Ricardo Sierra's Earth Skills Seven Day Challenge, June 1-7, 2014

I created this event to show people the power of connecting to the earth and nature through practicing earth skills just 15-20 minutes each day, for seven days.     I call in The Seven Day Challenge, and it's coming up on June 1, 2014.   Check out the video, too, that introduces what it's all about!

It's pretty simple.   You pick a skill that you can practice or study, and you commit to doing it every day, for just seven days!!!!!!!    And you will be amazed at how fast your learning takes off in just minutes a day......

Anyway, you can get more info about it on my web page,here.

If you know you want to do it, just click here to join our Facebook Group and get in on the fun!   It's going to be inspiring and awesome! 

Bird Language & Studies

As you know, Attitude and Mindset are two of the most essential ingredients for achieving our goals, and this challenge is no different.  It's time to get prepared, so we not only learn new skills, but we add a layer of confidence and self esteem boost to the week as well.   It's a powerful one-two combination that will spread from this activity to the other parts of your life as well.

Wouldn't that be nice?   Are you into it?    

Okay, so, here is a list of things that you will want to be prepared for:  

You can do Plant Studies!

Commitment:   What skills are you committing to practice for the Seven Days, and when will you practice them?   Try to remember to keep it simple and that 15-20 minutes goes by quick, so this is a good time to also practice realistic planning skills!   It's also a good time to think about why you want to learn these earth skills, and what your greater purpose is for practicing and learning them, and whether or not you are actually serious about growing closer to the earth or setting yourself up to learn.

If you look a head to your week and it's just too full for you, that's okay.  You can modify your personal agreement and no one will know the difference.  We don't judge!   The bottom line is that, whatever your specific commitment is to yourself, make sure that you are really committed to doing it and plan for success!   That being said, 15 minutes a day for seven days is pretty much doable for just about everyone, if you really want to learn new skills and grow.   So, be bold!   Let's do this!

Safety:   Is the skill you are practicing something that uses knives, or sharp tools or stone edges?  Do you have a safety plan for your practice that includes eye or ear protection, and is there a First Aid Kit present at all times?  Do you have to protect against breathing in dust or smoke?   If you are going out in the bush for your daily practice, does everyone in your group of skills enthusiasts know what poison ivy looks like at this time of year, or do you need to be aware of ticks or other local hazards, like snakes or black flies?   If you plan ahead for these things, you will be setting you and your group up for good times!   

Buckskin & Tanning Skills

Materials and Supplies:   Does the skill you have chosen have a materials list, or tools or supplies needed in order to get it accomplished?   Go over it in your planning so you know if you will need sandpaper, or string or a bunch of willow shoots or whatever it is you will need to make this happen!  If you get those things ready prior to Sunday, June 1st, you will be all ready to go to let your skills grow right off the bat, rather than spend that time searching your gear or looking in your garage for your stuff.   Make sure that if you are doing this with friends, that you let them know what they will need to bring if anything, and that they wear the right clothing for the weather, etc.

Daily Celebration and Final Celebration Incentives:   Everyone loves to have some incentives, especially when we complete a difficult task or achieve a goal that we really are excited about, and this is no different.   Typically, people will celebrate with food or a beverage that they enjoy, in a circle of friends, or maybe an outing or getting a tool that they have long wanted.   We don't need to go crazy here, but all I am saying is, "Give yourself every reason to make this a positive, successful experience, rather than a let down where you only go half-way and don't make it through the whole week."    

Celebrate Your Campfire Cooking Skills!

A reward will sometimes keep you going when your attention starts to wander, so, make sure that a person you trust will help keep you honest and then verify you did this challenge and award your prize!

On the flip side, some people tend to do things because they are motivated by the potential loss of something.   I have a friend who is an athlete, and she has an agreement where she will give $100 to her training partners if she misses a training session for a non-injury related excuse.   This keeps her honest and her team holds her accountable for her commitments, so it's all part of knowing yourself and how you want to set yourself up for success.

If you are doing this challenge with friends, or especially with kids, I would definitely plan on celebrating with something at the end, and even a great snack each session, too, just to keep it fun.

Contingency Plans:   On Saturday, it rained here at Hawk Circle really, really hard, on and off, pretty much all day.  It was really wet.   I immediately thought of everyone getting ready for this challenge and said 'We need some contingency plans so we all can stay on track!"   

So, what is your back up plan?   Do you have a sheltered place to go if you start experiencing rain or intense heat or dust or whatever is happening in your local area?   How will you adapt your activity if there is inclement weather to still get your practice in?

