SPACIOUS REFLECTION: We create an environment in which students can think deeply about questions of the good life and begin to discern their own calling: “...the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet,” in the words of Frederick Buechner. 

NATURE IMMERSION: We encourage students to connect to nature as a source of grounding, contemplation, insight and joy. Students live on campus here in the coastal woodlands of Maine. They learn to identify trees and plants, hike the preserves, and camp on the Maine Island Trail. Students slow down, sync up with nature and come to recognize their reciprocity with the earth.  

INSPIRED ACADEMICS: Our programs are saturated with ideas to live by. We create a retreat-like setting, alive with creative thinking, good books and lively discussion. Our professors guide students through reflective exercises, facilitated conversations and immersive experiences in a non-ideological, non-dogmatic way. All courses at Seguinland Institute bear college credit through our affiliation with UMaine Farmington. 

MINDFULNESS: We try to create a context in which students can cultivate the inner resources necessary for personal and community-oriented thriving. This includes daily mindfulness practice: the development of skills for calming and focusing the mind, knitting together fractured attention spans, and learning to sit with mystery. 

CREATIVE ARTS: Creativity is the lifeblood of human thriving–for individuals and communities. Too many believe that creativity is the domain of the select few, “the artists”. We create space for all students to explore and expand their innate capacities for creative expression.  

BACK TO THE LAND: Our campus is on the site of an old family homestead. In this spirit, we grow some of our own food and try “to live sanely and simply in a troubled world,” to quote Helen & Scott Nearing. We encourage students to grapple with the interconnections between the good life and the food life, as so many pressing issues of our time are food-related: climate change, health, inequality.

THE GOOD LIFE FOR ALL: Questions of the good life for one are inseparable from questions of the good life for all. We encourage our students to recognize that their own well-being is tied up with that of everyone else’s. We seek to instill in our students the skills to build strong and inclusive communities in the 21st Century.

Prof. Philip Francis, PhD

How do I go about living a good life? What will I do with my one wild and precious life?

This course is an experience of living into these questions.

Readings and conversations will be integrated with hands-on experiences in nature and adventures in homesteading.

Students may read Henry David Thoreau’s In the Maine Woods while following the footsteps of his 1846 journey through Maine.

Students may read Robin Wall Kimmer’s “Maple Sugar Moon” in Braiding Sweetgrass while learning to tap maple tree and boil sap to make syrup for the pancakes we cook up together.

Students may read the Nearing’s Living the Good Life while learning the homesteading skills they imparted to generations of back to the landers. 

Throughout the course students are guided through a process of articulating their values & visions of the good life while reading the best of American and Indigenous nature writing.

The course will take place in the closing weeks of the Maine winter. Within every season there is an invitation and an insight. Winter invites us to sync up with its rhythms, to slow down, conserve our energies, take stock, get perspective, prepare for the long haul, and secure a warm place around the fire with fellow travellers; warm beverages all around. Winter also invites us to step away from the fire, to walk out into the silent snow-covered landscape, to find new forms of adventure and joy; hidden reserves of warmth and resilience within. It was in the middle of winter that Albert Camus “at last discovered” that there was within him “an invincible summer.”

The Wintering edition of the Good Life Course at Seguinland is an invitation to embody this season of fire and ice on the coast of Maine, to discover your own invincible summer, and to allow your vision of the good life to emerge from the reflective rhythms of this time and place.

Prof. Marsha Dunn, MSW

The second and third courses in our Winter-to-Spring Semester explore the theme of Community-Building in the 21st Century. Given the breakdown of community in the modern world - in light of the palpable desire for belonging – these courses will be imbued with a sense of timelines and the work of hope.

This course we will explore the role of art & creativity in building thriving, resilient and joy-filled communities. We’ll spend time with community-focused storytellers, dancers, musicians, visual artists, poets and more. We will combine fieldtrips and hands-on studio time with discussions and artist talks.

Our hope is that students emerge from this course empowered to become community-builders in their own way, time and place.

Taught by Seguinland Faculty

The second and third courses in our Winter-to-Spring Semester explore the timely theme of Community-Building in the 21st Century.

In this course, we will explore the role of food in building thriving, resilient communities. We’ll spend time with poet-farmers, oysterwomen, rebel foragers, food forest philosophers, and wild mushroom hunters. We will combine field trips and hands-on planting with food making and philosophical discussion.

The course will culminate in the creation of an immersive, participatory, celebratory and sumptuous art-food installation - a feast for the eyes and the belly.