Last month I wrote a post that essentially proclaimed that I was just about done with my continual analysis of and reflection on my Teaching Drum experiences, because I realized that I was more holding on because I missed the family and the sense of purpose than because I had anything more to glean from my past experiences; and, I hinted that it was possibly time to get Teaching Drum out of my life forever, time to move on completely.

Not too long after that, strangely enough, I got quite a few Teaching Drum contacts, from e-mails and comments on my critique, “Town Doesn’t Exist,” to visits with a few Drum friends, old and new.

From all of this, I realized that the universe was telling me I was only half right.

I may be done with the limitations of the Teaching Drum mythology, but I can never be done with the community, and in fact, freeing myself from being bound to its mythos may let me regenerate my ties with the friends and community who are there.

Moving “beyond” Teaching Drum means being free and powerful enough in my own being to accept it for what it is rather than railing against its injustices, and to remain secure in my own integrity, allowing both sides to interact with greater richness than before.

I miss them, and maybe it’s time to rejoin the clan.

And, as far as that goes, I’ve realized that I’m ready to admit that my criticisms may be obsolete.

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I can’t decide if it is ironic or appropriate that after finishing writing the last post, on Teaching Drum, I found Tim Nelson’s guest post over on Dmitri Orlov‘s blog. (Orlov is the author of Reinventing Collapse, which discusses the coming collapse of civilization, from the perspective of his having witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union.)

Look closely—that’s a mouse or vole that Tim’s roasting, probably from a deadfall that he set. I’m pretty sure I made Tim pose meditatively just for this photo.

Tim is an old friend from Teaching Drum, and one of the most hardcore primitivists I’ve known. He’s done the yearlong for three years, gone on wilderness solo trips, as well as tried his skills in various places throughout the country. Whenever I see him he’s dirty from his adventures, got some craft or skill going on, and still living rough.

In my memories, I imagine Tim most in buckskins. When I picture him wearing even old ratty clothes, it just does not fit that well.

Tim has some crazy stories about hitchhiking, sleeping homeless, dumpster-diving, etc. He’s also been to a ton of Tom Brown classes—as I recall, every one that was available at the time.

Last time I saw him was after Rivercane Rendezvous in Georgia. I drove up from Florida to meet him and some others. We stayed in a motel and I paid for a room for the four of them, and even so Tim was actually considering climbing up and sleeping on the roof—because he just wasn’t used to sleeping indoors.

So anyway, I read his post, then I started reading the comments. The best one was:

Somehow when I finished reading this, I imagined Tim Nelson sitting in a cubicle in an “office tower” in Minneapolis/St Paul, or Milwaukee, where he works 8-6 daily in a suit-and-tie, and commutes in a Cadillac Escalade while talking ceaselessly on his Bluetooth.

Because it’s just too bogus, this story he shared.

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It’s been almost ten years since I first went to Teaching Drum, the school where I spent my year in the woods. I was there for the summer of 2000, and the whole year from April 2001 to April 2002, and then I left. I went back for a brief visit in 2003 and have not been back since. Yet for some reason it still pulls at me.

I spent the first few years after the yearlong sorting out my feelings about it. My interest in the primitive skills, or anything to do with the outdoors, waned, and I fled to massage school. I nursed my wounds. Eventually a narrative of trauma began to surface. I felt great fatigue, pain, and anger. I wrote a series of posts, Evolution of Consciousness, trying to dissociate myself from some of the ideology and beliefs that kept me in the Teaching Drum mindset. All the pieces fell into place with my magnum opus, my critique of the yearlong program, “Town Doesn’t Exist,” a more targeted, rational dissection of the program itself, which was cathartic and liberating in the writing of it. After that, I began to feel free.

That was three years ago. But here I am, talking about Teaching Drum again. I posted videos of Teaching Drum just last month. I recently revised my critique, and now I’m having a discussion in the comments about it. And I still see friends every so often from those years, or have interactions with others who have been to the Drum.

And I continue to have feelings about the school.

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Here are a few videos related to the yearlong. I’ve never met any of these yearlong students (I believe they are from the 2008-2009 program), but the motivations, joys, and challenges they describe are consistent with the ones I faced in my time at Teaching Drum. And, it looks like the approaches of Tamarack and other staff at Teaching Drum remain consistent with those that I’ve explored and criticized elsewhere.

This brief (about 11 minutes total) segment, split into two parts, is from a show done for CBC, the Canadian public broadcast network.

Part 1:

The “paleo” approach to things is turning into something of a boom, particularly in the areas of movement and diet. In the movement world, you’ve got Frank Forencich’s “Exuberant Animal” approach, based somewhat in evolutionary biology; and Erwan Le Corre’s MovNat. In the diet world, paleo diets have been thrown around for some years now, with one prominent source being Weston A. Price, who inspired, among others, Sally Fallon and her Nourishing Traditions.

Recently there was a New York Times article on some “paleo” people living in New York City, essentially profiling a small group of people who wanted to have the diet and exercise part but were “happy in the modern world,” driving cars and such. There are a wide range of positions, actually; certainly the people I was with (and was one of) were more heavily in the anti-anything-to-do-with-modern-civilization crowd.

For the most part, I just want to say, kudos to people trying to get back to natural roots and effective ways of living. I’m still trying to get back to those practices.

But, just to explore this a bit, I’ve got some criticism.

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Concurrently with the beginning of my association with Teaching Drum, I discovered the Toltecs.

