ONCE YOU POSSESS KNOWLEDGE, NO ONE CAN TAKE IT AWAY
I am working on an awesome free e-course tentatively called the Re-skilling Dojo. This project is a labor of love, made possible by years of study, experimentation, experience and maybe most importantly intent. Intent to see the world differently. To not walk around blind to what is around me while having all my needs handed to me on a platter in exchange for some green pieces of paper. This intent developed for too many reasons to explain here, right now. All those reasons are important, but one stands out pretty strongly, and that is that in an instant at any time or any place, those little green pieces of paper can become no more meaningful than any other pieces of paper, and even a lot less useful than some. At that point you could wipe your butt with them, but you might as well use a leaf because money ain't very soft!
I want you to mentally put yourself in any number of situations. It doesn't matter too much where you put yourself, but suddenly there is no job for you to work at, no money to buy things with, and no one to buy them from. What and who are you then? What is your identity and your worth outside of the modern industrial paradigm? How do you interact with that environment and get and make the things you need? If you are out in a natural environment, how much of what is there is even familiar to you? I'm not trying to scare you into taking my e-course (although, I guess whatever it takes!). The most important thing to me isn't even whether I or any of us survive this scenario, but more what it says about who we are- that we do or don't walk around more or less self contained, that is to say, with the innate ability to be independent. The idea that we either do or don't know how to take take care of our own needs, to take real physical stuff and turn it to various uses, is absolutely fundamental to the way I see the world. So, where are you in your scenario? What can you use to meet your needs? If you can't take care of yourself, then who do you turn to that has what you need and what will they want from you?
Over the years, people are always saying something like "when the shit hits the fan, I'm coming to your place." Uh, I don't think so son! I know a lot of talented and amazing people that are very competent and have mad skills, but I could probably narrow down the number of them I'd want to be in that situation with to less than the number of fingers on my two hands. And almost all of those people have one trait in common (besides being cool as hell of course :), ADAPTABILITY, knowledge that goes far beyond how to do this or that in X number of simple steps.
The Re-skilling Dojo is intended to rapidly download to you decades of accumulated knowledge that I have come to consider invaluable. Purpose? In the simplest terms, the purpose is to get everyone on the same page with some basic foundational knowledge, much of which should be common knowledge, but is now often lost in modernity. After that, we can build on that solid foundation.
You want to know how to do stuff. That's why you're here. Me too! I want to know how to do all kinds of things, and have so much more of that stuff to learn! There simply are not enough lifetimes. I am going to tell you specifically how to do all kinds of stuff on this site, and already have on the turkeysong and paleotechnic's blogs, the content of which is now housed here and in videos and in the various books I hope to get written in the coming years. There will definitely be some specific how-to skills in the Re-skilling dojo too. But, most of what I'll teach you in the Re-skilling dojo is actually much more important than the specific steps to do anything.
Those specific steps of how to do something are great and all, but there is something much more valuable available to us, and that is why and how things work. Insight into materials and processes gives you one of the most valuable things you can have in this life in all situations, and that is adaptability. Yes, adaptability again, beautiful, precious adaptability! I want you to see the world more like I have come to. I want you to walk into virtually any situation and see the almost unlimited potential to turn what is just lying around to useful ends of all kinds.
The world is a resourcescape of potentially useful stuff un-noticed by most people. The Re-skilling Dojo is largely about illuminating the unlimited potential in even everyday objects and materials. Teaching you to tan various kinds of leather would take it's own very long email course. We'll do that elsewhere. What I can do is lay open the world of possibilities inherent in a skin, tell you about it's structure, how to preserve hides for later use, all the types of leather and tanning processes and what tanning actually is. We'll get to the details later in blog posts, books and videos.
The Re-skilling Dojo is basically an in-depth primer. It will cover a lot of ground in laying a foundation for understanding the world you live in and the materials in it, all from a practical hands on perspective. Seriously, it's going to be awesome! I'm so excited to be doing this project. It's like writing a book though, with lots of pictures and illustrations, so it's going to take a while to get enough of a head start to actually hit the launch button. In my outline, the section on fibers, cords and ropes is 5 lessons long, all of which require pictures and or illustrations. The section on stone is 7 lessons long, and the fire section is 12 lessons long right now! (Why yes, I AM a total pyro, thank you very much!.. and you will be too when I'm done with ya! ;)
The sections and lessons will be delivered in small digestible bits that can be perused in the time it takes to drink your morning coffee. I won't be sure till it's done, but I'd guess that it will probably span about a year at 2 emails a week, with lessons in a section typically building on the previous ones. Fibers and cords, rocks of all kinds and uses, axes and hatchets, gardening, grafting, fats and oils, wood, bone, antler, horn and shell, sharpening, all things fire related, skinning and butchering, animal parts, leather and skin and all with a little practical philosophy and related musings sprinkled in here and there. Why am I doing this and giving it away? For love and money. You can read my business statement here, which I think you'll find more than reasonable. One thing is for sure. At a whopping price of free, this is amazingly valuable. If my other content hasn't already, I'm confident that this series will convince you that I'm worth listening too and that any content that I do sell (which will be the minority), books etc.. will be worth buying.
Subscribe to my blog on the sidebar and like the SkillCult facebook page to stay up to date on the launch of this series. Once I figure out how to set up mailchimp, there will be a form right here to subscribe and begin receiving the course. I may also release a beta version to test drive the course and get feedback on how to improve it. I have a lot of chores to do here at Turkeysong, a lot of videos to shoot and edit, blog posts to write, books to write etc, so as stoked as I am, the Re-skilling Dojo is a pretty huge project in competition with all of that stuff...
SKILLS ARE FOR LIFE!
