I'm home. My cheeks are slightly glowing from a day spent outside, there's mud on my boots that I haven't cleaned off yet, and I've made more notes today than I have in any single day of software development in the last five years. Day one of the actual woodland training is done, and I need to write this down while it's still fresh.
If you read my previous post, you'll know I signed up for Forest School Leader training with Nature of Learning, run by my wife Sarah and Charlotte. The intro call was on Zoom. This was not on Zoom. This was in actual woods, with actual trees, and actual weather - which, mercifully, was gorgeous. March has no business being this pleasant and I'm choosing not to question it.
Meeting the Group (For Real This Time)
There's a difference between meeting people on a video call and meeting them in a forest. On Zoom, you're a rectangle with a name underneath it. In the woods, you're a whole person who has to make eye contact and remember how to stand naturally. The fellow trainees are all genuinely lovely - warm, engaged, the kind of people who've signed up for a year-long course because they actually care about this stuff. That energy is infectious, even for someone whose default setting is mild social unease.
And then there are the trainers. Sarah and Charlotte are, I'll say it plainly, fab. They're comfortable, knowledgeable, and they create an atmosphere where asking questions doesn't feel like an admission of failure. Is it weird being trained by your wife? A bit. But mostly it's just really nice. I got to see Sarah in her element - confident, knowledgeable, genuinely brilliant at what she does - and that's not something you get to appreciate properly when you're hearing about it secondhand over dinner. Being in the room (well, the woods) while she does the thing she's spent years mastering? I loved that.
A Piece of Rope Walks Into a Top Five List
Here's my favourite fact from day one, and I want you to sit with this for a moment: a piece of rope is in the top five play equipment internationally.
Not a climbing frame. Not a swing set. Not an iPad. A piece of rope. Globally, across cultures, across continents, a bit of rope is one of the most valuable things you can hand a child. They'll skip with it, tie things to other things, make a den, create a boundary, fashion a lead for an imaginary dog, or just drag it through mud for reasons that make perfect sense to them and none to anyone watching.
I love this fact possibly more than I should. I've always loved rope and knots - proper knots, the kind you learn in Scouts. I'm a Cub leader - have been for years - and knot work is always the bit I look forward to most. Bowlines, clove hitches, sheet bends - I can tie them in my sleep. So when the knot work came out today, I was immediately in my comfort zone. Which, given how far from my comfort zone the rest of this experience is, felt like finding a warm room in an unfamiliar house.
Better than that, though - I got to share some of it. The way I teach knots to Cubs, the tricks for making them memorable, the little shortcuts that help a six-year-old understand why you go round the back and not the front. I offered some of the things I've discovered over the years, and it was so nice to be heard. Being valued for experience you can contribute - even when you're the least qualified person in the woods - is a remarkably good feeling. I'm used to being the one with the answers in a room full of developers. Being a student again and still having something to offer? That hit differently.
It's a Process, Not a Place
We spent time today discussing what Forest School actually is. If you asked me a month ago, I'd have given you a decent answer - decent because I've been absorbing this through Sarah for a decade. But today crystallised something I'd been circling around without quite landing on.
Forest School is a process, not a place.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it does. It's not "take children to a wood". It's not "do activities outside". It's a long-term, participant-led process that happens to take place in a natural environment. There are six principles underpinning the whole thing, and I'm not going to list them all here because that would sound like a textbook and this is not a textbook. But I will say: I love them. Every single one. They're the kind of principles that make you think yes, obviously, why isn't everything like this.
The participant-led bit keeps coming back. The practitioner creates the conditions. The participant does the discovering. You don't point at a beetle and say "look at this beetle". You create a situation where they find the beetle themselves, and the learning that comes from that discovery is deeper, more personal, and more lasting than anything you could have taught them directly. It's the opposite of a lesson plan. It's a trust plan.
We also talked about memories of play. What did you play as a child? Where? With whom? What made it memorable? There's something quietly powerful about a group of adults sitting in a woodland sharing stories about the games they played thirty years ago. Everyone had something. Everyone's eyes went somewhere else for a moment. Play isn't trivial. It's foundational. And a piece of rope is in the top five.
The Friendship Tree and Three Colours of Wool
We went for a wander through the woods and met the friendship tree. The How Hows are mythical creatures who live in these woods - or so the story goes - and they'd left strands of their hair (wool, in practice, but the mythology is important) in three different colours, each colour representing a different commitment: looking after yourself, looking after each other, and looking after the woods.
We made bracelets from the wool. Three colours, twisted together, tied around the wrist. Simple. The kind of thing that takes two minutes and means more than it should.
