Shalom Hill Farm

I’ve just returned from spending the entire weekend at Shalom Hill Farm, a Lutheran retreat center in the midst of the prairie in southwestern Minnesota, with my “religious education in relation to creation” class. I’ve taken classes there before, so I was looking forward to it. This time our class toured an ethanol distillery, visited with a produce farmer, and walked the land to see a “buffalo rub” boulder (which also led to a visit with a woman from the Jeffers Petroglyphs site).

New learning this time around included the statistic that prairie is the most endangered landscape of North America, with only 1% remaining, and that prairies can be understood to be rain forests inverted. Meaning: just as the rain forest serves as host to myriad species and filters air and water, the prairie serves the same function here. Where in rain forest the trees reach up to the sky, in prairies the plants reach deep down into the earth, anchoring the soil, filtering water, providing a vast ecosystem for myriad plants and animals. Archeologists and other scientists believe that prairie evolved over time from an interesting confluence of factors, beginning with a landscape that was sparsely populated with trees, that had intermittent ponds and lakes, and that had rolling hills. Buffalo were drawn to the landscape, and people followed. Eventually people burned most of the trees, and buffalo trampled what remained, so that a vast sea of multiple grasses and other flexible plants grew up to provide food, shelter and ecological diversity.

Given that I grew up in Wisconsin, and read all of the "Little House on the Prairie" books by the time I was 10 years old, you would think these would be familiar facts to me. But they were not, and it fascinates me how willing environmentalists are to support "saving the rain forest' -- the "lungs of our earth" -- but how oblivious some of us are to the prairie. Perhaps if we thought about it as the "liver" of the earth?

In any case, if you are looking for a warmly welcoming, comfortable, beautiful, and exquisitely relaxing retreat, check out Shalom Hill Farm. I understand that groups come from all over the country to visit it, in part to retreat, and in part to study its "green" architecture, since it was designed by John Lyle, nationally known for "regenerative architecture." The food served here is all locally grown, the beds are comfortable, and the night sky is so lit with up with stars (since there aren't city lights to obscure them), that it truly is a wonderful setting for retreat.