About The Learning Yard Project
Throughout this incredible year in human history, we have been quietly re-designing the shape and focus of The Human Nature Center. The start of the pandemic last February and the halting of our core in-person programs became an opportunity for us to get creative and to re-think how we could be useful to our community in a new way.
We continue to share nature connection through practical earth skills with kids and families (via Zoom). But we have also been working hard behind the scenes on a project that is both very personal and very public. While the outer world has shut down, we have been working to transform the space where my family and where the office of The Human Nature Center live into a home with a story for everyone.
“The home is a vessel for living,” writes Tewa poet, artist, and adobe builder, Nora Naranjo-Morse. I feel the truth in these words strongly. The home is where we eat and drink. It’s where we dress ourselves, shelter ourselves and our belongings, and more frequently- work. It’s where we dispose of our waste. All of those things: our shelter, food, energy, water, and waste are the choices that make up how we live here on earth. The events of the past year have helped me become even more clear and more passionate that our homes are the most important sites of ecological activity and social change on the planet. Our work is focused around that understanding.
Recently, I shared my growing sense of urgency to share the Learning Yard story publicly - and my fear of doing so- with one of our staff members. I knew we were doing this to provide a model. I’ve also been really hesitant to share it because it hasn’t looked like much yet. “It’s so unfinished,” I told Ilana. Her reply was, “I don’t think people these days are looking for the polished stories. They want REAL.”
Ilana helped me see that the story of our journey with The Human Nature Center carries within it the greater message of our organization: We were founded to help people understand and connect with ourselves as part of a greater whole. Nature is bigger than us, and it IS us. If this pandemic has reminded us as a species of anything, it’s that we cannot control the course of Nature. We can only do our best to respect and listen and work in harmony with the Earth.
The Learning Yard is a story of our response to the historic and powerful call to home that has been sounded for humankind. It is a story of a regular family taking tiny steps to watch, listen to, and care for its home on earth in a new way. Here is the beginning of our story:
I started The Human Nature Center in Ventura, California in 2018 with a vision of bringing people together through practices of earth tending in order to grow and rekindle a culture that sees and honors the relationships between all things. Ecology is one word to describe that mindset. There are many other words in other languages that carry this same understanding.
Being a new organization in a new city, I began by offering hands-on programs for families, children and adults. While the organization didn’t have its own property, doors opened quickly through relationships, and soon we were hosting workshops in three different gardens and school campuses around Ventura and beyond. It was amazing how these “borrowed” spaces came to life each week just by growing vegetables, hanging flags, sharing food, and playing games in them.
During our very first program season, I became pregnant. It was clear that I was going to have to move into a different kind of leadership more quickly than I had imagined. I hired and mentored instructors to teach in our style of Nature connection experiences. i began to create and document our curriculum so that it could be adapted and infused with the magic of other good educators.
However, as a small seasonal organization, I remain the one person with daily oversight. In 2019, late in the summer at the end of our first year, I stood on my back porch feeling very hot and very pregnant. The thought of driving back out to our community garden space to give it another water, even ten minutes away, was overwhelming. It became clear to me that for The Human Nature Center to grow in the right way, we needed a space that I could tend at an arm’s length; a space that I could easily tend with my own child in tow. We needed a space of our own.
A few days later, my husband and I stood looking out our kitchen window into the backyard. “Why don’t you just do it here?” He asked. I felt a flutter of lightness and excitement in my body. Then my brain asked, “But isn’t that kind of unprofessional?” My dream for The Human Nature Center has been a larger public space with workshop rooms and gardens and exhibits, but the reply to that part of the vision remains: “Not now.” So the answer is, it’s not unprofessional, it’s perfect. The incredible and unforeseen changes that began to unfold in the world only months later have only made this idea more appropriate to this time. After all, my profession is helping people connect to Nature in a way that has meaning in the context of their daily lives and the spaces they inhabit.
Starting The Human Nature Center at the scale of a small urban home gives it accessibility and relevance to individuals & families anywhere. Most important, it starts the seed of this organization with great care and attention to detail, at the pace of motherhood, and with love. This mothering energy is what’s needed to tend the seeds of people, plants, ideas, and institutions of in our world. It’s the nourishing energy we’ve been missing.
About a month after the pandemic started, I buckled down to work on designing the Learning Yard with the help of my friend, Daniel Francis, an incredible ecological designer. For the last year, we have transforming our home space into a model of ecological living for families. For now, we are sharing this home as an example with stories, activity ideas, and how-to’s.
The lessons that are coming through the deepening relationship with this little Learning Yard are already deep and rich. It is hard to describe with words how tangibly the feeling of a place changes when you begin to tend and work every small corner of it. It comes alive, and as I walk around this tiny land, I feel movement and good feeling emanating from the plants, trees, stones, fences, and walls. We hope you will share in this journey with us and that you will feel inspired to look at your own home space in a new way.
With love for people of all species and this earth, our mother and our home,
Meg Handler, Founder & Director, The Human Nature Center
