Jon's Origin Story

I'd like to tell you the story of how I found my way to LegacyTracks, and Regenerative Family Dynamics©.

To Influence Family Culture

The role of a healthy culture is complex. One pattern of support that a healthy culture provides is to ensure connection between the members of that culture, and connection with the natural world around them. What I learned on my life journey emerged slowly over time—truly a “hindsight is 2020”. My understanding of cultural systems is core to my path and mission in life. I have learned that even though culture tends to be “invisible” to its members, culture can still be changed towards health, and influenced in a positive direction.

All families have dynamics. A driver of family dynamics is the invisible structures, perceptions and habits of that family—the family culture. The family culture is unique to that group of people. What I came to learn over time is that family culture is not something that is set in concrete, but can actually be influenced, and that it doesn't take a degree in rocket science. It's a lot simpler and closer to the heart. Since families are struggling in so many ways in our times, this was an important path for me to explore.

Here’s where it began for me…

When I was a small boy, I was growing up in suburban New Jersey outside of New York City. Adjacent to the neighborhoods that I grew up in and inhabited as a boy, there were many open spaces and a lot of wild terrain for a young boy and my older sister to explore. I was born in 1960. The distractions of modern media were not prevalent in my boyhood. I spent a lot of time wandering in the forest and fields and fishing, often by myself.

Both sides of my family, my mother's and my father's, descended two generations ago from farmers, who were immigrants. My mother’s family came from Poland. My father’s family came from Ireland, the UK and other European lands.

My grandparents' generation had grown up in rural farming communities, where large families and extended families in the neighborhood were part of everyday life. You could say that the family culture included a lot of innate understanding of mentoring and fostering connection between family members.

There was an additional “bonus” in my family that led to my understanding of culture, and how culture can be facilitated. Both my maternal family line and my paternal family line lived close to the earth. In their childhood, in their adulthood, and into their late adulthood, they still practiced subsistence arts, farming and gardening and fishing, crabbing, and clamming. These influences were felt on both sides of my family. There were many role models in my family in all generations that inspired me to do the same. So I did.

When my sister and I were small children, both my mom and dad were very busy working and establishing businesses and careers. So oftentimes, we were left in the caring hands of either my grandmother and my great aunt on my mother's side or my grandmother and grandfather on my father's side. They often spent days with us, sometimes even a week. And often, my sister Kim and I were brought to stay with my maternal grandmother along the Barnegat Bay in New Jersey. Because of this, I had these regular “moments of healthier culture” that would last hours, to several days and even weeks. The grandparents had instincts and wisdom. Kim and I were truly blessed and benefited by these experiences.

My paternal grandmother, Nanny Cecil, was from Ireland. Nanny Cecil understood that if we were to go outside and find interesting things, and bring back a story to her, that this would enhance our life experiences. She told us many stories, and was a compelling storyteller, as was my dad. This, she was fond of sharing with us, is how she grew up. Her uncles and aunts and grandparents sent her out to do things and come back and tell stories.

My research at university into comparative cultural anthropology proved to me that this cycle of errands and stories is a very old part of healthy human culture. Children sent on errands to bring things back to grandma to either cook, or to tell stories about and ideally both. Sometimes, she sent us gathering apples and berries, so she could make pies and other delicious desserts. Sometimes the errand was challenging me to go with my fishing pole to catch some small panfish to bring back so Nanny could cook them for our dinner.

All of this delighted me as a boy. Eventually Nanny figured out that she could also get me to go on errands by sitting me down and reading with me. We had these little Golden Guides to Nature that Nanny Cecil had bought for us over the years as gifts. These wonderful books show the range maps of common plants and wildlife.

Nanny Cecil would say, “Hey, it says this kind of turtle lives here. If you could find that turtle and bring it back to Nanny, well, we could make a little home for it (a terrarium). And we could feed it and give it a name. But you know, Jonathan, you must remember where you caught it. Because as soon as you get bored with it, or the moment we notice it stops eating, we're gonna return it to where you found it…”

This meant I would return the little wild being to where I caught it. Starting around the age of eight or nine, I would go out and catch different kinds of frogs, snakes, turtles, newts, salamanders and lizards. I would bring them home and Nanny and I would have a rotating Menagerie in my bedroom. My mom was not all that stoked about this, and she and my dad had a plan. When I reached the age of nine, my family moved just a few miles up the road to another home in a location that afforded me even more exploration and more fishing holes. The new house was slightly bigger. The location was a few miles from the old place, and also gave me the opportunity to ride my bicycle with my fishing pole back to my favorite haunts, not too far away.

