ways of forming narratives have their benefits.
Since my interview with John, I have already started to incorporate some of his metaphors and methods into my own practice. I have tried to keep more of an eye open toward animal tracking and looking for resources in a landscape, even though I still always try to think of the trees and such as more than just a resource to be used. This winter I plan to take the entry-level Kamana course to start becoming better versed in naturalist practices. I will also continue pursuing more scientific knowledge through field guides and other reading, but won’t abandon more traditional modes of employing metaphor as well, hybridizing the modern naturalist method with the more imaginative, metaphorical processes used hundreds of years ago. That John considered his development of new modes of sensing and being in his environments “culturally transformative” was the most profound moment in our conversation. It gives me hope that this work of exploring new metaphors and modes of attenuation can possibly lead to the kind of cultural shift necessary to remedy our current relationships with the environment.