Carlos Castaneda became famous in the 1960′s for writing books, and writing a Ph.D. thesis for UCLA, about bumming around the Sonoran desert with a crazy Yaqui Indian named don Juan Matus, who taught him about hallucinogenic plants, but also about deeper ways of being and walking in the world. He became wildly popular, and eventually others elaborated on his work or even claimed to have met don Juan, while still others debunked him and his stories and claimed that he had made don Juan up.

I didn’t know any of this. The first book I picked up was actually Traveling With Power by Ken Eagle Feather, one of the people who claimed to have met and learned from don Juan.

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By this point it should be obvious that I was fairly anti-institutional when it came to spirituality. I had decided that Christianity was not for me. I touched on Buddhism in a superficial and dismissive way. My main influence was a “discarnate entity.”

During my freshman year I picked up a book called Grandfather by a dude named Tom Brown, Jr. This was to become another major turning point in my spiritual life, as the Seth books were some four years earlier.

Tom Brown, Jr., is probably the most famous primitive skills instructor in the United States. His story, detailed in his many books, is that an old Apache scout named Stalking Wolf came across him in the woods near his home in New Jersey and proceeded to mentor him and his best friend Rick, who was a relative of Stalking Wolf, the ancient ways of the scout: Tracking, stalking, survival skills, awareness skills, and the philosophy and spirituality that underlie them all. He was mentored for ten years and then had to find his own way in the world. He now runs the Tracker School.

But I didn’t know all of that then. The book Grandfather was a series of stories about Stalking Wolf, or Grandfather as Brown called him, and his adventures and travels throughout the Americas. I recall it being not actually that well written, in terms of style. But there was a mythic quality to the tales that seemed to transcend the lack of polish in writing style, and moreover, I was strongly attracted to the sense that there was a spirituality to be discovered out there in the natural world, a world I had never been truly comfortable with.

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From this new lens of animal-experience, I can begin to explain more thoroughly a number of other things, such as my paradoxical experience at Teaching Drum. I can begin to understand why it was both an empowering and a disempowering experience, why it helped me grow up and traumatize me simultaneously.

It was empowering and positive for me to the extent that I followed my inner drive to break out of domestication in mainstream life, to enter a flow of being that was connected to the woods life around me, to be a human animal living in much closer contact with nature.

It was disempowering and negative to the extent that it crushed my fragile sense of joy and exploration in my newly-inhabited animal self, by employing forceful methods and psychological acrobatics and manipulations to maintain my position. Even a love of chocolate can be destroyed by oppression.

The basic fount that I need to drink from is a joy of being alive. It’s not, I think, the type of spiritual joy that the word usually connotes. It’s a raw, aggressive exuberance that has a hint of violence and rage and cruelty in it, but only insofar as those are part of life. “Respect for life” and “joy in life” are oft-used phrases that carry gentle undercurrents, but that gentleness cannot encompass the violence of hunting prey, the forcefulness of giving birth, the power of a lightning strike, all of which display the power of life as much as enjoying a sunny day by a gently flowing river.

Past experiences I have sought have been attempts by me to seek out that dark animal joy, in whole or in part. The conundrum is that any attempt to systematize that experience destroys it. To be animal is to be wild. To be wild is to be beyond true control. Inner wildness is not to be tamed, only to be partnered with.

I have hypoglycemia, a pre-diabetic condition that mandates that I avoid refined carbohydrates, including sugars, starches, and grains such as rice or bread. If I don’t, I very quickly notice it: My energy drops precipitously, I feel dangerously drowsy, and I start getting a pounding headache. If it gets bad, I’ll throw up or even pass out (but I’ve learned enough not to let that happen!).

Hypoglycemia is “hypo” (low) “glycemia” (blood sugar). Blood sugar, or glucose in the bloodstream, is a primary energy source to cells throughout the body. We get it from carbohydrates, roughly broken down into “refined” carbs (white rice, white flour products, white sugar) or “simple” carbs (usually, fruits), and from “complex” carbs (the many types of vegetables). Simple/refined carbs go more quickly to the blood and so give a quick jolt. Complex carbs break down more slowly. Generally, the sweeter it tastes, the quicker it goes to the bloodstream.

Diabetes is hyperglycemia; it happens when, for whatever reason, there’s too much sugar in the blood. Hypoglycemia is opposite, but related; basically both indicate that the body has trouble regulating and distributing energy, usually because there’s some kind of underlying energetic deficiency, which can be caused or aggravated by poor diet (and usually is, with diabetes).

I had always eaten lots of rice and pasta. Things started going awry during my first summer at Teaching Drum in 2000. Higher quantities of sugar were eaten there as part of a food addiction cycle that I’ve written about elsewhere. Then one day we were all fasting for the entire day in preparation for a sweat lodge ceremony that evening, and as the day went on I felt more and more horrible as my blood sugar plummeted. I was barely able to stumble my way the half-mile down the trail to where the van was parked, and the ride in to the house was very difficult because every bump on the dirt road threatened to make me puke.

When I finally got to the house, everyone else left for the sweat, and I staggered into the house, opened up a can of tomato soup, ate a little, lay down, and passed out. When I woke up I felt tons better.

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A television crew for Outdoor Wisconsin, a show for a local public station, interviewed a bunch of us during my yearlong at Teaching Drum, in summer of 2001. If you want to see me in my woodsy glory, watch this.