In the interest of modesty (recognizing, and working within my limits) I have decided to publish new episodes of The Practical Woodsman every other week.
I would PREFER to publish new episodes of The Practical Woodsman every week, because I’m just having so much fun with it and it’s a theme I really enjoy and love talking about. It’s almost like play time for me.
However, I have another, long-established, online identity that revolves around things that are even more important; things involving emotional health, emotional disorders, recovery, relationships, parenting, and so forth. A lot of people have come to depend on me to keep a regular flow of content coming from that source, which involves articles, videos, podcast episodes and so forth. All of it takes a lot of work and time.
So in order to be able to regularly produce content for both unrelated projects consistently, and over a long period of time, I’ve worked out a good leap-frog system. One week I dedicate my time and energy into content creation for the one, and the following week I dedicate myself to content creation for the other. In this way I can simply leap frog over each week and hopefully create quality content for both and not burn out.
Thank you everybody for being here, for supporting The Practical Woodsman, and for allowing for an every-other-week schedule! There are so many things I’m looking forward to talking about, sharing, demonstrating, and arguing about on the topics of the woods, and meditative wilderness survival.
The school textbooks tell you the settlers crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom.
Some of them did, partly. What the textbooks leave out is the thing that sits in the actual letters, in the sailors' accounts, in the merchant pamphlets circulating in English ports from the 1580s onwards: a major reason people came to America was the wild game. Meat you could take. Meat nobody owned. Meat that walked into camp.
For a population legally separated from the animal for five hundred years, this was the whole pitch.
Consider what they were leaving.
A family in a Devon cottage in 1618 eats pottage. Oats, barley, an onion, whatever greens grew near the back door. No meat in it this week. No meat in it last week. There will be meat in it on Christmas Day, God willing, if the chicken is still alive by then. The deer in the forest at the end of the lane have been the king's property under the Forest Laws since 1066. Taking one is a hanging offence. The father has never taken one. His father never took one. The institutional...
