Cultivating Wisdom: Life, Business, and Society explores what it means to think and act wisely—and how wisdom can guide human flourishing, responsible citizenship, ethical leadership, and a healthy democracy. Offered as a Reveley Interdisciplinary Fellowship course, this class brings together philosophy, psychology, and business to examine wisdom through the phenomenon of American Transcendentalism as both an ancient ideal and a practical skill for a modern life. ENROLLMENT FULL.

The American Wisdom Tradition rests on an unalienable foundation of Native American Wisdom. That Native wisdom is irreducible to books and concepts, but rests on embodied experience lived in harmony with the natural environment in place and time. In this fall-and-spring series of field experiences, we will visit local environments of woods and waters, led by Russell Reed (Atakapa of Louisiana), experimental archaeologist and past supervisor of American Indian field programs at the Jamestown-Yorktown and Colonial Williamsburg museums.

Of all conceptions born of medieval Europe, the most powerfully charged and widely adopted is the mind-altering idea of the university. Arising a thousand years ago, this one revolutionary idea has spread to nearly every nation in the world and all seven continents. The ancient campus of William & Mary centers upon the oldest academic buildings in the United States. The university preserves in brick and mortar the ancient human aspiration to universal knowledge, the ultimate object of which is the unity of the individual soul. In this walking tour we examine the local origins of a universal idea. 

The American Wisdom Tradition rests on an unalienable foundation of Native American Wisdom. That Native wisdom is irreducible to books and concepts, but rests on embodied experience lived in harmony with the natural environment in place and time. In this fall-and-spring series of field experiences, we will visit local environments of woods and waters, led by Russell Reed (Atakapa of Louisiana), experimental archaeologist and past supervisor of American Indian field programs at the Jamestown-Yorktown and Colonial Williamsburg museums.

What would it mean to live even one day of your life illuminated by the Inner Light? What secrets lie inward even of innerness? What is the Innermost Life? The ways of woodland life are mysterious today, yet their mystery lies not so much in themselves as in the dark glass through which they are viewed from the remove of our modern lives. In this shared journey of shared words and images, we seek the secrets of simplicity, of innocence and the beginning of things. The Innermost Life is nearer to us than we think, if we could once see into its secrets.

Through the formative century of American letters and beyond, Ralph Waldo Emerson was “the arch radical of the world.” Among the wider circle of Americans we remember as Transcendentalists, such individuals as Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, John Muir, William James, Robert Frost, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Ansel Adams are practically unimaginable without the revolutionary influence of Emerson. This course will seek to recover the radical wisdom of the “Sage of Concord” as a means of bringing America’s revolutionary wisdom into focus, from the founding period to the closing of the western frontier.

The American Wisdom Tradition rests on an unalienable foundation of Native American Wisdom. That Native wisdom is irreducible to books and concepts, but rests on embodied experience lived in harmony with the natural environment in place and time. In this fall-and-spring series of field experiences, we will visit local environments of woods and waters, led by Russell Reed (Atakapa of Louisiana), experimental archaeologist and past supervisor of American Indian field programs at the Jamestown-Yorktown and Colonial Williamsburg museums.

Now a century after Ansel Adams took his first photograph, we almost cannot see nature except through his eyes. Yet those early photographs showed the world a nature it had never seen before: a revolutionary, brilliant refocusing on the Wilderness, the Whole Wilderness, and Nothing but the Wilderness, so help him God. Ansel Adams’ art was a radical act of the human imagination, to which we are all heirs today. In this course of striking masterworks and commentary, we seek to find our way back to the beginning, to see the world afresh through the lens of our greatest photographic artist.

The world looks to the example of America for many things: for the high road to opportunity, industry, progress and wealth; for ideals of freedom and equality; yet there is also the radically solitary road of personal independence, self-reliance, and wisdom. Progress and wisdom appear to run on parallel paths through American history, each defined by its own conception of the individual, on courses that seldom intersect. In this brief introduction to a complex tradition, we offer a radical re-imagining of the single-file “road less traveled” of “Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture.”