In that new place, my parents gave me a room in the daylight basement where I could set up my Menagerie. Around this time, we were picking up used aquariums that were left at the end of people's driveway for large item pickup, because that household had lost interest in taking care of the fish in the aquarium some time ago. Perhaps they were cleaning out their garage, and to my benefit! So pretty soon I had multiple terrariums going in the daylight basement. I even talked my parents into buying me one of those six foot plastic kiddie pools that are just a foot and a half deep. I set up this little indoor pond on the basement floor in front of a large window with good solar gain. I made a small turtle pond complete with wild fish that I caught in the local ponds and creeks.

This room became an unending source of focus and delight for me and I spent hours of my days caring for my animals and building even larger and more interesting terraria. I was getting really good at catching things, caring for them well (we rarely lost a single animal in those years), and really getting connected to my local habitats and its wild inhabitants. I developed a deep curiosity in all things in nature, science and exploration. This formed an important foundation for what was coming next…

Oldest Child in the Woods?

In the 1960’s, we--as many children in those times remember--played in these mixed age mobs of children, made forts in the woods, created dams to make ponds on creeks, had our favorite hangouts and played really well together without the need for supervision. As I was getting older, I noticed the older children that I looked up to were disappearing little by little. The older ones were “siphoning off the top” and disappearing to some unknown realm. When I was 10 years old, I was beginning to notice that I was the oldest child left in the woods. I was both curious and concerned. I felt one day I'd have to follow them.

This magical time of childhood in nature without adult supervision was drawing to a close, but something in my body told me,

“I need to stay the course.”

There was something yet deeper for me to do. Though there was a driving longing emerging, I don't know where it was coming from; just somewhere deep inside my being. Perhaps the emerging longing was some ancient memory and expectation that something was supposed to happen for me.

Staying the Course into a Rite of Passage

Later in the Spring of 1971, I was standing on a street corner at 10 years old with a large snapping turtle. And I had caught that turtle, but the friend who brought it to the street corner with me had to go and left me standing there and I couldn't get it any further. And that's when I met my neighbor, Tom.

Tom, his brother and parents lived a few houses down from me. Tom had been mentored since his boyhood along with his closest friend of the same age, since the age of seven, by his friend’s grandfather. Grandfather--as Tom refers to him--was an elder Apache Scout, who had never really joined the modern world. He had managed, with his people, to evade detection and capture. They lived on a cash economy for decades. Grandfather and his people managed to keep their language, their ways of mentoring, subsistence skills, connection to and knowledge of the plants and animals, birds and the cultural ways of their ancestors. This included a powerful set of awareness skills including accurately reading the tracks and signs of wildlife and people, and understanding the meaning of the subtle language of birds and animals. This body of knowledge and skill was passed to the children that they were raising, and this included Tom, though he was the son of Scottish immigrants.

When the Apache wars settled in the late 19th century, Grandfather and his people felt safe to move again. Grandfather’s son was in the armed services and stationed near where Tom was raised in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. Grandfather ended up living with his son in New Jersey, and became the grandparent caring for the young children in that household, similar to how I had grown up.

Those two young boys starting at the age of seven went on a true Rite of Passage: a long mentoring journey with this incredible elder who taught them all the ways of bird language and tracking and all the skills they needed to survive and thrive in the natural world. They learned about shelter and fire and many other skills over the course of 11 years. As a young man, my mentor Tom moved to the neighborhood where I currently resided. He was looking for someone to pass the mentoring to that Tom experienced with Grandfather. Grandfather had assigned Tom with this responsibility.

Tom saw me standing on the street corner with that giant turtle, asked me a few probing questions, recognized my passion and experience, and decided that I might be the one to receive his mentoring legacy. Tom tested me in many ways in those early days and weeks. I seemed to have passed the test.

Thus continued what my Grandmothers had started. I had stayed the course and my own journey deepened in a thorough Rite of Passage and Initiation into the deep skills and connections from Grandfather’s lineage. Tom masterfully facilitated a long and wonderful mentoring relationship with me that continues to this day. I am sixty, and Tom is seventy one. We stay in touch each day and are collaborating on an interesting project now.

Foundation of Curiosity & Passion

The errands that my grandmothers sent me on built up my own sense of intrinsic reward. In my adult years, as a mentor continuing this legacy of connection, I have seen the same in those whom I have served--and those served by this model by other experienced mentors. The routines built a kind of muscle-memory in our childhood nervous systems. This is an ancient and dependable response. We are literally born with this expectation in our nervous system--the culture will show up for us.

