Board Wisdoms

The Spiritual Context

The spiritual context of the Center for Education, Imagination and the Natural World is guided by the thinking of geologian Thomas Berry as expressed in his writings and talks, including The Dream of the Earth, The Universe Story (with Brian Swimme), The Great Work, Evening Thoughts and The Sacred Universe.

Board Members of the Center take as their starting place Thomas Berry’s understanding “that the universe from the beginning has been a psychic-spiritual, as well as a physical-material reality” (Evening Thoughts, 57). From this perspective, the Earth is experienced as our primary mode of divine presence.

Within the context of this reality, the board of the Center acknowledges that “we are constantly drawn toward a reverence for the mystery and magic of the earth and the larger universe with a power that is leading us away from our anthropocentrism to this larger context as our norm of reality and value” (Dream of the Earth, 17).

Furthermore, the Board acknowledges that we live in a time-developmental universe and that the human being has a particular role to play in earthly evolution. From Thomas Berry’s perspective, “the earth…is finding its way…to interior conscious expression in the human” (Dream, 47). Another way to express this would be to say that “the human needs to be seen as that being in whom the universe and especially the planet Earth becomes conscious of itself in a special mode of reflective self-awareness” (Evening Thoughts).

Taking Thomas Berry’s oeuvre as a touchstone for its work, the Board makes a commitment to the ongoing study of Thomas Berry’s work in the true spirit of a council in which board members enter into the living experience of the differing viewpoints in the souls of each other in order to come to living insight.

Therefore, in the context of the spiritual, we recognize

that all is sacred – alive and expressive,
that we have our place within this psychic-spiritual universe in mutuality and intimacy,
that as a board we must attend to that mutuality and intimacy.

To attend means to be present, to care for. In this sense, the board must attend to the Center and the wider Natural World in which it dwells by purposely functioning within the above mutuality and intimacy. In so doing, we meet the universe with recognition and empathy. To attend to our responsibility entails connection more by empathy and less by analysis, resulting in direction by recognition rather than conclusion in the usual sense.

Current practice for institutional decision-making relies heavily on the approaches and values of a culture that see the Natural World as a resource, as a means to human ends. Most of our institutions and their boards have generally focused on specific institutional objectives without trying to see the connections between their decisions and the greater natural world as a psychic-spiritual reality.

In contrast, the Center Board recognizes the need to adopt a different model for decision-making, one that we hope will sustain board consciousness of the reality of our belonging to the natural world as a psychic-spiritual reality. Therefore, we make it our sacred intention to proceed with a new type of respectful listening, to pause with our questions and hold them without insistence on a specific kind of answer, and wait. This approach embraces our connection to the larger locus of meaning and fosters a reverence that is expressive of willingness to listen, to hear and attend. Attention, as the mystic Simone Weil reminds us, is a form of prayer, and we feel that our life as a board should be marked by such reverence.

To that end, we collectively and individually recognize that we are living beings of the Natural World and that we share our world with other living beings in a sacred community, and our decisions affect others with whom we share the Earth.

To facilitate our consciousness of that sacred connection, the Board will begin its meetings by ritually celebrating our belonging to the more-than-human world (that we are as much a part of the Natural World as any flower or critter). In this space of acknowledged belonging, of humility and openness-to-recognition, we will collectively wait in Silence, offering our listening to that-which-is-greater-than-we. In this way, we invite the larger locus of meaning to bless us as the middle point of the Circle and sacred focus of our attention so that we may engage our specific business as a board.

That larger locus of meaning, that-which-is-greater-than-we, we may sometimes refer to succinctly as the Mystery. As a board, we will embrace our place within the whole by acknowledging and revering the Mystery.

Our decisions as a Board require that we be in rhythm with the Natural World and the Mystery. When we, as a communion of Presence, recognize a course of action has announced itself out of the matrix of our journey within the Mystery, that recognition partakes of the larger locus of meaning, brings us the gift of Wisdom, and deserves our trust and commitment. Another way of speaking about this would be to say that the Board listens for the emergence of the Divine Feminine in our time.

Such an approach to decision-making must begin with personal preparation and move into group preparation until we experience that we are moving and breathing in rhythm with the Natural World, that we feel our immersion in the Mystery. The preparations that assist our openness to directions include:

Taking time to look back at what has been clear in the past and has been unfolding over time to see if we recognize gestation and, if so, what strands have been weaving themselves together
Silence. We offer a question, perhaps, but then contain the energy of the question by letting it nest within us until we are still. When we are still, there is no expectation. We are in a place to recognize.
This openness to the Mystery makes possible a unifying space (among the group and of the group with the Natural World/Mystery) that is invitational and responsive. This, it appears, is where group recognition can happen.

