Our class is ended but not over. Not just because we didn't get to do all we were planning to do, but because no class ever really ends if the subject matters to you - and if the relationships you formed in it last. Folks in my classes often turn up the next semester or year (or even later!) to bring me up to date on what they're thinking and doing, often with work which grew from seeds planted in the class we experienced together. And I'm always hearing about friendships that started in classes. I think we planted enough seeds that that'll happen for us too.
If there's any work or reflection you'd like to share with me now, I'd love to see it. But I'd love to see it later, too, whenever the time is right. (Ours isn't a subject that's going away.) None is required for completion of the course, or for a good grade in it.
This is the version for the students in the first year seminar "Religion and the Anthropocene," who'll have to wait until next semester to learn how satisfying an end of semester full of final presentations and performances and reflections can be. I dropped "Ours isn't a subject that's going away" from the message to the students in "Religion of Trees," who instead got a photo (which you've seen before).
I'm pasting in a picture that could be a hopeful representation of what this semester might turn out to have been. It's a redwood I saw on a walk up Volcan Mountain in San Diego a few years ago.Both ended:
Hope to see you in the new year. Don't be strangers!