The routine of story sharing and catching is a critical building block and a dance partner to the errands themselves. It is as important to share the story of an errand with an unconditional and interested listener, as it is to go on the errand in the first place. Connection roots in our nervous system from both experience, and sharing those experiences with loved ones and mentors. The reward of these routines is to generate inner motivation within individuals served by this ancient process. This increases the curiosity and vitality in those involved. To both the storyteller and the story catcher. This, over time, gives over to passion for learning and living.

In my early teens, I became incredibly curious about everything--both in wild nature and in the world of people. This quality made me someone that my mentor could actually work with. Tom knew he needed someone with more than average curiosity and passion, who would go out and perform the errands and ever increasingly difficult tasks and subtle pattern learning that he assigned me on a daily basis. From 1971, until 1978, I wandered and explored the lands around our home and explored them ever deeper.

Through Tom’s mentoring and errands, I learned the tracks and signs, and the ways of all the animals and the birds. This built upon my foundation of understanding of the turtles, frogs, fish and other beings and elements of nature around me. Tom also cultivated my knowledge of the wild plants and their uses. And I learned the ways of fire and the skills of shelter. I was soon ready and able to live alone in the wilderness if I so chose.

Research into Connection Cultures

Instead, I went to college with a keen interest in studying cultural anthropology, psychology, world religions and natural history. Through this mentoring model, I had been brought into an understanding of bird language, which at the time scientists didn't even believe was possible. Now, science has caught up. In my book, What the Robin Knows, I lay out the patterns and the science. In those days, the idea of tracking and the idea of bird language were foreign to most people.

When I got to college, nobody seemed to know tracking or bird language. This surprised me. And, bird language was just one of the categories of things that I had been mentored through. In reflection on my own passions, I tried to understand why I had such love and passion for conservation, and wanted to understand why other people shared this conservation ethic.

Yet, as a young park naturalist, even some of my colleagues at the Monmouth County Park System didn't share my interest in preserving habitat and looking after wild things. I was very confused by this and wanted to understand the underlying psychology driving deep connection with nature.

It began to occur to me that the way I had been mentored in early boyhood, and then again in my later boyhood by my mentor, Tom, something had happened in me. I had grown more empathetic and more caring about the life around me. I was deeply committed to doing something about ways to help preserve habitat. I had worked as a conservation volunteer since the age of 16, and have always worked in and supported conservation efforts globally ever since.

I asked this question of myself,

“Could it be that something in this journey of connecting to nature had changed my heart and my way of seeing the world had shifted my values?”

And,

“Could it be that we could influence others towards a better way of tending the commons of nature for the benefit of all and for future generations?”

Through comparative cultural anthropology, I researched which cultures around the world were the best at connecting everyone to nature. I studied the patterns in the mentoring model of my grandmothers, and the mentoring model of my mentor, Tom Brown.

Universal Cultural Patterns of Connection

Through this I discovered that all over the world, all peoples, no matter what their cultural background, no matter what their lineage or history, all had a similar cultural pattern. The elders understood a map of land and creatures and beings, and cultivated curiosity, awareness, passion and connection in the children to their living neighbors, stars, sun, moon, weather, seasons and elements. This would ensure the best outcome for the children to survive and thrive as adults, it was part of their education system.

This mentoring also caused their hearts to open and for them to be caring and thinking about regenerating culture, but also regenerating land and resources for the next generation. So the blessings that they received in their life could be experienced by the generations to come. This is an instinct that emerges in all of us. This was also an instinct that emerged in me. Then I started to think,

“Well, what if we can influence culture?”

Influencing Culture through Mentoring

Reflecting back to my childhood, I saw the influence of different cultures within the larger cultural patterns. I had an amazing connective experience with my grandmothers interspersed with my family culture, back to my peers in school, and my friends in the neighborhood. I found something jarring and disconcerting about the difference between the way my grandmother's worked with me, my sister and cousins, versus the way my peers and my family culture when everyone was together and the grandparents weren't around. The experience was distinctly different.

It was a source of pain for me to be excited about something and to try to tell a friend or to try to tell my parents at the dinner table, then to be brushed off or dismissed or ridiculed for my interest and passion in those weird nature things. And that led me to think,

“Well wait, how can I cultivate better connections with friends and better connections with relatives?”

