OUR STORY
Our story begins at a moment in time from 1995 to 2009, when cultural historian and ecotheologian Thomas Berry retired to the foothills of North Carolina to be near his family and the land he had known intimately as a child. It was in the foothills that eleven-year-old Thomas Berry experienced a moment of grace in a meadow near his home that became a touchstone for his life and work. It was in the foothills that the seeds of his vision for a sacred earth community were sown.
Our work with Thomas Berry began on October 12, 2000 at Timberlake Earth Sanctuary, when the Center brought Thomas together with Richard Lewis, Founder of the Touchstone Center for Children in New York City, for a retreat with educators entitled, The Primordial Imperative: Nature, Education and Imagination. Thomas spoke to us eloquently that day in a conversation that was to be the first of many conversations we would have with him about children and the earth. On that day, he told us that “the destiny of the children and the planet is going to depend on us to respond to their deeper mode of being.”
Over the years, as we worked closely with Thomas, we were deeply moved by a passage he wrote in 2003 in his Foreword to Thomas Merton’s When the Trees Say Nothing that was to become a guiding quote for the Center’s work:
“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. A deep psychic shift is needed to withdraw us from the fascination of the industrial world and the deceptive gifts that it gives us... Eventually, only our sense of the sacred will save us.”
We were beginning to understand the full significance of what Thomas was telling us. The “deep psychic shift” was much more than environmental activism, than learning new information “about” the earth, or substituting one worldview for another. Thomas was talking about the very nature of consciousness itself, and he was telling us to go deeper. “The basic difficulty,” he said, “lies deeper in the human mind and emotions than is generally recognized.”
We were being called, through our relationship with Thomas Berry, to imagine a way forward for children and those who work with children that would open up a space for an I-Thou rather than an I-It relationship with the natural world – a way forward that would mirror Thomas Berry’s recognition that the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects to be used.
And so, a work began at the Center in the form of practices that would invite children and educators into an experience with the natural world as a “mode of sacred presence primarily to be communed with in wonder, beauty and intimacy.” The depth we were seeking brought us directly into the realm of Silence, as well as imaginal, intuitive and contemplative ways of knowing. We moved gradually into practices that cultivated a sympathetic union with the natural world – practices that shifted our perception of the natural world from the “surface of things” to one where we perceived the particularity of each subject of the natural world as a “thou”. These practices cultivated a meeting – a mutually enhancing relationship – between the human being and the natural world.
Through our programs, we began to make ourselves deeply available to a sacred universe by offering loving attention to the natural world and bringing ourselves into the deeper Presence that surrounds us. Unlike many mindfulness practices in which “attention” is a goal in itself, in our practices the intention has been “relationship” and “resonance”. We behold the natural world in a deeply listening and receptive way. We behold with a loving eye and an open heart. Our practices might be viewed as “holding at bay” our habitual ways of “knowing about” and accumulating information. Through these practices, we awaken the unitive imagination, that more subtle faculty which unifies and moves us beyond the dualism of an I-It relationship with the world.
From 2000-2021, we created, saved, wrote and shared a body of practices, field notes, journal entries, essays and books with those who experienced our programs. We then entered a new phase of the Center where we engaged in 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.
The Center was guided by a Council of Educators from 2012-2024 as a working embodiment of its mission to recover the inner vision of a society in harmony with nature. Council members were all graduates of the Center’s Inner Life of the Child in Nature program.
BOARD WISDOMS
Center history