The Embercombe Year Course will focus on developing the skills of Survival and Nature Awareness. Over 6 weekends spanning a year, we will move from the basic survival skills to some of the sophisticated craft-based skills that we associate with our ancestors. From the excitement of making wild-fire and constructing shelters to sleep in, we will move towards making flint tools, bone needles and hooks and other artifacts that we may have seen in museums and understanding their use in the context of our survival in nature.

Through the process of the Year Course we will be forging a strong connection and grounding with the Earth and with those who take this journey with us. The journey will take us into the development of our awareness of nature, through tracking and bird lore, skills that link us to an unbroken tradition of understanding ourselves and our environment deeply. Working with the plants and trees, we will build knowledge and understanding of how to forage for food, medicine and many essentials from the plants that grow around us and that we may consider to be weeds.

Please bear in mind that all these skills take time to master so a certain amount of your own practice will be required between meetings, in order to attain a reasonable standard. Engaging in this type of transformative learning opens us to possibilities that take us beyond our normal range of experience, yet are merely our birth right as a human being. There is no pre-requisite for this course.

ITINERARY

Meeting 1: Survival skills

Orientation, Wild fire making, shelter building (group shelter), Water purification, Wild food with some wild cooking, Cordage, Silent movement and Nature awareness.

Meeting 2: Awareness skills:

Introduction of tracking, The sacred Question, Nature Awareness, Routine of invisibility, other shelters, grass blankets, bowl burning and spoon making, Beginning of wild medicine, Clearing stick & Armadillo medicine.

Meeting 3: Deepening Awareness.

Sit spot, The worlds of grandfather, 5 voices of the birds, Concentric rings, Continuum, Bark containers, Blind fold work, Beam work, Pitch use, Continuation of tracking, Caretaking.

Meeting 4: Communicating with nature.

Blind fold tree feeling, Tree burial, Sit spot, Tree preaching, Single track analysis, More silent movement, Flint and stone work, Tree medicine and use, Inner vision practical intuition, Night out.

Meeting 5: The way of the hunter.

Sit spot, Projectile use, Bow and arrow making and using,

Sensing, Cat and mouse, Track ageing, Hide work, Traps.

Meeting 6: Becoming.

Bone work, Needles, hooks, tines and barbs, More flint work, Sit Spot, Questioning and the Quest walk, Intention, Prayer and Healing, Signs, Passion and Rapture.