How can I make connection work, with people who may not be aware of disconnective cultural patterns? What if I could have people listen to my stories, and I can be there to listen to their stories. I made an effort to build relationships across all the different kinds of cliques in the high school that I attended. I made friends with the jocks. I made friends with the people who are super nerdy and geeky. I made friends with the “bad kids”--the ones that were on the edge and always in trouble. I made friends with those who were academically focused and achieving. I didn't really have an enemy in high school. Looking back now, I see that I had become a bridge builder interested in cultivating good relationships. We could listen to each other's stories.

The Role of Common Context in Connective Family Culture

I loved more than anything when I got home at dinner to tell stories to each other. Some scenarios that didn't work were the stories that my mother would ask for with the best of intentions,

“How was your day at school?”

My sister would roll her eyes and sigh rebelliously, and I would feel resistant. None of us shared the same common context, and this made for disconnective moments--not that anyone intended this outcome. This happens a lot with people today.

At the same time, when my mother said,

“Oh, Kim, and Jonathan, you know, I saw the groundhog today. He was up in the mulberry tree today and it was so funny. And there were so many birds, I saw that oriole.”

My sister and I would get really excited. The next day, we'd be looking for the groundhog in the mulberry tree. Sometimes we'd get lucky.

My mother would tell us about the song sparrow’s nest outside the front door. We would all then tell stories about the sparrow feeding its young. We'd tell stories about the robins or mourning doves singing.

These were family stories that brought us together, because there was a common context when we all talked about nature in our yard, such as the things that were seasonal that were happening that we could all experience.

If we talked about our different days, my mom at her real estate office, my dad at his office, Kim and her grade in high school, me and my grade in high school, there was no common context.

My dad, having grown up with a strong Irish influence was really good at recognizing those moments. He always shifted them by telling us a joke and sharing a humorous story and got us all laughing because humor was always something that could build common context.

Early Research

By the time I got to college, I was passionately inquiring as to,

“Where's connection coming actually from?”

I observed the patterns that people can connect to nature, and that people can connect to each other as people. I noticed that often the people who connected to nature are less interested in connecting to people.

It's almost as if nature was the place people went to get away from people. And as people built strong relationships with nature, they became agitated by people.

Also, the people who were only interested in connecting with people were hard to get to connect to nature.

This drove my research deeper into connection as a phenomenon.

Connection, whether it's with nature, or with people, follows a set of patterns and principles.

People in Groups

Early on it became apparent that groups seem to be self isolating. This is exaggerated today with the “echo chamber” effect of social media. Each group, with their different focuses and values emerge with their own unique culture--supporting connection (potentially) among that group’s members.

In high school, I was moving between the socially oriented people, and the people who were more nature focused, and who tended to be more oriented to small and safe groups of sensitive people. In the absence of “safe groups”, they tended to be loners. In my baseline pattern, I tended to be more of the loner type. My mentor, Tom, was certainly this way. Two of the people (besides me) that Tom was mentoring at this time also were loners--even outwardly expressing suspicion and projecting judgements towards people.

The Effect of Nature Connection on Connection with People

I began to study the dynamics between people that would lead them to connection with each other as well as with nature. I started to recognize that nature offered things to our neurophysiology and our well being that people-connection didn't offer, AND that people connection offered well being elements that nature didn't offer. And because of this understanding of the two patterns of connection, it seemed that the two need to be intentionally intertwined.

Later on, in the 1990s, my mentor Tom shared with me a diagram of two arrows. The two arrows formed a circle, but they didn't quite connect; somewhat like the Recycle symbol with only two arrows.

Tom told me that his Elder mentor, Grandfather, said that,

“Half of this circle is nature connection, and the other half is people connection.They need each other. One without the other would cause the wheel not to roll.”

All of a sudden, it all made sense to me. We need to cultivate both nature-connection and people-connection together. This led to an emergent realization:

We can influence people-connection by applying simple tools, which are well known and respected in many fields. One example is greeting one another in a present way. Another is catching each other’s “road dust” stories to help with a sense of arrival and deepening presence. A third, well-researched and supported tool, is offering simple gratitudes with one another before beginning an important conversation or meeting.

And we can influence nature-connection with simple errands and simple activities that can happen right in the backyard or anywhere that you find yourself--even in the city.

I began teaching a model based on my anthropology research starting in 1983. I researched, applied, tested and iterated this model and refined the model. From 1983 onward, my mission evolved.

At first I just applied that model working with children directly and experienced great results from the start. We saw that over time, with good mentoring support in both nature and people connection, children became more present, alive and creative. Their curiosity, motivation and drive to learn also increased. Parents noticed; especially the parents who knew these children--and whose own children were not receiving the mentoring. The differences were apparent. There were several parents who reported to us that their teens had overcome a number of anxiety-related conditions, addiction and depression. The young adults who had grown up in our program are described as wholesome, inspiring and incredible role models.

