being human winter-spring 2017

being human anthroposophy.org

personal and cultural renewal in the 21st century

“Inspired by the Work of Rudolf Steiner” (p.14) Tierra Viva: the Santa Fe Biodynamic Conference (p.16) Why Anthroposophy Needs America (p.20) “Come Forth!” The Lazarus Project (p.32) What’s Scientific About Spiritual Science? (p.39) The Redemption of the Animals (p.44)

Michael Balin of the Free Columbia Puppet Troupe, prepares for production of the “Ramapo Salamander” (see Gallery, page 27)

a quarterly publication of the Anthroposophical Society in America winter-spring issue 2017

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being human

ANTHROPOSOPHY NYC Programs and resources in visual arts eurythmy music drama & poetry Waldorf education spirituality esoteric research economics evolution of consciousness health & therapies Biodynamic farming social action self-development

WORKSHOPS TALKS STUDY GROUPS CLASSES FESTIVALS EVENTS EXHIBITS

UPCOMING EVENTS & PROGRAMS STEINERBOOKS RESEARCH SEMINAR

at NY University, Friday-Saturday, March 17-18 after-party at ASNYC, Saturday, March 18, 5:30pm

THE ESOTERIC UNDERSTANDING OF DEATH, DYING, AND SURRENDER

with Lisa Romero and Giesela Wielki, March 24-26, Fri-Sun

Celebrating 50 Years of Inspiring Waldorf Teacher Education!

THE ART & PRACTICE OF SACRED CONVERSATION

Workshop with Lynn Jericho, May 27-28, Sat-Sun

ANTHROPOSOPHIC MEDICINE FOR EVERYONE, Wednesday, monthly

David T. Anderson, March 8, Apr 12, May 10, June 14, 7pm

EURYTHMY, Monday, Monthly

with Linda Larson, March 13, Apr 10, May 22, June 5

MEMBERS’ EVENINGS, Friday, monthly

for members of the NY Branch or Anthroposophical Society; April 7, May 5, June 2

Rudolf Steiner Bookstore Open Tue-Thurs 1-5pm, Fri-Sat 12 noon-8pm, Sun 1pm-5pm; call for info: 212-242-8945

Steiner has “the most impressive holistic legacy of the 20th century...”

— NY Open Center co-founder Ralph White

centerpoint www. gallery asnyc spiritual therapeutic world & outsider artists

The New York Branch

.org

Anthroposophical Society in America 138 West 15th Street New York, NY – (212) 242-8945

NOW ENROLLING / REGISTERING FOR SUMMER 2017: Low-Residency Elementary & Early Childhood Completion Track Teacher Education Programs with MEd Option

•

Grades 1-12 World Language Teacher Education Intensive

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Summer Series Courses & Workshops

www.sunbridge.edu

ALKION CENTER

SUMMER INTENSIVE COURSES 2017

Week I - June 18 - 23

Week II - June 25 - 30

Week III - July 9-14

History through Music w/ Eric G. Muller

Bringing Mathematics to Life in the Classroom w/Marisha Plotnik

Early Childhood: Voice and Lyre Music w/Channa Seidenberg Festivals w/Andree Ward

Introduction to Early Childhood Ed. with Felting Crafts w/Andree Ward Color Environments & Lazure w/ Robert Logsdon and Sara Parrilli

Leading with Spirit: The Art of Administration and Leadership in Waldorf Schools: Understanding the Social and Spiritual Foundations w/ Mara White, Lisa Maher and Leading with Spirit staff

Meditation and Color | Wood or Stone Carving | Lazure Project

FOR MORE INFO: WWW.ALKIONCENTER.ORG

Eurythmy | Veil Painting Sculpting the Human Head in Clay

ALKION CENTER | Anthroposophy, Art & Teacher Education 330 County Route 21C, Ghent, NY 12075 | 518-672-8008 | info@alkioncenter.org

Inhabiting Interdependence Being in the Next Economy

John Bloom In this insightful book, John Bloom, author of The Genius of Money, explores approaches toward transforming the conventional habits of mind and practice that have led to today’s imbalance in our economic life and in society as a whole.

