Learning Opportunities

Learning Opportunities while visiting Bashan

For the physical:

• What is sustainable living?
   
• Passive Solar
  (design, cooking, how? why?)
   
• Drinking from the sewer… no way!
  (alternatives to flushing away valuable water sources)
   
• Making Adobe
  (a hands-on, play in the mud experience)
   
• Building with the earth…
  (Adobe, Cob, Paper-adobe, Mud daubing: hands-on building)
   
• Building an emergency shelter
  (hands-on with whatever is available… shelter can be used for your own personal camp shelter during your stay)
   
• Find it, use it… being a pack rat
  (there are treasures in that trash! Learn about things you can do with what others throw away)
   
• Catching the rain
  (how to catch and store water where ever you are)
   
• Walking in the rain… diverting rivers
  (monsoon season water diversion, seasonal pools and ponds)
   
• Food foraging
  (dinner with nature and the foods we find there)
   
• Food to store… which store?
  (when stores are closed or you’re snowed in… there’ll be a storehouse if you prepare ahead)
   
• Don’t kill that weed! Wild edible / medicinal plants
  (how to research and find foods that heal)
   
• Shrooms… how to survive eating fungus
  (I’m still here!) (some simple rules and the do’s and don’ts of fungus foraging)
   
• Where am I… what to do with a compass, or not?
  (learn how to read a compass, or find your way without one)
   
• Being still
  (the practice of being still and listening)
   
• Bat ballet and marching ants
  (spring, early summer for bat ballet… a real experience with these little mis-understood creatures. Ants from spring to fall we can follow their trail but how do we live with them?)
   
• It’s a spider… kill it!
  (Why do we hate spiders? Can we learn to love them? My husband did... well, maybe love is too strong of a word… tolerate?)
   
• Living with Dogs cats and other annoying animals
  (more than just mans best friend… dogs are real individual personalities… and cats, well everyone knows that cats are well beyond personality)
   
• Roosters’ crow, Chickens cluck
  (down home scoop on poultry)
   
• What’s that smell?… Goats gotta love em’
  (it isn’t true… goats don’t eat everything, only some things)
   

Learn to make an adobe brick.

For the Spiritual:
 

• In the Beginning, God created the heavens and the earth… so what’s missing?
  Did you know that in the Hebrew the first verse of Genesis is only 6 oops I mean 7 words…
   
• All Creation speaks… straight from the Donkey's mouth
  (do animals talk, did they, will they, how?)
   
• Out of the Earth… where life began
  (out of the dust of the ground God made every living thing… all except one that is)
   
• Dominion vs. Stewardship
  (what’s the difference, does it matter? Yeah, it does)
  
   
• It’s all Greek to me…
  (what is the difference between Greek (western thought), and Hebrew (eastern thought), and how does it effect our view of God, Creation, and life in general?)
   
• The teaching, instruction, and direction of God… essential to Life?
  (What are the teachings, instructions, and directions, of God and why are they essential?)