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This past week I took the boys and joined the inimitable Michelle Wilde at the weeklong Elements Gathering.  We made cordage with wild dogbane, we carved raw alabaster into fetishes, we sewed and beaded braintanned buckskin medicine-bags, we started fires, we gathered food, we baked acorn bread, we wove baskets. My children went feral before my eyes, bartering for knives, setting traps, crafting their own belts and clothing from the desert landscape.

Every evening (rather surreally in this landscape of buckskin loincloths and flintknapping) there was world-class music.  I wrote this reflection by lantern-light after listening to William Close play the Earth Harp.  If you click on the link there, you will see a very professional and las vegas-y presentation of what the earth harp is.  My experience of it was far more…well…elemental.  I could feel the music rising up the ground through me, humming out all of the sadnesses and rough edges and deeply-carried emotions. I understood sound healing for the first time.  In the context of the week, it was a life-changing experience.

Years ago, my friend Bud Howell introduced me to primitive skills and accompanied me to Tom Brown’s tracking school.  In those weeks of tracking and shelter-building I could feel the beginning of something large and vital, but it fell by the wayside as the years went on.  Now I had found it again. I felt as though I’d been watering one tree all of my life, and suddenly had learned that my life is not one tree.  My life is an ecosystem, layered with shrubs and vines and groundcovers, and for the first time all of them were watered at once, and the raw bits and ends of my life started to cycle round and support each other.  There’s really no way to put it into words.  But this is what I wrote as it happened:

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