My face is glowing. Not in a healthy outdoorsy way - in a "you've been outside for three days straight and your skin doesn't know what's happening" way. I am home, I am exhausted, and I am already trying to work out how to combine software engineering with being in the woods at the same time. That's probably a sign of something. I'm not sure what yet.
Day three. The last of the first block of woodland days. And it started so gently.
A Knot, and Then the Mime
We kicked off with a timber hitch. A knot I know, haven't used a huge amount, but comfortable territory. I tied it neatly, felt good about myself, thought right, I know what today's going to look like.
Then they told us we'd be reviewing yesterday's learning. In mime.
I no longer recognise my comfort zone. I'm not sure it exists any more. It may have packed a bag and left sometime around the puppet show yesterday, and the mime was just confirmation that it wasn't coming back.
I had to mime being a tap. Then damper bread. Then a pair of loppers. I'll leave the details to your imagination - it can be no worse than the reality, and it was almost certainly more dignified. The thing is, though, it worked. You remember things differently when you've acted them out with your body. My brain has filed "tippy tap" under "that time you pretended to be plumbing in a forest" and I suspect that memory is never leaving.
I keep coming back to the group. They are absolutely great. Supportive in a way that isn't performative - nobody's doing encouraging nods while secretly thinking you look ridiculous. It's genuine. Non-judgemental. Not even knowing looks. We seem to have complementary strengths that pull us all through the difficult bits, and being part of a group like that is a genuinely lovely thing. I didn't expect that to be one of the highlights of the course, but it is.
Shelter Building and Eagle Eyes
The rest of the morning was more comfortable ground. Risk assessments, then the absolute joy of using everything we'd learned - knots, tarpaulin, pegs - to build a shelter. This is the kind of activity where all the individual skills suddenly click together into something practical. You're not just tying a timber hitch for the sake of it. You're tying it because you need that tarp to stay up and keep people dry. Context changes everything.
Then we played Eagle Eyes. Charlotte stood in the middle as the eagle, eyes closed, while the rest of us hid behind trees around her. Periodically she'd call out instructions and we'd have to move, creeping closer without being spotted. If she pointed at you, you were caught.
I got caught. I had five seconds to move to another tree and I panicked about squashing the bluebells. Hesitated. Spotted. Out.
Caught because I was worried about the flowers. I could have made it to that tree, but not without trampling the bluebells, and that wasn't a trade I was willing to make. I'll take being caught over squashed bluebells every time.
I joined Charlotte as an eagle after that, which was its own kind of fun - watching adults try to sneak between trees with varying degrees of stealth. Why don't we do this more? Genuinely. Why do adults stop playing games in the woods? We'll happily spend two hours staring at a phone screen but suggest hiding behind a tree and people look at you like you've lost it. We've got it completely backwards.
Coppicing, Cookies, and a Mallet
The afternoon was glorious. Properly glorious. The weather was perfect, the sun was filtering through the canopy, and we got into some serious tool work.
Coppicing first - which went well, apart from the moment where I only almost squashed our entire team under the branch. Almost. Nobody was harmed. The word "timber" was said with appropriate urgency. We moved on.
We cut a wood cookie - a cross-section slice of a log - and then moved on to the bit I'd been waiting for without knowing I was waiting for it: making a mallet out of a log. Give me a saw, a froe and a knife and I am off. That's not a boast, it's just a fact about where I feel most myself. Tools, wood, something to make.
Here's the daft thing. I've taught other people to make mallets before - at Cubs, at Sarah's Forest School sessions. But I'd never actually made one myself. The cobbler's children, and all that. So when mine came together - clean, solid, functional - I was properly pleased. Unreasonably pleased, again. The kind of pleased where you keep picking it up and looking at it and putting it down and then picking it up again.
And then sitting on my own, whittling. That is my happy place. Not one of my happy places. The happy place. The place where my brain goes quiet, my hands take over, and I feel completely at ease and settled. Three days of being pushed and stretched and mimed at, and it turns out the thing that centres me is a knife and a piece of wood and nobody talking.
Holistic Development (The Theory That Landed)
As the sun moved behind the trees and the temperature dropped just enough to notice, we sat for one last theory session. Holistic development - how Forest School supports physical, emotional, social, and cognitive growth all at once, rather than slicing learning into neat subject-shaped boxes.
This one landed. Where the history session yesterday had my brain in a panic, this resonated. Maybe because I'd just spent three days living it. I could feel what holistic development meant because I'd experienced it - the physical work of the tools, the emotional stretch of the mime, the social warmth of the group, the cognitive challenge of the theory. It was all there, woven through every session, and I hadn't noticed it happening until someone gave it a name.
Maybe the theory is starting to land. Maybe you have to feel it before you can learn it. Which is, now I think about it, the entire point of Forest School.
Sit Spot
Then I saw it on the board. Sit Spot.
For the uninitiated: a sit spot is exactly what it sounds like. You find a spot. You sit in it. Alone. In silence. You watch. You wait. You notice what's around you. That's it. No task. No goal. No output.
Historically, this is not a comfortable place for me. My brain does not know what to do with this kind of silence. I'm someone who uses loud music to comfort my brain - to fill the space, to give it something to chew on so it doesn't start chewing on itself. Sitting alone in nature with nothing but my own thoughts and whatever the woods decide to show me is... a lot. It's a skill I need to work on, and I know that, and knowing it doesn't make it easier.
Fortunately, a squirrel hopped through the trees and then got really cross with Charlotte. Absolutely furious. Chattering away, tail flicking, delivering what was clearly a very strongly worded complaint about the noise levels in its woodland. It kept me occupied for long enough that the sit spot didn't tip over into genuine discomfort, and I'm grateful to that squirrel. I owe it something. A nut, probably.
Back to the Screen (For Now)
Three days done. We're back on Tuesday, so tomorrow it's back to the monitor, the keyboard, the pull requests and the product roadmaps. Back to the world that runs on electricity and WiFi and the assumption that servers will keep serving.
I don't think three days in the woods has changed me. I think it's given me proper time to explore a part of me that was always there but never got enough attention. The calm, the noticing, the wanting to be outside - that's not new. It's just been buried under screens and deadlines and the general noise of running a business. Three days of space to actually be in it, properly, without rushing through on the way to somewhere with WiFi. I'm already looking forward to Tuesday with a genuine eagerness, because it means I get to go back.
I'm also already trying to work out how I combine being a software engineer with being in the woods. There has to be a way. A laptop with good battery life and a decent tarp, maybe. Or maybe that's entirely missing the point. Maybe the woods are valuable precisely because the laptop isn't there.
I'll figure it out. Paul Pinecone always does. Eventually.
