Our Event Season Gets Underwaysharing Windward with a few hundred friendsDuring the spring, summer and fall, various non-profit groups use Windward as the site where they hold educational camping events. These can range from historical re-creation groups to environmental fundraisers, events which allow us to share Windward with folk who have an appreciation for this special place in which we live.
My favorite visitors are the ones to earnestly work to develop their medieval skills and use them to create remarkable examples of pre-industrial life from chairs to tunics, from kegs to gameboards. In the case of the group that camped with us this weekend, you could walk into their village and not see a single thing that spoiled the illusion that you'd turned a corner in time and travel back to an earlier time.
One way to describe the Middle Ages is that it was a pre-industrial way of life that enabled people to live sustainably in the same place for centuries. While those days were fraught with ignorance and superstition, it was also a time when people lived in balance with nature. As we move into the post-industrial age--a time when mankind will no longer be able to maintain a consumption based way of life by liquidating cheap natural resources--many of the old skills and ways of living will need to be dusted off and put back into use as people learn to marry the science of the industrial age with the sustainabilty skills of the pre-industrial age. At which point, the post-industrial world will have come full circle. |
