"My Sewanee experience was shaped by the exceptional communities that I was a part of. This has definitely affected my expectations for what a community can and should be. Sewanee also filled me with the drive to be an active citizen, intent on bringing new ideas and improvements to reality. Since graduating, I have worked in outdoor education in North Carolina and Alabama, and although I feel incredibly fulfilled by my occupation, I am also eager to do more and bring even more life to these places. I found my passion at Sewanee and it has been carrying me ever since!"

Joseph was a member of the Greenhouse and the Crafting Guild while attending Sewanee. He also worked with the Office of Environmental Stewardship and Sustainability (OESS).

Before college, studying the environment seemed to me to mean learning the names of all the seemingly independent parts (plants, rocks, fungi), and penetrating the walls of academia to retrieve the guarded secret of how to save our planet from ourselves. 

As a student at Sewanee, my faith was tested. Professors and peers elucidated the numerous ways that a wealthy few have damned us and our wild-born kin to slow and brutal attrition. I dreamed that the days of bird-bone needles and seal-sinew thread were Eden and that the day we rent the earth with a plow to sow one uniform phalanx was the day we fell.

But lo, a harmonious day awaits us if only we greet our earth kin with love, compassion, wisdom, and grace. This is what I learned In school. 

Where the wild woods whisper secrets in a tongue we’ve long forgotten, where youthful laughter peals brave and free, where the boundary blurs between natural and supernatural, where sprites dance and haints prowl, I am or long to be. I live the transient life of a seasonal outdoor educator. 

Brother Elijah

Retired GreenHouse co-director, professional swashbuckler, and meme gangsta 

elijah.greiner@me.com

LinkedIn: Profile of Elijah Greiner