Land is the Teacher

Nature is the truest book

My journey in education was seeded in Boulder, Colorado, in 2002, when I was first cracked open by the elemental world of storytelling and nature beings. For several years I created Living Story journeys for kindergarten children. A different elemental storytelling character was born for every child’s birthday — each one facilitating her own nature-based story journey. Characters like Poppy the Pixie and Red of the Oaks, Beanie Brownie and Stella Poinsettia.

We opened the book of imagination and wonder together.

Photo: Mila listening to sunset and milk pod fluff

Nature is teacher. Nature is psychopomp. Nature is mirror and facilitator.

There were times the story became so alive it startled us all. Once, I was performing on an outdoor stage at night in Vermont — telling a story about the light that shines out of darkness — when fireflies and bats came flying in around me as I spoke, and flew out again when the story was done. In another journey, a deer literally walked into the circle, towards the birthday human as I was telling a story about gentleness. Dragonflies swarmed over us during a story about dragons and the courage to see clearly. Butterflies arrived, literal and mythopoetic, into stories already alive with transformation.

I have journeyed on many lands with hundreds of stories in my pockets — west to east, north to south, south to southwest and back again to the mountainous center carrying a calling to meet children and communities where they are most alive: in their bodies, in the living world, inside story and song and the wheel of the year.

The land does not lie. She is the truest curriculum I have ever encountered. As Waldorf teachers, we work in harmony with the more-than-human world — with the spiritual world, with the elemental world — and we trust each day to bring living encounters. The nature spirits are trickstery like that. They always hav a secret up their sleeve.

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In Vermont, our school sat on the edge of the Northeast Kingdom, encircled by rolling hills and dozens of acres of land. That year, my daughter spent an entire year in an outdoor classroom — a tipi, a fire in the woods, making kindergarten soup in the snow, the long cold season her teacher.

Photo: Mila going to check out her classroom, Orchard Valley Waldorf

My first grade students and I harvested apples from the orchard and wandered deep into the woods to a place called The Crack: a geological mystery, possibly shaped by a meteor thousands of years ago. Our classroom came alive through Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. The elements were not metaphor. They were the lesson plan. We sang to them, bellowed with their winds, sledded on their ice stories and discovered frogs and woodpeckers in their secret nooks.

At what was then called Sacred Mountain Sanctuary — now the School of Living Arts, in Candler, NC — I had a class of fifth and sixth graders perched atop a mountain. We natured, we learned, we sang. Appalachian-style, unselfconsciously, joyfully. Those children loved to lift their voices; they performed for their parents, for the community, for chickens and horses, and the sky. I created living story journeys with the faculty, spelling stories at stations among manzanita trees and creeks and boulders, letting the land hold the narrative across the entire wheel of the year.

Photo: my students at SOLA reading with a hen

Photo:my daughter in animal arts

At Asheville Waldorf School, we spent as much time as possible outdoors — on field trips, harvesting, building forts, singing in the woods, storying in clearings.

Photo: my Students at apple orchard outside Asheville

Photo: Asheville hiking with second grade

also that year- one of my first graders became gravely ill. We walked with Josh as a class, as a community, all the way through. He came to me in dreams letting me know he was prepared for the adventure. In one dream he appeared as a warrior from a different lineage, in his adult self, unafraid.

The veil between the worlds became extraordinarily thin in the classroom. I wrote a musical play about the Firebird in his honor, and that fairy tale came to life among us as we navigated his illness and, eventually, his death. He was literally airlifted by helicopter from a local hospital to a larger children’s hospital far away while we performed our play in his honor as the grey wolf carried the young prince Ivan(John) to kingdoms beyond the beyond, retrieving the Firebird, the golden horse and the golden soul, for his journey.

Photo: Josh’s celebration of life- we sang and shared gratitudes

Josh passed in the summer, around St. John’s fire. So apt for a story about a young prince moving between life, death, and life again — through the numinous world, through mystery and love. S

Later in second grade -COVID changed everything, I finished that school year online, sending children outside mid-session on Zoom to find things in nature that reflected number patterns, letter patterns — anything to keep their hands in the earth. To make mandalas and nature spirit faces.

That autumn, I co-created a living homeschool enrichment pod, and the children named it Rainbow Creek Crow, after the way the stories had come to life on their land.

Three years in Sedona — thousands of acres of red rock formations, mythic and ancient, becoming the book we read from every single day. I began with a class of first graders and eventually moved into different roles across every grade, bringing choir and poetry to middle schoolers, bringing song to community festivals. Those Sedona children were so lit up by the natural world that in first grade they created their own play — based on the elements, written from the inside out. It was genuinely beautiful.

I would occasionally encounter my students of their own volition, creating sacred shapes in nature like this:

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Learning without nature, in my humble opinion, can be so dry. So dead. Nature restores education. She is, for me, the heart and soul of every educational encounter I have ever been part of. She does not separate the academic from the somatic, the mythic from the mundane, the grief from the joy. She holds all of it.

I am now turning toward my next decade as an educator and am dreaming.

I am dreaming living school communities deeply rooted in the soul of the year, in its festivals, its thresholds, its seasonal rhythms as the organizing heartbeat of community life. Schools drawing from the well of Waldorf education and other inspired methodologies, as well as the soul-centric developmental frameworks of Rudolf Steiner and Bill Plotkin. School rooted in nature and coyote mentoring, with a rich, living story curriculum woven through every year, and educators who carry diverse gifts but are hungry — hungry — to shape rites of passage curriculum together: for the nine-year change, the twelve-year threshold, the long initiatory passage of adolescence.

And perhaps a school that also turns toward the parents — offering land-based and story-based body based and art based teachings to help adults re-pattern their own childhood passages. Not just observe their children’s, but enter their own.

I am dreaming into collaboration across distance: co-creating curriculum with educators and storytellers in other parts of the world, mentoring teachers who want to bring this medicine into their own classrooms and circles, and letting the web of story do what it has always done — travel.

I have been blessed to witness what is possible when a school is rooted this way. When the land is vast. When there is room for movement and magic, for communal singing and rites of passage, for the Firebird to arrive at exactly the right moment.

I am looking for communities, for land, for collaborators, for people who feel this in their bones.

If something in you says yes — I would love to hear from you.

© Stasha Ginsburg | The Wild Remembering