To recognize his 35 years of teaching as a resident artist, Caddy received the 1997 Sally Ordway Irvine Award for Arts Education.
In his own words: “In 1994 I suffered a stroke, and was elated to find myself alive, somewhat sensible, and still capable of making poems.... [When I] came home to the land, I was freshly amazed by beauty; in my absence, green had learned a thousand new names.... After stroke therapy, I decided to spend the rest of my allotted time writing and sharing poems of celebration and helping people recover their intuitive connections with Earth.”[7] Self Expressing Earth evolved into Morning Earth, a non-profit 501(3)c educational organization.
Originally sponsored by Hamline University’s Center for Global Environmental Education, Morning Earth has become, among other things, a web site of over 400 pages that Caddy describes as “an antidote to environmental despair, a resource toward ecoliteracy for teachers of students of all ages, and for everyone interested in the confluence of ecology and the arts.” Perhaps the most striking aspect of Morning Earth is the five-day-a-week combination of a nature photo and a short ecologically literate poem, taken and written each day by Caddy working from his home in the Minnesota woods.
They are also updated daily on the website,[8] Many hundreds of these photo-poems are archived on the web site which now receives several thousand unique visitors a month.
In 1984 John and his collaborators won a Studio X-2 Grant from the Jerome Foundation, for which he teamed with choreographer Susan Delattre and composer Pat Moriarty to present onstage his poem cycle "The Heronry" with voice, jazz and dancers.
In 1998, Caddy began writing a small Earth poem every weekday morning, which he then emailed to subscribing classrooms in his SEE program at Hamline University's Center for Environmental Education.
To begin, John just did this practice in eight-week school-scheduled stints; since 2001 he has written and emailed the poems year-round to a steadily growing list of friends, classroom teachers, and subscribers who read about the project in magazines or newspapers.
John Caddy's largest and latest collection of poetry is 2008's "With Mouths Open Wide: New and Selected Poems" (Milkweed Editions).