February 12, 2009
Hello from the OE.
Life at Lincoln feels just a bit odd these days. We know change is coming, but we don’t know what it will look like. We have a few more OE years in our sights. Will they be followed by a new generation of OE faculty, or old faculty sponsoring new programs, or something altogether different? We don’t know. But amid the uncertainty, our lives are flowing quite smoothly. We sense something good is coming, even though we might not know what it is until it arrives.
In the OE program, we’re teaching smaller groups of students. This has pinched us financially, of course. But the pace feels more humane and we notice that we have more time to give each individual. It’s been a pleasure having Jessie Van Eerden as our creative writing guru and getting reacquainted with her husband Mike (OE’99). The Women’s Studies May Term comes along this year, and Nancy and John are expecting a capacity crowd. Our week-long Contemplative Retreats are gathering steam. Participants seem stoked about spending a quiet week in a pretty place, with both structured and unstructured opportunities for honest self-exploration and meaningful conversation.
The success of these retreats has seemed like a sign pointing us toward some rich possibilities for our future here at Lincoln. They bring in a modest income, put to good use the facilities that Phil and Sam and Pat care for so lovingly, and offer meaningful growth opportunities for the fifteen or twenty attendees as well as those of us – Nancy, Doug, Alison and our friend Frank Rogers – who lead and staff them. Speaking for myself, the journey that began, six or eight years ago, into a more contemplative spirit, and a growing appreciation for the theology that underlies it, has energized my own spiritual life, deepened my long-standing fascination with a strangely unfettered Jesus, and synchronized beautifully with a newly-discovered counseling model (created by Richard Schwartz) that has paid rich dividends for me personally. So I am feeling the tug toward enhancing our retreat programs as one path into the future.
As a step in this direction, the Lincoln community has agreed to launch our first major building project in 34 years: a small, beautiful structure tucked into a scenic corner of the property, set aside for organized and individual meditation and prayer. Phil will design this ‘green’ building and supervise construction, using lumber that he and Sam mill from the trees that I drag out of the forest. We expect the chapel to find heavy use during our summer retreats, but we’ll also use it for vespers services and the ‘contemplative exercises’ that are now a cherished part of our fall OE curriculum. We hope, with volunteer help, to keep the cost under $50,000. If it sounds like a good idea to you, we welcome your help in making it happen. We’d be overjoyed if we could raise $25,000 in donations – we think we can handle the other $25,000 out of savings and an anonymous foundation gift. If interested, you can use our new PayPal account (it’s also at our website on the ‘Alumni‘ page) or send us a check (no fees that way). We’d love to have volunteer construction help this July. Contact me if you’re interested: dougfrankoe@mac.com or 15097 Hwy 66, Ashland, OR 97520.
We appreciate the gifts many of you have contributed over the past year to our general expenses or our financial aid fund. That fund, which offers loans and grants to students losing their home campus aid, will continue to need replenishing even as our chapel project goes forward.
Our ever-lovin’ alums have been dragging us into the digital age. Bob Craigmile (OE’83) has passed the OE webmaster baton to Steve Johnson (OE’93/95), who has designed our new OE website (www.oregonextension.org). That’s where you can find links to this summer’s Contemplative Retreats (June and August), the May Term program and Steve’s new OE video. Steve has added an Alumni page to our website. We’ll post this letter there in case you accidentally delete this message. ☺ Steve has posted an ‘OE Web Badge’ there, with a suggestion that you use it to link your own website, blog and/or Facebook account to the OE website to give us a little added push in our all-out efforts to recruit new students.
If you indulge in Facebook, you can find links on our website to the OE Facebook page and Facebook’s OE Alumni community. We’re also building an email address list so we can reduce the stamp-and-paper versions of our annual letters. If you’re not sure you’re on that list, but want to be, email me. (See what I mean about the digital age?)
We continue to make our housing available, at reasonable rates, for short and long term stays. Lower OE enrollments mean we can accommodate guests in the fall months as well, although faculty time for visitation is limited by our other duties. Alison is our contact person for would-be visitors (oregonex@aol.com).
Since the arrival of email and internet, we hear regularly from many of you. We feel greatly enriched by all this digital contact, even though our stuffed inboxes sometimes keep us from responding as promptly as we would like. We’re glad you’re here on this amazing planet with us, and trust that 2009 will be full of love and wonder.
