"I teach them to learn with their feet"

On my last morning in Colorado I woke up to a dusting of snow.  How many times over the years I’ve woken up in that very same spot to the sunlight cutting through the windows. And every time, when I wake to see snow I can’t help but have the same of feeling of wanting right then and there to get outside to play. Snow is exciting. I put my coat over my pajamas and looked at my shoe options. The rushed packing for the short trip provided limited options: running shoes, strappy sandals, black danskos.

Damn my feet were going to get wet; I stepped into the danskos, their winning element over the running shoes: an inch platform and no ventilation holes.  Walking out the door, I remembered a pair of too large plastic boots that I had shoved into the back of a closet some time ago. Hoping to find them in the place I remembered, I rummaged through the closet in my old room. Sure enough. Out with the danskos, into the rubber boots.

Single sprigs of green grass poked up out of the layer of snow here and there. The sun had begun to melt the light layer as it warmed the trunks of the trees and rocks. Outside it was beautiful. There is something about sunshine, newly fallen snow and chilled air. My sockless feet felt the cold through the thin rubber boots. I turned to see nothing but my footprints leading from the house, to the barn, to the garden…. My trail in the snow.

I thought about a conversation that I had back in Oregon some weeks before. Halloween night actually. We were at one of Corvallis’s classic dive bars, amusing ourselves with the horrible karaoke, $1 PBR, and creative fashions that emerge one night out of the year. Walking back from the bathroom, I crossed a guy sitting by himself on the stairs. No costume, no drink. As I walked by, he softly said “I like your wings.” Now normally I would smile, nod and keep walking. Instead I stopped and replied “where is your costume?” he answered “eh, I wore it last night.”

He asked me what I was doing in Corvallis; I explained my master’s program and very quickly a conversation evolved not about costumes, not about the bar, or of OSU; but about teaching people. He was passionate about teaching and showing people new things. From my years of doing the same, I’ve learned to see passion in teachers and in students. You can see it most in their eyes. When a person is truly passionate about something, their eyes change when they talk about it.

I’ve come to believe that it is not content that matters most in learning situations but instead it is the experience and it is what that experience invokes in each of us that weighs the heaviest. “I make them take off their shoes and feel the ground” He said. We are so accustomed to walking but how often do we actually take the time and feel what is under our feet? It was brilliant idea. He taught his science by feeling. He had people walk over objects and surfaces and explore what it felt like to the skin on the bottom of their feet. Through this process, he taught about marine life, and forestry and soils all by having people walk across them.

So I thought about this as I walked through the snow, it was so very cold; the idea of taking off my boots was not appealing but even still as the cold seeped through the thin rubber of my boots I thought about the concept of learning with my feet. The tools that we use to teach one another, so many, sometimes on purpose but other times we pass along learning experiences without ever even knowing we’ve done so.

Making Churchela

 I'd like to lay claim to making the time these days to undergo such a project without an ulterior motive; but alas this not such a project. Turns out adding in a "for fun" 4 credit course is not maybe the best idea when trying to balance out an unusually hectic fall but needless to say a anthropology of food class has provided some interesting learning opportunities. Spending a Sunday afternoon making  Churchela with a group of lovely ladies from my class proved to be quite an experience. Churchela stems from Georgia among other places. The most simplistic explanation: a string of nuts dipped in a condensed grape juice left to dry which creates a sweet, candy-like treat.

I had been on a ankle rolling endeavor to collect the walnuts hidden among the grass in S's front yard and they turned out to come in quite handy for this project. Another one of my churchela comrades collected the end of the season grapes from a neighbors yard. We dug up string and needles and the project commenced. 

