Matt's 11-Month Forest Monk Program, Episode Four

Description

In this episode, Matt shares some great woods-wisdom, goes on an adventure to Lake Superior, and has a visit from his mom. Still no pizza =)

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Tags: Kenton Whitman,ReWild University,Human Rewilding,personal rewilding,mindfulness,how to,bushcraft,survival,wilderness survival skills,how to survive in the woods

Video Transcription

yo yo yo everybody it is I back from the woods I'm actually wearing a cape right now cloak and it looks pretty cool I haven't looked in a mirror but I'm pretty sure it looks cool at least that's how it feels so don't ruin it definitely look just spent the last two or three hours walking around the farm looking for mushrooms I wanted to make an omelet for breakfast this morning and I was like okay I'll get up and go find some mushrooms to put in my omelet and yeah usually you can't walk 10 feet without stepping on a mushroom I walk around this whole property probably three or four months and this is the bounty I acquired a 10 s through mushroom yeah pretty pretty disappointing but as I came down here to record this I just so happened to be walking on the path and there's a big huge mushroom right there and that's edible elmwood stir so I guess some weird trick of fate trying to trying to make me walk around all day although it's not half a bad day for walking this is really excellent weather right now the first cold night that I've had really last night the thermometer said 40 degrees in 9 30 this morning and it must have gotten colder than that at some point it was the first night that I actually felt cold and mice inside my sleeping bag although I wasn't wearing any warm layers really so I have to get used to that but smells so fresh out here clean and just like fall oh my gosh the humidity is gone and everything dries out it's windy right now and that makes the force really loud and when the trees are rustling and crashing around sounds kind of scary at first but like the whole place is going to tear down I've been worried a little bit about my shelter coming down but it's actually pretty protected under all those trees my shelter looks a bit like a kite I think but I think that's just an illusion the wind that comes through it hits the mosquito netting is actually broken up almost completely so that so the air going over the top of the shelter ends up going faster than the air over the bottom of the shelter and that actually pushes it down so it's a really nice design works pretty well still feel like the whole place is going to uproot at times and it's really cool though watching the clouds Scott across the sky and sunshine one moment darkness the next it's pretty neat and the best part is mosquitoes are gone gone they're all gone yes yes oh my god this is already my favorite time of year just for that reason I love fall I've been working on some improvements to my camp things that I've been thinking I would do for a long time but haven't actually gotten around to yet right it's the other day I built the tripod for cooking my food hanging my cast-iron pan over fire and now I can actually control the temperature of my cooking and that's a huge improvement I can cook my food without burning it to a crisp on the outside last night I was working on a shelving unit that I'm going to put in inside my camp because there's a little bit of do that sometimes forms on the on the dead grass inside my shelter and I want to get my stuff up off the ground so I'm just driving some holes into the ground right now and I'm going to attach some boards to that had this idea going around for a while but I wasn't sure if I'd actually be able to do it hopefully once I get the whole thing together I'll take some pictures of it and upload those I think it's going to work out really well actually you know one of the reasons I decided to do the entire 11 month program out here rather than maybe a three-month program which would have been

here is I didn't want to be able to just power through the whole time I wanted to have to adapt to my situation in my circumstances have to mentally become comfortable rather than just push through like I only have two months left or I only have two weeks left I wanted to feel like it was an immense amount of time basically like I was going to be here my entire life and then I want to have to I don't adapt to that and I think I'm becoming much better at doing that for some reason whenever initially whenever I stopped thinking about the length of time that I'm gonna be here like 10 months and 21 days more or I've made it through two weeks and five days now will I be able to persist the rest of the time you know I would always be constantly going over the length of time ahead and reviewing the length of time that had passed and comparing the two and judging whether I would be able to manage to do the whole thing for some reason whenever I would stop doing that and whenever I would be just present right here in today or in this week or in this minute like my mind would freak out and you're like whoa whoa what are you doing you need to go back and think about the whole 11 months like stop settling in and getting comfortable you need to remember that this is going to be a long ordeal that you're suffering through and that that's a pretty weird thing that was happening but I don't think that's happening anymore I'm getting a lot better at just living for the day living for the moment if I think about trying to make a hot meal every day over my fire for the next year and trying to give it very nutritious and in accordance with the different changing of seasons it's a little bit hard to think about like I can't it's overwhelming to imagine all the work that would take but I just think about today's three meals and maybe tomorrow three meals and just keeping enough variance in those then seems to my energy for cooking seems to renew itself it's like your heart again it's all the rest that it needs between beats so what I'm trying to do is get all the rest that I need between days and be totally refreshed new every morning and that I think it's pretty worth legal I've decided that since I have a lot of time to think about things and

