Hello Again Blog Readers,

Here in Plymouth, we are learning more and more that Nature truly has a mind of its own. After the damage done by Tropical Storm Irene, all of us here at Farm & Wilderness have been doing everything we can to help the community. We were fortunate enough to have minimal damage to our property.

And with all the rain came Autumn as well. The temperature is dropping (we even got a frost or two!) and the leaves are starting to turn their colors as well.

As we get farther from the summer, we only get closer to the next. So, I am very excited to announce the camper leaders for 2012!

The role of Speaker will be fulfilled by Moonsong Chickadee.

Stepping up to Fire Keeper will be Maple Holds the Spring.

As Drum Keeper we will have Stone Turtle Shines.

And finally, as Spirit Keeper we will have Ember Speaks.

Please join me as we usher these four incredible young men into their new roles. Being a camper leader is most certainly an honor, but not one without its own responsibilities and challenges. I know this is an opportunity for some personal growth that these young men will not take lightly.  I look forward to the chance to work with them.

Before I close out this message, I also wanted to let you all know that I have started posting photos from the summer on the Flying Cloud Facebook Page (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Flying-Cloud-Summer-Camp/151054301606358).

Just looking through all the photos we took has put a smile on my face I just can’t seem to wipe off. So I just want to say one more time, thank you all so much for such an incredible experience. I hope you have a wonderful school year and please check back in every so often for monthly updates.

Be well,

~FF~

Wow!

What a summer it has been. And what a closing. The last week of the summer can be a truly crazy ride. Ceremonies, Fair, banquet, and departure day; it’s quite a whirlwind of events. The summer passes by so quickly and on that final day, it is so hard for us to let go of those fine young men.

In closing out this summer, I would like to send out my appreciation to everyone who was a part of Flying Cloud this summer. Parents, campers, FC Staff, F&W staff, and visitors. Without all of you, our experience could not be what it was. I know that I will look back on this summer with only fondness, as I feel comfortable saying this was one of the greatest summers I have ever had at Farm & Wilderness.

Over the coming months, I will be changing my posting pattern to writing once a month. So, please check back occasionally  for a little piece of Flying Cloud.

I look forward to talking to so many of you over the coming year and hope that all of you who lived with us this summer are having a smoothing transition back to the rest of the world. We have a number of events throughout the rest of the year that we would love to have you join. The first one is Harvest Weekend and it is not all to far away (October 7 - 10). It is also my hope that we can all bring Flying Cloud not just home with us, but to all of the people who don’t have such an incredible opportunity.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me with any questions, concerns, or thoughts throughout the year. I am always more than willing to talk about Flying Cloud. The best way to reach me is shoot me an e-mail at Zach@farmandwilderness.org.

Much love and be well Brothers and Sisters,

~FF~

Greetings Blog Readers!

Here we are making our way through the last week of Flying Cloud Summer 2011. It has certainly been a wild ride. Trips returned just a few days ago and all of the campers and staff are beaming about their experiences. Grand adventures were had by all!

This week I also come bearing news of another set of names. On Monday night we held our fourth and final Naming Ceremony of the Summer. It was a pretty big deal. The Farm & Wilderness community really pulled out all of the stops and I feel safe saying this was the biggest Naming Ceremony that I have attended. If my calculations are correct, I believe we had over 250 people squeezed into our tiny clearing. All of them came to honor eight Flying Cloud brothers and one Flying Cloud Sister. It was a very special event indeed. We don’t bring a woman into our community every day! Also, we had some wonderful guests from days of old. Both He Looks to the Stars and his son, Foxfire Oak, came up to the woods to share some stories with us (for those of you who don’t know, these two incredible men were both Directors of Flying Cloud at one time).

The night was  beautiful with a large fire and a moon that laid heavy on the horizon as we settled into the Naming Circle. All of our community members had such wonderful things to say and the names that were given fell so comfortably upon the shoulders of those who received them. Please join me in honoring our new Flying Clouders:

Wolf Song

Lynx Tracks the Moon

Fox Reads the Seasons

Snowmelt Sage

Boulder Shares the Rhythym

Howls the Night

Osage Arrow

Horizon Laughter

And last, I am very excited to welcome Sarah Waring (the Farm & Wilderness Program Director) into our circle with her Flying Cloud name Gift of Life.