Acknowledging that money has permeated almost every aspect of daily life—including our relationships to nature and to one another—Bloom asks: How and why did we arrive at our

current forms of social practice, including organizational life and governance?

This inquiry leads us to a major reconsideration of personal and cultural conditioning and our economic selves, as well as our systems of exchange, so that we can understand how we can be in the next economy in a way that supports and celebrates our human capacities.

John Bloom offers an argument for returning natural resources, work, and forms of capital to their origins as gifts rather than as commodities. By adopting such a framework, we can find a deeper meaning and purpose for stewarding these economic gifts on behalf of a more livable and interdependent future.

ISBN 978-1-62148-175-1 196 pages | paperback | $20

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SteinerBooks order phone 703-661-1594 www.steinerbooks.org

Summer Program 2017 Waldorf Teacher Rejuvenation 2nd to 5th Grade Teacher Training Taster Art and Storytelling Courses

www.bacwtt.org tiffany@bacwtt.org 415 479 4400

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Part-time Waldorf grades & early childhood certificate programs Fully-accredited MA in Education in partnership with Mount Mary University, Milwaukee, WI

Summer Intensive July 9-28 Accommodating distance learners through • in-person intensives • video-conference classroom participation, and • online coursework.

www.greatlakeswaldorf.org 414.616.1832

Connect to the Spiritual Rhythms of the Year...

A sacred service.

An open esoteric secret: The Act of Consecration of Man Celebration of the Festivals Renewal of the Sacraments Services for Children Religious Education Summer Camps Study Groups Lectures

The Christian Community is a movement for the renewal of religion, founded in 1922 with the help of Rudolf Steiner. It is centered around the seven sacraments in their renewed form and seeks to open the path to the living, healing presence of Christ in the age of the free individual.

Learn more at

www.thechristiancommunity.org

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Contents 8

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from the editors being human digest

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initiative!

14 16 18

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arts & ideas

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24

26

27

32

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Why Anthroposophy Needs America, a reflection by Virginia Sease Steiner & Kindred Spirits, review by Terry Hipolito Now West: Kaspar Hauser. A Touchstone or Humanity, by Penelope Baring Gallery: The Free Columbia Puppet Troupe “Come Forth!”: A Report on the Lazarus Project,

by Laura Summer, Jordan Walker, and Sampsa Pirtola THE TRAShOLD OPERA: The Heartelligency of Lazarus, commentary by David Adams

research & reviews

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39

44

45

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Inspired by the Work of Rudolf Steiner, by John Bloom Tierra Viva: the Santa Fe Biodynamic Conference, by Laura Scappaticci Harvesting Fall Color at the Fiber Craft Studio, by Chris Marlow

Evolving Science & the Task of the Natural Science Section The Beauty of Anthroposophy, or: What’s Scientific about Spiritual Science?

by Frederick Amrine Redemption of the Animals, review by Olena Provencher Honeymoon of Mourning, review by Christiane Marks

news for members & friends

46 So, friends, what should we write about the Youth Section?

51 An Appreciation of Torin Finser, by Carla Beebe Comey & John Beck

52 Anthroposophy is Taking Root and Bearing Fruit

in Post-Katrina New Orleans, by Margaret Runyon

54 Shining Hope and Intention, by Deb Abrahams-Dematte

55 A Note from the Director of Programs, by Laura Scappaticci

55 Southeastern Meeting in Decatur, Georgia, by Kathleen Wright

57 Ruminations of a Council Chair, by Dennis Dietzel

59 Me & Anthroposophy, by Christa Lynch

60-61 New Members — Members Who Have Died

61-71 Rebecca Lynn Christina Watterson • Sheri Reiner • Dorothea Ann Pierce (née Sunier)