The American Wisdom Tradition rests on an unalienable foundation of Native American Wisdom. That Native wisdom is irreducible to books and concepts, but rests on embodied experience lived in harmony with the natural environment in place and time. In this fall-and-spring series of field experiences, we will visit local environments of woods and waters, led by Russell Reed (Atakapa of Louisiana), experimental archaeologist and past supervisor of American Indian field programs at the Jamestown-Yorktown and Colonial Williamsburg museums.

“The hands are the cutting edge of the mind,” cultural historian Jacob Bronowski once observed. In this series of reflective walks through the Historic Trades at Colonial Williamsburg, we seek to regain the wisdom of skilled hand work to a world where it has almost wholly disappeared. How does the human mind suffer when the hands have no voice? In this first series of three meetings, we will visit sites representing the fundamental crafts of Food, Clothes, and Shelter.

“The hands are the cutting edge of the mind,” cultural historian Jacob Bronowski once observed. In this series of reflective walks through the Historic Trades at Colonial Williamsburg, we seek to regain the wisdom of skilled hand work to a world where it has almost wholly disappeared. How does the human mind suffer when the hands have no voice? In this first series of three meetings, we will visit sites representing the fundamental crafts of Food, Clothes, and Shelter.

“The hands are the cutting edge of the mind,” cultural historian Jacob Bronowski once observed. In this series of reflective walks through the Historic Trades at Colonial Williamsburg, we seek to regain the wisdom of skilled hand work to a world where it has almost wholly disappeared. How does the human mind suffer when the hands have no voice? In this first series of three meetings, we will visit sites representing the fundamental crafts of Food, Clothes, and Shelter.

“The hands are the cutting edge of the mind,” cultural historian Jacob Bronowski once observed. In this series of reflective walks through the Historic Trades at Colonial Williamsburg, we seek to regain the wisdom of skilled hand work to a world where it has almost wholly disappeared. How does the human mind suffer when the hands have no voice? In this first series of three meetings, we will visit sites representing the fundamental crafts of Food, Clothes, and Shelter.

“The hands are the cutting edge of the mind,” cultural historian Jacob Bronowski once observed. In this series of reflective walks through the Historic Trades at Colonial Williamsburg, we seek to regain the wisdom of skilled hand work to a world where it has almost wholly disappeared. How does the human mind suffer when the hands have no voice? In this first series of three meetings, we will visit sites representing the fundamental crafts of Food, Clothes, and Shelter.

Of all conceptions born of medieval Europe, the most powerfully charged and widely adopted is the mind-altering idea of the university. Arising a thousand years ago, this one revolutionary idea has spread to nearly every nation in the world and all seven continents. The ancient campus of William & Mary centers upon the oldest academic buildings in the United States. The university preserves in brick and mortar the ancient human aspiration to universal knowledge, the ultimate object of which is the unity of the individual soul. In this walking tour we examine the local origins of a universal idea. 

Have you ever longed for Life in the Woods? The woods are more than trees and earth and sky. The woods are a way of being, of seeing and feeling the light. In this class set in the shadowy light of the autumn woods, Diana Lorence invites us to look and learn to see with woodland eyes and all our original senses. She draws on her seven years of solitude in the woods at Land’s End in California to let the forest teach us what meanings await in the woods of our memories and imaginations, illuminated by a Woodland Way of Seeing.

The American Wisdom Tradition rests on an unalienable foundation of Native American Wisdom. That Native wisdom is irreducible to books and concepts, but rests on embodied experience lived in harmony with the natural environment in place and time. In this fall-and-spring series of field experiences, we will visit local environments of woods and waters, led by Russell Reed (Atakapa of Louisiana), experimental archaeologist and past supervisor of American Indian field programs at the Jamestown-Yorktown and Colonial Williamsburg museums.

“When words lose their meaning, the people lose their freedom.” So observed Confucius 2500 years ago, though he might have been speaking to us today of our most urgent issues. Over the course of the past two revolutionary centuries, certain words of fundamental importance have so far lost their meaning as to reverse their import, at the cost of the very freedoms they purport to protect. What is freedom? What are words? What is meaning? In this course we will examine the meaning of six familiar words and endeavor to reclaim our inner freedom.

