April 5, 2022

Dear Friends,

Last week, The BTS Center team gathered together for a day-long staff retreat. It was a day of laughter and ideas and planning – but most of all, it was a day of connection. This gathering marked our first time meeting in person as a full team. In fact, it was the first time that a few of us had met in person!

Being together, both masked inside in the morning and then outside for the afternoon, was a deep reminder of how important our senses are in forming relationships with one another and with the world around us. In our afternoon session, we ventured down to the edge of Casco Bay, where our own Aram Mitchell led us in an exercise to utilize our five senses in experiencing and communicating with the world around us. As we shared the sights, sounds, smells, feels, and tastes we noticed, we tuned in more acutely to this piece of the earth where the land meets the sea and learned to know it in a new way.

While we know that each person has different ways of encountering the natural world, and while each of us may have access to different senses or use them in different ways, we also know that there is so much to be learned about the world and about ourselves by slowing down and tuning in to the place in which we find ourselves.

Spring offers so much to please the senses, from the scents and sights of bursting blooms to the swirling of winds and the sounds of birdsong after a long winter. This spring, we have a number of exciting offerings, and while most of them will happen in the online space, we hope that they will act as invitations to a deeper sense of the natural emergences where you are. Please join us – we would love to see you!

All the best,
The BTS Center Team
Spring brings an abundance of events and programs at The BTS Center! We hope you will join us for one or more of these offerings:
What we're reading, listening to, and engaging:




  • We're engaging with the work of Maine-based scientist and climate-change artist Jill Pelto.
Spring
by Mary Oliver

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge




to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her —
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.
As the seasons shift and perhaps allow for more time outdoors, we invite you to try this Trailside Practice from Aram Mitchell, our Director of Partnerships and Formation. You can find more of these Earthbound Practices on our website.
The BTS Center | 207.774.5212 | info@thebtscenter.org | www.thebtscenter.org
 Our mission is to catalyze spiritual imagination with enduring wisdom for transformative faith leadership. We offer theologically grounded programs of continuing education and spiritual formation, including workshops and retreats, learning cohorts, public conversations, and projects of applied research.