About Cheryl Hellner
My lifelong love of language began at the age of nine when my fourth-grade teacher opened every school day with a poem. I was entranced. I began writing and filling one brown spiral notebook after another with the music, rhythm, and meaning of words.
After graduate school when I became a teacher and education specialist in my local Head Start program, a new fascination emerged: the braiding of story and visual images we call the picture book. Sitting on the floor of the Cheshire Cat bookstore in D.C., I spent hours poring over story after story. Sing Up the Earth! fulfills a long-held dream of writing and publishing my own picture book stories.
I write, and tell, stories that nourish our children’s relationship with the living Earth, and with their own beautiful and mysterious creativity.
As a teacher/retreat leader and writer with Dayspring Earth Ministry, my work is to awaken and nourish awe, reverence, and wonder for the sacred Earth community which is alive and singing, asking—especially now—for our wisdom and care.
Dayspring, the place where I live and work
Standing in the wild old-farm fields of Dayspring, just after sunset, I hear the heavy hurried traffic on interstate 270, north of Washington, D.C. But I hear also or feel in my body a silence, a stillness, the subtle yet palpable prayer of our Earth moving from daylight into darkness.
Dayspring is not a wilderness far away from city and suburb. Rather, it is a small wonder—206 acres of fields and forests, ponds, hedgerows, and in the creek valley, stone ledges—the roots of old mountains. Migratory waterfowl and songbirds pass through in season. Deer, Coyote, Red Fox, Raccoon, Opossum, Red-tailed Hawk, Great Horned Owl—so many wild creatures, so many calls, cries, songs.
Dayspring is also home to a small Christian community, part of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C., dedicated to silence, prayer, contemplation, beauty, and loving intense engagement with the needs of our suffering world.
This is the place where I live and work. Dayspring land, creatures, and community nourish and inspire all my creative work: stories, poems, teaching/retreat leading.