This ninety-minute-long walking tour of the town and gardens along Palace Street in Colonial Williamsburg examines the city through the philosopher's eyes. Do gardens have meaning? Is architecture more than shelter and decoration? Is there a difference in Williamsburg and what difference does it make to us? What role can a city play in the pursuit of wisdom? Registration and Colonial Williamsburg Good Neighbor Pass required.

In this class of words and images, Michael Lorence will be joined by Ed Pease and David Stemann, the architects who recently restored all the Civilian Conservation Corps cabins in Virginia. In 1890, the American frontier was declared closed. A consumer revolution exploded out of that vacuum only to collapse into the depths of the Great Depression. In response, the CCC was formed to bring hundreds of thousands of white, black, and Native American men and women back into healing contact with the land, restoring a suffering nation with a vision of a simpler past and wiser future.

For seven years, Diana Lorence and her husband lived alone in an unelectrified, twelve-by-twelve-foot house they built themselves, hidden in the woods of Northern California, in a world lit only by fire. Without telephone or computer, without automobile or access to stores, Diana’s Innermost Life answered her deepest need for something we have all left behind. Please join us for this true story in words and pictures of what it is like to live for years of your life, literally out of this world.

The American Wisdom Tradition rests on an unalienable foundation of Native American Wisdom. That Native wisdom is irreducible to books and concepts, but rests on embodied experience lived in harmony with the natural environment in place and time. In this fall-and-spring series of field experiences, we will visit local environments of woods and waters, led by Russell Reed (Atakapa of Louisiana), experimental archaeologist and past supervisor of American Indian field programs at the Jamestown-Yorktown and Colonial Williamsburg museums.

Henry Thoreau's beautiful essay “Walking” describes the art of walking as “Holy-Landing,” a crusade undertaken to reclaim the paradise of our beginnings. “We should go forth on the shortest walk,” he says, “in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return.” America once stood for a paradise regained of boundless forest and stream: a mythic landscape preserved from the beginnings of time. In this narrated woodland walk through the majestic Bassett Woods at Colonial Williamsburg, we seek the sources of American wisdom in the ancient forests that shaped the early nation.

What would it be like to wake in the morning and know that you had no light or heat, no television or radio, no computer or phone? No car, no neighbors, no news, no appointments, no stores, no errands, no chores? Of all the thousands of questions that have been asked about Diana Lorence’s years in the woods at Innermost House, the one most frequently repeated is simply, “What did you do all day?” The answer may surprise you. And after seven years of deepest satisfaction, Diana could truly say, she never worked, she never played, and she was never bored. You are cordially invited to spend 24 hours in words and pictures with Diana of Innermost House.  Registration required.

For seven years, Diana Lorence and her husband lived alone in an unelectrified, twelve-by-twelve-foot house they built themselves, hidden in the woods of Northern California, in a world lit only by fire. Without telephone or computer, without automobile or access to stores, Diana’s Innermost Life answered her deepest need for something we have all left behind. Please join us for this true story in words and pictures of what it is like to live for years of your life, literally out of this world.

In this timely invitation to American Wisdom, Michael Lorence is joined by special guest Dr. Michael Luchs, Distinguished Professor and Chair of Marketing at the W&M Mason School of Business, a leading expert in the field of Consumer Wisdom. “I think of wisdom as the art and science of thriving," says Professor Luchs. "More than ever, I believe that wisdom is something we all can learn, and that how wisely we choose to use our resources can have a profound effect on our well-being – and on others as well.” Please join us for this philosophical and practical exploration of a subject of interest to us all.

During her seven years in the woods, Diana Lorence of Innermost House found herself practicing a feelingful form of what she later learned is called "forest bathing." Walking in silence amidst the surrounding beauty of the woods, bathed in that sweet air, the delicate passingness of nature altered her sense of time and place, until the boundaries between herself and the world softly relaxed, and gave way to a sense of oneness Diana calls "timeless time." Every morning in the woods is then the first morning, again and again forever. Please join Diana for a gentle guided walk in the beauty of our own Bassett Woods.