Beginnings
I was born into and grew up in post WWII rural Alaska – still a US Territory then.
My father instilled a sense of adventure in me with stories of travel around the American Southwest in his youth and WWII Navy combat close calls. My mother, one of ten children and daughter of a Swedish immigrant blacksmith, cultivated a love of nature with taking my brother and I camping in the wilderness, stories of growing up in rural Montana in a family and community where people heated their homes with wood, dug their own wells, made their own candles, foraged for wild food plants and butchered their own farm animals. She read me the poetry of Robert Frost, Wordsworth and Dickinson.
The Hurts
Yet, my father, like most men of that era, had strict ideas of who a man and woman were supposed to be and was intolerant of those around him who did not conform. Given that my mother was an independent and capable woman, they could never agree, so domestic violence was chronic in the household. I was a sensitive boy who felt unsafe in my own family. Speaking up was a risk I learned to not take, resulting in shaming or punishment, so I remained quiet. I became an observer and a listener for threats and when it was safer.
My parent’s conflicts circulated above unhealed grief of their first child dying as a newborn; a grief that possessed our family with unspoken sadness and resentment between my parents. As a consequence, I felt invisible and undefended, so a spiritual loneliness possessed me. I never really felt fully seen, held or welcomed by my family. The shadow of ungrieved death remained a curtain between me and the others.
At age seven, I ventured outside by myself for solace. I rapidly developed self-sufficiency outdoors, deeply connected to the land, the seasons, the animals. We had over a mile walk each way to school and back home. One day, I was surprised by a mother moose stampeding towards me, mowing down the smaller trees – an attack no one survives. I ran for my life. That encounter taught me to be present, to study the tracks before me – who made them, what was their direction of travel, their disposition, and proximity? I listened into the woods more deeply, to feel the landscape and know my place in it. The moose was my first of many animal mentors. The bird’s songs gave permission for my voice to emerge. I began to write poetry very early in my life.
The following spring, I tagged along with older boys, friends of my brothers. One of them had a BB gun. The game was shooting at anything. One-upmanship. Who could hit the target? We came upon a beautiful sparrow singing atop a tall alder, silhouetted against the blue sky. It was my favorite of all birds. I knew its song well. My heart secretly sang its song, I felt so connected to it. Each of the boys shot at it, missing. I said, “I can hit it.” I wanted to belong in the group. Everyone chuckled mockingly at me, the tag-along, but gave me the gun, anyway. I felt my heart connection take aim. I pulled the trigger. The sparrow went instantly silent and tumbled limp through the air to the ground. Everyone was impressed. I walked up to the base of the alder, finding the bird dead in the leaves. My heart broke, I felt rage against myself. I had never killed anything before, nor seen anyone kill something with a gun. It was then I learned my power to kill what I love. I came to mistrust my power.
Relationship Needs Met
Bullied at school, intimidated at home I came to mistrust people. I learned that being alone outside was safest. Unlike people, the animals, some dangerous, were still predictable, would listen to me and not criticize. My senses, imagination, and body could feel alive and free there. I had a favorite tall spruce tree that naturally called to me to sit in the shade of its boughs regularly on the moss, roots and cones, and just watch, listen and feel. Nature became my home, my family, my mentor and my friend where I felt loved and where I could belong.
The animals showed me their trails; the birds their nesting patterns and migrations; the summer it’s energizing endless sun; the winter its mystical aurora. I spent more time outside than inside. I became somewhat feral. I became like the animals – aware and confident among them, as one of them.
Disappointments
At age ten, the Great Alaska Earthquake with the primal terror it delivered, brought ruin to my nature refuge – nature could not be trusted, either.
A few years later, the State of Alaska determined they were going to blaze a new highway through our living room. We had to move. The bulldozers destroyed the land I was so deeply part of. I ceased trusting institutions.
When I was sixteen, my brother – two years older and my strongest anchor to humans, died in a car accident. In my devastation, I ceased trusting life and the living.
I opened up to the world beyond the living – to the spirit world, the ancestral. I only felt connected to that which was unseen.
The trauma possessed me for decades. I had difficulty communicating with people. Having learned to isolate in nature, wilderness solo journeys became my best balm, though I could never completely relax not knowing when the next huge earthquake would raze the forest again or when machines would overturn it.
New Start
A few years later, I was introduced to dance, and dance became my new refuge. My dance teacher was my first human mentor who saw me. He became my reentry into the human world.
In my years dancing I went to college, read a lot of books, met a lot of people, made a few friends, but a hole inside me still governed my limited capacity to relate comfortably with others. Filled with mistrust and a lack of confidence, I never felt completely safe with them.
The Awakening
As a young man, in 1978 I bought a book, “The Tracker” by Tom Brown Jr. It’s title intrigued me. When I read it, I felt seen for who I truly was for the first time. I had never heard the term “tracker” before and had no idea that I had grown up as one – with the animals mentoring me in the art of knowing them as I did. That book led me back to nature with new energy as I began studying tracking as an intentional craft.
