The Vision for the Transfiguration Preserve is a stewarded, healthy and biodiverse ecosystem, with access for educators, students, researchers, and spiritual seekers at varying levels and abilities. The natural environment is the experience sought—where reflectivity, learning, spiritual connection, and exploration of the natural world can occur—in a landscape that has little or subtle evidence of human impact.
This Vision was crafted by the Sisters of the Transfiguration in collaboration with Conserving Carolina when a Conservation Easement and Memorandum of Understanding was created. The Sisters donated xxxx acres to Conserving Carolina in xxxxx, and this land is now preserved for all time from encroachment and will keep a “light footprint” to maintain this pristine ecosystem.
This VISION is used as a rubric or standard by which all the events and participants activities here are designed and manifested.
What? A stewarded, healthy and biodiverse ecosystem, in a landscape that has little or subtle evidence of human impact.
Why? The natural environment is the experience sought—where reflectivity, learning, spiritual connection, and exploration of the natural world can occur.
How? For educators, students, researchers, and spiritual seekers to visit, connect with nature, explore, and learn, at varying levels and abilities.
DEAR ONES,
Warm greetings of love and gratitude to all of you who know and love this place.
The river is singing in the midst of so much desolation.
My brother Hans called with this poem and I thought it perfect to share with you.
I am well and so grateful to be able to be here.
Family and friends and so many good strangers are pouring in with assistance.
But the land! The forests, the trees, the flowers, the birds, the RIVER is giving more encouragement than I can say, filling our hearts with remembrance of our own True Nature: resilience, wisdom, and compassion.
I'll be posting more soon and photos of the "New River Gorge" here...as the Rocky Broad is now widened, and so beautiful.
Adrift
Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief. The light spraying
through the lace of the fern is as delicate
as the fibers of memory forming their web
around the knot in my throat. The breeze
makes the birds move from branch to branch
as this ache makes me look for those I've lost
in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
of the next stranger. In the very center, under
it all, what we have that no one can take
away and all that we've lost face each other.
It is there that I'm adrift, feeling punctured
by a holiness that exists inside everything.
I am so sad and everything is beautiful.
by Mark Nepo