gain experience and wisdom and a lot of you out there don't have so much time I was hoping to be able to impart some of the things that I've learned and with that in mind I plan to issue a challenge every time I do one of these videos so before I had my challenge of taking a day off spending a day without distractions and I'd like to continue that for as long as I can so for my challenge today I want you to do something new every day and keep doing that for the rest of your life that is my challenge it doesn't have to be anything big can be something big but it could just be something simple you could go to a different place on your walk every day you could try cooking a different meal every day or just try a different food from the supermarket you could climb a tree or you know

eat a different plant or something doesn't have to be anything specific but just something that you haven't done for to be anything I realized back when I was living at home a lot of the time I would just go through my day and at the end of the day I wouldn't have anything to talk about like looking back on the things that I've done done nothing new done nothing noteworthy or worth talking about and I've just been following the same old routines and I've always done whereas here every time I write a leather letter to home it's like five pages worth of new things I've done just the past week and those are just the noteworthy ones like the amount of new experiences I have each day is staggering so if you're able to get a new experience every day no matter what it is I think that's worthwhile and that's my challenge face you and Brett went up to I call it Brett secret beach because last year he he discovered it we sighted it way down the beach and then and then just sent him off solo to walk down there and he found this secret beach but you guys went overland this time and what was what was your adventure like it was an adventure I'll call it that my quite a trek we we parked at the trailhead and I was thinking like one two three miles may be super easy hike you know just a little trek off into the woods so we walk along the trail it's super overgrown just covered with grass and trees falling across the trail but that was a bit of a hike to get through but it was pretty nice just lots of aspen trees trees lots of whitebark on both sides of the trail really cool forests and be like maybe a mile and a half and we're looking at the map and there's a point where the creek that we're following to the lake comes closest to the trail and the trail ends before we get to the beach so we knew we were going to have to follow the creek at some point so we looked on the map when we found the spot where the creek is closest to the path and we decided to leave the path and join the creek there which was kind of a terrible decision if we wanted to he make it there and any reasonable amount of time but it was the fun way of doing it so we ended up the creek just seems to have carved a huge ditch through the land and we ended up hiking up and down and up and down that ditch and it just curved all around in crazy directions and we probably went two or three times as far as we would have following on a trail just trying to go around the hills and follow all the different meanderings of the creek and just squeeze our way through big spruce trees it was kind of a pain but so much fun saw all sorts of toads and frogs and lobster mushrooms and fail lots of birds you would see you just be walking along and out of the grass on the side of the trail it'd be like the sound of thunder and you'd see just a bird flying through the trees and it sounded like a jet engine so it must have been I guess it was a business or grouse or something but those things are pretty cool and we did finally make it to the beach I was cool it was like you can see it from record of my house off but just can't feel a way of getting to it I just have to get over the ceiling yeah yeah we straggled into their like desert Wanderers arriving it in a waste it was great though the view from that beach it was like that whole trip felt you wouldn't really consider a three-mile hike through the dense forest to Wisconsin to be a vacation but that's really what I felt like just second day especially we just kind of SAT around on the beach you know had leisurely breakfast and coffee and then wandered around looking for agates I got pretty cold cuz of the wind so I just laid down in the sand where it was hot and sunny and you know if you just sit with your face in the sand for a little while you just notice really cool things just a little handful of sand only has dozens of cool little stones and crystals in it and it's fun to just stare at that for a while anybody had come up they probably would have thought we were weird staying with their faces as I said we didn't even pitch our tents we just rolled out the sleeping pads and slept under the starfield sky actually it was the pretty close to the full moon so it was kind of hard to sleep out under the stars the first night I just kind of hid next to the hill under all the trees where it was dark and that was a bit nicer but no mosquitoes perfect weather is great Wow and we stopped it a smoked-fish place on the way back and they had brown sugar lake trout oh that was awesome hahaha that's some good fish fish I've ever had yeah