Robert (Bob) Monsen • Eva Kudar • Gloria Patterson Bowman • Hartmut von Jeetze Harriet Myers • Carolyn Sue Getson • Richard Hicks • Peter Julio Clemm

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from the editor Dear Friends,

The Anthroposophical Society in America General Council Members John Bloom, General Secretary Carla Beebe Comey, Chair (at large) John Michael, Treasurer (at large) Dwight Ebaugh, Secretary (at large) Micky Leach (Western Region) Dave Alsop (at large) Marianne Fieber-Dhara (Central Region) Leadership Team Deb Abrahams-Dematte, Director of Development Katherine Thivierge, Director of Operations Laura Scappaticci, Director of Programs

being human is published by the Anthroposophical Society in America 1923 Geddes Avenue Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1797 Tel. 734.662.9355 www.anthroposophy.org

Editor: John H. Beck Associate Editors: Fred Dennehy, Elaine Upton Proofreader: Cynthia Chelius Design and layout: John Beck Please send submissions, questions, and comments to: editor@anthroposophy.org or to the postal address above, for our next issue by 5/15/2017. ©2017 The Anthroposophical Society in America. Responsibility for the content of articles is the authors’.

The life and work of the Anthroposophical Society itself is at the front of every section this time. Usually all that is held for the last section, but the ASA is itself one of the “initiatives” arising from the work of Rudolf Steiner, and our new General Secretary John Bloom spoke to that in his talk last fall at the Threefold Educational Center north of New York City.

As for arts and ideas, “anthroposophy” itself is an art and an idea of great significance, as Virginia Sease described at the same gathering in connection with North America and the USA. As for research, despite minimal financial resources, the work of Rudolf Steiner’s School for Spiritual Science continues. The Natural Science Section in North America held an excellent meeting recently and we have both a report of that and one of the presentations. Prof. Frederick Amrine has written a number of astonishing, insightful articles for being human, and this one, despite requiring close attention and benefitting from repeated readings, is not only about beauty in science, it is a thing of some literary beauty in itself.

So this issue celebrates anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner, and the society he inspired and finally took on his own shoulders. Speaking personally, while I know that this publication could not do “being human” justice unless we could publish an issue every week or every day, our strong focus on the work of Rudolf Steiner is no embarrassment to me.

Human beings need a way forward that is worthy of us; that is clearer every year. That this way must rest on the inner truth of each of us is clear.

That it must be a matter not of direction and control but inspiration and empowerment—that also seems right. That we will each have to improve ourselves is certain. And that we will need the capacity to appreciate and support each other as fully as we love our own selves—that is unavoidable. Rudolf Steiner’s work empowers everyone who is willing to hear what Virginia Sease describes: the knock at the door of our own living humanness.

•

There is more online! Budgetary limitations have reduced our annual number of pages. We are seventy-two rather than sixty-four pages in this issue, but there is still too little space for excellent longer articles and essays.

Please go to our website at www.anthroposophy.org and choose articles from the navigation bar. By the end of February 2016 there will be new items there

by Bill Trusiewicz, Fred Janney, and Christopher Schaefer. We will be introducing those, and linking to them, in the next being human email.

John Beck HOW TO receive being human, or to comment or contribute Copies of being human are free to members of the Anthroposophical Society in America (visit anthroposophy.org/join or call 734.662.9355). Sample copies are also sent to friends who contact us at the address below.

To contribute articles or art please email editor@anthroposophy.org or write to Editor, 1923 Geddes Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48104.

The cultural context of anthroposophy is the focus of both the reviews included in this issue. Terry Hipolito reviews Rudolf Steiner & Kindred Spirits by Robert McDermott, a magisterial undertaking that explores the astonishingly wide-ranging dimensions of anthroposophy in light of the American Renaissance of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Asiatic spirituality, modern social justice initiatives, ecology, and much more. Just as important, as Hipolito emphasizes, is Professor McDermott’s projection of the exigent role of anthroposophy in confronting the rich menu of catastrophes that are staring at us right now.

