The Great Remembering:

People ask often- why study primitive skills, why practice bushcraft- why why why??

you know you like it, you know you love it, but it is sometimes hard to justify or explain why it is so satisfying to spend so much time focusing on such a simpler time when someone asks why.

It’s because these crafts help you remember. You remember your humanity. It’s in you blood, it’s in your dreams, when you step outside and feel the soil under your feet, and you enter the trees like coming home, you can still hear it and still feel it. You remember in your genes. Your ancestors are with you always, you are them, they are you.

Isn’t it ironic that there are more people making friction fires and knapping flint and practicing primitive skills than there has been since the discovery of metallurgy? Not even 100 years ago many of the primitive skills that we think of as common fodder at an event were dangerously close to being lost. Nevertheless, a primitive skills revival; a great remembering is happening, and we can thank uber modern technology for that. The Internet, Online Forums, Email, YouTube, Facebook, Google, Instagram- reality Television is driving hundreds of skills events and gatherings across the country every year. These platforms are the crystallization of knowledge – and We have used technology to spread the gospel of anti-technology and we are reclaiming our prehistoric roots!

But more importantly; we are returning to the basics, bushcraft is simply the creation of tools from nature to create human habitat -skills to procure and process food. That’s it- and that’s huge- it is everything you need and nothing you don’t. That’s a skillset that so many humans have forgotten, but the revival of these skills is creating a unified consciousness and a canonical, translatable ability to reclaim what it means to be human.