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A caterpillar
this deep in fall –
still not a butterfly
~ Matsuo Basho
Welcome to the Archival Website of the Center for Education, Imagination and the Natural World, a nonprofit organization that operated in the foothills of North Carolina from 2000-2024.
The evolution of the Center co-evolved with the return of geologian Thomas Berry to his native Greensboro, NC in 1995, where he lived and worked for the last fourteen years of his life until his death on June 1, 2009.
Through Thomas Berry’s story of an unfolding universe, we became deeply aware of the transition from a living phase of a flourishing Earth to our present phase of death and destruction that is still “deep in fall” and removed from the breath of life. In his prophetic words for the Center, Thomas Berry wrote:
“There is a different way of knowing. The Center for Education, Imagination and the Natural World is about this other mode of consciousness. What you are doing at the Center is fundamental and deeply important at this time in history. The children of the twenty-first century will determine the fate of this planet. The twentieth century was a century of death and destruction. The twenty-first must be a century of life. The Center is giving children integral experiences, validating experiences to give immediacy to the natural world in the course of their own human development as an emerging consciousness in our time.”
This century of life will require a “deep psychic shift,” as Thomas referred to it:
“There is a certain futility in the efforts being made—truly sincere, dedicated, and intelligent efforts–to remedy our environmental devastation simply by activating renewable sources of energy and by reducing the deleterious impact of the industrial world. The difficulty is that the natural world is seen primarily for human use, not as a mode of sacred presence primarily to be communed with in wonder, beauty and intimacy. In our present attitude the natural world remains a commodity to be bought and sold, not a sacred reality to be venerated. The deep psychic shift needed to withdraw us from the fascination of the industrial world and the deceptive gifts that it gives us is too difficult for simply the avoidance of its difficulties or the attractions of its benefits. Eventually, only our sense of the sacred will save us.” (Foreword, When the Trees Say Nothing, 18-19)
These words from Thomas Berry suggest that the noosphere–or mind sphere–alone will not bring forth a consciousness that embraces the natural world as a “mode of sacred presence primarily to be communed with in wonder, beauty and intimacy.”
Thomas was calling upon us to make a deep psychic shift from the realm of cerebral intellectuality that permeates the noosphere into a deeper realm of interiority that he referred to as “an emerging world of subjective intercommunion”–a world that generally resides outside of our schooling and our dominant cultural coding.
Again, Thomas offers wisdom:
“(We) have been hesitant to enter profoundly into the inner reality of the created world in terms of affective intimacy. We do not hear the voices of the natural world. We tend to be autistic to relation to the non-human beings.” (The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth, 38)
In regard to “stewardship” Thomas writes:
“It does not seem to provide us with the feeling qualities needed to alter the destruction presently taking place throughout the planet. The doctrine of stewardship may be too extrinsic a mode of relating… It does not establish any intimate presence of ourselves with the world about us.” (The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth, 41)
And then this from Thomas about love:
“Earth entire was born of divine love and will survive only through human love. (We) are ineffective just now largely because we have not understood the need of compassion for suffering Earth, the compassion expressed by Saint Paul in his reference to the world ‘groaning for deliverance.’” (The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth, 71)
In all its work and endeavors from 2000-2024, the Center for Education, Imagination and the Natural World devoted itself to this shift from the noosphere to what some have called the kardiasphere. Through the cultivation of affective intimacy, intimate presence and subjective communion with the Earth, we heard and responded to the echoing words of Thomas Berry: “The twenty-first century must be a century of life.”
References:
Thomas Berry, Foreword, When Trees Say Nothing by Thomas Merton, edited by Kathleen Diegnan (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 2003).
Thomas Berry, The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2009).