CENTER HISTORY

When ecogeologian Thomas Berry retired to Greensboro, NC in 1995, one of his close friendships was with Carolyn Toben.  Carolyn was first introduced to Thomas Berry’s work in 1978 by his sister Theresa.  Many years later, Carolyn visited Thomas at the Riverdale Center in New York and remembers that first meeting as marked by “extraordinary graciousness and hospitality.”

After her husband’s death in 1999, Carolyn inherited Timberlake Farm Earth Sanctuary in Whitsett, NC just outside of Greensboro. For over three decades the 165 acres of woods, meadows, ponds, and trails had been the family home. Wishing to preserve and protect the farm, Carolyn was unsure what the future would hold.  After discussions with Thomas she requested colleagues from the fields of history, geology, art, music, and creative writing to assemble at the Farm to imagine how to proceed. For the next ten years Thomas’ inspiration guided the development of the Center for Education, Imagination and the Natural World at Timberlake Earth Sanctuary. 

In March 2000, Carolyn formally established the nonprofit Center with the emerging mission of “bringing to life a new vision of the relationship between the inner life of the child and the beauty, wonder, and intimacy of the universe.”  During the ensuing years Thomas met frequently with Carolyn and Center staff to further develop the creative context within which the organization would evolve. These conversations were later shared by Carolyn in her book, Recovering a Sense of the Sacred: Conversations With Thomas Berry, published in 2012.

“The life of the child,” Thomas reminded us,

“has always been organized around a real abiding world of beauty, wonder, and the intimacy of living processes....the wind, frogs, butterflies...not a manufactured electronic world of virtual reality. The child has a natural bond of intimacy with the natural world, a remarkable sense of identification with all living things.” (RSS, 96) 

“The long term survival of our children,” he continued,

“will actually depend on a new relationship between the natural and the human worlds.  Children need to develop within a whole cosmology of the sun, moon, stars; they need to awaken to a world to relate to as a communion of subjects, not to use as a collection of objects.  Relationships are the primary context of existence, and children need to see us practice a sympathetic presence to the earth, as a means for being in a mutually enhancing relationship to it.” (RSS, 98)

Center staff began to practice a sympathetic presence to the Earth with children on Timberlake trails that nurtured a bond of intimacy with the natural world, as Thomas continued to encourage and inspire.  Programs like Awakening to Nature, Empathetic Listening, and the Poetry of Nature created a context where children experienced a living and loving relationship with the Earth.

In 2006, the Center initiated a two-year program, The Inner Life of the Child in Nature: Presence and Practice, where this learning could be shared with educators and others with children in their care.  The program culminated in a collection of practices created by participants during their second year.  In 2011, many of these essays were published in Only the Sacred: Transforming Education in the Twenty-first Century, edited by Peggy Whalen-Levitt.  The collection includes Thomas’ essay “Our Children, Their Future.”  In 2004, the Center began to publish a biannual journal, Chrysalis, where this emerging work with children and educators was shared.

Having returned to his birthplace in the foothills of North Carolina during the last fourteen years of his life, Thomas returned also to the meadow that inspired a moment of grace in his childhood that became a touchstone for his life and work.  The Center’s programs for children and those with children in their care were intended to provide today’s children with their own “Meadow Across the Creek” moments.  “The Center,” Thomas wrote shortly before his death in 2009, “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.” 

With the Great Recession and its aftermath, profound changes followed for Timberlake as privately owned land and for the Center as a non-profit organization.  In 2012, Timberlake Earth Sanctuary, LLC, was formed as a Toben family business.  With this transition, the Center was asked to wind down its operations on the land as Timberlake opened its doors to a wide range of individuals, organizations and groups in order to preserve and maintain the earth sanctuary in perpetuity. 

There was mutual recognition that the Center would need to continue in a new form.  On June 18, 2011, Carolyn wrote the following letter to the Center board:

In the midst of all this, the idea of an Educator’s Council, or a Faculty Council had come forth, and I realized that this fit the understanding of changing the form in which the Center had been operating, that indeed the leadership of the Center needed to be expanded in a time in which its mission was more needed than ever before. And that this work needs to reach a wider audience as it plays its part in a continuing unfolding of a sacred story, a creative story and a story that now needs from each of you your deepest considerations and deepest prayers.

In 2012, an Educator Council was formed, composed of graduates of the Center’s Inner Life of the Child in Nature Program, to hold in trust the mission of the Center, which remained unchanged: 

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 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. 