…..for all of us here at Lincoln…
Doug
News Notes from the Folks at Lincoln
From Sam and Pat: Thank you for the ways you contribute to our lives at Lincoln. We have both taken on helping roles here since ceasing to teach full time. In addition to teaching music and remedial reading every Thursday at Pinehurst School, Pat does all the cleaning, laundry and much of the residence refurbishing to improve the look and appeal of our dwellings. She also tends to the summer flowers. I care for the grounds and our growing plantation where we once parked cars and stacked logs. We built a prayer labyrinth in the midst of the newly planted trees and shrubs and that ground just below the mill pond has become a real, live place. Leilani and Evan just moved to the Rogue Valley, where he works for the Department of Veterans Affairs as a home care medical psychologist. Leilani teaches mostly Hispanic kindergarteners in the Medford school district. Up in Butteville, on the banks of the Willamette, Scott and Allissa live with Owen (4) and Emmy (2). Scott provides psychological services to disabled folks in the Washington State Human Services department and Allissa works for Eli Lilly. They all thrive and we connect regularly. We like the mood that pervades this place as we work to make new opportunities. Just this week our community decided to build a prayer and contemplation chapel in the woods south of the bark burner. Phil built a beautiful deck and passage way of native cedar across the newly sealed and over-flowing trout pond. Erin Linton has become “Landscape Queen” turning the trout pond area into a quiet dell. Doug works tirelessly at restoring our forested acres. Nancy and John and Alison labor along with Doug at improving our academic program and creating the retreat aspect of our ministry. And Dave continues the campaign to leave Soda Mountain wild. All these good things make us mindful that many others have had their hand in the teaching, healing and meaning-making we will to occur here. We are truly grateful.
From Phil and Alison: It was a milestone year. Jordan turned 18. Nelson turned 21. Phil turned 50. And I simply turned gray. In truth, I feel the year, overall, was marked by calm. And maybe that’s a truer sign of age than chronological numbers. Perhaps it’s an indication of resignation – of the children being grown and gone, of leaner times, of adumbrations of changes in our lives at Lincoln – but I prefer to think that it might reflect something deeper: a trusting acceptance of what is. Of course, our lives are not difficult for us to embrace. We are neither beset with physical ailments nor fraught with quotidian misfortune. Jordan thrives as a freshman at St Olaf in Minnesota; Nelson is on the home stretch as a senior at Goshen in Indiana. The mountains soothe in silent majesty; the wood shed brims with fir and pine. Truly, we are exceedingly blessed and grateful.
From John and Nancy: We are recruiting in the Midwest and east coast, along with OE alumni assistants, and hope to meet the lively and curious students who will study with us here next fall. We return in late February and March to continue working on the Women’s Studies May Term and the two summer contemplative retreats. Anne is writing her dissertation in Paris; John and Nancy will visit her in April to celebrate their 40th anniversary. Erin is a student at SOU, waits tables at the Greensprings Inn, and creates sculptures and cards in her spare time (when she isn’t rescuing injured animals). Nancy continues to experience spiritual direction and supervision as a gift and a deepening in her own life as she accompanies persons desiring to wake up to their lives and spiritual journeys. She wishes for more time in her pottery studio, and hopes to read Grace Jantzen’s, Becoming Divine, Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion during March, a book which bases human meaning on the universal experience of birth, rather than death. John is touting Ordinary Wolves by Seth Kantner as the best novel he has read in a decade.
From Dave Willis: My ‘not-humans-apart’ efforts involve connecting others (and myself) with wilder parts of creation in ways that get those special places the best protection humanly possible. Through straight-up advocacy with the Soda Mountain Wilderness Council and show-me trips with Littlefoot Expeditions, we helped establish 53,000 acres of public land around Lincoln as the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument a few years back. On January 15 this year the U.S. Senate passed S. 22, the “Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009.” Among many other things, S. 22 designates over 23,000 acres of Monument backcountry a few miles south of Lincoln — including Pilot Rock, which many OE students have climbed – as the Soda Mountain Wilderness. The same bill, if the House passes it, will end cattle grazing on public lands here – though full ecological recovery from the damage of 150 years of commercial livestock grazing may never be possible. The omnibus bill also adds 79,820 acres to the breathtaking Hoover Wilderness adjacent to northeastern Yosemite National Park where we have been guiding people (including OE alums recently) on Sierra Treks since 1972. (Doug has led OE backpack trips into this area every September for years.) I’m more than aware how very flawed and human political processes and products are. But my thankfulness for the glimpse of hope sparkling in these wildland protections is immeasurable.
