Learning to Hunt With a Bird of Prey

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Quote I'm pondering -

“You don’t hunt deer because you love them. You love them as a result of hunting them.” - Jameson Parker

Over the past week, I've been reading In the Company of Bears: What Black Bears Taught Me About Intelligence and Intuition. I'm falling more and more in love with these creatures as I learn about them. They communicate hierarchies and family dynamics in a complex way. In one example, the author found a grandmother bear adopt a child that the mother could not attend to properly. They negotiated adoption (and the complex rules associated with it) over one night of communication. Amazing to read about. I will be hunting a black bear in Montana in one month.

Successful hunting requires deep empathy. To achieve a kill, I must insert myself in the mind of my prey. I must know his needs, understand her fears, and how the external landscape alters their behavior. I must feel their thirst and hunger, not just comprehend it intellectually.

In this way, my heart opens to the animals that I hunt in a special way. It is love that I feel for the deer, for the elk, antelope, bear, and every other animal that I hunt.

Practice I'm starting -

I have officially started the long process of falconry, learning to hunt with a bird of prey (raptor). I start by finding a sponsor who selflessly commits time to guiding me. Then I must pass an exam, build a mew (shelter), and capture the bird.

I have consistently been drawn towards falconry. During my chiric sanango dieta I had incredible visions of birds of prey come up. Often I follow the vision intuitively even if my conscious mind (or meaning making mind 😅) hasn't caught up. My friend Preston asked about my intentions and desires and it helped me recognize more deeply why I'm drawn to this:

Falconry is one of the only practices of being in partnership with a being of nature.

Dogs, cats, or any other animal relationship has a level of dependency associated with it. A raptor only stays with me if I am partnering with it to support him. If I am not pulling my weight, he will leave and take his chances elsewhere. One of my biggest and most long-term visions is to be in partnership with the land and a red-tailed hawk is a good place to start.

Crypto -

The amount of wealth being created in the space of cryptocurrency, tokens, and blockchain is incredible right now. There is plenty of speculation and nonsense despite the strength of underlying principles, but I am enjoying what opportunities there are with speculation.

BlockFi is a neat platform where I've started storing some of my crypto. It is a platform to buy crypto, but up to ~ $50-60k in bitcoin (1 BTC), it yields a 6% return. A friend of mine who has done very well in crypto has 1/3 of his assets in BlockFi to essentially collect a "dividend", which is what I'm doing as well. Highly suggest this is if you have some and want it to grow.

I'm not well-versed in monetary policy (and don't want to be). But my knowledge of history and a fair bit of confirmation from friends who are in the know, suggests that inflation and the dollar are not as great bags to hold. I'm moving a lot more of my assets into Nano ledger S hard wallet and putting some high-risk, high-reward money into nascent tokens.

Considering I'm up 147% in the past year already, my hope is to be able to accrue enough for some land down payments in the near future to continue my partnership with the Earth in all the ways possible.

With love,

Mansal

P.S: I also loved this quick 4 min clip from Dr. Zach Bush about indigenous wisdom, what he considers "connected wisdom".