Matt's 11 Month Forest Monk Program, Episode Three

Description

Part three of Matt's adventure. He meets his first gauntlet challenge, tries to start a fire in the rain, and talks about toilets, going barefoot, and mosquitoes as teachers. Sorry. No pizza. Yet.

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Music by Kevin MacLeod, at Incompetech.com.

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

I know everybody's been wondering about the the pizza so I have to ask you about the pizza and this doesn't happen yet right no okay I got the pizza though I bought it from the store y'all's encouragement gave me gave me the strength to go ahead and buy it so I just have to do something with it and the other big question people have been asking me about is that homesickness that you were dealing with you in the beginning is that shifted or transformed at all I think it has gradually gone through a transformation and the biggest thing is you know if I try to think about that I'm going to be here 10 more months that's just a staggering amount of time but if I just think about I'm going to be here one more day that's a lot more bearable and I just focus on what's going on right now uh-huh and that really helps to alleviate the homesickness whenever it comes up yeah there's a lot that's a big thing that I came here to learn to that sort of just being present and not worrying about what might happen in the future mm-hmm you you're meditating now really regularly right yeah I meditate whenever I get up in the morning then I usually eat breakfast and then meditate for another half hour after that okay and so do you notice like science says by now that you've actually had shifts in your gray matter of your brain do you notice subjectively any differences in your mind state yeah I think I feel a lot more peaceful and you know I still get times when there are just thoughts running around in my head going in circles but I'm able to just focus on them and usually turn them off okay which is something I couldn't do before so I'm think I'm getting more focused able to direct my own thoughts a lot better than I could before yeah definitely yesterday I felt just really peaceful all the time even though it was rainy and cold and wet out all day and just felt like yeah I'm in the middle of a forest and it's not a whole lot to do but that's not a problem oh I can keep myself entertained it's more on showed up at all you know just everything random memories from when I was like 7 years old all the way up to the present just pop up for no reason Wow and let me just go away and I forget all about them for this next week hahaha okay so this was your first gauntlet challenge and got my challenges once a month something given to you to practice some of the skills that you've been working on but this was the practice although outwardly it look like skills it was more about mental practice I'm guessing that's maybe what you experienced what we'll find out so we're here at your cool camp you found it out I'm under a car Wow and yeah let us know about your your experience yeah it was definitely definitely the mentality of it was the hardest part just doing like I really didn't do much yesterday I just mostly spent the day wandering around eating fruit and breaking plants fishing so I was allowed to bring three items with me besides just the clothes that I'm wearing hadn't changed yet this morning so I brought my Clinton steel with my char cloth so I start a fire nut countess is one item with what you have right and you can see that worked out all right fishing pole and abroad my pot so I can purify water I didn't actually purify any water until like eight o'clock last night so I pretty much spent the entire day without drinking anything which worked out okay I got a bit dehydrated but I got a lot of water from plants and berries fruit although drinking water is definitely the most efficient way to get water from outside your body to inside your but we found a bunch of wild plums yesterday and they're all gone now those are really good the skin is super bitter like just like on a plum you'd buy from the store maybe but the inside is even sweeter than any store wat plump really good so I ate all of those and as he doing

