Can ancient texts teach us about “The Good Life?”

Exploring the Good Life in the Classroom, the Kitchen, and the Garden

The Good Life is a rather ambitious title for a course. I admit it. But I didn’t know what else to call it.

I wanted my students to encounter great thinkers from antiquity to the present wrestling with some of life’s most important questions. When I was a college student back in the late 90s I was privileged to have an entire year-long course on western humanities. It’s changed since then, but Reed College is still committed to giving its students an introduction to the classical texts of our culture.

In my course, students struggled through Aristotle on happiness, delighted in Plato’s still-relevant advice about love, embraced Maimonides and Petrarch, Augustine and Cicero, Thomas More, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and, of course, Marcus Aurelius.

It was clear from the start of class that a few things were missing. First, the texts I assigned all came squarely from the classics of the western tradition; there were no contemporary voices, and few women (although I did assign several living female scholars of classical and Renaissance culture). Second, there needed to be an experiential component. After all, one can’t only talk about the good life; one has to live it.

Mara helped me remedy both shortcomings. First, she suggested I choose a few essays from Katsi Cook’s recent spellbinding collection Worlds within Us: Wisdom and Resilience of Indigenous Women Elders.

Katsi is a remarkable midwife, environmentalist and activist from the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne. We have a personal connection to Katsi and have developed a friendship with her and her husband. Mara co-produced an event last Fall in Shelburne, VT, where Krista Tippett of On Being interviewed Katsi live in community with about a hundred social creatives at an interfaith center overlooking Lake Champlain.

What Katsi shared that November day, as you’ll hear in the interview, moved her audience; my students were similarly touched by her wisdom and the essays she collected.

I specifically assigned the essays from Oglala Lakota elder Loretta Afraid of Bear Cook (whom you heard about in my last essay) and Tewa artist and poet Nora Naranjo-Morse of the Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico.

I want to share a few unedited excerpts from my student response papers after reading Worlds Within Us. The collection is special because it was compiled through oral interviews and conversation, and has the vitality and relatability of sagacious conversation.

A bit of background: during the first week of term I gave them a prompt and asked them to write a page or two and post it to Blackboard, our university’s LMS (Learning Management System). Reading a few of those essays in the first week, I detected the presence of AI. I wanted to hear what my students thought, not ChatGPT. So I pivoted, and had them write by hand in class. My goal was to get them to disengage from technology for a few minutes and re-engage their brains.

It worked. I would bring an analog clock and an hourglass with about twelve minutes of sand in it. Students never had to look at a device to keep track of time; they simply glanced up at the hourglass. I noticed two interwoven but distinct ideas crop up again and again in these student pieces: creativity and spirituality; and collective vs. individual relationships to the land.

Creativity and Spirituality

One student wrote that Loretta’s essay “felt refreshing,” like “a gust of cool wind flowing through the pages,” and that Nora Naranjo-Morse’s “description of finding and maintaining her creative integrity” was “the idea that captured my attention the most.”

Another student found herself “tearing up at the words of these women. My whole life, I feel like western society has conditioned me to give back to and appreciate spiritual forces above the Earth. Hearing about the Tewa and Lakota people’s appreciation to the earth itself was beautifully refreshing.”

Supplementing classics of western history and thought with contemporary, indigenous perspectives oxygenated our classroom discussions. One student even delighted in spotting connections between Lakota wisdom and ancient Stoicism: “to me, specifically when Nora mentioned the idea that every breath is a connection to the world really corresponded with Aurelius’s mentions of being intentional.” Students also remarked on the timely wisdom and self-determination found in indigenous American cultures.

Collective vs. Individual Relationships to the Land

Another central theme was ancestral ties to land. One student, reflecting on the fact that some of her great-grandparents were immigrants, said she felt the “loss of connection, of an ancestral tie to the nature we live near.” Nature, she pointed out, has been “driven out of our ‘modern’ world.”

Another student, on his way to a career in finance in New York City, also related to the concept of ancestral land: “every time I visit India I visit the farmland my grandpa grew up on, and the land we still have. In a sense this helps me connect with my family history.” This student wrote that “my parents moved here then had me. I am first-generation American born. Sometimes this can make it hard to connect with my culture. However, when we have our holidays and ceremonies such as Holi, Diwali, and Indian New Year, it helps me reconnect with my culture in a way because I am not always surrounded by it.”

Another student of South Asian heritage shared that Nora’s “descriptions reminded me of my grandparents who were both farmers. The way of life described almost transported me back to when I watched my grandma working in the field, carrying huge baskets of crops over her head. Even now, my parents love to plant and garden, but those traditions are fading with me.” For my students, close connection to ancestral land is inseparable from a sense of belonging. “I believe part of the Good Life includes staying away from the individualist ideology and returning to things like the earth, community, and ourselves.”

This sense of rootedness and belonging was a through line in student responses, one that I wanted to explore experientially, in the real world beyond the printed page or the glow of the screen. So with permission from the honors college I welcomed them to our home for dinner one April evening. When they arrived, three teams organically formed: one in the kitchen, another in the garden, and a third committed to crafts.

Excerpt from one of my students’ depictions of “The Good Life”

The students seemed to genuinely appreciate the invitation to help prepare taco bowls, transplant overpopulated zinnias from one bed of our terraced garden to another, and learn some basic calligraphy skills. In a subsequent response paper one student wrote “We are living in a dark period of history that I only thought existed in textbooks. But, it is clinging to the moments that make us human that reminds us of why the good life is worth fighting for. It’s not present in a paycheck or a trophy, but present in the moments I get to spend planting zinnias and drinking sparkling tea with not just classmates, but friends.”

What did I learn from my students about the good life? Classrooms are fine, and constitute the lifeblood of the modern university. And even though experiential learning is both a buzzword and an endowed center at many universities, including my own, sometimes the most basic experiences— preparing a meal together, working a bit in the garden, sitting down to a centering practice like writing a handwritten letter of appreciation to a loved one— are the most central to our humanity.

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