For us on the board of The Center, the above reflections establish the greater context for all that follows in this document.

The Institutional Context:

The Center for Education, Imagination and the Natural World is a 501(c)(3) organization that was founded in the year 2000. The following mission statement of the Center was adopted on May 9, 2006:

Mission Statement

The mission of the Center for Education, Imagination and the Natural World is to bring to life a new vision of the relationship between the inner life of the child and the beauty, wonder and intimacy of the universe.

Presently, the natural world is viewed as a commodity to be used rather than as a sacred reality to be venerated. A shift in our way of relating to the natural world is essential if we hope to participate in nature’s unfolding rather than in its demise. This shift is nowhere more crucial than within the field of education where the child’s way of relating to the natural world is formed.

The Board of Trustees, together with the Center staff, holds the trust of the Center, consciously guiding it to fulfill its mission while staying close to its foundation in the thoughts of Thomas Berry over the course of the Center’s growth and development. We were gifted with the following quote from Thomas Berry in July 2008:

Today, in this crucial moment of history, we are called to recover the inner vision of a society in harmony with nature, and the urgency of reciprocity of care between ourselves and our environment.

This newly recognized relationship between us and the surrounding natural world rests on our experience of its wonder, beauty, and call to intimacy. In preserving and augmenting these responses, we realize, perhaps never before so vividly, that, as the consciousness of that world, we have an indispensable role to play. More than just protection against pollution and extinction of life forms, that role calls us, further, to revere Earth as that community of which we are a part, the source of our life and livelihood, and, above all, the primary means of our recognition of and communication with the divine.

The Center restores a relationship with the natural world based not on a view of other beings as objects to be used, but as subjects to be communed with in an integral and sacred society.

The Center is a perfect context for the continuity of this work with children and the sacred. It has brought joy in the last years of my life, for the children have always been closest to my heart.

The Board also holds in trust the following quote from Thomas Berry and Vision Statement that describe our way of working toward a communion of subjects.

“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.”

~ Thomas Berry

Vision Statement (adopted in 2011)

The Center for Education, Imagination and the Natural World is a leading advocate and model of a view of educational practice in which intuitive, imaginal and contemplative ways of knowing, in all their unifying capacities, are seen as central to the development of a mutually enhancing relationship between the human being and the natural world. Such a view, if practiced at all levels of learning, can begin to change our understanding of the role we play within this life-bearing process we know as “nature.”

Through its programs for educators and children, the Center is a national resource – a remarkable gestating environment – for reflection and practice that is leading to practical outcomes affecting the child, the natural world, and the culture at large.

In a spirit of shared governance, the Board’s primary responsibility is to exercise leadership in the legal and financial domains of the Center, while the staff’s responsibility is leadership in the educational spheres.

In particular, there are four principal responsibilities of the Board under North Carolina statutes for non-profit organizations:

The Board establishes for itself a way of working that is compatible with the mission of the Center that enables it to fulfill its responsibilities to the Center. This includes procedures for arriving at decisions and developing the Board itself, for example.
The Board, with guidance from the Director, establishes the Center’s mission, develops the strategic plan, and reviews the Center’s policies to make sure they are effective, well managed, and consonant with the Center’s ethos.
The Board is responsible for the Center’s legal and financial operations and for facility rental agreements. The Board approves the annual operating budget and receives an annual audit or review of the Center’s financial operations and assets. The Board makes sure that facility rentals are adequate for the Center’s programs. The Board bears primary responsibility for the financial stability of the Center and for fundraising.
The Board selects the Director and works cooperatively with that person.

In its meetings, the Board acknowledges the more-than-human world by allowing time to be present to the natural world and also allowing time to be in the presence of Silence. These practices encourage board members to listen to Earth and Spirit as they work together on behalf of the Center.

Board members seek to work together in freedom as a living community and acknowledge that more can be brought about in knowledge and action through the union of individuals than by the same individuals, each standing alone.

The Board views itself as a “council” – a consulting “together” – and affirms that it is through the inner activity of experiencing and harmonizing the differing perspectives in the souls of others that the group comes to living insight.

Leadership in the board shall be mobile – a free function that moves around within the group depending on the needs of the situation and expertise of individual members.

Board members recognize that they are sometimes entrusted with confidences that should not go beyond Board meetings. It is the responsibility of Board members to be conscious of confidential issues and to maintain confidentiality in relation to them.

Board members agree to make a financial contribution to the Center each year in keeping with their resources.

Board members agree to attend all quarterly board meetings each year and to devote time to one of the working groups of the board outside of board meetings.

For a history of Center Board Members, click here.