Prior to the start of Summer Quarter, 2009

I have been living near Meadowbrook Pond for seven years now and up until the spring of 2009 I think I have only visited the area twice and on both occasions I only stayed very briefly.
My first visit to Meadowbrook with the intention of surveying the area for my study in the Kamana Naturalist Course was in the beginning my Spring Quarter of 2009 at Antioch. I was to choose a personal practice for my Transformative Leadership course and after a few different attempts I chose to make Meadowbrook Pond the spot for my personal practice and place of daily reflection.
I returned the next day to photograph the area for my Transformative Leadership reports and to send to Dan Corcoran, my future advisor at the Wilderness Awareness School. Above are the photographs that I took that day.






Below is my Personal Practice report from Transformative Leadership back in my spring quarter.


Assignment 2: Personal Practice
Intention: To increase insight and self-awareness: to develop reliance on intuition: and to increase the ability to stay grounded in who you are.
Background: Our intentions are often sabotaged when a lack of awareness of our own assumptions, beliefs and patterns of thinking distort our perception. Likewise, in the hustle of every-day living, and external pressures to conform, we may find it difficult to discern our own inner wisdom. We often become mechanistic, relying on our mental, conceptual ability and excluding other sources of knowing. Adopting a personal practice for the duration of the course will provide an opportunity to experiment with one way to stay grounded and aware, and to access more of your personal resources.
Strategy: Select one practice that you can commit to, on a daily, or at least several-days-a-week basis, for the duration of the course. A practice may be meditation, a daily walk, exercise, inspirational reading, journaling, gardening, etc. On the day of your team’s completion of the assignment below, please be prepared to discuss your journey with the class.


Kamana is:
The Kamana Naturalist Training Program is a four level home study course that covers the naturalist background needed to engage in the wilderness arts, including tracking, bird language, survival and native living skills, traditional herbalism, and naturalist mentoring.
It is the ultimate blueprint for a student's time spent in the field and in conducting nature-related research. Students become confident naturalists, melding modern field ecology with the skills of a native scout. Naturalist and tracker Jon Young, who uniquely designed it to model the process in which Tom Brown, Jr. mentored him as a boy, wrote it.
Kamana is completed "at your own pace and at your own place." It may take one to four years total to complete all four levels of the program.

Since I already have had previous experience with courses like this, Dan at WAS is starting me out at Level II
A two large parts of all the Kamana levels are

Field Exercise One: Finding a Secret Spot
This is an area you visit on a regular basis where you will practice exercises that expand your awareness of nature and knowledge of place. You'll discover it's much more that just picking a spot to sit in the woods. All future exercises will stem from this searching and mapping experience
My "secret" spot (no longer a secret, is the Thorton Creek Greenspace located in Meadowbrook Park.
http://www.seattleurbannature.org/Resources/NEmaps/ne-7.html
You are supposed to pick a space you can easily get to on a daily basis. Meadowbrook is a 5-minute bike ride from my house.

Field Exercise Two: The Sense Meditation
Learning to overcome that little "voice" that prevents us all from really tuning into the language of nature. In other words, "Lose your mind and come to your senses!"
This is really the Personal Practice for Transformative Leadership. I know I will be continuing this after this quarter, I thought I would utilize this assignment to get in the habit.
Deliverables for this assignment and the Kamana course will be journaling, personal and field notes.

There is a lot more to Kamana II, which I will get to in my summer course.

This is also a personal practice that serves my assignment from my monthly men's group. I have been assigned to take better care of myself.
I had a physical exam shortly after my daughter was born and right before I started grad school here at Antioch. It was an extremely thorough. I even had an Echo Cardio test done by a cardiologist. The results of my exam concluded that I was healthy as a horse. My blood pressure was just below 120 over 80, which is a normal blood pressure for my age and condition,
Two weeks ago my doctor told me my blood pressure is now 139 over 89. 140 over 90 is considered high blood pressure. She said that the second I get onto a crowded I-5 my blood pressure will elevate to well over 140 over 90.
I haven’t checked it since then, but I am hoping that my personal practice will help bring it back down.

My Secret Spot:
Thornton Creek Greenspace located in Meadowbrook Park
* The “Secret Spot” is not necessarily a place where no one else can find out about, but more so a place that is special to me, or a place that “feels” like home. It means “special to me alone”. Jon Young has recommended a book by Forest Carter called The Education of Little Tree. In the book you will find the meaning of the Secret Spot that Young is referring to.