Olena Provencher introduces us to Douglas Sloan’s The Redemption of the Animals: Their Evolution, Their Inner Life, and Our Future Together. An Anthroposophical Perspective. Against the background of a trenchantly clear analysis of our unthinking surrender to the Locke–Darwin–Bentham paradigm, Provencher shows, Professor Sloan exposes the indifference of our treatment of animals as senseless automatons to be used for “gastrocentric” pleasure, experimentation, and capricious fun. Plainly a new perspective is needed, and here the book refers the reader to Rudolf Steiner’s evolutionary understanding of the familial relation, based on sacrifice, between humans and animals, and the urgent call for us to step up to our intended roles as guardians for and partners with other living beings.

Frederick Dennehy Membership in the Anthroposophical Society in America includes membership in our national library in Hudson, New York, including borrowing by mail. Please use the information below to find out more about this unique resource.

Insight Inspiration Community EXPLORE HUMANITY’S PATH AND YOUR OWN. BECOME A MEMBER TODAY! JOIN ONLINE AT

www.anthroposophy.org/membership

Questions? Contact us at info@anthroposophy.org or 734.662.9355, or visit www.anthroposophy.org

Rudolf Steiner Library Contact Information Rudolf Steiner Library of the Anthroposophical Society in America, 351 Fairview Avenue Suite 610, Hudson, NY 12534-1259 (518) 944-7007 (voice & text) rsteinerlibrary@gmail.com Hours: Wed–Sat, 10am–3pm. Home page: www.anthroposophy.org/rsl Library catalog: rsl.scoolaid.net

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AND YOUR OWN. BECOME A MEMBER TODAY!

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ANTHROPOSOPHICAL SOCIETY IN AMERICA

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MEDICINE PAAM Website The website of PAAM, the anthroposophic physicians’ association, (paam.wildapricot.org) continues to develop. Five tools and insights for helping each of us find greater health are featured: • Anthroposophic Medicine: a comprehensive model for integrative medicine at all levels of care.

• Integrative Insights and Language: tools for addressing the physical, functional, emotional and spiritual aspects of the human being.

• A Science of Observation: learning from nature to better support and stimulate the body’s own healing processes.

• Ground-breaking Research: bringing innovative approaches to today’s most pressing medical needs.

• Medicine as a Journey: nurturing the spiritual development of physicians as healers.

It is also the location for details on upcoming doctors’ and nurses’ trainings, the ongoing webinar series “Learning the Language of Healing Plants,” and resources on subjects like mistletoe therapy for cancer.

ANTHROPOSOPHICAL

e and wide ldorf ne, eutic

The digest offers brief notes, news, and ideas from holistic and human-centered initiatives. E-mail editor@anthroposophy.org or write “Editor, 1923 Geddes Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI, 48104.”

www.anthroposophy.org

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ght

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AMERICA

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AGRICULTURE Biodynamic Birthday Cake for the Pope In December the National Catholic Register reported: Pope Francis today blew out 79 candles on a giant “biodynamic” lemon cake made especially for his birthday and delivered to his St. Marta residence.

The low-calorie dessert, made from free-range eggs, Italian cream and Calabrian lemons, was the fruit of painstaking work by pastry chefs at Hedera, an ice cream shop nearby on Borgo Pio. Head chef Massimo Grosso said the cake, whose icing sported the Jubilee of Mercy logo, was big enough to cater for 80 or so guests at the residence, according to the Italian news agency Adnkronos.

No doubt made with the Pope’s environment encyclical Laudato Si in mind, the cake was the

Benefits of mem • Connecting with • The print edition initiatives, arts, i • Membership in t community foun Switzerland • Borrowing and r the Society’s nat • Discounts on the and store items • After two years o

for Spiritual Scie

Are there require Steiner’s work in th

Questions? Cont

being human digest product of biodynamic agriculture, very similar to organic farming.