We are now getting ready for the Farm & Wilderness Fair this Saturday, August 13th. If you haven’t heard about it yet, I highly recommend you do what you can to attend. Flying Cloud will be providing all of our standard fare, home made beef jerky and hot sauce, plus the ever popular fried grasshoppers and crickets! To find out more information follow this link:

http://www.farmandwilderness.org/events-and-retreats/alumni-bbq

I hope to see y’all there, but if you can’t make it this year hopefully we’ll see you next year.

And with that I’m headed back to the woods. With only four days left, it’s now time for all of us, both staff and campers, to start thinking about how we will bring Flying Cloud home with us. I know I am feeling charged up to get me through another year till I can find myself back in the clearing among the community so many have come to love over all the years.

Be well,

~FF~

Greetings Blog Readers!

Yet again sorry for the delay in posting. I think this might mean it is time for me to shed my commitment about always posting on Sunday evenings. I wanted to wait until we had all our new Flying Cloud names to make the post, which meant I wasn’t able to get back to my computer until now.

Let’s jump right in- our August Session is off to a spectacular start. We brought in two new counselors and 17 new campers (we had 21 campers stay for the full summer!) Almost half of our community is new to Flying Cloud, so we’ve been really getting into the vibe of orientation. There is always an interesting shift to close out the July Session community and then immediately jump into forming a new community only days later. This year, the full season campers have been particularly great and welcoming and integrating the new Flying Clouders. We went through much of the same orientation we did at the beginning of the summer (how to build safe fires, use blades properly, how to do chores, etc.), but this time we had our full season campers taking on more leadership roles. Along with helping the new campers learn how to live at Flying Cloud, many of them have really been stepping up and are even teaching activities like leather pouch making and stone arrow crafting. This is truly an expression of the cyclical model of ’student becomes teacher’; only we also learn from those we teach as well!

If you’ve been following the blog, you know that a list of new names should be in here somewhere if we just had a naming. You’re absolutely right. So please join me in welcoming and recognizing nine of our brothers with their new Flying Cloud names (if you don’t know much about Flying Cloud names, take a look back to this post from earlier in the summer: http://www.farmandwilderness.org/fcblog/2011/07/10/well-under-way/).

Weaving Forest

Sky Otter’s Embrace

Osprey Dive

Heron Spring

Questing Crow

Yearling’s Bliss

Summer Dog

Constellation Gives

Watching Mountain Brings

I am so proud of all these young men for the journey they have traveled to reach their new names. While it takes a little while for the weight of a name to settle, I know with so much certainty that these names will settle well on the shoulders of these Flying Clouders.

Nine new names given, and we jump right into trips! Today the whole was split into the groups they will be with for the next four days and three nights for their overnight trips. During this half of the summer, we have a pretty incredible line up of options for the boys. In the hiking department,we have an expedition leaving right out of camp and hiking some of the biggest peaks in our area called S.K.i.P. Trip (Shrewsbury, Killington, an “i” for the sake of making a word, Pico). Our other hiking trip currently is to the Breadloaf Wilderness Area, which is a couple hours north of us in the Green Mountains. For those interested in a little time on the water we our offering a Raquette River Canoe trip in the Adirondack Mountains in New York. Beyond hiking and canoeing we have two other trips as well. First, we have our standard Wilderness Survival Trip. We take the campers and staff trip leaders for this trip to a hidden location where they can practice all their different survival skills from debris shelter building to friction fire to wild edibles collection. Then, (drumroll please), we have our capstone trip experience for the older campers which we call Uber Scout! This is a trip designed around testing our abilities of camouflage and silent movement. This trip is a pretty epic adventure that the campers always walk away from proud to have been a part of.

So, first thing tomorrow morning, we will see all the trip groups off. They will return to us on Saturday evening just in time for the last week of camp. The summer comes and goes so fast, but there is still so much that will happen in the next week and a half.

If you haven’t thought about it yet, I suggest you consider coming to join us for the Farm & Wilderness Fair on August 13th. All of the F&W camps are involved in a great time and we love to have as many guests as we can find! You can find out more at http://www.farmandwilderness.org/events-and-retreats/alumni-bbq.

