Passing Through: Sharpening Stone

9:36 am text: Hey bud, my wife just saw a buck get freshly hit on the 238. Just past Jackson Hill in the ditch. Thinking about your post earlier saying you know someone who can process the deer. Would be a shame to see it wasted.

I make a post on several community threads and text my friend Darien. She's first to respond. We know each other from a local Earth Skills gathering in Oregon called The Sharpening Stone.

Having spent a share of time elbow deep in animal fat and blood, not shy of the wreckage of roadkill, I load up a couple of tarps, knives, cordage and hop on my farm scooter to head down the hill for a carpool in Darien's truck.

Who needs to hunt when you've got highways? Automobiles are effective (and expensive) projectiles.

The first deer I hit, I was a little drunk, a little high, and 19 years old. The bed of my truck was full of random garbage and empty beer cans. It was January in Vermont. The deer popped out from behind a snowbank at the exact moment I passed by. We connected at 55mph. The deer skid across the frozen county highway like a bag of bacci balls tossed down a bowling alley.

The deer was still breathing, paralyzed, and all I had on me was a dull knife. My buddy Tommy encouraged me to do the deed, put this doe out of her misery, but I couldn't. I didn't know how, and I didn't wanna increase the misery of this poor creature.

I called the game warden, reported the deer and got out of there.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A village assembles in the forest. We are not here to move back in time, but to honor the old ways and carry them along with us wherever we may end up. Some of us are luddites, primitvists, and neo-primitivists rediscovering old ways to bring them into the present, implemented over 4 nights and 5 days.

It's nothing glorious, but it's surely magnificent. At an Earth Skills gathering like Sharpening Stone, most of the food is either killed on site or sourced from nearby. Each day is punctuated by a food circle, the camp notified by the sound of a mason's hammer against a makeshift bell, an big old c02 cylinder with the bottom cut out.

The kitchen is comprised of a simple screened-in lean-to, built from logs and salvaged lumber. We use large camp coolers and a home-made walk-in cooler, a shanty-shack addition kept chilled a small window AC unit installed in the wall.

We use propane burners and on-demand water heaters for the dish station. For cooking, stainless steel prep surfaces are adorned with enough cookware to feed 200+ people. Dinner is made using stock pots and pressure cookers.

Breakfast rolls on cast iron skillets and stock pots. The place is powered by volunteers and funded by ticket-holders. This year, tickets were in the neighborhood of $300. No small fare until you hear that Les Stroud, a.k.a. Survivorman, hangs out here sometimes. He's one among many talented and celebrated survivalists who walk the Earth Skills circles. Also see: Tom Brown Jr.

After meals are finished, announcements begin. Classes of all variety are offered. Hard skills like animal processing, fire-making, hide-tanning (bark and brain solutions), plant identification, wild-tending, knife-forging, flint-knapping, fish-hook making, cordage-making, basket-weaving, tracking, felting, porcupine quill embroidering, severe wounds and trauma training,

All these skills are helpful, and also there is an array of very important and often over-looked soft skills. These include relationship building and maintenance, women's and men's circles, simple iniations for youth into adulthood, youth circles and games, story & song circles, trade blankets, and a plethora of healing modalities.

We ponder the right story for the right moment, the right teaching for the time. How many tales and teachings have unfolded from our ancestors around firelight, beneath starlight?

The nights at Sharpening Stone are adorned with entertainment. There are campfire open-mics where poets and singers bring serious heartfelt offerings. The talent of musicians and orators here is on another level. They come from a multitude of amateur and professional backgrounds to bring high art back to its mythic bedrock all around ye olde sacred fire; ordained pile o' burnin' sticks.

Another night, there is a powerfully charged African Drumming session that gets everyone shaking loose and dancing. Another night hosts a raucous, raunchy trade blanket for adults, where anything and everything is up for trade if it's on the blanket. Best watch your step or your own body might be traded for a jar of dried kiwis, or perhaps a fine hand-woven basket!

The tone of Sharpening Stone is pretty darn wholesome and with a healthy heaping of connection and education. It makes me wonder:

Where did all these communities go? Is this even real? Would we all be so happy and cheerful together if we were living here for twenty years already, facing the raw challenges of surviving on these lands?

Are we just cosplaying primitivist village? Everyone in their buckskin pants, wearing cattail hats, seeking a sense of belonging. Is it just another scene, another portal into fringe culture, another clique? It has cool kids and celebrities like any cultural fixture, although this crowd behaves with genuine humility, which is fucking rare.

A rainbow gathering wishes it carried community interdependence like an Earth Skills gathering. What I find disappointing about most festivals and gatherings in North America is the inherent lack of direction, focus, and education. There is a total lack of pragmatism within most outlying North American cults. They're either polarized between collectivist and individualist paradigms, or else they're idealizing some wishy washy post-New Age dogma.

The Sharpening Stone, not a cult (yet), is something far better: it's autonomous. Genuinely so. It seeks to empower each individual in not only the ways they want, but the ways they need for better relationships in regenerative culture. It makes teachers out of students, blurring the lines between hierarchies. Even working in the kitchen, everyone is encouraged to play within flexible leadership roles, balanced by their merits and qualifications. Acknowledgement and encouragement are the key spices here. Kids are taught how to handle knives and cook, if they choose to. It's all based on volition, effort, and consent.

Everyone carries some sort of skill and the desire to deepen their knowledge through genuine effort is important to individual and communal relations.

When it comes to it, the main five are food, water, shelter, medicine, and transportation. Whether you hoard beans, books, bandaids, bicycles, or building supplies, pick one and collect, you'll be able to trade with others.

What will we do when it all falls apart, and who will wash the dishes after the revolution?

The songs that the camp host sings are not about morality or dogma or praying for someone else to fix this. No, his songs are about the bounty contained within the forest. A multitude of food. See: yampa, camus, biscuit root, to name a few.

As I'm typing this, there's buck blood on my hands. Darien is butchering our recent highway score, waxing historic, reflecting how storytelling is seemingly a lost art, along with a lot of hard skills which were carried up until the last few generations. Sure, we can use Grandmother Google. It's better than nothing, but being able to learn directly from someone, from mouth to ear going back ages, proves itself to be a much more effective means of transmission, especially for those who learn better by doing.

Whether or not we have elders around, it's worth considering the types of behavior and stories we wish to model for the younger generations. A question that poet and mythologist Sophie Strand asks of us,

"Does your prayer have roots? Does your story have fur? Does your metaphor have an ecosystem? Is your philosophy edible? What does your god smell like?"

Off I go to lunch to enjoy some backstrap. The hide will go into pants (Darien), the bones to broth (or to compost) and then ink for tattoos and printing, I’ll offer the velvet from the antlers to a local wizard, while the blood goes back to the soil and whatever we don’t want will be enjoyed by Katkin, the wolf.

Special thanks to Adam & Sarah Larue and the Sharpening Stone Crew. Check them out at thesharpeningstone.org

Shoutout to Darien Lane, skills enthusiast and prolific singer songwriter. Found on youtube and Spotify.

Holler to Saturn Lanturn intergalactic bard using poetry to help keep the cosmos orbiting.

Some animals were harmed during in the making of this article. It was not our fault. We are scavengers.

Jon D Rapp is sometimes a reverend, mostly a writer, and always a tramp. He enjoys disappearing into the forest, reappearing in small towns with magical artifacts, spending time as a rock at the bottom of a deep river, and writing love letters to beautiful (and ugly) strangers, He has figured out a way to pay rent with poetry and will continue to pursue the written and oral traditions in balance with commerce and dharma practice,

Keep your eyes peeled for some of his novels.