Biodynamic agriculture is a “holistic, ecological, and ethical” approach to farming in which food is grown and harvested according to lunar cycles. It treats soil fertility, plant growth, and livestock care as ecologically interrelated tasks, but has been criticized for being “pseudoscience” and “quasi religious hocuspocus.” The technique is nevertheless used in nearly 50 countries. Germany accounts for 45% of the global total.

BD Preparations from JPI The Josephine Porter Institute “has been a national producer and distributer of biodynamic preparations since 1985. Over the past three years (since we moved to Floyd VA), we have produced and sold over 100,000 units of biodynamic preparations to over 2,500 practitioners of regenerative agricultural practices. During this time, we have also served customers in 48 states of the union plus ten U.S. territories and Canadian provinces.

Interested growers sign “associative contracts” with JPI, including the new beginner “Pfeiffer Associative Contracts” (for one-acre or less). Associative contracts help JPI plan for their growing volume of service.

Associative contracts for JPI preparations are similar to the economic concept and associative relationship of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA).

Biodynamic practitioners support the yearly work of JPI by planning ahead and contracting for their preparation orders (available at discounted rates for different acreage levels). And in return, JPI plans

its preparation-making and distribution schedule in advance, thereby assuring that individuals and businesses with associative contracts will have the biodynamic preparation they need at requested spring and fall delivery dates.

The final date for receiving an associative contract discount is March 31, 2017. JPI is at (540) 745-7030; online go to jpibiodynamics.org.

HUMANITIES Camphill Special School “Common Good Report” Last year Claus Sproll let us know that Camphill Special School underwent the Common Good Report assessment that is fairly well known in Europe. “We were the first US organization to go through. It’s actually a pretty big deal. We scored well in the major areas of social responsibility, etc.” The evaluation covers five areas: human dignity, solidarity, ecological sustainability, social justice, and democratic co-determination and transparency. The report summary included these observations: The mission of [Camphill Special School] is to create wholeness for children and youth through education and therapy in extended family living, through which the children and youth are better understood and their disabilities moderated. The aim is to unfold the potential of the children and to participate in life in a full and meaningful way. The top priorities of the Camphill community are to continuously improve the educational, residential, and therapeutic services through diversified funding sources. The long-term goal is to prepare the students for the transition to

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being human digest adult life with diversified life skills learned through living in a sharing community.

In addition, through its work at the Beaver Farm campus, Camphill Special School seeks to unfold personal individuality, interpersonal relationships and care for the environment within the context of biodynamic farming. Biodynamic farming refers to a spiritual-ethical-ecological approach to agriculture, production of food and nutrition. Biodynamics has spread out to all continents and thousands of farms, vineyards and gardens in a myriad of ecological and economic settings. The core of biodynamic farming strives to create a diversified and balanced farm ecosystem leading to fertility and healthy produce.

Special preparations ensure the restoration and harmonizing of the life forces of the farm, improving the nutrition quality and flavor of the food. In fact, community supported agriculture (CSA)—a rapidly growing trend—was pioneered by biodynamic farmers. Often, biodynamic farmers cooperate locally in various ways: with surrounding farms, schools, and homes for social therapy and thus contributing to the Common Good.

Beaver Farm produces biodynamic organic meat, greens and eggs, supplying both the main campus and the farm itself with top quality nutrition both for residential students, coworkers and employees of the organization. In addition, biodynamic farming offers the residential students with a variety of important life skills and meaningful land work.

Previously, Camphill Special School has not been connected to the Economy for the Common Good movement. Nevertheless, on a small scale the Camphill community has lived the constitutional values of the Economy for the Common Good for over 50 years, placing solidarity, dignity, and cooperation at the center of daily life. The services of Camphill Special School are the main contribution to the common good.

Contact persons listed for questions related to the CG report at Camphill Special School include Board Member Jan Goeschel (jgoeschel@camphill.edu) and Director of Development Guy Alma (galma@camphillspecialschool.org ).

