I can’t believe it is June already — and towards the end of the month at that!
The formal sabbatical portion of this project ends on July 1st, but I’m enjoying these workshops and retreats so much that I will be continuing to do this work into the foreseeable future.
A brief overview of this project to date includes the following:
+ 11 workshops and/or retreats held in five states (Minnesota, South Dakota, Montana, Wisconsin, and Ohio)
+ 92 people participating in storytelling and video creation
+ 20 completed videos posted so far for public engagement (many more stories have been told, of course, and more videos are still being completed)
I am so deeply grateful to the Board of Luther Seminary for making this project possible. Their generosity and commitment to restoration and repair is clearly part of their commitment to our school and its mission.
Here are a few resources that have come across my screen this month that you might find useful:
+ brief glimpses of the hard work of cooperation circles in the United Religions Initiative who are caring for creation through global biodiversity, prepared as part of the 2024 Global Biodiversity Day :
+ to pair with that, here is GBIF—the Global Biodiversity Information Facility— which is an international network and data infrastructure funded by the world’s governments and aimed at providing anyone, anywhere, open access to data about all types of life on Earth
+ Stephen Proktor’s “Day Dream” a visual/musical meditation depicting soaring over a cloud forest
+ Richard Rohr’s very brief meditation on “the doorway of our shared inheritance”
I will continue to send out this newsletter, but it will likely be much more occasional, as I get drawn back into my primary teaching and administrative responsibilities at Luther Seminary.
In the meantime, allow me to remind you of the quote I use in every workshop, from Valarie Kaur:
“Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger protects that which is loved. And when we think we have reached our limit, wonder is the act that returns us to love.”
(Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger, xvi)
I pray that you may find ways into wonder.