Feeding Our Minds and Hearts

From coursework to workshops with K-12 students, to presentations in church basements and Rotary Clubs, education is central to the work of New Perennials. Just as agriculture feeds our bodies, education feeds our minds and hearts. Education shapes how families, communities, and societies transmit their most central values. In the transition away from traditional and ecologically destructive annual agriculture and toward more perennial and diverse alternatives, New Perennials seeks to grow the cultural capacity for perenniality and diversity not just in agriculture, but also in education, the arts, health and wellness, and in our daily lives.

It began in a Middlebury College classroom. The Perennial Turn is a team-taught course that explores thoughts and thinkers, embodied learning, and contemplative practices to help us find new and ancient pathways that help us live good lives in just and restorative ways. Community partners work with our students on local and regional issues. Students are paired with community partners in five areas: food and farming, teaching and learning, health and wellness, creative and performing arts, and faith and sacred practice traditions. The course culminates in a daylong conference where students and partners share their works with a broader audience.

We use the term “perennial turn” to describe ancient and recent ways of knowing that point to discoveries in fields as varied as cosmology, quantum physics, evolutionary and ecosystem biology, and systems science. These discoveries increasingly reveal a Universe and Earth that are alive, creative, emergent, long-lasting, and diverse in ways we have not even imagined. It seems that our ancestors knew much of this for thousands, if not thousands of thousands, of years and honored this sacredness of existence in ways that have largely fallen out of favor. As we collaborate within our region, the course brings together theory and ideas with the real-time practices that our partners bring forth in their many ways. We explore questions focused on what is needed now for healthy minds, bodies, and spirits in a world where societies and ecosystems are breaking apart.

In the last 200 years, much has been written about the need for fundamental changes in human ways of doing and being, including how we grow food; view “otherness” and treat other human and non-human beings; teach and learn; practice healing, including the approach and “management” of death and dying; and view, practice, and talk about religion and spirituality in society. The course considers these areas to be ripe for transformation and explores the interrelationships among 1) annual-disturbance surplus-agriculture, 2) the thought systems and hierarchical state-societies that co-emerged with agriculture in many places around the world, and 3) imaginative ways forward that offer just, reasonable, and resilient alternatives alongside an emergent perennial and diverse agriculture.

The turn to perennial thinking is a long game. It requires a deep dive into a different way of being human, a way whose details we can only imagine, and we cannot come anywhere close to fully imagining it. The turn from human devastation of Earth to humans as a mutually beneficial member of the Earth community is part of what Thomas Berry has called “The Great Work.” The turn is the challenge and the necessity with which we humans must engage if we don’t want to continue on our life-destroying trajectory.

Recommended reading:

1. Perennial Turn course syllabus (PDF)

2. Perennial Turn reading list (PDF)

3. Inter-learning (PDF)

4. Community engagement (PDF)

5. Glossary (PDF)