Second, starting in the 90s, the parents got really interested in what was working so well for the children we were serving with the model. My partner and Elder mentor, Ingwe and I, began teaching adults how to facilitate this model, and therefore become more effective with their children. I began to mentor adults, while mentoring children in the 90s.

The third shift in my mission emerged in the late 90s, I focused on training adults, and I published how to work in a connection-focused mentoring style with the children in a book called Coyote's Guide to Connecting with Nature.

And today my mission continues to evolve.

Meeting Peter Johnson

I met Peter Johnson a few years back at a workshop I was leading called Music, Nature & Storytelling. During that workshop, I was reflecting with people about the connection tools to make relationships with people stronger, which we were also using in our workshop and demonstrating. In other words, we were running the workshop using people-connection tools. We were also running nature-connection tools and activities and errands and weaving them back into the people-connection tools.

Emerging Attributes of Connection

What I've come to understand is that when we connect to nature, and to people, we connect better with ourselves. The most powerful design is balancing connection to self, nature and others. Experience has shown us that this approach opens up a whole aspect of our heart, and builds the capacity of our nervous system.

As a result we become happier. We become more vital, and more curious. We listen to each other more, and we listen unconditionally, and that really helps support catching each other's stories. This helps us to build on mentoring relationships. We develop empathy and we want to care for others. We develop the heart to help, and we become active in service to make things better for others. We develop deep respect and love for life itself. We become more loving, with a greater capacity for forgiveness. And, we develop a quiet mind, and much more creativity; our gifts and our genius begins to shine. These are the attributes of connection.

We studied these attributes from the late 90s, into the mid 2000s.

Vision and Mission for Connection

My vision is to bring these attributes of connection to everybody on the planet. It's a tremendous benefit, a birthright really, and nobody should suffer without it. Part of our birthright as human beings is to experience the full expression of our nervous system in full connection.

This level of connection simply will not happen without a healthy regenerative culture around a person. My grandmothers provided this for me as a boy. My mentor Tom did this for me as an older child and into my teens.

A healthy culture cultivates connections between people & people, people & themselves, and people to nature. The Mission is to support emerging healthy cultures in families, organizations and communities to reach the vision.

Over the years, our team isolated and identified simple tools for building and transforming culture. We began to teach them to families and discovered--to our relief and our complete exhilaration--that family cultures can shift. These tools can be learned and adopted.

When I met Peter, he reflected back to me that he was so relieved that he wasn't the only one noticing that connection was important, and that some experiences in life can be very disconnected. Also that family systems can cultivate disconnection instead of connection.

Why and how did families forget to be connective? Where did the culture get broken?

This cultural continuity usually got broken long before families immigrated into the United States. For instance, in England, my ancestors were conquered by the Romans, and that's when their culture was broken. In Ireland, my family ancestors were conquered by the British and that's where their family culture was compromised. In Poland, my ancestors were conquered by so many I lost count.

And, by the time my great grandparents arrived in America, they had only remnants of culture.

The fact that family culture is so often broken today, and the fact that family dynamics suffer is nobody's fault . It’s not the family who's living. We can't even blame it on Grandpa, or great grandpa, and this was a big relief to Peter.

“It's not our fault. And we can fix it.”

And yes, we can. This cemented mine and Peter's friendship. We began to communicate over the years, and we began to see the vision of Legacy Tracks. I had been working with Lonner Holden during this time on a project supporting a San Bushman community in the central Kalahari. Lonner, Peter and I would soon benefit from good and connective conversations.

Lonner brings a lot of gifts to our triad, which I'm sure if you read his story, you'll see a lot of similarity between Lonner and I. We both are great believers in mentoring. We're both great believers in healing family culture, as is Peter. We all appreciate nature’s softening influences and magic. This brought us together to begin to explore in a deliberate way how can we bring these tools into the family legacy challenge.

When Peter told me the grim statistics about legacy transfer, ending in litigation 90% of the time, both Lonner and I were shocked and horrified. We began to explore the idea of incorporating cultural mentoring into families. Perhaps this could shift the momentum in a more positive direction. Our team began to see that we needed to emerge and help others to understand our theory of change for Legacy Tracks and Regenerative Family Dynamics. We are dedicated to sharing the methodologies with professionals who serve legacy families. We are interested in having a conversation with experienced practitioners who serve legacy families to try to explore and understand how we might bring these valuable tools to more and more families and to help shift that 90% number the other way.