Hand Crafted Programs

Guided Hikes: Join Tes on a guided hike and explore the land and its inhabitants. The agenda depends on the season and what surprises the forest has to offer. Possibilities include: tree identification, wild and medicinal plants, animal tracks and signs, bird identification and language, and how to read the landscape to discover clues about its past, present, and future. Locations vary from Tes’s property in New Marlborough, MA, to local public wilderness areas.

Private Wild Parties: Wild parties happen in the woods (your place or mine). Invite friends to experience a day and/or overnight in the wild. With Tes’s guidance you can create your own personalized event. Kids parties can include fire making, cooking food over the campfire, all sorts of fun group games that explore and strengthen our wild skills, night stalking, and/or an overnight campout. Adult friends and/or family can customize a gathering in the woods. Some of the favorites are hanging out in the woods, making a campfire together and preparing organic food from Tes’s vegetable garden with wild foraged edibles thrown in, focusing on a primitive skill, a late afternoon fire with appetizers and drinks to welcome in the dark, or extending your party to include camping out and sharing connection and stories under a starry night sky. Moms, gather your daughters, their friends, and their moms, and head into the woods. Tes has years of experience and skill in hosting mother-daughter overnight campouts that are powerful at any age.

Primitive Fire Workshop: Join Tes and others interested in skill building for a daylong workshop of firemaking. Learn how to make the perfect one match teepee fire with only natural materials found in the forest around us. Learn about tinder collection, tinder-bundle making, and igniting fires with a steel/ferro rod. Witness and test out a bow-drill set (ancient friction-fire method) and begin making your own set to take home. Use the campfire we make to prepare your lunch and enjoy the warmth of connecting with others.

Foraging Wild Edibles and Primitive Cooking Workshop: Spend the first half of the day combing the landscape finding and foraging wild edible and medicinal plants. Then get a quick fire-making lesson and build a campfire for cooking. Together we create a menu and prepare some additions for a collective lunch. Be surprised and grateful for the bounty and powerful nutrition the earth has to offer while deepening our connection with the natural world and each other.

Solo Retreats: Need to escape, rest, and reconnect with yourself and the natural world? Book some private time in Tes’s newly built, off-the-grid, adorable 10’x12’ cabin in her woods. You choose the length and conditions of your stay. Go minimalist and carry in only what you want to bring. Or hire Tes to guide, supply, and pamper you with visits, equipment, and delicious homemade organic meals.

Your Forest or Mine – Learn the Land: Would you like to know your land better, or a particular habitat in your area? Tes can take you on a wander of your choice and help you identify and learn about what grows on your property, who lives there, and who moves through the territory. Tes is filled with stories and teachings that spark curiosity and wonder, deepening your connection to the natural world.

Parenting Consultant: With 20 years of working with children between the ages of 4 and 24 and raising two daughters (now in their 30s), Tes can provide personalized individual and group consultations and experiences for parents and their families to help them grow in healthy ways. How do we keep up with the times, and the constraints of social norms without losing ourselves? Tes believes the antidote is a return to the wild. Learning how to take care of oneself in the natural world, face and overcome challenges, and use newly acquired skills, helps grow inner strength and perseverance, and builds character and self-worth. Over the decades Tes has helped hundreds of young people to find their voice and inner strength through a nature-based lens: that respect for all living things helps each of us navigate the overscheduled modern world.

Speaking Engagements: Tes is a lively, entertaining story teller and speaker whose enthusiasm and humor can ignite a crowd of any demographic or size. She can speak extensively about her lifelong connection to nature, but she is also a motivational speaker on health, protecting the environment, and joyful living. You can find her giving talks at community events and venues throughout the year.

Tes’s TedX Talk:
https://www.ted.com/talks/tes_reed_our_roots_matter_jan_2019

CONTACT ME FOR PROGRAM INFORMATION AND SIGNING UP: tesreed01230@gmail.com