TIES situates graduate study within the larger human journey to understand how we might live in deeper harmony with the Earth. In doing so, it draws on the work of Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, and Maria Montessori, who each emphasize the power of story in revealing our place within an evolving cosmos.
Perhaps you already know the Story of the Universe; perhaps you have shared it with children and observed their total embrace of the magic that is real. You may have seen what happens when a child suddenly feels — not just knows — that they are made of stardust.
This story is in our cellular heritage.
But here is a question worth sitting with:
What do you suppose the cosmic forces have for you and your presence in the world?
In their seminal work, Journey of the Universe, Brian Swimme and Mary-Evelyn Tucker describe a universe that is, at its core, a creative act — still unfolding, still reaching toward greater complexity, greater beauty, greater awareness—a living system, still in process. And living systems, as Fritjof Capra and Pierre Luigi Luisi remind us, are not static. They learn. They adapt. They self-organize toward something the parts alone could never have predicted.
Which means the story isn’t background.
It’s an ongoing exploration.
The same principles that organize a cell, a forest, a reef, a school of fish moving as one mind through open water — these are the principles organizing your classroom, your community, your personal life. You are not standing outside the system observing it. You are nested inside it, in relationship with it, shaped by it, and shaping it simultaneously. Every choice you make in your prepared environment — every question you ask, every moment of stillness you model, every time you follow a child’s fascination instead of your own agenda — participates in something larger than the lesson.
This is not a metaphor.
This is how living systems actually work.
Joseph Campbell spent a lifetime pointing at the same truth from a different direction. The hero’s journey is not a story about exceptional people doing exceptional things. It is a map of what happens when any living being answers the call that is already inside them — descends into the unknown, faces what needs to be faced, and returns transformed, carrying something the community needs.
The call, in Campbell’s telling, always comes at the moment of greatest readiness — which often feels, from the inside, like the moment of greatest uncertainty.
Sound familiar?
Many of the educators who find their way to TIES describe the same thing: a sense that their work has reached a threshold. That what they know how to do is no longer quite enough for what they sense they are meant to do. That the universe story they’ve been telling children has begun, quietly and insistently, to ask them to live it more fully themselves.
That is the call.
The TIES program is, among other things, a prepared environment for responding to it.
Eighteen months. Fully asynchronous. Designed for working educators who are ready to use their own lives, their own questions, and their own classrooms as the laboratory. A learning community that takes seriously the idea that personal transformation and professional development are not separate endeavors — that the educator who is becoming is the most powerful force in any room.