Expecting the Unexpected...

Well, I am finally back in action here after a couple weeks away. It was a fantastic trip to Lopez gathering kelp (video to come), and and an adventurous journey to California. I was down there to hang out with my long time friend and mentor Jon Young, founder of Wilderness Awareness School. In the Fall, he and the school are a releasing a very important book based on all the school's mentoring techniques and activities that they have come up with over the past 25 years.

So, being I have all this internet launch experience now, Wilderness Awareness asked me back to orchestrate the event. Though I have no idea where the time will come from, I couldn't say no. So, I headed to Cali with video camera in hand to document the essence of this book by capturing Jon Young in action.

I more or less went down there with no scripts or preconceived ideas of what the heck I was gonna do. I just let the 3 days take its own form and captured on camera the story that needed to be told. So, I expected the unexpected. After more than a decade of working directly with Jon, I know this is the best way to work on projects with him. In other words... just wing it. We always get great results. It's how we built a good part of the school's foundation, so why stop now?

This is a photo of Jon with Michael Doran. Jon mentored Michael when he was a teen, and our school got him interested in woodworking by making bows. Michael ran with that passion and became a violin maker. Michael recently presented a violin he made to Jon at my house. Jon is a great fiddle player. This story is the essence of the material in this new book.

So, the first part of this post was to fill you in on exactly where the heck I was over the last couple weeks.

The NEXT part is to share an article I just wrote for the next edition of Foxprint (the school's newsletter). It had the same theme, so I thought, "why not Blog it too!"

Though it has not even been emailed yet to the school nor edited...here it is... (I am sure you know my personal style by now... post first, edit later.. :)  )

Expect the Unexpected
By John Gallagher, L.Ac.

Folks often join Wilderness Awareness School to learn about nature. However, what REALLY happens when you hang out with Wilderness Awareness School is that you learn about YOUR nature. You get your “diploma “when you realize they are the same thing. Here’s a story about how I discovered my nature…

It was 1991, I was going to be graduating college, and I was looking to avoid the inevitable. That was of course getting a job. Well, I wasn’t opposed to getting a job. It was just that I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do when I grew up. I was only 21 after all. Disillusioned with the world of mass media that was I trained to work in, I found this guy named Jon Young who had an interesting plan.

You see, this elder named Ingwe wanted to go to Alaska. So, being that Jon has a challenging time keeping things simple (if he did, there would be no Wilderness Awareness School), he thought, “Why not take Ingwe to Alaska on a cross country tour of national parks and Native American reservations? We’ll get a bunch of people to pay for it and call it ‘an environmental summit tour’ that will mark the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage! And Gallagher, YOU get to shoot the video!”

I was instantly sold. Not only did I get to go across the U.S. and to Alaska on a cool tour with groovy people, I got to use my video skills. The later feature made it WAY easier to sell the idea to my parents, who might have been wondering if I planned to use the information I learned in college in a real world application.

I should probably back up a bit and tell you WHY I liked Jon Young in the first place. When the 1988 Exxon Valdez spill happened, I more or less woke up. I had just been to Alaska and was in awe of that very same landscape, so I was I became really angry when that happened. Having just arrived at college, I naturally joined environmental clubs, where we wrote lots of letters to oil companies and argued over Earth Day t-shirt designs.

What Jon had to offer was something simple, that make sense, and that worked. Rather than everyone around you feel uncomfortable by being a fringe activist, why not work WITH people to help them connect with nature. If people had a deep connection and appreciation for nature, then they would have no choice but to treat the Earth with respect. The more children and adults we could foster a deep connection with nature, the better our chances to save our life support system (the Earth). The children we trained would grow up with an environmental conscious, no matter what their profession.

It was more effective to empower people to make a difference. I found I was making more progress by bringing joy to people’s lives and no longer isolating them. Before Wilderness Awareness, it seemed like no matter how many letters I would write, how many doors I knocked on, or how any people I told to recycle…well, it was never enough. It often left me hopeless.

With my work at Wilderness Awareness School however, I am filled with hope every day. Yeah, it’s true I worked 80 or more hours a week for about 8 years before I saw a paycheck. Those crazy stories of what some of us early pioneers of the school had to endure are all true. Why did I do it? Well, deep down inside I always envisioned I would have a son or daughter, and I wanted a school like this for them. And if I did not have any kids, then I was helping the future generations in any case.

Nearly 20 years later, I have a son AND a daughter. And this next fall BOTH of them will be enrolled in Wilderness Awareness School for the entire school year. When you go by school office around 3:00pm and see those kids get out of the van after a day out with our amazing instructors, they have life in their eyes. It’s the vitality and hope that I once felt by looking into Ingwe’s eyes while he was telling stories.

After Ingwe left this world, it felt like it was time for me to move on as well. I did my job. I was part of creating an incredible school that is now stable and on its feet.  Though I still do contract work for Wilderness Awareness, I moved on to create new opportunities for people to discover their nature.

I know my place in the world. I know my nature. I could NEVER have done this without the mentoring and community of Wilderness Awareness School. I thought I was doing this just for the future generations, but have since discovered how much I learned about myself, my gifts, my vision and my path in this world.

Every story someone writes about their experiences at Wilderness Awareness always ends in people discovering their own nature. The story is always different, but the essence of the ending is always the same.

Now that I finally figured out what I wanted to do when I grew up, I carry forth the spirit of Jon Young and Ingwe in all the work that I do. Could I have expected this when I joined up with Jon and Ingwe 18 years ago? No way. Like I said…expect the unexpected.

When I finished designing the Kamana Naturalist Training Program I chose two words to end the long and tumultuous adventure of self-discovery that is called Kamana…

The Beginning…

John Gallagher lives in Carnation, WA with his wife Kimberly and children Hailey (4) and Rowan (9). He is a five-element acupuncturist. LearningHerbs.com is their family business that carries the teachings of Wilderness Awareness into the worlds of herbs and home remedies.

Comments

[Angelica]

John, thanks for sharing this story with us! I know that Wilderness Awareness school and Kamana has, and continues to inspire me every day. It has given me such a deep love for our Earth. Truly, what our Earth needs are relationships with humans from direct experiences in nature. I understand this more and more every day, as like you said, you can only preach to people for so long about how to recycle, etc. I could go on and on! Anyways, thank you for everything you do, its very inspiring to many of us. :)