The Real Story of Woolman

by Ben Kercheval, Student F’09

When people ask me “how has Woolman been?” I’ll say “good,” “great,” “an experience.” That’s true. It’s also been grueling, heartbreaking, and horrifying. What an amazing, mysterious place in the woods that allows these emotions to coexist peacefully.

It seems when others ask “how has Woolman been?” I’ll be in on this secret of what Woolman really is. Of course it can’t be explained in words or text on a page because it wasn’t experienced that way.

How was it experienced?

In moments in time

Feelings in my gut

Colors in my mind

The most fitting way to describe Woolman would be to share the feelings, moments, and stories that were stitched together by time to make my Woolman.

Here goes…

Woolman is coming out of the woods before a pizza dinner, seeing orchard mists and a setting sun paint the sky.

Woolman is heaving chests, bikes thrown down, and poetry at the summit of Woolman Lane after a grueling ride.

Woolman is the lost structures in the Sierra Foothill forests, rotting and waterlogged, waiting in the undergrowth for future Woolmanites to discover them.

Woolman is singing,

SHOUTING!!

laughing,

stomping,

and banging pots and pans.

Woolman is lurking under Madrone Hall with mountains of snowballs waiting for the other students to come, so we can ambush them.

Woolman is thinking like a mountain.

Woolman is the satisfaction of chopping a pine log, smelling the spicy oils, and burning it.

Woolman is conversing in a hammock in a nighttime pasture, hearing the crunch of cows pulling grass from the ground nearby and the heartbeats of those with me.

Woolman is sweating on a hot summer night, shaking my body to the thump of an electric feel.

Woolman is hippies at the BriarPatch, and an old European man in a community garden.

Woolman is raw milk and kilts.

Woolman is talking in Spanish to children in Mexico, dancing for them and giving them rides on our backs.

Woolman is manazanita forests tickling your clothing and hair.

Woolman is cold at night.

Woolman is depression, rebellion, division, and suffocation.

Woolman is saying goodbye.

Woolman is bathing in the ice cold Yuba River, and then resting on warm rocks that hum with an unexplainable presence.

Woolman is crying in another hammock, feeling utterly alone but loved in the arms of a friend.

Woolman is scaling a friendly pine with bark falling on my head from climbers above, and relishing the view splattered with a bloody sunset.

Woolman is the scent of hot compost being carried by the wind to me where I rest on yet another creaking hammock.

Woolman is shaping clay.

Woolman is washing chickens in warm, soapy water, and then blow drying them next to a crackling fire.

Woolman is shoveling cow shit, and enjoying it.

Woolman is solitude.

Woolman is chaos.

Woolman is feeling like I’m in a glass chamber with no oxygen but lots of colorful smoke to distract me.

Woolman is gaining a connection to the land that’s tangible and ready to be expanded.

Woolman is being a tree, growing new rings as I battle rainstorms and blizzards.

Woolman is carrying on.

Pain.

Woolman is beautiful.

Woolman, I love you, as well as your…

turkeys
people
vegetables
sunsets
grass
cows
oxidation ponds

and patchwork of different lives, beliefs, and actions.

Goodbye, but certainly not for good.

Thank you.

Let’s Begin!

by Sage, Mia, Hannah & Lily, Students
Perhaps to save the world
there’s more than one way to be
you can do it by riding a bike,
or planting a tree.
But here’s the truth we want you to see:
“green consumerism” is not the final key.
To turn the lock, to open the door
the key is not to buy much more
but to buy much less
and to be wise
about your actions,
and to analyze.
Change government policy,
it can be done.
We live in a democracy.
This should be fun.

Memories Worth Remembering

by Mia D’Angelli, Student

The Woolman experience has filled me with memories worth remembering. This has been both the best and the hardest time of my life but I can honestly say that without this semester, and the intensity of its challenges and exuberance, I would not be who I am today, striving to be myself and live out my values. In the midst of the semester, I found little time to think through what I had learned and form my own opinions but I am coming out of this with a desire to grow as a person. I want to take my passions for music and change to make the world a better place.

During this semester, an important belief solidified for me – the idea that any system in which one person can have more power or influence than another is fundamentally set up for exploitation. I believe that if you have something beneficial to say, those around you will listen. In saying this, I want to portray the hope I have for the future in that we must all strive to live in a way that makes life worth living. We can never be solely responsible for ourselves but must feel the weight of society on our shoulders.