Pacifica Journal: 20 years, 50 issues Congratulations to our sister publication Pacifica Journal and editor Van James.

It was clear from the start—1996—that this newsletter was fulfilling a need. The late Fred Paddock, librarian of the Rudolf Steiner Library wrote in 1997: “This is the journal to watch! The Pacifica Journal takes in the whole pacific rim, including Australia, the Philippines, Japan and India. It is in this region that anthroposophy as a world movement (and not just a central European transplant) will meet its test. The task of inculturating anthroposophy into the Asian setting will demand the best thinking we can come up with. Pacifica Journal has clearly taken this challenge seriously. One has to only read Florian Sydow’s “The Emergence of World Culture in the Pacific” (which has been running in the last couple of issues) to see this. Along the same line is the article … by Karl Kaltenbach, “Towards a Universal Human Consciousness.”

New Books for Educators and Parents Please Visit Our Online Store! store.waldorfearlychildhood.org

Love as the Source of Education:

The Life Work of Helmut von Kügelgen Edited by Susan Howard $14

Let’s Dance and Sing Freya Jaffke, translated

by Nina Kuettel $18

Waldorf Early Childhood Education: An Introductory Reader Edited by Shannon Honigblum $25

E-mail: info@waldorfearlychildhood.org www.waldorfearlychildhood.org (845) 352-1690 Fax: (845) 352-1695

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It’s available now on a twice yearly schedule as a PDF publication; write pacificajournal@gmail.com for information.

EDUCATION Educational Challenge in Europe Michaela Glöckler reported last fall from Alliance ELIANT, the European umbrella organization for anthroposophical initiatives, on “prob-

being human digest lems and opportunities in today’s educational system” in the European Community.

Since the introduction of PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) to education in 2000, standardization, equality of opportunity and comparability has become increasingly important. Countries are competing with one another for the best position in the league table.

This places both teachers and pupils under enormous pressure.

Educational researchers are voicing strong concern about a system of education that is permeated by previously unknown levels of inequality, the unquestioning acceptance of an expanding use of information technology and the drive to adapt teaching to the needs of the jobs market. The climate of true learning, creativity and community in the school is being increasingly displaced by the drilling of

Odyssey Journeys 2017 Temples, Pyramids, Sekem community

EGYPT March 25-April 9

Sail the Nile in a traditional dahibiya.

facts, fear and isolation, and the lessons a mere routine.

During a conference organized by the European Council for Steiner Waldorf Education in Luxemburg in January on the theme of diversity in assessment, Prof. Heinz-Dieter Meyer from the State University of New York called for Pestalozzi’s idea of achieving ‘harmony between head, heart and hands’ to be taken up anew. This would enhance a pupil’s concentration capacity, overcome their sense of isolation and reduce conflict. Examinations could then be about applying what has been learnt in a reliable way. This is however precisely what is striven for in Steiner Waldorf schools.

We are very pleased therefore that Steiner / Waldorf education is represented in the Working Group on schools set up by the European Commission in February 2016!

In January the European Council for Steiner Waldorf Education (ECSWE), one of our founding organizations, successfully applied to join the European Commission’s working group on schools and will be actively engaged with it in an advisory capacity until 2018.

ELIANT is online at www.eliant.eu.

Leaving a Legacy of Will

All inquiries by September please

GREECE With Van James Athens, Delphi, Patmos, Ephesus, and more.

June 26-July 18

An opportunity to make a gift which will bring expression to your intention, and love for anthroposophy into the future.

For more information, contact Deb Abrahams-Dematte at deb@anthroposophy.org

For information contact Gillian at 610.469.0864 or gillianschoemaker@gmail.com PlannedGiving_QTR AD_FINAL.indd 1

10/25/14 winter-spring issue 2017 • 136:44 AM

initiative!

IN THIS SECTION: In his debut at General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America, John Bloom spoke of the inspiration of relationships and the challenge of communicating Rudolf Steiner’s work, “anthroposophy.”

