The Poet Creates the World...

READING LIST:
Ralph Waldo Emerson – Nature
Henry David Thoreau – Walden
Wendell Berry – The Art of the Common Place
Annie Dillard – Teaching a Stone to Talk
Aldo Leopold – A Sand County Almanac
Walt Whitman – Song of Myself
Barbara Kingsolver – Small Wonder
Steven Bouma-Prediger – For the Beauty of the Earth
Lawrence Buell – The Environmental Imagination
Rachel Carson – Silent Spring
Sigmund Freud – Civilization and its Discontents

Drew Ward spent the week with us for Environmental Literature, more appropriately titled Imagining the Earth. 15 students participated in this class, the others scattered throughout Belize on their first week of internships. We dove deep into these amazing texts, allowing our imaginations to wander as far as they could go. We spent the beginning of every class looking at poetry and scripture and the evenings we watched films (visual texts that clue us into deep metaphors). Poetry, prose, short story, novel, film, newspaper, song, lyric, art – what do these have to do with creation care? How many times did we say, “Is this an environmental text?” throughout the week! The students became experts at answering this question. Midweek we traveled to the Mountain Pine Ridge and conducted class on the deck of Five Sisters Lodge, a beautiful location overlooking the cascading Five Sisters Falls. Cant take a student that close to a waterfall and not expect to end up in them. We enjoyed lunch and a swim at Big Rock Falls, a postcard swim hole and a local favorite. We concluded the week with worship service of extraordinary measures, carefully planned and carried out by the students. A great week it was!