This semester I have been challenged academically and emotionally. I have been provided with a foundation to build from, and I see the future as an open door to take my voice and use it.

The Heartbreak of Teaching at Woolman

by Angelina Conti, Peace Studies Teacher

I want to tell you all the ways that my job as a teacher at the Woolman Semester is breaking my heart… which are also all the reasons I love it.

The first is that because we are focused on Peace, Justice and Sustainability, we are by definition engaged with many problems facing this country and the world. That’s a lot to lay on a young person. I was at a social event in town recently and after hearing what I do someone asked me, “Do your students know how bad it’s going to get?” I hesitated in saying yes, not because I doubt their understanding of anything we’ve covered this semester here, but because that’s never been the tone of our time together. So the second way this job is heartbreaking is that despite their engagement with a daunting list of world concerns, these students have never lost their joy, enthusiasm, creativity, or hope.

The third way this work is heart breaking is that we try to do so much in such little time. I often understand our work together here, teachers and students, as being about throwing open doors to new ways of thinking and being before rushing on to the next door. Sometimes without delving deep. In Peace Studies I try to give them some indication of the ideas, tools and concepts that are available to them, and hope that once introduced they’ll return to them later when I’m not looking. The fourth heartbreak is that they do return to those ideas and tools, they do use them, often fashioning them to suite their own needs, sometimes using them to point out the flaws in our program, and generally surpassing anything I could have taught them.

I understand our work at the Woolman Semester, and actually teaching in general, as being about helping young people to catch fire for something. I really love the quote from Howard Thurman that we used on the graduation invitations: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and then go to do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive.”

The last way that this work is heart breaking is that we are trusted with these young people for 16 weeks, we totally fall in love with them, and then we have to give them back. To their families, communities, and schools. We send them out to continue lighting up the world.

Students Interview Utah Phillips on Homelessness and Nevada City Shelter

Woolman Semester students interview Utah Phillips on homelessness (along with other founders of Hospitality House). Hear the story behind this amazing asset to Nevada County, CA.

How to Make Your Own Soymilk Using Raw Soy Beans

Coleman Watts from The Woolman Semester teaches you how to make your own soy milk, using a soya soymilk maker.

The Locavore Movement and the 100 Mile Diet

Woolman Semester students search near and… well, near, for healthy, sustainable eating from csa farms to the cows in the back yard. Find out what it means to be a locavore, and why it isn’t always easy to stick to the 100-mile diet.

Giving Thanks

by Jeremy Delaney-Peterson, Student

Some time ago, I became aware that every person that enters one’s life, if only for a moment, has something to offer.  Sometimes, it’s as simple as a smile or a laugh.  However, if you search for it, they often have something much deeper to give.  We, too, have something to offer everyone we encounter.  What each of us has to offer is different, and what another person has to learn from us often varies based upon their own needs and experiences.  For this reason, I’ve come to tolerate people who I may not always care for.  In fact, it seems that it is often those who are most different from us that have the wealth of insight which exists in our encounters with one another.  In sharing and embracing these, we have the ability to share this wealth.

Knowing this and actively attempting to give and gain from everyone we meet works for the benefit of all.  I believe that it has the power to better us as individuals as well as remind us of the intrinsic value of every person, regardless of their similarities or differences from ourselves.  We build upon this non-material wealth that lasts a lifetime and is vastly beneficial to the betterment of our own lives, at the cost of sharing something that we do not give up in doing so.

This idea came to me before I came here to Woolman, but it has since proved to be true on so many occasions.  In class discussions, every person that speaks participates in sharing their perspective and interpretation of an issue, providing a new perception to all of those who may think in a different way.  Outside of class, I find it much the same.  Just the other night I stopped on the way to my cabin to exchange a few words with Michael, a teaching intern at Woolman.  What started as a brief chat turned into a conversation that lasted two or more hours.  It is truly amazing to realize that people have as much going on in their own lives and minds as you do!  When this is realized, it seems so obvious that this wealth is out there, in the minds of all who surrounded us, and that we all have access to it if only we take the time to seek it — and what a powerful thing it is to simply take the time to share such things, to listen to people, and give what we have to offer.

A Traveler’s Treatise

by Ravahn Samati, Community Intern
Travel is a necessary part of the human experience. I am prejudiced. The travel I refer to is not to beachside resorts in developing countries or posh Manahan bungalows or travel agency week-longs to Europe. I am interested in the marrow of a country’s identity. I want to hear her stories. The people are the crux of my experience.

