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Movement Inspiration 6/11/14 Build a Fort
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Movement Inspiration 6/11/14 Build a Fort

When I reflect back to childhood and think about how I expressed manipulative movement capacities then, one of the biggest themes was fort building. My brother, my cousins and I would spend hours, day after day in the summer building forts in the forest we were quite ambitious including catapults, stone ovens, scouting towers, beds and obstacle courses, we spent 3 months at one point chopping down a giant douglas fir tree with machetes to build a causeway over a canyon on one side of our fort.

While not all children get the chance to explore this type of play as deeply as we did most people can remember forts made of pillows in their house, or sticks in the yard. Building shelter is an essential skill for human survival in most environments, and I think it plausible that we have some innate drive to explore the capacities of building.

Fort building is not of course the most efficient path to building strong muscles to help you jump farther, or bigger muscles to make girls or boys take notice of you, but try it and you might find it still calls forth a childlike sense of joy in you.

You can play it in whimsical way with small child in your life, using pillows and couch cushions or if you vroaden your interest beyond movement culture, shelter building is key component of survival training, or moving away from forts building is a great skill to complement your movement training by building yourself vault boxes, scaffolding set ups, and climbing walls or of course it can be form of art and mediation like building stacks of rocks at the beach.

For inspiration check out this awesome tree fort my Dad built and then go build something for fun today.

Tree fort

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