Cath Conlon: Bringing Life to the Land
by Donna Mosher

The kitchen is a cook’s dream: spacious, with open shelves for cookware and labeled bins for staples; an expansive granite island with two utilitarian sinks; a commercial range; room for several cooks, and perches for onlookers. The decor is a charming mix of country French and a trend-setting loft look. Cath Conlon directs lunch preparations for her 20 school-aged visitors, instructing one in the sautéing of kale, sending another out to the garden to snip some fresh mint for the tea, pointing a third in the direction of the water pitchers and glasses. All the while she is busy filling dishes, stirring a pot on the stove, peeking at an aromatic delectable in the oven and sharing her vision of a world sustained by – and supporting – a healthy planet.

Cath Conlon has created a magical oasis a mere hour’s drive from the third largest city in the country. Carved out of the land, yet intrinsically a part of it, Blackwood Educational Land Institute offers its Houston-area visitors a sense of peace and tranquility rarely found in daily life. One breathes more easily here; one feels a oneness and a rightness with life, a distant remembering combined with an intuitive knowing that, somehow, this is how life was meant to be savored.

Thirteen years ago, the Conlon family’s 23 acres near Hempstead, Texas, encompassed little more than a forest of trees and brush struggling to grow in poor soil. Now it has been transformed into Blackwood Educational Land Institute, embracing a 5,000 square-foot environmentally friendly straw-bale house, a prolific organic garden that contributes to the meals, a greenhouse, a spiral garden, a butterfly garden, bee hives, a chicken coop, a water harvesting system, a passive solar heating system, a labyrinth, and even a delightful little privy.

Created in Community
Countless hands – large and small – have created this environmental treasure, all working under Cath’s masterful guidance and irresistible enthusiasm. The dream was inspired by Cath’s desire to offer students a place to learn about their interdependence with the land and to experience honoring and shaping life on it. The result is an ongoing and ever-changing indoor-outdoor classroom, where the students range in age from preschool to adult, and where the lessons are so captivating that no one really recognizes it as learning.

Blackwood Educational Land Institute was established as a non-profit organization dedicated to reminding students of humanity’s intrinsic bond with the land, teaching the interconnectivity of all things, and suggesting that great things can happen if we only realize that such interdependence extends to our families and our communities as well.

Such was the spirit in which Blackwood was built. Cath invited students and teachers of schools in the Houston metropolitan area to come to the site. They lived on the land, working to improve the condition of the soil and building a sustainable habitat while studying their traditional classroom lessons for part of the day. Others were inspired by Cath’s dream, and pitched in as well. Master gardeners, engineers, scientists, doctors, city planners, and even a pond hydrologist shared their expertise with the students, with particular emphasis on how their discipline is connected to the land and the community.

Today thousands of individuals each year are educated, enriched, and enlivened at Blackwood. School-age students are the lucky ones, spending a week or two in a hybrid educational environment fashioned to present both hands-on outdoor experiences and more traditional computer- and book-based learning. They leave with an enthusiasm for the land that flows into their family life and even has them eating their vegetables!

Adults savor bits of Blackwood as well, participating in opportunities ranging from spiritual retreats to corporate board meetings. Cath is careful to make sure even the grown-ups leave with a little more reverence for the land. “One group generated so much trash when they were here, I made them take most of it home with them!” she laughs.

Another story struck her with more poignancy, reminding her how restorative the land can be.

“A group of Montessori students and their teacher were here for a week,” Cath says. “One day they had been especially busy – up early for lessons and working diligently outside since lunch. About mid-afternoon, the group took a break, pulling the rockers out onto the lawn to read. I walked out to see if they were ready for a snack, only to find each and every one of them asleep in the sun!

“This place offers something folks can’t seem to find in their daily lives. It puts us in touch with a peaceful inner core – a vitality we find when we gain a reverence for the land. That’s what those children got that day. And it’s theirs. It is a nugget of peace that belongs to them only. They will always have it; no one can take it away.”

Hard work and healing
Cath knows first-hand the vitality an intimate relationship with these 23 acres can generate. It may have saved her life. It certainly gave her one.

Cath had worked as a psychotherapist for four years until, one day, she realized she could not see another patient. “I had lost my sense of possibility,” she says. In 1989, Cath was diagnosed with tumors and cysts in her ovaries. Her doctor wanted to perform an immediate hysterectomy. She told him she wanted time to try to heal herself. He gave her two months. Moving to the land that would become Blackwood, she camped out in her son’s tree house, planted a garden, and began to detoxify her body through healthy eating and a meditative lifestyle. In one month, the doctor told her the tumors had shrunk by 50 percent. Within one year, her tumors and cysts were gone.

“That was when I decided to dedicate my work to strengthening humankind by teaching others how to reconnect to the land,” she says. “We teach what we need to learn. I couldn’t escape it. So I shifted my work to renovating physical environments rather than emotional ones.”

She threw herself into learning how to live on the land, traveling back and forth to New Mexico for nine months to learn permaculture. She took classes and workshops on healthy living and eating. She now also works as a general contractor, supplementing the Blackwood income which currently generates only enough money to cover about half the non-profit’s expenses.

“It’s not an easy life,” Cath is quick to dispel any romanticized notion one might have about life at Blackwood. “There is no way I can manage this land alone; I work off-site so I can pay others to work here with me.

“I’ve made tradeoffs,” she says. “That’s what life is – a series of choices. You take a step, come to a fork, and then find yourself faced with a hard choice. And you make it.”

It is clear Cath’s passion for the place gives her the energy to work hard and make the hard choices.

“Mother Nature has been able to keep the world in harmony for billions of years. Communities, to a large extent, reflect the individuals that comprise them. The stronger and more content the individual, the stronger and more content the community. The land helped save me. Teaching communities how to listen to the land and become caretakers of the land is my way of giving thanks.”

And the rewards are as great as the work is difficult.

“My days are full and wonderful,” she says, smiling. “A day might be spent gardening in the morning, talking with architects at noon and hosting a feng shui workshop in the evening. I have my health and I have an incredible life – and I’m creating it one day at a time.”

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