Carving Skills

You see, what I am training you and your group to do, is to not let yourselves off the hook when something comes up.   You still have to honor your commitment and get your goal accomplished.   If we let ourselves off the hook because of a little rain, or because the traffic made you late, or whatever the situation is, you will start to create a pattern of not accomplishing your goals.    You will get the mindset that it's okay to let it all go, as long as you have an excuse.   Which is not a good habit, in earth skills or in any other venture in our lives.   Seriously, this type of thinking is outright poison to your dreams and vision.  (Not to mention the damage it does to your personal relationships.)    

So, that means, you have to have a mind that says 'I always finish what I start, no matter what."   

This is a very, very powerful mindset that will help you and your kids or your friends throughout their life.

So, what could go wrong or have a potential to derail your plans?   

Do you have a group doing this?   What will you do if no one shows up?   Will you still practice it anyway, for yourself?

Phone a Friend:   Who is your go-to source for help if you get stuck in your practice?   Are you prepared to reach out if you need help, either to one of your friends, or a mentor or teacher, or someone in our Facebook Group?   Let us know if you need help, and I promise you, there is a ton of help all around you, all the time.  (Just like in Nature!)

 You just need to ask for what you need!

Accountability and Inspiration:  One way that I have set up this challenge is to invite you to post a short update on what you did in our Facebook Group!  You can share what you learned, what you did, and a photo or short video.   This will allow you to know that you are staying on track, and if everyone is doing it, we will all see your progress, comment on your work and give you 'mad props' for making it happen!   It will feel good. You will also be inspiring others to keep going, too.   Feel free to share your trials and tribulations, and what you did to keep going.   I promise you, whatever you are working on or working through, you aren't alone.   

I can also guarantee that looking at what everyone else is doing and hearing their stories is going to be powerfully inspiring and also build a great connection and community among us all.   And I would love to have you and your group be a part of all of that.   So please, join us there, and share, and don't worry about whether your skill is big or small, or whatever.   Trust me, we all love it all!

If you aren't on Facebook, well, seriously, it takes like ten seconds to join.   You need a password and a valid email address.   You can join, do the challenge and check it all out, and then you can delete your account afterwards, if you want. 

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Okay, if I haven't scared you off by all these ideas and suggestions, please go to my Earth Skills Seven Day Challenge page and check out the different downloadable journaling sheets, planning guidelines and more, as well as the video above, which is all about these same things I just wrote about.  

My bottom line is your success.   I know that if you practice a single skill every day for just 15-20 minutes, it will positively affect your life.   I know this from my own experience, as well as countless other students and apprentices.   This stuff is very, very powerful, and it doesn't matter which skill you pick.   I want to see you succeed, and to be awesome.   So I am pulling out every stop to help make that happen.

See you in the Facebook Group!   We have a week to get ready, and then we will be doing this together!

If you want to join, please click here:

Ricardo Sierra's Earth Skills Seven Day Challenge Facebook Event

June 1-7, 2014.

On the Lookout for Teaching Materials: The life of a wilderness skills instructor.

This milkweed grew it's whole, six
month life in view of this country road.
Now it will live in our barn for a while
and then maybe for a few years
as a necklace or bracelet for a young
person's first natural fiber cordage.

 So, last week, I was driving down some back roads through the Catskill mountains, on my way to teach cordage with natural fibers to about 25 fourth graders, when I noticed some long, white plants clustered in clumps along a guard rail.   There was a good shoulder and room to pull over, so I did.

I put my flashers on and hopped out to take a look.   The plants were milkweed, and they had been dead since November, and slowly decaying and going back to the soil.   The surrounding grasses and plants had also died, and the little snow that we had this winter had pushed it down close to the ground, but the milkweed's white stalks had many that were still standing.   This is due mostly to the strong fibers contained in the bark of the stalk, that helps keep them upright through all kinds of weather throughout the plant's short life.   It also makes the plant valuable to anyone in a wilderness survival situation, or who loves natural fibers!

The whiteness of the milkweed stalks stand out
from the browns and tans of the other
roadside vegetation, even at highway speeds,
if you are on the lookout for them!

I collected as many as I could, gathering the ones that were upright or laying sideways but not directly on the ground, as the ones on the ground are usually too far decayed to be used for cordage.  Also, stalks with large dark grey splotches, or black ones, are almost always rotted under the bark to the point where the fibers just crumble and break.   One of my instructors, Tim Brown, told me that he only gathered the white stalks because they were be best, most silky fibers of any milkweed he gathered, and he stopped wasting time on the grey ones because it just saved time sorting.   I think he is right, because it's the same thing that Sam Thayer says about gathering acorns.   You don't want to just gather every single acorn that you see and then have to sort them later, but instead sort as you gather, so you save that extra step and can then process only the best!   It makes sense, doesn't it?

The back of my car, with assorted timber framing
and program gear, now with my collection
of several roadside stops of milkweed.

I got as many as I could carry and put them in the back of my car, and continued on my way.   They were a little wet, so I had to make sure that they were dried out when I got home and spread them apart to dry in the barn.  I have bundled them up too soon in the past, when they were a little wet, and the whole bundle got really moldy and were ruined, wasting all of that time, effort and fibers!