Hope to see y’all there and if not please don’t hesitate to contact me at Zach@farmandwilderness.org with any questions, concerns, hopes, or joys you might have!

Be well,
~FF~

Hello Again Blog Readers!

Turns out, it can be much harder to get out of the woods and back to a computer than I thought it would be. So, where are we?

Our July Session has come to an end and the August Session campers have arrived. This all happened in a whirlwind of powerful moments, some sadness, and, of course, immense amounts of joy!

I wanted to take some time to tell y’all a little bit about how we close out a session. Just like the beginning of the summer, we hold a Friendship Fire. This is a time for our community to come together. This is time in reflection, rather than the anticipation we feel at the start of something new.

I truly love the closing Friendship Fire because of one special moment. That moment is when all of our community members have the opportunity to speak on behalf of Flying Cloud. This is often when we, as staff, realize all the work we have been doing has not been in vain. The lessons we sought to impress upon these youths have in some way broken through and we have made a powerful impact on their lives. This summer, more than any summer I have been a part of, I saw something truly special happen. The campers started using language and verbalizing their experience in the same way the staff speak.  Here they were, expressing themselves with such maturity and self-awareness  like I had never seen before. To share with you, here are some quotes from the night:

“Flying Cloud accelerates my growth.”

“Flying Cloud encourages me not just to be myself, but to seek within myself the person I want to be.”

“Flying Cloud showed me that there are so, so many ways to be a man.”

And the last one I want to share with you is an extension of a standard line. Every summer, a camper will say Flying Cloud is my second home. This year I heard this gem:

“I used to think Flying Cloud was like a second home. Now I know the truth though. Flying Cloud is my real home.”

These are just four comments from the 30 kids who chose to speak on behalf of Flying Cloud. We felt like that was exactly how we needed to wrap the first-session bundle.  I feel safe saying it was a session deserving such a wonderful close.

But, with the closing of the first session, we were thrown right into the start of another!

Sunday’s cooling temperatures (a much needed relief from some serious heat and humidity!) heralded the arrival of our August session campers. In a interesting twist on enrollment patterns, second session brought us 18 campers who have never been to Flying Cloud before. As I think I have mentioned in the past, sharing Flying Cloud with others is just about my most favorite thing to do. So rest assured, I am psyched for this fresh community. We open our August session with a Friendship Fire, just like we did for the July session.

This time though, we already have the essential tool of fire. What we are missing though is the metaphorical coal that we light the fire of our community from for second session. Friendship Fire is that coal. As usual, we gathered in Kahonkahona (our ceremony lodge) as dusk settled on the clearing. To symbolize the gathering of individuals into a new community, we brought a small bed of coals on which to build a fire. As our Camper Leaders (the four campers who have shown leadership and responsibility) orient the new campers to the Flying Cloud ethos, each camper or staff (both new and full season), placed a stick on that fire. Slowly, those coals brought that wood to flame and light was shed on the darkness of the approaching night, on our new group. Here too, the campers and staff share a piece of themselves. We asked some questions and  the most powerful one was, “What do you want to share with your brothers at Flying Cloud this session?”

“A sense of responsibility.”

“My passion for nature.”

“A sense of happiness and love.”

There were many more, but these were the ones that stood out to me.  I believe these three quotes do a fitting job of representing what it means to live at Flying Cloud.

I know this post was a long one and I have rambled on for quite some time now. What can I say is Flying Cloud inspires me, especially this summer. I would like to share that in all of the summers I have spent at Flying Cloud, I have never had as much fun as I am having this year. And I am not the only person saying this. I am hearing similar sentiments from campers and staffers alike. If I could summarize briefly why I feel like we are enjoying ourselves,  I would say this:

We seem to have found an uncanny ability (within the relationships between our staff and other staff at F&W camps, our staff and our campers, and our campers and other F&W campers) to access a passion and appreciation for all of what is great about childhood. These range from silly games to intentional recognition of the personal journey we are all on, whether this is the  paths we walk alone or the trails we walk with one another.

Thanks for all of your support and for lending us your boys.

Be well,

~FF~