WildernessDrum.com
Title
Wilderness Drum -- Wilderness Survival, Primitive Skills, Wilderness Spirituality
Description
Ultimately we can all lay claim to the term native and the songs and dances, the beads and feathers, and the profound responsibilities that go with it. We are all indigenous to this planet, this mosaic of wild gardens we are being called by nature and history to reinhabit in good spirit. Part of that responsibility is to choose a place. To restore the land one must live and work in a place. To work in a place is to work with others. People who work together in a place become a community, and a community, in time, grows a culture. To work on behalf of the wild is to restore culture.
I am Steve Beyer, sometimes known as Walks Slowly, and I am president of Wilderness Drum, Inc. I have three grown daughters and a wife who has kept me endlessly fascinated for thirty-eight years. I have two doctorate degrees – one in religious studies and one in psychology. For a dozen years I had an academic career as a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Graduate Theological Union. During that time I wrote three books on Buddhism in general and Tibetan Buddhism in particular. Then, for more than twenty years, I was a lawyer, and served as a senior litigation partner at a major international law firm.
For many years now, I have been drawn closer to the spirits of the wilderness. I have been certified as a Wilderness First Responder and Outdoor Emergency Care Technician, with additional certification in Pre-Hospital Trauma Life Support. I have also been certified in wilderness leadership both by the Wilderness Education Association and by SOLO's Outdoor Wilderness Leadership School. I now work with others in a wilderness setting, offering counseling and guidance in what I have come to call wilderness spirituality, leading vision fasts and rites of passage, helping to facilitate traditional and self-created ceremonies, and helping others to contact the wilderness spirits who try to teach us how to be human beings.