Episode 54 - The Forest Educator Spotlight: Seven Things I Wish I’d Known Before Starting Hawk Circle

2023-12-11

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I started my Hawk Circle Wilderness Camp in the summer of 1989, but it had been a dream of mine for about four years earlier. It was glorious, and it was amazing. It was also a process of trial and error, and I made a lot of mistakes, mostly minor, but still, mistakes all the same. Despite being a relatively quick learner, it still took years to really hone the 'recipe' and build something that created consistent results. Once the program was in a good place, there were hundreds of different ways that I learned to refine, h...

I started my Hawk Circle Wilderness Camp in the summer of 1989, but it had been a dream of mine for about four years earlier.

It was glorious, and it was amazing.

It was also a process of trial and error, and I made a lot of mistakes, mostly minor, but still, mistakes all the same. Despite being a relatively quick learner, it still took years to really hone the 'recipe' and build something that created consistent results. Once the program was in a good place, there were hundreds of different ways that I learned to refine, hone, reimagine and re-work to help Hawk Circle be a place that helped people, and didn't actually produce more trauma for everyone involved. (I know, I dream big!)

I don't have a time machine so I'm not going to get any 'do-overs', and I haven't yet learned to control any 'time-slipping' like Loki in the Marvel Universe, but I CAN share some of the things I've come to see as essential to my own journey as a forest educator and as a program director. If any of these can help one of you out there to be more successful, work easier, build better relationships or just experience a little less struggle in the day-to-day, that's all I can hope for!

The field of 'forest educators' is vast, and it's a multiversal spectrum of wonderful people working in all kinds of different capacities, so it's difficult to say if all of these will be useful to everyone. It's useful to just hear the questions sometimes, and turn them over in our minds, opening up to the possibilities and new ways of thinking.

There is a good chance that even if I came back in time and told my younger self all of these, my stubbornness and idealism would put up some amazing resistance that would keep me from truly benefitting, but I'd like to think that I would eventually come around!

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