Institute

Every day, the natural world presents us with a beautiful tapestry of stories—stories of change, growth, and deepening relationship. But change is hard—as everybody knows. It forces us to expand and develop. The seeds in our garden must break into shoots if they’re to participate in its thriving ecosystem; our chickens’ eggs must hatch into chicks if they’re to wander forth and join the brood; and we must till the soil and labor in the dirt if we’re to bring forth its fruits and celebrate our harvest together. Nature, it seems, is always pushing us to transcend old forms to attain new levels of interconnection and interdependence.

Today, as human civilization confronts the limits of its old forms, the world community must adapt to become more sensitive, holistic, and complex in its ways of thinking, feeling, and being. As our institutions, infrastructure, and ideologies reach their breaking points, we must learn to stretch our minds and hearts to reach beyond them towards more comprehensive visions of the world. As everywhere the narrowness of old perspectives conspires to stifle our individual and collective flourishing, we are called to push the envelope—and shift the paradigm.

To facilitate such crucial changes, we will need communicators, educators, artists, and others to showcase and propagate a more expansive worldview of complexity, relationality, and emergence that is already coming online. Founded in 2023, Sky Meadow Institute is an organization dedicated to this civilizational onboarding effort by promoting relational, processual, and systems-based perspectives on the things that matter most.

We believe that, precisely by becoming more conscious of life’s expansive webs of connection, we can outgrow the constricting limits of our older ways of thinking and assume the more expansive, integrative kind of vantage needed for the 21^st century. From how we eat, live, and work to how we learn, grow, and worship, everything looks different from a view informed by relationality and complexity.

Instead of unsustainable monocultures, we can imagine durable permacultures. Instead of reductionistic quick-fixes, we can imagine holistic, whole-person health and development. Instead of linear methods of extraction and exploitation, we can imagine dynamic cycles of exchange and co-creation.

Most importantly, by learning the deep patterns and structures that Nature uses to complexify and grow, we can move beyond the broken ideologies of the (post)modern world, which see human life as alienated, meaningless, and absurd, to recognize ourselves for what we really are: participatory beings every bit as interwoven into the beautiful tapestry of change, growth, and relationship as seeds and eggs and soil. And to the degree our distinctly human nature does set us apart, this is to be seen as our gift (not our curse) for bringing deeper intention, rationality, and care to Nature’s cause of cosmic complexification.  

The mission of Sky Meadow Institute is to articulate and promote this inspirational vision of sustainability, interdependence, relationality, and transformational flourishing. Drawing on fields as diverse as complexity science, plant medicine, process philosophy, permaculture design, evolutionary spirituality, and the arts, this vision is what we see emerging at the cutting-edge of culture. It is, we believe, the next chapter in Nature’s story of change and growth.

To help tell it, we welcome writers, artists, educators, philanthropists, visionaries, activists, designers, farmers, philosophers, and more to get involved!

The programming for the Institute is hosted at our retreat center here in Stannard, Vermont. Here is a glimpse at some of the initiatives and events we have in store for 2024: