Seton Castle Restoration Ground-Breaking Ceremony Speeches

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January 21, 2005
Speech given by Aaron Stern

On behalf of the Academy for the Love of Learning, the Seton family on both sides – we welcome you – this ever-widening circle of family friends and community

I’m Aaron Stern – founder of the Academy for the Love of Learning. We are an educational organization based here in Santa Fe.

There’s a wonderful paragraph in a book I know that helps describe us – and also sets the stage for our time this afternoon:

“At the heart of every age is a unique impulse out of which, through the course of events and under favorable conditions, emerges a new cultural body. It is as if each age had its own "DNA," which lives first in the consciousness of a few individuals who, like artists, "... create out of their irrational imaginations the planetary mystical perceptions that begin as heresy and end up as heritage.” (From Lightworks by Milenko Mitanovic)

We believe that our work at the Academy for the Love of Learning contains some of the ‘cultural DNA’ for our particular age.

The mission of the Academy is:

“To awaken, enliven, nurture and sustain the natural love of learning in people of all ages. We seek to encourage and cultivate the powers of critical thought, imagination, curiosity, innate sense of purpose, wonder and inspiration, and an ongoing awakening of the heart. To carry out our mission, the Academy exists as an educational research and development organization involved in a continuous inquiry into and the development and advancement of educational forms that support these human capacities.”

I believe that Earnest Thompson Seton, who with his wife, Julia Seton, built this remarkable house, had embodied in his life’s work the cultural DNA of his particular age.

Early in life he found a deep and profound connection to animals and the natural word. He found a magical doorway into this world that in the end was his own spiritual path. And, he began to speak his own brand of heresy….

He lived from 1860-1946 – at a time when this country was rapidly industrializing, believing that our natural resources were utterly infinite and inexhaustible.

Seton, speaking his ‘heresy’ – was among the very first to blow the whistle on this – to recognize and name the obvious: To use today’s vernacular – he began to speak about the sustainability of life on this planet. He helped us to recognize the very water in which we were swimming as a culture, of displacing and exhausting our natural resources and planetary life.

Through his words, deeds and images he taught us that, in fact, life on this planet was both precious and precarious, that our resources were exhaustible and needed to be respected and protected, and that we must find our way to a respectful relationship with nature and the planet and all of its life forms.

Through his extraordinary artwork – some four thousand paintings and drawings – and his 67 books, through which he expressed his passion for life and all of nature, he touched us profoundly; and he helped us to begin to see and understand the task at hand. And, he founded vital organizations that continue still today, to impart and awaken in others what he had come to understand. They include the world-wide Woodcraft League whose motto is ‘Woodcraft is life craft’ – and the Boy Scouts of America which he co-founded with this deeper intent at its heart.

He directed our attention to and developed personal alliances with the first peoples of this continent, the indigenous culture that lived here long before us, believing they held the important key…the key to understanding about living harmoniously with the earth and the heavens and all of the web of life of which we are part. This alliance informed deeply the foundations of the Woodcraft League and Boy Scouts. The extraordinary, formally ‘dedicated’ Kiva and Hogan on this land give testimony to this alliance.

In short, Seton talked and did something about sustainability long before it became fashionable.

Yet we still have not fully gotten his message as a culture; sadly, his legacy is at risk, just as is this building that stands behind us. His particular form of “heresy” has not yet quite turned yet into heritage, we have a ways to go. And we hope and believe that this restoration and this partnership between Seton’s legacy and the Academy will be a contribution to that.

In the end, in our work at the Academy, we believe deeply that if engaged fully in our ‘love of learning’, that THAT in itself will lead us quite naturally to Seton’s wisdom – that as human beings, we can’t HELP but want to find a loving respectful, reverent relationship, filled with awe and wonder, with all of life.

As we commemorate this occasion, this restoration of Seton Castle, it is helpful to think of the meaning of this word “restoration”:

According to one dictionary, it means:

Measures undertaken to return a degraded ecosystem's functions and values, including its hydrology, plant and animal communities, and/or portions thereof, to a less degraded ecological condition; to get or give new life or energy regenerate, rejuvenate.

Clearly, much as this building is suffering degradation, our environment and life all around us is suffering a profound assault and degradation.

A restoration then is a healing, a coming together, a becoming whole (again).

As an educational organization the Academy will utilize this remarkable building, land and legacy to help us understand the water in which we swim today; to help us to awaken to and support the necessary changes that will help heal both our natural environment and our inner environments – our human being-ness’, our relationships, and our capacities for true interdependency. Through the sacred act and commitment to learning itself – the love of learning – we believe that we can restore ourselves and become whole.

In closing, I would like to read a portion of Seton’s “Message From the Chief” as published in his 1902 publication “The Birch Bark Roll” – the manual and mandate of his Woodcraft League, which later became the foundation of the first Boy Scout’s Manual:

“There is a winding deer trail by a stream in the pine woods, and the glint of a larger breadth of water through the alders, with stars in the grass, a high shady rock for the nooning, and a bell-bird softly chiming.

I have always found it very, very pleasant to go there whenever my life would permit. But for long the entrance was hidden from me, and I never should have seen it had I not found a Guide. I was struggling and heart hungry, worn out and lost, hoping to find the way and fearing I never should, when one day a wonderful creature appeared to me. She was very old, I know, but She seemed very young, fresh and athletic, and She had a kind look in her eyes. She said, "Ho, Wayseeker, I have seen your struggle to find the pathway, and I know you will love the things you will see there. Therefore, I will show you the trail, and this is what it will lead you to: a thousand pleasant friendships that will offer honey in little thorny cups, the seven secrets of the underbrush, the health of sunlight, suppleness of body and force unfailing, the unafraidness of the night, the delight of deep water, the goodness of rain, the story of the trail, the knowledge of the swamp, the aloofness of knowing, the power to see a bird when you hear its note, the upbuilding things which are never taught in schools; a crown and a little kingdom measured to your power, but all your own.

These are the things I offer, because you have persevered, but there is a condition attached: When you discover the folksiness of some tree, the compact of bee and bloom, the all-aboutness of some secret, the worthwhileness of the swamp, or the friendship of a frog-pond, you must in some sort note it down and pass it on to another truly a Wayseeker, that the liquid gold turn not to vitriol in your hand; for those who have won power, must with it bear responsibility."

And he ended with: "Because I have known the torment of thirst, I would dig a well where others may drink."

We have undertaken a complex task – and there are many here and not here who have helped us. As we complete this first phase of the process, this getting to the point now just to begin the physical restoration, I would like to name some of these extraordinary people and offer our special thanks.