Tamarack Song - Becoming Nature: Learning the Language of Wild Animals and Plants

BECOMING NATURE

Do you often feel rushed and far removed from feeling the peace of delighting in the natural world around you? Tamarack Song gives a way to return to heightened sensory awareness and fulfilling kinship with wildlife. Enriched by his background in environmental education, wilderness survival, and wildlife conservation, the author guides readers with a variety of exercises to an active experience with Nature around and within us. Here are practical steps you can take to better know Nature and yourself.

PENELOPE SMITH, AUTHOR OF
ANIMAL TALK AND WHEN ANIMALS SPEAK

Tamarack Song teaches how Becoming Nature is our natural and innate state of being. Becoming Nature is beautifully written and filled with practices to help us reconnect with the natural world. This is an important and powerful book to help us improve our personal health as well as bring back balance and harmony to the planet and all in the web of life.

SANDRA INGERMAN, COAUTHOR OF
SPEAKING WITH NATURE AND
AUTHOR OF WALKING IN LIGHT:
THE EVERYDAY EMPOWERMENT OF A SHAMANIC LIFE

Acknowledgments

Its unfortunate that my name is the only one to appear on the cover of this book, as it has been a collective project. It takes all of us working together in dedication to the greater purpose that this book serves, I stated to the staff when we began. From the onset, they got behind the book, and it has been a sheer joy to work with them.

Without the eight months of effort that project editor Julie Plumitis put into shaping my rough draft into something coherent, along with working on all other aspects of production, Id still have... well, a rough draft. Editor Margaret Traylor gave the manuscript a critical read-through early on that caught inconsistencies and helped structure the book. Be heartless, I implored final editor Rebecca Lill. Dont worry about bruising my egoI want this book to be the best it can possibly be. I have no comment on the state of my ego, yet I will say that she was anything but heartless, as you can see by the honey-smooth flow of the text.

I didnt envision this to be a visually appealing book, yet here it is, bedecked with artwork of a caliber that youd expect to see framed. This is thanks to the gifted hands of Jennine Elberth and Kristine Scheiner.

Yes, agents place books and negotiate contractswhich are indeed valuable servicesyet the checking in, encouragement, sage feedback, and career consulting they do is equally as valuable. If it were not for Rita Rosenkranz, my agent, this book could still be sitting on the unfinished projects shelf.

To call Bear & Company a publishing house is a misnomer, as the staff works together more as an extended family. Right away they made me feel at home with them, and the quality of their book craftingthe proof of which you hold in your handspeaks family pride.

With all of the good people who have come together to help birth this book, there is one who was there for every moment, from conception on: my mate, Lety Seibel. The range of her knowledge and ability, along with the comfort and inspiration that only she could provide, gave this project both substance and soul.

To the donors who support my writing through the Old Way Foundation, and to you, the reader, for completing the circle, I convey my deepest gratitude.

I have grown taller from standing with Trees.

I have grown smaller from crawling with Snails.

I have grown lighter from soaring with Birds.

And along the way I have grown the wiser

by forgetting all that I thought I knew

and becoming my teachers from forest and pond.

They taught me to speak their wordless tongue

to move like a shadow and think like a lake

to dance to the drum of the wild within.

So now and then when I go back to town

I forget that I need to speak words again.

For out in the woods its a trill or a twitch

and I feel their feelings and dream their dreams

while at the same time they come to know mine.

So I shed my fur and grab a pen

to tell what its like to rise with the sun,

to swim with a Turtle and touch a Deer.

For these are the gifts Ive come to know

when the teasing wind wakens my soul

to enter the wild and see through their eyes.

TAMARACK SONG

All author proceeds from the sale of this book go to support the creation of the Brother Wolf Foundation, a nonprofit sanctuary for Timber Wolves rescued from puppy mills and backyard cages. The sanctuary is being founded to foster a renewed, respectful, and mutually beneficial relationship between Humans and apex predators. Through Wolfs inspiration and example we can relearn animal language so that we can truly come to know them, rather than just knowing about them. For more information, go to www.brotherwolffoundation.org.

In Honor of My Teachers

Having grown up in an era when Nature field guides and outdoor skills classes were practically unknown, I didnt discover until well into my adulthood that it was possible to learn about Nature by instruction and study. I had assumed that one learned directly from the animals and plants, which I did. Along with those teachings I received guidance from my mother, a woodswoman all her life, and from Native American Elders.

Back around 1980, I attended a primitive-living skills class. I was in my early thirties and excited to finally meet other like-minded people. Prior to that my closest nature-loving companions were the Wolves with whom I lived. That was okay with me, as we were familythey knew me better than did any Human. In addition, the Elders would encourage my relationship with the animals by regularly sending me directly to them with my questions about Nature.

The class, with its diagrams, measurements, and unfamiliar technical terms, confused me at first. Then I remembered the Elders speaking in their ever-gentle way about Natures way and the new way. Their words are echoed in this childhood memory of New Mexico Acoma Pueblo Elder James Paytiamo. His Elders would say:

Listen! Listen! The gray-eyed people are coming... nearer every day. [They]... are going to get you to drink hot, black water.... Then your teeth will become soft... your eyes will run tears on windy days, and your eyesight will be poor. Your joints will crack when you want to move slowly and softly. You will sleep on soft beds and will not like to rise early. When you begin to wear heavy clothes and sleep under heavy covers, then you will grow lazy. Then there will be no more singing heard in the valleys as you walk.

I knew the singing; some of my Elders called it the song of the track. I would listen to it along with the Wolves of the pack I lived with while we lay in the Grass or silently wove through the woods. Oglala Lakota Elder Standing Bear talked about how his people heard the song when he grew up in the 1800s.

Kinship with all creatures of the earth, sky, and water was a real and active principle. For the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept the Lakota safe among them. And so close did some of the Lakotas come to their feathered and furred friends that in true brotherhood they spoke a common tongue.

At the same time, I understood why the song had become so hard to hear, as I was one of those raised to have poor eyesight and wear heavy clothes. Yet, no matter what our background, I believe we all feel the ancestral yearning from deep within to join in the song of the track. Whether we learn from animals and Native Americans or from books and instructors, all of the lessons go back to the time when we would sit around the evening hearth and listen to stories of the hunt and the insights of Elders. We learned from the animals as wellwe understood what they said.