From 2012-2020, the Center was able to offer its programs on a program-by-program rental basis at Timberlake Earth Sanctuary, while its offices moved to the Director’s home. These eight years were a time of deepening the work, both on the programmatic and publishing level, supported by the Kalliopeia Foundation.  

Under the leadership of Director of Children’s Programs, Sandy Bisdee, the Center deepened its work with Awakening to Nature, Empathetic Listening, The Poetry of Nature and our Thomas Berry Summer Programs for Children.  Under the leadership of Director, Peggy Whalen-Levitt, we continued to offer our two-year program for educators, The Inner Life of the Child in Nature: Presence and Practice, and our seasonal Presence With Living Earth programs for adults. In 2014, we created a performance piece, The Meadow Across the Creek: Words From Thomas Berry, for the Thomas Berry Centennial at the Greensboro Historical Museum.   

Publications expanded in 2015 with our Emergence Series authored by those close to the Center who were carrying the work forward in new and promising ways: All the Scattered Leaves of the Universe: Journey and Vision in Dante’s Divine Comedy and the Work of Thomas Berry by Andrew Levitt; I am You, You are Me: The Interrelatedness of Self, Spirituality and the Natural World in Childhood by Colette Segalla; and Opening Forgotten Sanctuaries: Recognizing Education as Sacred Encounter by Clay Lerner. In 2017, we published Heron Mornings, a collection of poetry by Andrew Levitt.  

During this time, the Educator Council evolved as a Wisdom Circle to hold a deep sense of the sacred at the heart of the work.  This was a profound phase of transition for the Center in which the Educator Council was formed to support the Life of the Center with patience, devotion and care.

Then, in March of 2020, the Pandemic put the world on pause for more than a year and brought the Center into a place of deep listening.  The Educator Council responded to the Pandemic from a place of depth and wisdom:

At the Center, we have a deep sense that we are being called into “not knowing”; that old and habitual ways are being dissolved; that we find ourselves in a place of deep receptivity with this moment in time.  We see the Center’s work of surrendering – of being within the unfolding story – as a way to assist in uncovering the veil of Love that is Earth’s destiny. As Thomas Berry has said, “Earth was born of divine love and will survive only through our human love.”  We welcome a slowing and a pause to listen. 

Within this slowing, the Center opened a space to reflect on the evolution of its work since its beginnings. In the twenty years from 2000-2020, the Center created, saved and shared a body of practices, field notes, journal entries, essays and books with those who have experienced our programs. We then entered a new phase of the Center where we began a two-year process of synthesizing and contextualizing this body of work to share with a wider audience.  

During this time, from 2021-2023, we graduated the Inner Life of the Child in Nature class of 2022, but our other program offerings remained dormant. Our monthly reflections and the publication of our journal, Chrysalis, continued as usual.  In May 2023, we published The Place of Our Belonging: A Work for Children and Educators Mentored by Thomas Berry. 

Following the publication of The Place of Our Belonging, the Educator Council of the Center recognized that the essence of the Center was now living and radiating throughout the world, both through those who have experienced our programs and now, also, through those who have held our publications in their hands and have been inspired to bring forth new emanations of the work.

A feeling of completion rested within us.

As we pondered the future of the Center, we felt resonance with these words of “Beyond Endings” by John O’Donohue:

“Creatures made of clay with porous skins and porous minds are quite incapable of the hermetic sealing that the strategy of “closure” seems to imply. The word completion is a truer word. Each experience has within it a dynamic of unfolding and a narrative of emergence….

The nature of calendar time is linear; it is made up of durations that begin and end. The Celtic imagination always sensed that beneath time there was an eternal depth. This offers us a completely different way of relating to time. It relieves time of the finality of ending. While something may come to an ending on the surface of time, its presence, meaning, and effect continue to be held into the eternal. This is how spirit unfolds and deepens. In this sense, eternal time is intimate; it is where the unfolding narrative of individual life is gathered and woven. Eternal life is eternal memory; therefore it becomes possible to imagine a realm beyond endings where all that has unfolded is not canceled or lost, but where the spirit depths of it are already arriving home.”

Through this process, we recognized that the moment had come to bring the Center, in its nonprofit form, to an “ending on the surface of time” in June 2025 – the 25th  year of our work.  And we recognized that there is a realm beyond this ending “where all that has unfolded is not canceled or lost, but where the spirit depths of it are already arriving home.”

References

John O’Donohue, “Beyond Endings” in To Bless the Space Between Us (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 156-157.