The Dark Night of the Soul
A couple of years later, on a small commercial fishing boat in the Pacific Northwest, tossed about by a gale, and struggling with the persistent void from my brother’s death, which I filled the desperation of with the futility of trying to become him in my actions and mannerisms, I searched for my true self. This absence in my soul had become a constant inner torture which I could no longer tolerate. I was spiritually lost. A deep imperative inside me urged me to discover my authentic connection to life.
Liberation & Triumph
This inner effort melded with the physical effort and focus to survive not being thrown overboard. Astonishingly, a small bird landed a foot in front of me in the center of a coil of rope in the middle of the raging storm. It was a sparrow thirty miles from land. Facing me and looking me squarely in the eye, with one “peep!” It gave me a simple message – “You don’t have to try to be someone, because there is no one (else) to be!” and took off into the tempest. I felt an overwhelming aliveness rush through every cell of my body. My mind washed clean. My heart opened. The message instantly liberated and transformed my entire being.
Transformation
From that point on, I desired only to become a positive agent for transformative change for others. I studied and became an Asian arts practitioner. As my understanding of the art of healing deepened and I served hundreds of people over the years, I learned more of human suffering, coming back into connection with people through empathy, compassion, gratitude, service and trust in the process – we are all designed to heal. As I was healed, I became a healer. I saw that, through generous and accepting reciprocity, a sense of wholeness is meant to be embodied in everyone.
The Insight
As my understanding evolved and I mentored others in healing themselves and they, in turn, caring for others, I came to meet other nature connected people. Through these mentoring relationships, my nature connection practice came to finally meet my healing practice. Healing practices and nature practices were expressions of the same process – nature regenerating its wholeness through and within the person. We are designed by nature, so we most easily heal – return to wholeness – when strategically engaging with nature.
I researched neuroscience, Ecotherapy, mindfulness practice, human evolutionary biology and psychology, neuroscience and the principles of linguistics (connection as a language), discerning their intersections and compliments, and experimented with the universal human affinity for nature.
The Deepening
I came to work with people connecting them to nature as healer, mentor and designer of life and purpose. I innovated programs using poetic principles of association to inquire into personal and professional questions through the senses, likening the qualities of those felt questions with qualities and relationships found in the natural world.
During one group nature wander, applying these principles and dynamics to direct sensory engagement and meditation on the qualities of a tree as a community hub with connections to both the darkness (the unseen below the surface) and the light (the visible reaching into the light), a woman participant had a powerful shift in her relationship with her deceased father. A weight lifted from her heart as she realized an integrity of his she had never before seen in his character that had gifted her in a very personal way.
The Surprise
In these outdoor programs, I observed healing love and connection within families being restored from strategically engaging with the connection system of nature. Unexpectedly, the most buried pains of my relationship with my own childhood family of origin began to heal. I began to see with new eyes and a more open heart my parents as individuals with their own strengths, weaknesses and vulnerabilities. I had new appreciation for all they had given me, with forgiveness and love. I came back into relationship and connection with my early family in a way that has been liberating and also informed my capacity to listen into and observe how disconnection in a family – mistrust, control, competition, denial, avoidance, judgement and fear – can be treated by prescribing simple nature connection practices that meet the specific need at hand.
Meeting Jon
During these years of research and program designing, I met Jon Young. I took workshops and studied tracking and Bird Language – the Original Art of Listening – with Jon and his program’s graduates. I experienced his Art of Mentoring connection community, which calmed more of my old anxieties about people even more. There, I felt reinitiated back into the human village with a sense of renewed freedom, connection, purpose, joy and gratitude.
Resolution
It was in Africa with Jon in the spring of 2018 that we got to know each other better while visiting the San Bushmen of the Kalahari. In the Bushmen, I witnessed involuntary and effortless individual, family, community and nature connection coherence and flow. I witnessed the Bushmen modeling how nature connection – curious sensory aware engagement with nature’s complex and interwoven community of living things, and human connection – intergenerational extended family groups curious about and caring for each other, were interdependent.
The Bushmen’s welcoming customs were simple, but extensive. It was with the Bushmen that all of me felt welcomed. Even parts of me I didn’t know that were there became known to me, as they were welcomed to the surface, too. That welcoming was transformational for me.
The remaining buried threads of disconnection from my own family, nature’s earthquake betrayal, the bulldozing of my beloved refuge, my brother’s death – all invisibly began to melt away. I felt welcoming, unconditionally, of my entire life.
This experience informed and energized my work and brought to focus the need to serve families more.
Meeting Peter
I was introduced to Peter Johnson at a grief tending gathering. We sat at the fire exploring the possibilities of nature connection, healing and families, and discovered we had core values and diverse backgrounds which complimented each other’s passionate desire to serve to the same end.
From this path has emerged the three of us exploring the possibilities of creating rich and effective connection programs for families – to bring connection back into alienated families, and strengthen those families who already share values as a connection culture within themselves.
From this collaboration, Regenerative Family Dynamics was born.
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