My experience here has been amazing, but there is one thing that is very unsettling. The sheep don’t want to be my friend, the rocks are ugly, the wheat is stale, the brick crumbles, and the wood is rotten. Pass me that Devo Card! You Silly Goose, I’m not talking about Chewonki’s resources, I’m referring to the land of Catan! I’d have to say that I am a strong competitor, but there are some people (and I refuse to use names) that block my roads to success. Whenever I can, I crush their chances, Read More

Chewonki is a place of change. During the semester we’ve seen an amazing alteration-- in ourselves, our community dynamic, and our relationship with the rest of the world. Some changes are not quite so grand and yet still incredibly important. Little things, like the change of the view from our cabin doors are as surprising as any epiphanies we come to on our many walks through the wilderness. Each morning we step out at 6:45 (probably running late for morning gather) and run into a different Read More

In Greenwich Mean Time, fifteen minutes doesn’t seem like a significant amount of time, but at Chewonki, arriving at the farm at 6:30 while all of the other cabins are allotted a luxurious fifteen minutes of extra sleep before the world mandates their appearance at morning gather at 6:45, it’s a big deal. As we rub the sleep out of our eyes and watch the farm cart struggle through the potholes, the sun begins to rise. We split up and tackle our chores, letting the silence slowly ease away as Read More

What do you do on a chilly rainy day? A mud rove! Just imagine running through the woods with all of your  friends.  There is no better feeling than running with friends who you’ve slowly grown to love for the past three months. “Friends” doesn’t just include the teenagers, but also teachers. There is no divide in the moment because all of us had one goal in common: to have fun. Although the mud was quite slimy, it was perfect. The drizzling rain and the chilly air barely mattered as we Read More

The joys of a sunny afternoon guitar jam are not to be underestimated, with flaring eyes and flying fingers and noise, noise, noise to keep me standing up. I'm exhausted, five hours of sleep for three nights, my irregular sleep schedule of 5:00 AM wakeups catching up to me, and Neil Young's “Down By The River” is making for one hell of a jam. The place is the Osprey Lodge, a lovely dilapidated building with bird sized holes in the walls, occasional birds flying through at night, a ping pong Read More

Sometime last week, just after dinner, I was making the short walk between the Wallace and the library (my study space) and was not at all in the mood to do homework. As I neared the doors of the Allen center, however, I noticed two of my classmates, Jen and Peter, standing outside of the doors seemingly doing nothing. Confused, I approached, and saw a tiny black and white bird just sitting outside of the doorway completely still. It was in shock, having just flown into one of the Allen center’s Read More

As the semester progressed, I found my expectations and what I wanted to get out of my Phenology block each week began to change. Instead of working on the drawing of a hemlock tree that I was supposed to be doing, I started meditating for long periods of time with my eyes closed, just listening to the sounds of the forest, or sitting and just looking at things – a red squirrel darting up a tree, the tiny irregularities of different twigs, the things that were living in the ground beneath my Read More

Where is Baylor? So, can you read who’s blogging this week? Where are my snow pants? Where are Pehtar’s facial hairs? Any announcements? Carob? (3 months into the semester) What time is dinner? Red Tailed Hawk vs. Red Tailed Hawk on a stick? Father Ben? Bredman? Ben Red Squirrel? Nope. Kj kj (?) Where’s your blog? Why is there baby in my cake? Maya vs. Red Squirrel and her mailbox? Dishcrew 5 Lyllie vs. glass? So who did their sustainability homework? Anyone? –Ruth (credited to Read More

Today was my cabin's last day of farm chores! It was so sad to think about how I was doing every chore for the last time. For the past two weeks, my cabin has woken up at 6 o’clock and has rolled out of bed by 6:15.  Here is a typical day on morning farm chores: We first head to the kitchen to pick up the Slop and Compost (Slop is leftover edible food waste that we feed to the chickens and compost is all other food waste such as banana peels or coffee grinds). At the farm, I take care of Sal, Read More

Dear Chewonki blog readers, Earlier this morning we finished the yearbook for semester 46. While I would love to tell you as co-head that all went smoothly and as planned, I can’t. As expected with a large undertaking like this, everything that could go wrong did. Nothing was finished on time; we had to convert all of the word documents into pdfs; the computer we were using was having trouble with this conversion; we almost didn’t have a class photo; we didn’t do any tangible work until two Read More