What Shelburne Farms Taught Me About Bibliotherapy and Stillness

In 2017, I attended an Education for Sustainability educators' institute at Shelburne Farms in Vermont. The overall experience of that one week programme and the subsequent summer institutes were defining moments that changed my practice and made me a more effective educator. One of the things that made this professional development different from others was that it provided an enabling environment for literature to sink in.

The big idea of sustainability is to make the world a better place. And I found myself reflecting on how bibliotherapy cannot thrive in the midst of chaos. The environment must be conducive for literature to have an impact on the emotional wellbeing of the reader.

Shelburne Farms gave me that environment. And in giving it to me, it quietly reframed everything I thought I knew about bibliotherapy.

Every morning at Shelburne Farms, we were invited to choose a spot outdoors, sit in silence and journal. No agenda. No discussion. Just you, the landscape and whatever arrived when the noise stopped.

I chose the lakeside. And I kept choosing it.

There is something that happens when you sit beside still water in the early morning. The world slows down in a way that no classroom, no library building and no well-designed reading corner can quite replicate. Your breathing changes. Your attention shifts. The internal chatter that follows most of us through our days begins, gradually, to quiet.

And in that quiet, something remarkable happened. The book I was reading came alive in a way it had not before. The characters felt closer. The themes landed more deeply. I was not just reading words on a page. I was inhabiting the story in a way that felt almost physical.

That is when I understood something important about bibliotherapy that I had not fully articulated before. Books do not heal in isolation. The environment in which we read matters enormously.

The Sit Spot as a Bibliotherapy Tool

The sit spot is a practice rooted in nature education. It is disarmingly simple. You choose one place in nature, return to it regularly and sit in silence, observing, breathing and writing whatever comes. Over time, familiarity with the spot deepens your capacity for stillness, attention and reflection.

These are precisely the conditions that make bibliotherapy most effective. A reader who is anxious, distracted or emotionally defended cannot fully receive what a book is offering. But a reader who has spent twenty minutes sitting beside a lake, watching the light move across the water and writing their thoughts in a journal, arrives at the page with something open in them. The story finds a way in.

Nature journaling extends this further. When we write about what we observe outdoors, we practice the same skills that deep reading requires: noticing, naming, sitting with complexity and making meaning from what we see. The sit spot and the book become companions in a single practice of paying attention.

What Shelburne Farms Taught Me

Shelburne Farms is not simply a beautiful place, though it is undeniably that. It is a community of educators, farmers and thinkers who have built something rare: a learning environment where sustainability, creativity and genuine human connection exist not as programme objectives but as a way of life.

The warmth of the Shelburne Farms family stayed with me long after I left Vermont. So did their quiet insistence that education, real education, happens when we slow down enough to notice the world we are actually living in.

Their professional development programmes are among the most transformative I have encountered in fifteen years of teaching across multiple countries. If you are an educator looking to deepen your practice this summer, I would encourage you wholeheartedly to visit. You will not return the same.

An Invitation to Educators

As we think about building bibliotherapy into our schools and libraries, let us think beyond the bookshelf. Let us think about the reading corner beside the window, the bench in the school garden, the grassy slope where students are allowed to simply sit and be before they open a page.

We must intentionally create library spaces in and out of the classroom if we want the reading experience to be truly meaningful. Bibliotherapy works best when the reader is already in a state of openness, and nature, in whatever form we can access it, is one of the most reliable pathways to that state.

The lakeside at Shelburne Farms reminded me of that. A sit spot, a journal and the right book at the right moment can do together what none of them can quite do alone.

Find your spot. Sit in it. See what arrives.

The Harbour Library exists to put the right book in your hands. Nature exists to prepare you to receive it.

🌊 www.theharbourlibrary.com