Once they are dried, I usually bundle them in clusters of thirty stalks or so, enough to give each kid a couple of stalks to make a necklace or bracelet as they are learning to process and twist the fibers into a nice reverse wrap.

Drying the stalks in the barn so they don't get moldy.

(Note:   Be sure to take the seed pod heads off of the stalks if you can, because they will explode in silky seed whiteness everywhere if they stay in the back of your car and dry out because your car gets hot.   I have come back to my car to find it covered in fluff that is very hard to get out because it clings to everything, and the silk filaments break easily and are not good to breathe.   Don't learn the hard way like me!   Also, in these photos, the stalks and pods were wet from rain, so I didn't have to worry about that, but you might not realize that in the photos, hence this important tip!)

Close-up of my milkweed stalks.

As I was gathering at my next stop, I thought about the time needed to gather and prepare all of these materials for our programs.   It adds up!   We gather dogbane, arrow shafts, atlatl dart shafts, mullein stalks, goldenrod, horseweed and even some swamp milkweed from time to time, all through the fall, winter and early spring.   We gather certain grasses for tinder, or for insulation demonstrations, and grass mats.   We clean, bundle and prepare them, storing them in our barn or staff cabins so we can run programs all year round.

It doesn't stop there, though.  We also look out for cedar, poplar, cottonwood or basswood logs for spoon blanks, bow drill sets, coal burned bowls, hand drill fire boards or animal carving.   These we have to select the straightest sections without knots, and cut them to the right lengths, as well as split them into smaller sections and then dry them both in the sun and wind, and then place them up in the high spots in the barn to fully season and dry.   It takes a long time to cut up 100 bow drill sets in rough sections!

My milkweed bundles, all tied up
and a random bundle of dogbane!

The silky silver white fibers of milkweed!

One of the main reasons I wanted to post about this topic is to point out to instructors and mentors that these gatherings take time, and unfortunately, you can't just go out and buy cordage fibers or bundles of milkweed at the store, and you have to do it at the right time and plan ahead...   There is a value to these things that you have to be sure to add to your fees as you work, and make sure you understand this as you build your business, so you don't work for free and get burned out.   It seems simple to understand, but if you aren't familiar with running a business, it is easy to forget or let it slip through the cracks.   Likewise, it sometimes is the business manager who gets 20 classes signed up, but unfortunately forgets to make sure that you actually have enough milkweed/dogbane/bow drill kits, etc to run the program!   In those times, you have to scramble and think fast, and do what you can to make do, but in the long run, to preserve sanity, you have to make sure you plan that time in your seasonal schedule for that kind of gathering!

When you find the seed pods on the stalks, be sure
to scatter them around sothey can find a good home
and grow more milkweed!

Remember also, that kids are going to be doing the carving or processing, and we want to have good results, so be sure to discard the junky stuff so you don't make a third grader try carving a spoon out of a piece of wood with six knots in it!   Save those pieces for your staff!   (Ha ha, just kidding!)   The survivalist part of myself always thinks that someone will be able to make something cool out of interesting materials, but unfortunately, it often means you will have a box of mostly un-useable chunks in a year or two.  Throw them in the fire and move on to the good stuff, people!   I have a story one time where I was going to a home school group to teach cordage and fire making, and my staff assured me they had plenty of wood and bundles of milkweed for the class, and when we got there, you guessed it!   We had three bundles of crumbly fibers that were useless, and the box of cedar wood for bow drill sets was pure Knot City.   Bad for carving bow drills and fireboards.   Very bad.


So, we were lucky to go to a local feed store/landscaping supplies, and bought a cedar fence post that had almost no knots.   We sawed it up, and it worked out.  We had to pay about $30 or so, but it was worth it to pull the workshop off!

My bundles, safely stored in our barn until
we need them for our school programs,
summer camps or apprentice program.

The cordage was harder.   We found some raffia fibers at a craft store (Michael's, I think it was) and used that, but we also were able to strip off some green tree fibers from some basswood shoots that were growing on a roadside tree, and we cut a few off and brought them to the camp and let the kids peel their own and then twist it up, and they loved it.   However, while I can celebrate the fact that we made do and were successful, it it is also true that I was sweating bullets and working hard to solve the problem, rather than spending that time connecting to kids and parents and relaxing before the program and getting our group plan together.   It is good to have things run smooth, and good preparation will help your programs have less stress, less effort and great results.

It's all about the details, right?   If we take care of the little things, we will be on our way!

Anyway, with this warmer winter and less snow, you should be able to see the roadside weeds pretty easy in some places, and you can be on the lookout for milkweed and other plants for your own practice, crafts and programs.   Good luck and happy gathering!