When Your Work Becomes Your Practice

What creating an ecospirituality syllabus is teaching me about integration

Photo by Mikhail Pavstyuk on Unsplash

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I‘ve written dozens of syllabi in my academic career.

This one is different.

I’m designing a year-long ecospirituality certificate program, four modules, experiential content, the works. As a professor and researcher, I know how to build a curriculum. I’ve done this before. Many times.

But yesterday, working on the syllabus, I realized something: I wasn’t just organizing content. I was practicing what I’m teaching.

ReWilding the Soul: A New Certificate Program in EcoSpirituality

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Creating this syllabus became contemplative practice.

Past syllabi were intellectual exercises, arranged readings, sequenced assignments, and met learning outcomes. Professional work, kept separate from spiritual life.

This syllabus refuses that separation.

Because I can’t teach ecospirituality at arm’s length. The experiential content comes from my own walks, my relationship with trees, the times landscape taught me what no book could. This isn’t borrowed expertise. It’s embodied knowledge.

The work and the practice converged.

Just like writing reveals what thinking conceals, creating curriculum about kinship with the more-than-human world requires that same kinship to flow through the designing. The syllabus isn’t describing ecospirituality, it’s emerging from it.

Medieval monks didn’t separate sacred work from spiritual practice. Copying manuscripts was prayer. Growing food was devotion. Work and practice were one thing.

We’re the ones who split them apart.

This week, notice where your work and your spiritual practice might converge.

What if they’re not separate things you’re trying to balance, but one integrated practice waiting to be recognized?

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A note on this piece: This is another atomic essay, short, experimental, and less polished. The writing equivalent of noticing something while walking and pausing to name it.