Jeff Vander Clute profile

June 69:00AM - 5:00PM

Flowing into the beginning of a new cycle

Fall: Sunday, Sept. 26, 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Fee: $25

Meet at Thomas Berry Hall, Whidbey Institute, then we'll be going out into the garden.

Spring is a time of renewal, and many of our local herbs and weeds are excellent spring tonics.

Kumudini Shoba will share an ayurveda approach to rejuvenating our vitality at this time of year with plants we can grow.

We'll be hands-on out in the herb garden gaining practical knowledge of herbs: identifying, planting, cultivating and harvesting. Kumudini will also be teaching how to best capture their healing essences throughout the season.

Dress for gardening outdoors! We'll provide gloves and tools!

A vibrant website is never complete. It is always a work in progress, like all of us...

This is a conversation where anyone may post ideas for the website, suggested wording changes, and things of the sort. Thank you in advance for your input!

The Dining Room is perfect for a 50-guest meal. While dining, guests have a beautiful view of the surrounding Chinook lands through three walls of windows.

A Ten-Month Training in Nondual Awareness with Pir Elias Amidon
Beginning November 17, 2010 at the Whidbey Institute

The Open Path is a non-sectarian approach to spiritual realization. It is a path dedicated to the direct experience of our natural state – a state known as Pure Awareness, Selflessness, Nonduality, Oneness, Original Spirit, and by many other names. It is a process of natural enlightenment that belongs to everyone.

The Open Path Training consists of three 4-day seminars held at Whidbey Institute, a series of written teachings and exercises that are sent to students every few weeks, and frequent telephone contact with Elias through individual calls, group conference calls, and telephone work with partners.

For complete information, please visit:

  http://www.openpathtraining.org

Over the years, Whidbey Institute at Chinook has inspired thousands of people to make a difference in the world. This conversation is a space for sharing stories of how the Institute has touched our lives. Enjoy!

Thanks, Mira! I've added to the answer options. I'm imagining that we could create a Q&A space where people can ask and answer questions of this sort.

It's great to see you here! Please let me know if you need assistance setting up your profile. We'll be building out the space and the informational site in the coming weeks and into August. Thanks for being an early settler...

This space is an experiment in how we might coordinate the many volunteers who want to contribute time and energy to Whidbey Institute.

This short trail starts by the labyrinth, turns up the hill, and winds back to the sanctuary.

With map in hand, we set out from Madrona Meadow on what I thought was Farm Loop and immediately got lost. :)

Down the hill we went, toward Aldermarsh. Once we figured that out, we went back up the hill and walked the short Sacred Ridge trail instead.

This is a barn-raising! 

It's a pleasure to be helping to build a virtual space for the Institute. I'll be off-island today at meetings. Will start the next round of building on Sunday. Happy Friday.

After reading aloud part of Thomas Berry's universe story, I have been noticing that the story is being expressed everywhere. This video is one such expression. "Listen to the music... deep inside."

[Description]

Community and relationships is one of the major themes of Whidbey Institute. This may also be what we as a species are most in need of learning.

What does healthy community mean to you? What kinds of healthy relationships are you in? What are opportunities to grow healthy communities and relationships?

This is a conversation about sustainability, one of the major themes of Whidbey Institute.

[What would we like to say about this?] 

I'm reposting this from Nipun Mehta's InnerNet Weekly. The below post, called "Our Teachers in Nature" is an excerpt of a talk called "After Darwin" by Elisabet Sahtouris. Her work is about understanding living systems, and it was part of the inspiration for going in the direction of gardens as an organizing principle here on Avanoo.

Looking at living systems over time, I came to understand that they all go through a cycle that's very like our psychological maturation cycles. We start with a unity, we're undifferentiated, we come into the world new. And then individuation happens. We have many experiences. We branch out in many directions. And humanity, as it diversified and had more and more people, created more and more conflict. Exactly as the early Earth differentiated into bacteria and then they developed different lifestyles and they became competitive. They invented technologies in order to carry out their hostilities. They created enormous problems including global hunger and global pollution. And they had to solve those eventually by negotiating differences, moving on around the cycle, and working out cooperative schemes that ultimately led the ancient bacteria that ruled for the first half of Earth's life to form a new kind of cell as a community of different lifestyle bacteria working together. That's the nucleated cell that we're made of, that all these trees are made of, that all the beings in the waters are made of. Everything we see around us is made of this wonderful big cooperative cell.

Now humanity is going through the biggest event since the time that bacteria formed the nucleated cell because we're now trying to form the body of humanity around the globe. Seeing that other species matured out of a youthful competitive phase into a mature cooperative phase means everything to us now. The Darwinian story only goes to the adolescent part where there's hostile competition. You take all you can get. You fight your enemy. You try to out-do him or try to bump him off and that's what makes you survive.

But that's not what sustainability is all about. Sustainability happens when species learn to feed each other instead of fight each other. You get mature ecosystems such as rainforests and prairies where you have far more cooperation than you have hostile competition. You can still have friendly competition, but that's very different. So I see humanity doing exactly this right now. We of the western culture who divorced ourselves from nature saying “We're separate. That's nature out there. Let's see how we can exploit it to our purposes.” Interestingly, we're the species who invented the concept of entropy and we're the one who creates it, who deteriorates eco-systems while the other species are building them up. So we have a great deal to learn from nature and by recognizing that our conscious experience is of other beings, is of teachers in nature that we can learn from and gain hope from. If bacteria could do it without benefit of brain, can't we [do it] as humans with big brains?

--Elisabet Sahtouris, in After Darwin

I have stayed in Mushroom for two weeks in total. What a joy to be in a small cabin in the woods with the sounds of Nature all around!

The fact that it's a teeny tiny cabin accentuates the feeling of being outside, while still being inside...

I read two passages by Thomas Berry at the 2010 Easter service at the Whidbey Institute in... Thomas Berry hall!

From The Dream of Earth:

It's all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we are in between stories. The Old Story - the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it - sustained us for a long time. It shaped our emotional attitudes, provided us with life purpose, energized action, consecrated suffering, integrated knowledge, and guided education. We awoke in the morning and knew where we were. We could answer the questions of our children. But now it is no longer functioning properly, and we have not yet learned the New Story.

From Befriending the Earth: A Theology of Reconciliation Between Humans and the Earth:

The universe story is the account of a long sequence of transformations. In some ways, all that has gone before is imperiled at our moment of the story and we are asked to undertake a vast transformation to enable the next phase of the story to come into being. We are venturing into a truly new type of experience. It requires a great deal of us. We did not choose to be here; the story selected us to be here. Once we are here, we must be willing to fulfil the destiny assigned to us; that is our grandeur, that is our blessedness, that is our joy, that is our peace. That is our gift to the great community of existence that is making the journey as a single sacred community. We are not making the journey simply by ourselves. We are making it with the entire universe community, the human community, the life community, the earth community. It is a single journey. At different moments, special responsibilities are assigned to specific groups of people. Each of us, in our separate ways, is destined to be a significant personality in celebrating the past, grieving over the disasters of the present, and giving birth to the future.