time. Selg’s volumes will certainly inspire many readers and will contribute to the enhancement of those capacities of heartfelt-thinking and critical inquiry, which, if I am not mistaken, was one important element of Rudolf Steiner’s Michaelic mission. Bruce Donehower (bdonehower@yahoo.com) is Lecturer in the University Writing Program, University of California at Davis, as well as a novelist (SancXtuary: A Novel; Ice: A Novel of Initiation; Miko, Little Hunter of the North), editor and translator (The Birth of Novalis, The Consolations of Philosophy and Other Tales). He is a member of the collegium of the Section for the Literary Arts & Humanities of the School for Spiritual Science in North America.
Why On Earth? Biography and the Practice of Human Becoming A review by Sarah E. Putnam, PhD Anyone seeking to follow the Delphic injunction to “know thyself” will benefit greatly from this lyrical, practical book by Signe Schaefer. In a tone that is conversational, compassionate, and deeply personal, Schaefer poses far-reaching and difficult questions, and provides experienced guidance on the path to self and higher Self discovery. She references the well-known texts on biography by the O’Neils, Burkhard, Lievegoed, and SturgeonDay, among others, and goes beyond them in this integrative and inspiring work. Out of his research, Rudolf Steiner, described the human individuality as a being with continuing existence, extending before birth and beyond death. Each person comes into earthly conditions and situations with unique gifts and burdens, the effects of which are observable in his or her biography. Each of us also comes into life with certain intentions, created by our higher Self in order to further our development toward wholeness. Schaefer addresses these issues, ever mindful of the freedom of the individual while speaking of destiny, gender, temperament, the seven-year phases, and life stages. Along the way, she takes insightful excursions through wide-ranging topics. She discusses the women’s movement and the fourfold human being, works with questions such as “why seven (years)?”, takes a whirlwind tour through the planetary types, and awakens and deepens her read-
ers’ involvement with a topic through practical exercises. Readers familiar with literature on the senses, drawing in nature, Waldorf education, the foundation books, and human development will appreciate her big-picture vision and ability to integrate ideas from diverse approaches. She makes thoughtful and incisive use of poetry and literature to capture a feeling, an image, or a life stage. Throughout, the author is true to her central question of what it means to be “on a long journey of becoming”, a human being in the active sense of the verb, a “human becoming” (p.12). Indeed, she is leading the reader, through exercises and questions that prompt personal reflections, to answer the question posed by her title Why On Earth?: “Why am I here, in this place, in this family, at this time?” The structure of the book reflects these questions about incarnation and becoming and honors the complexity of human existence as a gradual process of transformation from the inherited body, characteristics and talents with which we were born into a self-created, free being. Schaefer begins with the most generic and archetypal aspects of incarnation: gender, temperament, and the phases of life. Then, using the imagery of the four seasons of the year, she devotes a chapter to each: spring (birth to twenty-one), summer (twentyone to forty-two), autumn (forty-two to sixty-three), and winter (sixty-three and beyond). As she takes us through each of these stages, she makes clear how development becomes more and more individual, less predictable, and more free. The penultimate chapter is a crescendo of this progression toward individuation, a call to the reader to grow in self-knowledge by pursuing an inner path of meditation. Organized around the Foundation Stone Meditation’s three mantric calls to the human soul—to the inner practices of spirit recalling, spirit sensing, and spirit beholding,—the author describes the six basic exercises from Steiner’s Outline of Esoteric Science with a clarity that comes from personal experience. She ends the chapter with a powerful example of an activity that she shared spring issue 2014
• 45