In the stories of others you will find yourself. If you are in search as I am you will discover a larger humanity, able to identify injustices more readily, you will become more holistic and conscientious in your thinking. One’s gripes become petty. One’s privilege becomes obvious. One’s existence is humbled. It is necessary to re-remember over and over again these gifts of travel. Everything becomes contextualized.

With varying degrees of travel experience and Spanish proficiency, the Woolman Semester set out to La Frontera: the borderlands of Mexico and the United States. Our journey was a 1000 mile round-trip caravan across borders both inward and outward. Meanwhile, Latin Americans were crossing similar distances in search of sustainable wages at free-trade zone warehouses or across the border to the United States in search of greater reward and risk.

The borderlands is the journey of the migrant, the terrain, the two way current of culture and more recently the institution of immigration. The borderlands terrain revealed itself only after we exited Aqua Prieta in route to the wall to refill water tanks for passing migrants. Its monotony was formulaic in its beauty. Only the most well-adapted species of plants and animals were able to make homes in this arid climate. The terrain was inhospitable to the weary traveler. The black edifice loomed large in the distance. Zoe mentioned how the two sides were identical in their makeup and if not for the wall itself there would be no distinguishing the two countries.

“There is nothing new about migration, its been happening for as long as humans have been alive,” said Marc, our host from the Immigrant Resource Center. The newly created edifice is only two years old at Aqua Prieta. It’s under construction in other places along the border and currently covers only a third of the border. One irony of the wall’s construction: instead of keeping people out of the United States, it prevents illegal immigrants from ever going home.

Then we met the people. Most of us were able to bear witness at the Migrant Resource Center. The task was a simple one, ready food upon the arrival of migrants freshly deported from the United States. Unconcerned with where we were from, they accepted purposefully. One night we met with a band of 12 and another night a group of 10. They were hungry, thirsty, boots unlaced, most of them planned on returning to the desert to make the trek again soon. This was the cycle.

Thanks to all the people we met, who shared there stories of reflective pasts or their visions for the future, welcomed us into their homes and fed us: Angel, Moonchies, Jordan, Marc, Miriam, Larry, Doug, Lalou, the intentional quaker community, Café Justos, C.R.E.T.E., Immigration Resource Center, Comminidad Centro, DougPrieta. The gifts of travel will continue to reveal themselves thanks to you.

Who Gets Water, Who Gets Sewage?

by Malka Howley, Student

If we accept that the right to life is a basic human right, which we must if we believe in any other rights, then we must also accept that the right to clean, safe water is also a basic human right.  We need water to drink and to grow food, among other things.  Water is a fundamental human need, that is indisputable, and to deny someone clean, safe water is to deny them life.  Yet that is happening all over the world.  Pollution and man-made drought are affecting many people in all sorts of places, sometimes impacting huge industries or economies, but the people who are disproportionally affected are the poor.  For the present, and the foreseeable future, the world’s richest people (which includes people that we in the United States would consider “middle class”) will always be able to buy clean water or food imported from far away, even if those things become much more expensive.  And it is the people with money who can simply move away if there is a severe water crisis of some kind.  But it is those who cannot afford to do those things who are the most affected by water crises.

Fred Pearce’s When The Rivers Run Dry is full of examples of poor or disenfranchised people being hurt by different kinds of water crises, but here is one that seems to encapsulate several common issues.  In Gujarat, India, and in many other parts of the developing world, farmers have to irrigate their crops with raw sewage.  Like many places, water is scarce and in great demand.  And while the irrigation canals are virtually always empty and the water table is dropping rapidly, the flow of effluent is never-ending.  This is the case in many other places; Pearce reports that a tenth of the world’s irrigated crops are watered with sewage.

But this doesn’t just mean human waste, which would be bad enough, but also toxic chemicals dumped by factories, which aren’t just poisonous to consume, but also kill the soil.  Farmers are forced to water their crops with pathogenic, toxic waste because it’s the only water available.  And the people in towns, similarly, have no choice but to buy those crops.

Of course, there can be benefits to using sewage for irrigation, but only if it is an officially recognized and regulated practice, and measures are taken to make it safe.  As it is, the practice is harmful and dangerous.  The situation demonstrates how water crises (in this case, both drought and pollution, although globally there are other problems too), trap the world’s poorest people.  Good water shouldn’t be something only some people can afford.