We mashed the grapes down in a big pot, bringing it to a boil until the liquid began to thicken. Straining out seeds and skins, we returned the liquid to the pot and put it over low heat until it reduced itself to a near 3rd of what it had been. The meantime found us cracking and stringing walnuts (and attempting hazelnuts...no go- they broke and ended up in bellies instead of on strings)  

When the grape juice was ready, we thickened it ever so slightly more with a handful of flour. The best part then: dipping the strings so they became gooey messes. Finally hanging them to dry for a few days and va-la Churchela. We had four of us working on the project and we figure that we spent somewhere in the realm of four hours to make our ordeal; in reality the project required something like 16 hand hours to make. Probably not something I'd just whip up on a whim but pretty damn cool to see the process through. Our first crack at the time-honored Georgian treat looked not so much like the pictures I pulled up on the internet; we later determined we needed the grape liquid to have reduced even more. Even still, the best part came in the process of making, the wine drinking that paralleled the project and the conversations.

This whole project was brought on by the visit of Ken Albala, a do it yourself food advocate. I picked up his book "the lost art of real cooking" which offers some great recipes that connect the maker back into the process. Albala's Blog covers a whole array of projects and recipes and is more than worth the visit.

I was first introduced to the Art of Spinning in Scotland. Staying with an amazing couple in Penicuik, they introduced me to a family friend that spun so much wool that the shelf lining the entire living room was full of spindles of beautifully spun fiber. literally hundreds of spindles. Over the course of an afternoon I got the crash course on how to prep the fiber;  washing, picking, carding and drafting. And then came the best part, the spinning. She loaned me a hand spindle "to learn on" while I stayed in Penicuik. Well....I learned that the art of spinning is quite a challenging one. And at the end of my day, 11pm would find me standing as high as I could possibly get on a chair or table or bed, the higher I could get, the less I had to stop my handspindle; I could let the yarn keep growing and growing. BUT I learned that it sure is disappointing when your yarn busts off at the mid-section  and then all the rest of it uncoils itself. Yes it is truly an art. So in leaving Scotland, I took something like 40 feet of yarn with me, only that forty feet took me almost a week to produce.

I really think that sometimes in life you're just supposed to learn things. And life will just keep pitching those opportunities at you until either A.) you accept or B.) you throw your arms up in the air and run like a bat out of hell. So a year later found me living at the the end of the road, deep in the heart of the Chugach Mountains. A winter care taker at the Eagle River Nature Center. Alaska is different in the winter. It is not like the summer where every place you look there are visitors. No, the people that survive the winter really want to be there, especially those that are willing to make the drive back into the valley in the depths of January. we would get the fire started early. At 10am they would come, a guild  of lovely ladies (and sometimes a fella or two) to spin wool. Bags of fiber in tow they would daintily position their wheels in a semi-circle around the fire.  For two hours, their hands would pull and turn. They welcomed me into their circle and taught me the beginning ropes to the wheel. Now I thought my hand spindle was impressive, but damn if the wheel didn't spin out yarn 50 times faster than my own hands could do it. And so it went, one weekend every month they came and each time I would learn something new.  "Someday" I told myself.

I got a phone call from my mom about 2 weeks ago. She had returned from an amazing trip into the mountains of Colorado. "I got you the best gift ever" but she wouldn't tell me. She left me hanging, I'd just have to see it the next time I came through Colorado. And circumstances played out, Colorado came sooner rather than later and I found myself there this last weekend. I walked into my old room and what sat in the corner? Well a spinning wheel of course. An antique wheel that fits me just perfectly. It's going to require a little doctors visit (I think there has got to be spinning wheel doctors, right?) I'm in love. another hobby. the going joke around these parts is that I need a "dork shed." Yes it is going to contain all my strange hobbies- growing mushrooms, microscopes, my baking experiments........ and now the spinning wheel. I think the dork shed is just going to have to be a yurt.

In Passing

When your footsteps walk a path day in and day out, changing that path can be the most challenging of times. We are learning this. The learning process is hard. But, I think in passing we are also learning what it means to lean on others especially when your legs don't quite feel as sturdy as they always have. We are learning the importance of stories; and the importance of listening.  Who ever claimed that "laughter is sometimes the best medicine" really was onto something. Still, I think it is also important to remember that medicine also comes in the form of letting your eyes rain, especially when you can let them rain with others. Nothing would grow if it never rained. And with the close of a day brings the changing of seasons, and of chapters, and of times. You never know what you'll find when you leave the beaten path.