This season, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we remember the long thread that ties us to community—the generations who came before us, those who will follow, and the land that holds all of it together.
When a Plan Comes Together
A few weeks ago, I found myself at the Trackers Farmhouse for our Trackers A-Team weekend overnight. Over thirty teens were there—laughing, tired, proud, and hungry after working on skills all day and preparing a feast from foods they’d foraged from the wild and we raised on our farm.
Outside, Dutch ovens sat on deep coals: lamb and duck Shepherd’s Pie and feral apple cobbler from the orchard. The night was jovial and warm. Raccoon Rob led a raucous song, and Nico (Captain Nick) shared his latest (yet unseen) trail-cam photos of neighborhood bobcats, cougars, and bears… oh my!
Before anyone touched a spoon, we needed a moment. It had already been a big weekend—pressing harvest apples into cider, learning how to butcher animals raised on our homestead, the grit of late-October weather, and a spontaneous candy raid to Sandy town’s annual trick-or-treat. They had earned their feast. They had earned their pride. They were, without question, the Trackers A-Team.
But we needed to know of the bigger circle around us.
Protectors & Stewards
Our guest was Deb Scrivens, someone I first met nearly thirty years ago at the old Tracking Club at Oxbow Park. It’s hard to explain what it meant for young me back then to find people who spoke the same language of tracks, bushcraft, and the quiet stories written in the sand. There was no Trackers Earth in the nineties, no online forums I knew of, no easy way to meet anyone interested in these skills. I’d spent seven years learning alone—from library books, used paperbacks at Powell’s, and thousands of hours outdoors.
Then I walked into Deb and Elizabeth Moore’s animal tracking club. And suddenly I wasn’t alone.
So I thanked Deb that night. I asked the teens to feel gratitude for the people who helped build community long before we ever showed up. And because Deb’s young granddaughter was sitting with us, they could see the full arc: those who came before, those who are here now, and those who will come after.
Before we ate, I shared a tradition from our extended community: elders and children eat first. Then I added a Trackers twist—Rangers eat last.
Rangers are the original of our Four Guilds, and I think they represent what most kids want from Trackers. They’re drawn to skills that feel nearly fictional in modern life but that they inherently hope to exist: crafting a shelter from the land, creating fire without matches, moving quietly enough to read bird calls and animal trails as subtle sign. But it’s more than fantastic ability; it’s a sense of service and contribution. The Ranger’s archetype is the protector—the one who makes sure everyone else has enough before taking their own portion. But there was something deeper to address: grief and gratitude.
For the food we harvest and for all that gives to us.
The Gift of Grief
People talk about gratitude a lot this time of year—gratitude for family, for abundance, for the winter gatherings that remind us who’s still walking beside us. At Trackers, we teach gratitude as a survival skill. To care for land, for future generations, for a community, you have to notice everything you’ve been given—and everything you’ve taken. And you can’t have gratitude without grief. Let me explain.
In tracking, we say: to know a thing is to honor it. The more you learn about a person, an animal, a plant, a fungus, or a natural phenomenon, the more you’re familiar with it. The more you familiar you are with it, the more you feel for it. This is the foundation of all survival skills: functional empathy that keeps us aware of what surrounds us.
When I follow elk, I read their tracks more clearly when I try to perceive the world as they do. What do they smell here? What do they hear? Where would they be vulnerable? How is the sunlight hitting the meadow they depend on? Where is the cougar that’s hunting them (or me as them)?
But in that moment empathy doesn’t end with the elk. You have to understand the cougar’s territory as the cougar. You have to understand every plant where the meadow vole lives its whole life. You have to feel the struggle of the thimbleberries you watch from seed to sprout to harvest. When a Tracker is really paying attention, they’re carrying a full spectrum of all stories at once. So many stories and so many feelings it might overwhelm you—but instead, it forces you into a silent awareness.
In our modern world, kids are often told two contrasting narratives: either to dwell on your feelings or to wall them off. Neither extreme works. There’s a third option. Humans evolved over two million years to be Trackers—aware not only of their own feelings, but able to empathize with the whole spectrum of nature found in the land around them. To always see the widest breadth of their environment. To map every detail and connect them together foraging as a community. And to access that awareness, you need silence. You need the ability to pay attention and wait for what comes to you.
On one side of that silence is grief. On the other side is gratitude.
Giving Back
You feel this especially in harvest. You thin a sapling for a bow. You salvage a deer on the roadside. You pull a trout from the lake. You dig a dandelion root from the soil.
To survive—to know a thing—you have to empathize with how it lives and grows, and then accept that you may also harvest it. The grief is real. The gratitude that follows is not a performance—it’s recognition that your life continues because another life changed. And you may be willing to offer the same some day.
You gather firewood not only for warmth, but to reduce fuel loads so the forest is a little safer from summer wildfire. You clip willow for baskets, knowing careful cutting makes the habitat thicker for birds and browsing deer. You thin a stand of saplings so the strongest trees can rise and diverse plants can grow.
None of these choices are casual. Each one leaves a mark, and acknowledging that mark is part of the work.
Gratitude & Honor
So that evening, before Raccoon Rob picked up his guitar for a concert level dinnertime performance, we discussed about how Rangers—and all Trackers—will inevitably create moments of grief simply by harvesting and living. And because of that, we carry a responsibility to offer gratitude. That gratitude will never “balance” anything. It isn’t supposed to. It, tinged with grief, is meant to keep us honest about our place in the world and our connection to the lives that support us.
I think our A-Team teens understood, because it’s something we all feel. Our society can teach us to either ignore grief or let it consume us. But grief comes from knowing, caring, and having loved. Gratitude is how we honor that knowing.
Of course the potluck had plenty for everyone, including seconds. But to honor the full circle, Deb, her husband, and her granddaughter were first in line. And to follow the Rangers code, my honor was near the end.
Remembering Our Stories
Grief and Gratitude: you can’t have one without the other. This is part of the path of a Tracker: to feel both, reconcile both, and carry both. And with all of that in mind, as we head into the season where people gather with one another around food and fire, I’ll offer this:
Remember your family. Remember the elders who came before and the children who come after. Remember our world beyond the human—the animals, the forests, and the fungi. Remember the silence required to see it all with awareness and a sense of real adventure.
And remember that every gathering, every meal, every fire is part of a story that began long before us and will continue long after.
Thank you for all you share with our family, Trackers, and our community!