In the Wild!
30 April 2025
Dear Friends,
It is springtime and life along the River Dart is full. Let your imagination dwell in that for a few moments…
We’re at Sharpham Estate, just down river from Totnes, above reed beds, geese gaggles, and all sorts of paddlers, swimmers, divers, diggers, flyers, breathers. Everything is blossoming. Lambs are jumping and skipping. There’s buzz and birdsong in every key. The sky is blue and the land, every shade of beautiful. And we’re all noticing as much as we can possibly stretch our little awarenesses to take it all in. That is the invitation. Life!
This is how it feels to us, anyway. We’re teaching (and learning) again and it’s exhilarating. We almost forgot how much we love each other! It has been a long winter.
This marks another important stage in our wild journey to the new Schumacher College. We are underway and heading somewhere into an open future. We are free! How this journey turns out, what tales we might one day tell about it - we’re all dying to know. But life is about right now.
Perhaps now’s a good time to quote Gary Snyder:
“To be truly free one must take on the basic conditions as they are—painful, impermanent, open, imperfect—and then be grateful for impermanence and the freedom it grants us. For in a fixed universe there would be no freedom. With that freedom we improve the campsite, teach children, oust tyrants. The world is nature, and in the long run inevitably wild, because the wild, as the process and essence of nature, is also an ordering of impermanence.”
This is how we find ourselves, entangled in this wonderfully brief adventure.
This course up at Sharpham, the New Schumacher Foundation - A Transdisciplinary Course for Our Times, started Monday. This, as well as the one-day seminar last Saturday, and the upcoming ‘World Wild’ courses in Estonia, Netherlands, Greece, and Japan (so far) are exploring a range of themes concerning how we might live flourishing lives together - with each other and all the living things, mountains and rivers, too - in awareness and justice, in abundance and freedom, in co-creative deed and story.
We wish you all could be here, now, looking down river with us toward more bends, hills and far horizons. It’s so full of life. You would love it!
In gratitude,
The Schumacher Wild team x
Image courtesy of Sarah Hawkins