Sustain Thyself
April! Perhaps the most transitional month in the calendar. A month to dress in layers, carry an umbrella, seek out poetry, and honor the Earth and sustainable practices. Basketball season feels as if it is waning, and baseball is just getting started. In Central Oregon, we head into the brilliant, if brief, burst of green between the natural yellow tones of late winter and the dusty, dirty brown of the summer months. According to Chaucer, April is the month we get itchy feet and start looking for a pilgrimage on which to embark.
April feels like the end of something and the beginning of something else.
In the academic world, it’s the beginning of the end. Once we return from Spring Break, it is a slide, ever quickening, to summer. Students are squirrelly. Weekends feel too short for everything we want/need to pack into them. Meetings get added to calendars with dizzying speed as everyone starts to realize the end of the academic year is nigh, leading to a sense of panic about all that still feels undone.
And, I don’t know about you, but I’m tired.
There are many things to say about the idea of sustainability as relates to the academic world. We can talk about sustainable institutional and personal practices, or about ways to incorporate sustainability concepts, discussions, and activities into courses. The question of sustainable practices asks us to consider our values, and thoughtfully re-approach our priorities. We may be particularly sensitive to the way our values about our disciplines conflict with our values about the environment. (Good medical hygiene practices are not particularly environmentally sustainable! Is it better for students to read print books or electronic ones? Better how? For the environment or for student learning? You see what I mean.)
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These are important questions — and ones that lead to important conversations within the institution and individual fields. And they are important questions that we are all struggling with personally.
I don’t offer answers or guidance here. Not at all. But what I do want to do this month is offer the reminder that personal sustainability — feeding ourselves (in every sense), providing ourselves rest, connecting to those things that make us feel renewed — is necessary for us to be equipped to face big questions, contradictions, natural transitions, and the thrilling drop to the bottom of the roller coaster that is the months leading up to Convocation. Sustain yourself first. Conserve your vitality first. And then turn that energy outwards. And repeat.
If you are looking for ways to embrace April, here’s a few ideas.
Pick up a book that explores the relationship between ecology and the academy. Bryan Alexander’s Universities on Fire: Higher Education in the Climate Crisis; Sustainability on Campus: Stories and Strategies for Change, edited by Peggy F. Barlett and Geoffrey W. Chase; Sustainable Universities and Colleges, edited by Mark Starik and Paul Shrivastava; or Matthias Barth’s Implementing Sustainability in Higher Education: Learning in an age of transformation.
Read some poetry! Don’t know where to start? The Poetry Foundation is a great resource. Or, listen to other’s read poetry — almost every community in the U.S. has some poetry events/programming in April (check libraries, colleges, bookstores for offerings).
Get outside, regardless of weather. Plant a tree. Tend a garden. Pick up some trash.
Or do all three — grab some contemporary ecopoetry or some Whitman, Wordsworth, Mary Oliver, or Camille T. Dungy, and read it outside.