wild grapes and it came down to the farm and just gorge myself on raspberries and a bunch of little tomato like things that brett showed me black nightshade was a really good and just picked a bunch of plants to most of the plants up here are super bitter and inedible unless you're super hungry if you ask me but there are some good plants down at the farm and i spent a lot of time fishing i was probably out in the wrong time of day I was like mid afternoon out fishing so it was pretty hot it's not much shade down by the creek and I don't think the fish were biting but it was a fun thing to do on the little diversion good way to spend the time and I found some cattail rhizomes down there I found a really big nice ones like that long and really thick lots of good food from that and it actually had a shoot on one end so I could eat that and it tastes like cucumber yes and then came up here after all of that eating was done or to spend the night I didn't sleep much last night I really could have slept last night I was in a pretty good situation here you can see all this grass that I've hauled from all the way across the field some spots the hay truck doesn't collect it all and just leaves it on the ground so there are good places to pick up grass and I put that all down as a bedding and I made my fire right here initially it was huge and hot so I had to sit way back but eventually died down that comfortable coals and I could just sit next to really close but every time I was on the verge of sleep I would basically just start awake and realize that my fire was going out and I'd have to I lined up a bunch of sticks on the outside of my fire really long things that lasted me the whole night I just fed them in constantly what waking up like every half hour to restock the fire and make sure it didn't go out I don't think I only fell asleep like once or twice last night most of the time I was just dozing but then I dreamed some weird dreams about frogs strange but I had really a lot of fun last night no no mosquitoes smoke kept them all away there might have been like five all night and it's really a really unique experience to just sit next to fire all night stuff as it gets colder just huddling closer and next to the coals seems like one of those nights that you only have a couple of times in your life and I'm grateful that I got a chance to be here do that DiCarlo any hot rocks a little bit there wasn't really a need to I mostly just curled up right next to the hot part of the fire wow that's awesome physica it got down let me stone in the valley our gauge read 39 fahrenheit walls between three and four Celsius yeah so that was you know seven degrees Fahrenheit from freezing ah and it's usually a little bit warmer up on the tops of the hills here but that's it still was a very chilly night yeah alright still summer technically feel like I can see my brother moment ago office yeah yeah I tried to catch some fish I didn't manage to also fished in a pond a little bit try to catch a northern pike but I ran enough time the daylight was leaving it's all I came up here and found some chicken of the woods growing on a tree to eat so I scared that it wants to don't roasted over the fire I also found an old man in the woods and tried to roast that but I'm not sure how successful I was okay just to be heating up knows his small light and tissue it i just decided no I'm not that hungry oh oh yeah I realized later on that I could have just chosen my three items I could have taken the sleeping bag tent water gun so that would have kept me warm dry hydrated and free of mosquitoes hmm but I think this was the funner option more adventurous version of it I wanted to challenge myself was like I dreamed actually tuesday night i dreamed about doing this that had already started this it was you know hardly halfway through had my fire going already and when I woke up from that dream I just knew these are the three items i'm going to take okay figured it out you're just talking about going barefoot and like six months ago anytime I went out of my house I would have put on shoes you know without a second thought and now I'm thinking why did I do that why do you need shoes shoes are they're just big and clumsy and they slide around on your feet a lot who needs them there and there were like 100 dollars a pair too yeah a big thing for me is they just they wear out so quickly I can go barefoot and now that my feet are adjusted to it it doesn't hurt to do it and i also just don't wear through shoes and so you know i have those nice pairs of shoes that i keep around in case i'm going to go through really rough terrain but otherwise just my father brought you brought this conversation cuz we were all running through the woods and you were saying yeah there was a time a year ago where it would be unimaginable for me to run through the woods barefoot and now it's just like that i do it all time in us I've not at you know I've occasionally poked my foot and stuff like that but relative to the amount of times I injure myself on other things it's pretty average amount of injuries so yeah I mean it's it's like I i avoid choose when I can now and that was very unusual for me

go go bare feet that's so cool so I came up here thinking I you know like anybody would be just huddle under their tarp staying dry and I found you out on your exercise bouldering pullovers and I was waiting for the arc to show up with you pretty major storm last night and it's still raining no going there's been a warm front moving in the past couple of days

the clouds just getting uglier and uglier what

like its supposed to go away tomorrow right I don't know I can check whether the part but you saw this coming via the clouds you say huh yeah yeah if we can get a fire started today probably I have some dry kindling and stuff started in my box well I'm thinking we don't use any of this stuff we just got in the woods and Sarah think we can do it I guess if you say we all right pepper will give it a drag today okay so basically we're ready to give this a shot and one piece of char cloth although it's a big enough one that you could break it in half and try to okay so failure out in the woods but we came back use the magnesium fire starter and got it right away okay he said something that I think would surprise a lot of us about what might be challenging going back into civilization and this had to do it toilets oh yeah like I said just squatting over a hole is infinitely superior to using toilets just so much better and I mean the view is good too but I'm gonna miss that for sure not just sitting there for like 20 minutes of your book or your I patty it's all over in two seconds much better it leaves make fine toilet paper okay you have dealt with mosquitoes in the last couple weeks they've hit pretty hard and it's a hatching of the species that's small and quick to bite and pretty painful agile too yeah I can get away from you how are you dealing with those I try to imagine them as teachers just little teachers whispering their teachings into my ears and that's what the buzzing sound is and then they land on me and they bite me I just think oh my teacher is decided that I'm ready for a challenge and that i can accept the challenge of itching for a few minutes and that I'm capable of that so I try to believe what the mosquito believes that I capable of itching for a couple of minutes without being bothered by it and I really deep down believe that there's nothing that they can do to hurt you it's just that conditioned instinct on the surface to suffer from this firing of the nerves in your body like it's just a sensation and there's no reason it should cause you to suffer but a lot most of us just allow ourselves to just be dragged along by that sensation and trying not to do that and temperatures to you said and this actually is historical for you that you are able to thermoregulate really well yeah you haven't been uncomfortable even though the temps have been sometimes high and sometimes really low at night and yeah every time I go camping somewhere hot first day is just always miserable and hot and like this whole trips gonna suck but in the second day it could be the same exact temperature and it still feels hot but it's not uncomfortable anymore and it's been the same way here first day I got here super uncomfortable sweaty all the time just hot but I mean it's hot now it's probably 80 degrees but it's not uncomfortable and it can be you know 60 degrees in the mornings and I'm not cold because there's no sudden abrupt temperature change like if you went from 70 degrees inside and walked outside into 60 degrees you get cold but as long as the temperature change is gradual you can really adjust to it pretty well and you almost don't even notice it okay coffee you actually like oh dude i had my first cup of cat food camp brewed brewed coffee this morning it was amazing i loved it and did you get it every part of it your whole beans and just know I ground up the beans at the co-op that's good so I only got well I got too much and then I gave the rest to Dottie and John because it was gonna go bed before I could drink it all I kept a little bit the second two cups were pretty weak because i tried to use the same grounds over so i need to perfect my recipe ok Wow