I hope you all are doing well out there. I see @GHuns has been busy!
I took a few days off because of the holiday weekend here in the states (Labor Day), and tried not to work on things and just take it easy. I have enjoyed the recess but looking forward to getting back to things tomorrow (Tuesday). Just a reminder that I have another online channel and work that I do unrelated to Practical Woodsman, so I am literally always recording something, writing something, uploading something, managing communities online.
I try to hopscotch the two things, one week I primarily focus on Practical Woodsman, the following week I focus on my other work.
Point is, I rarely take a break from content creation. And honestly, it’s not easy for me to take breaks. I enjoy this stuff so much. But if I’m not mindful, I can get close to burn out.
Anyway, I hope you guys and gals are all doing good out there. Looking forward to new stuff this week.
Enjoy this video of Balsam Range singing ‘Blue Mountain’ from Friday night.
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...
