Adult Day Workshops: Comox Valley

This year we are offering 4 one-off workshops for adults to come together and build community around land-based skills. If you are looking to connect more to nature, to hone your bush skills, build your confidence, or gather teaching content as an educator, then these workshops are for you.

We teach within a context of decolonization and grief-tending, approaching these skills as cultural practices that can feed our relationship to land, history and community. We aim for these gatherings to be experiences of depth, connection and discovery for all skill levels. We’ll challenge ourselves to apprentice to the landscape, working from that relationship to build our personal capacities, and our village.

We learn best in the container of supportive community, so expect games, stories, songs and one-on-one mentorship as a part of each session.

Natural fibres were essential to our ancestors for cordage, cloth and basketry. These are things we still depend on daily, and learning to harvest and process fibres for their production is an incredible way to deepen connection with life and the landscape. These fibres bind, contain, and carry all that gives us life. We’ll introduce some local fibres, practice harvesting and processing, and produce some baskets from plants. 

Location: Japanese Town Historic Site, Cumberland

Cost: $72 + GST

Time: 10am-4pm

Fire knowledge is the oldest kind of security. Personal relationship with this element was a priority for all of our ancestors. We’ll call on that ancestral context and learn to build fires with only what we can harvest from the woods in winter. We‘ll study various materials and techniques for fire-making in a wet environment, including ancestral skills such as friction fire and flint striking. Come away with some elemental confidence to court fire from the land.

This workshop will also cover some essential winter skills: tarps, knots, fire-cooking, and winter medicines. Winter can be intimidating on the land, offering us more challenges than any other season. To many land-based peoples it has indeed been a lean time, but also a traditional time of hunkering down and telling stories. What if we could learn to be outdoors and remain comfortable, confident, and connected to the landscape? With the right skills and perspectives, Winter can be the quietest, cosiest, and richest time of year to be out.

Location: Green Haven Farm

Cost: $72 + GST

Time: 10am-4pm

Spring brings forth abundant plant growth: the return of energy from deep in the ground up into the fresh air. Suddenly, sprouts and leaves are pushing up full of water and complex chemicals that can feed and heal our bodies. We will study some local plants for use as foods and medicines, identifying, harvesting, and processing them together to take home vital knowledge of just how richly the land can provide for our needs.

Location: Green Haven Farm

Cost: $72 + GST

Time: 10am-4pm

The land is full of life, and full of stories, at all times of year. Honing your curiosity, critical awareness, and intuition as a tracker can yield incredible insight on these other lives and stories. This workshop will feature some basics of pacific northwest track and sign, focusing on the art of tracking as a mode of inquiry mostly forgotten in the contemporary world. “Reading the land” to understand complex natural systems and secure vital resources is what shaped the human mind. It’s a style of paying attention, and questioning our own certainty, that leads to aliveness, rich discovery, and real knowledge. 

With the return of the birds we get some incredible allies for tracking. Birds are constantly communicating what is happening in the woods - from predation, to animal movements, to topography, to available resources; like us, they talk about just about everything! This workshop will also cover bird language: learning to notice the character of different bird calls to ascertain what might be happening in the immediate environment. They see much that we don’t, and have much sharper attention, so if we can pay attention to them, we can learn what is beyond our own senses. 

Location: Green Haven Farm

Cost: $72 + GST

Time: 10am-4pm

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