Matt's 11 Month Forest Monk Training, Episode 8

Description

Matt's last episode before he is joined by three new Forest Monks for the remainder of his program.

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Tags: Kenton Whitman,ReWild University,Human Rewilding,personal rewilding,mindfulness,how to,bushcraft,survival,wilderness survival skills,how to survive in the woods

Video Transcription

[Music]

let's duck I'll let you go jump up and down and see you

oh my gosh he's brave enough to count coup you ask just don't get near town let's just watch it the tree this bark grows into it it grows out more the tree's bark grows in like there must be periods of fast growth and slow growth because do you see that huge ah

okay

[Applause]

[Applause]

you

if it can make my door out of another one of those bundles so I just need something once I crawl in there I can grab it with my arms and pull it over me the coz yeah if I was a squirrel or something or a mouse I just see that if you like I can crawl into that and spend the night there and that's the coziest thing I've ever seen basically you've made a little entrance right here yeah well once I crawl in I'm gonna take all this grass but sitting this on top and pull it over on top of me I get it so that's not actually part of your upper insulation right now that's going to be important sitting there at the moment okay hello the world I'm still here right now in one of my favorite places on the property this is a black spruce swamp and at least this time of year it's one of the places where you can really just go anywhere it's not tangled with undergrowth and it's very flat the all the water and the swamp is frozen and the snow is even melted in a lot of places so you can just walk across this layer of ice and look down and see frozen moss rose and spagna moss under the ice like a little like little mini ecosystem came out here yesterday and spent a couple of hours looking for the other secret treasure of the swamp occasionally if you look hard enough you'll find a few leftover cranberries from all the way from last fall cranberries frozen cranberries are delicious and they're worth searching for the other thing I searched for out here is deer antlers because this is the season that they're shedding them right now and this is deer country there's not a whole lot over by where I live but I've seen lots of deer sign over in the swamp and I'm hoping that someday I'll come across a pair of antlers just freshly shed on this on the moss but that brings me to an interesting realization I had yesterday cranberry hunting and particularly antler hunting can be pretty frustrating business because you wander around sometimes like 10 or 15 minutes not a single cranberry I hadn't found any deer antlers yet and I've been looking for hours and hours and so you can it's easy to get frustrated when you have this aim that you're searching for and it's it it goes on realized you can't find the object that you're looking for but what's not frustrating is walking in the woods and looking at the ground and looking at all the plaits on the ground and how each individual mound of Spagna moss has hundreds of different shades of green on it and when how it looks when the sunlight is shining off them for the dark green leaves and then when you do find that little cranberry after your 10 minutes of searching

it's like wool an extra gift this little jewel of the forest this ornament that's been waiting for me here for three months in the snow and so it doesn't become looking for cranberries it becomes enjoying the woods and finding cranberries while you're doing that and so hopefully I'll find some deer antlers while I'm doing that they'd find a deer skull and I not to do it on the stump and it's overlooking the swamp as a sentinel of the haunted forest spring is coming soon and I think and I'm pretty glad of it February was kind of a tough month for me mentally I think winter here is just too long it's I like winter I like all the snow and the tracks and the cold air but I think it's about two months too long here in northern Wisconsin and that's kind of the problem I was having in February we like I just just a little bit tired of going outside and looking at ice and then coming back inside cuz it's not that much else you can do unless you want to dig around and get your fingers frozen off in the snow but there are there are two things that I noticed really help you out if you get into a at least they helped me when I got into those mental states where I just just don't want to be through the rest of this day you know first of those things is just walking and I think if you just walk long enough it's very very hard to stay depressed and to continue to have those negative feelings it's a very soothing practice I noticed I remember that I think I heard somewhere that Hippocrates prescribed walking to something to sufferers of depression before he would prescribe any other drug or ailment or cure just because it's so beneficial like I think it was Thoreau said he didn't feel right unless he walked for four hours every day so walking is pretty powerful and I do a lot of it here the other thing that has helped me is building a fire and that's one of the reasons February was so difficult for me is that I was disconnected mostly from those campfires that I used to make I mean I used to make campfires one or two times a day everything

they and that just gives you you know something hot and cheerful and smells nice and you can look at it for a couple of hours cook your food on it it just gives you something to focus on it really brightens my mood a lot when I have a campfire and so I am really excited about being able to do that more as the weather warms up but even building a fire when it's cold out I would do that occasionally I think I can't fire sitting on top of the snow that's a pretty cool thing I also didn't feel super happy in February about my food situation basically starting last week I am on a much more restricted diet then I have been before and it's a very healthy diet and I'm glad I'm eating it but it's it can be difficult mentally to to not have those things that were used to eating everyday sandwiches and stuff and so this this very restricted diet I'm on lasts for two weeks but then after that the entire rest of this program that I'm on is going to be more restrictive than I have been eating and so even though I done the two-week period before back in February because at the end of my two-week period I can't just go back to buying whatever I want it kind of felt like I'm facing a food Armageddon here at the end of February like oh my gosh after this week I'm gonna be it's the end of the world I'm not going to be able to buy all this bread and bacon and cookies that I've been enjoying I've got to eat them all right in this week you know that was I was kind of difficult basically I felt like I wasn't gonna enjoy food ever again for the next four months but it doesn't seem that way at the beginning of March here Canton bought me all my food supplies for the week and that included a wide variety of vegetables I'm not used to getting a wide variety of vegetables at the beginning of the week and I started to realize all the things that you can do with that and come up with new recipes and the more I eat vegetables like the more I enjoy vegetables like I yesterday was kind of a milestone for me I actually had my first ever vegetable craving I've never had one of those before but I just was walking along and I thought man I could really go for some fried green pepper with onions right now and it wasn't like I wanted them on a hot dog

I just wanted to fried green pepper and onions by themselves and that seems like a pretty cool achievement for me last time I did the two week diet I mean I had cravings through the roof I was like every other every other minute I was like oh I want it I want a grilled cheese sandwich right now cuz it basically can't eat bread can eat cheese can't eat bacon and definitely no sugar but I guess maybe doing it before has helped me out now that I'm on this two-week diet again it's a lot easier for me I don't miss meat at all like not even a little bit just nice you can get a lot of satisfaction out of just foods like beans and quinoa and that's not really something I'd realized before but it's kind of it's kind of liberating for me because I do feel like we eat way too much meat in America and I am able to move in that direction so that's nice to know

I also got rid of my watch got rid of my phone which had has a clock on it don't have any way of telling time anymore about the Sun and I don't care I don't need time like before it's interesting I would have this urge to know what time it was basically and so I would go over to my watch look at my watch find out what time it was and satisfy that urge but as I did that I noticed I don't actually feel any happier since I've looked at my watch than I did before so what was that doing for me there's really like once you can free yourself of that desire to know what time it is it you know it's a lot more it's just one less thing that you need in life and it's kind of easier on the mind to not be following a clock all the time so I kind of liked it and I still have the Sun to keep track of when I need to be making dinner and stuff Sun setting right now I should probably go