I'm keeping mine. Not on my wrist forever - that would interfere with typing, and I have MongoDB queries that won't optimise themselves - but in my journal, as a marker. A reminder of where this started. Well, where this properly started. If I'm honest, it started years ago. A lot of today felt comfortable and familiar in a way that shouldn't have surprised me but did. Sarah's been doing this for ten years and training for a few. If I hadn't absorbed a substantial amount of Forest School knowledge by sheer osmosis over that time, it would almost be worrying. Turns out living with an endorsed Forest School trainer is its own form of continuing professional development.
I Hid Behind a Log and It Was Brilliant
We played 1-2-3 Where Are You. If you don't know it, it's essentially hide and seek with a call-and-response element. Someone counts, everyone hides, and when you hear "one two three, where are you?" you call back so the seeker can try to find you by sound.
I hid on the ground behind a log.
I'm a forty-year-old CTO. I build SaaS products. I coordinate AI agent teams. And I was lying face down in the leaf litter behind a fallen tree, trying not to giggle, while a group of adults played a game in the woods on a Tuesday afternoon. It was genuinely, properly fun. The kind of fun that doesn't require a screen, a subscription, or a WiFi password. Just trees, people, and the willingness to look a bit daft.
There's something about giving yourself permission to play as an adult. You forget you can. You forget it's allowed. Then someone asks you to hide behind a log and suddenly you're eight years old again and the only thing that matters is not being found. I recommend it. I don't recommend the getting-back-up-off-the-ground part, which reminded my knees that I am categorically not eight years old.
Blindfolded Tree Hugging (Sort Of)
Before the risk assessment stuff, we did plant and tree identification - working in groups to identify trees we'd been guided to while blindfolded. I want you to picture this: a group of adults, hands on each other's shoulders, being led through a woodland with their eyes covered, then asked to feel a tree and work out what it is. It sounds like a trust exercise from a corporate away day. It is not. It's significantly better than that.
The idea is: you feel the tree blindfolded - the bark, the roots, the shape of it - then you're led back to a different spot, take the blindfold off, and try to work out which tree you were at. Here's the thing though. I'd already guessed the tree while I still had my blindfold on. The bark, the way it felt under my hands - I just knew. And then when we went around identifying others, I was confident. Which I genuinely did not expect, because I'm usually terrible at trees. I can tell you an oak from a beech on a good day, but beyond that my botanical knowledge has historically been "that's a tree, and that's also a tree". Apparently a decade of walking these woods with Sarah has taught me more than I realised. The osmosis keeps revealing itself.
We named one of our trees Marvin. He was a hawthorn, and he had a face in his trunk - the kind of creepy, gnarled face that looks like it's been watching the woods for centuries and has opinions about everyone who walks past. Marvin felt like the right name. He had that energy.
Boundaries, Risks, and Cold Toes
The afternoon covered boundaries and risk assessment. Not just the physical risks you'd expect - trip hazards, tool use, the standard health-and-safety stuff - but emotional and social risks too. How does a child feel when they're asked to do something unfamiliar? What's the emotional risk of a group activity where you might fail in front of others? How do you create an environment that's challenging enough to be meaningful but safe enough that the challenge doesn't become threat?
I'm going to be honest: I feel like I'm in one big emotional risk assessment right now. I am quite a long way from my comfort zone. Not dangerously far - nobody's asking me to abseil off anything - but far enough that I'm noticing it constantly. Every group activity, every sharing exercise, every moment where the natural response would be to make a joke and deflect but the situation asks for something more genuine instead. It's uncomfortable in the way that growth is uncomfortable. I know that because Sarah has told me approximately four hundred times, and today I started to understand what she means.
We finished the day with one final knot - the shear lashing - and made a star from sticks. Then we were asked to find an object from the woods that represented how we felt.
I went to the river and picked up a stone. It was a lovely stone - smooth, solid, the kind that fits perfectly in your hand. I chose it because I felt like I'd got a solid grounding today. A foundation to build on. The kind of first day where you come home and think yes, this is going to be good.
Also it was cold. Like my toes.
Tomorrow
The weather forecast for tomorrow is even better than today. I've got my boots by the door, my notes spread across the kitchen table, and a bracelet made of wool that I need to press into a journal before the cat investigates it.
Day one felt like arriving somewhere I've been heading for a while without quite realising it. A lot of it was familiar from years of living alongside Forest School. Some of it was brand new. All of it was worth being outside for, even the bits where my toes lost feeling and my social anxiety had a brief argument with my determination to be present.
Two more days in the woods. I'm looking forward to it. And this time, that's not something I have to think about before saying - I just know.