you

like a spear hand this is gonna like slide down through here instead of squeezing real harm the squeeze moderately hard I'm going to drop my shoulders back yeah yeah all right now chin down they keep trying that's defense number one that's coming around as I'm thinking or trying to control this hand coming through yeah it seemed like you look pretty cool though yeah it's very cool Oh

why does breaking off a piece of that will make us card so what you're doing essentially is your hitting that it's really cool we looked under microscope this is harder than the metal ah and it breaks off a little teeny piece and it does it was so much pressure and it makes it molten essentially so those sparks are a little piece of molten metal and I've done this have caught them I'm piece of paper because they you know it takes about that fire to cool off oh yeah yep in there perfectly round little little balls that's really neat oh because of course yeah yeah every time you make a spark your farming is perfectly round little ball pick up the whole thing I'm just trying to squeeze the grass tight against the partial oh my gosh got fire already oh my gosh that is amazing this was a strange two weeks because I'm not strange but just different than our regular routine your mom came out for a while and you had me venture up north with Brett how was it to see family it was good yeah haven't it's been more than twice as long now then I have seen my parents ever before in the past so the longest I've been away from home ever was 22 days and now it's been 50 days and there's some I'm on the other day so that was the first experience

did that affect homesickness at all did you have like a relapse when she left yeah I pretty much just went back to I said I felt like I had the full weight of 11 months on me again after kind of forgetting about that yeah for sure that happened and especially that was compounded by the nasty weather that day and it just rained all afternoon and was windy and maintenance underdahl night although so only my mom was here we went into town and visited went into like a coffee shop and we got a mocha latte I'm not sure what that is what it was bitten and walked around the farmers market and that was really fun but just back at my camp that evening out in the field I'm just kind of breezy and fall sounding and watching the leaves drift through the air and one point I just started running through the field and was chasing after all these leaves to the air and just started laughing and shouting and like freedom feels so free right now this this is not something I could be experiencing in a coffee shop or in my bed at home like this is something special and that was a really cool moment that's powerful then it started raining like an hour later just getting depressed again LOL was over pretty quick but still remember that oh wow so good so you haven't you've had some experiences with on both sides of that having that pain and then transforming that pain yeah and I think a lot of the problem is i'm just very short-sighted like whenever I feel down or unhappy it's like oh dang it I'm gonna feel like this for the rest of my life no good there of course that's not true yeah and just feel like I should be out fall the only other time I've really felt like it was fall was when I spent a year in Rhode Island this Washington has pretty sucky seasons and in Rhode Island we did so many fun things in the fall like played I played soccer games and corn mazes and pumpkin fests and Snyder pressings and feel like I should be doing all that sort of stuff around here but well I might get a chance to do some of it yeah I'm gonna carve a pumpkin perfect fun

where do you feel like you are right now today today I feel pretty good probably because I got about 11 hours of sleep last night haha and it's pretty sunny out it didn't rain last night and I don't know it was cold this morning but I'm not cool anymore and I guess I'm just not thinking about being here for nine more months and that makes a big difference it's not thinking about it sure like last night I actually felt really good I was reading and then dinner with my fire and I feel like I'm becoming more able just tolerate my own mind he's like basically my main motive for doing this is it's amazingly difficult for people who have lived like i have just with stimulation all the time just be by yourself not really doing anything and get your mind to shut up and not bother you so much but i think i'm getting better at it