Laura Scappaticci and Deb AbrahamsDematte were hugely impressed by the Biodynamic Association’s biennial conference, in Santa Fe, NM. Chris Marlow’s short report on a workshop with Henrike Holdrege of the Nature Institute, at the Fiber Craft Studio, illustrates the deeply holistic character of initiatives inspired by Rudolf Steiner.

Waldorf schools are often started by parents; Jeanette Rodriguez was called by her son to create the Otto Specht School.

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Inspired by the Work of Rudolf Steiner

by John Bloom Remarks as new General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America at its Annual General Meeting, October 7-10, Threefold Auditorium, Chestnut Ridge, NY.

Rudolf Steiner

Greetings to you all, and thank you for staying through Sunday morning after a very wisdom and art-filled several days. Thank you Torin [Finser] for your kind introduction and for the metaphoric hand-off of the ferryman’s oar. Thank you also to Virginia [Sease] and Joan [Sleigh] for your warm welcome into the international community of General Secretaries and work of the Society worldwide.

Before I dive directly into my comments this morning, I first want to honor Torin for his nine plus years of service and leadership. I am just beginning my four-year stint, but already have a sense of the energetic forces that will be needed to meet the future as a vital Society. I also want to appreciate all our prior General Secretaries for the gifts that they contributed and continue to contribute to our work.

At the opening of this gathering, we spoke the names of those who have crossed the threshold. I am mentioning this again, toward the close, because those who have gone before have much to offer us. I have benefited from such guidance. Those who have recently crossed and others returning are counting on us for nourishment and an appropriate preparation for them. I assure you we need them as they need us.

I never once imagined, when I first walked into this [Threefold] auditorium for the first time 36 years ago for a conference, that I would be the one standing up here on the stage speaking as General Secretary for the Anthroposophical Society. At that time, the Society was a great mystery to me. As a young founding parent of San Francisco Waldorf School, I joined the Society because it felt as right to do as enrolling our child in a school that didn’t yet exist. The founding board members of that school, including Rene Querido and Lexie Ahrens, who was my sponsor, made it clear that joining the Society was part of the expectation as I joined the board. Connecting to the wellspring of Waldorf education was essential to the school’s mission. I knew that membership meant having a connection to Rudolf Steiner and his work. What I did not know at the time was that I would be on such an intensive and extensive journey into the world of Rudolf Steiner and the manifestations of his work. And, I had no inkling that I would later become the administrator of the San Francisco Waldorf School after having been on the board for twenty-three years—until I put term limits in place. Then 18 years ago, I left the school to join what was the Rudolf Steiner Foundation, now RSF Social Finance, which as a leader in the emerging field of social finance publicly declares that we are “inspired by the work of Rudolf Steiner.” We take that very seriously in our day-to-day activities, and it is the key to our growth and the trust that we hold. And I must add that RSF has committed to supporting my time to serve as General Secretary, even as I continue my work there as vice president for organizational culture. I can already see that being General Secretary could be full time work, but that is not yet possible.

My path to and into anthroposophy has been through relationships, though I have read and studied. I have had the privilege to meet many extraordinary people who have transformed, and continue to transform, themselves in service to spirit and to serving the aspirations of others as they serve the world. These individuals are my inspiration, and I hope I too can live up to this high expectation. I have learned much from Rudolf Steiner’s words and from those who carry a mastery of Rudolf Steiner’s insights. And I have grown most, and engage deeply, with those who hold the mysteries as a place of

invitation to be in them together, for the sake of the radiant, the arduous, and the abundant.

This is my expectation of you as members of the Society, regardless of where you are on your path or journey: be and live that invitation. This fundamental expectation is also a key part of the Society’s path for growth.

While the Society does not currently have a financial endowment, it does have a spiritual endowment the riches of which we have barely tapped. It is comprised of the ever-bearing gift of Rudolf Steiner’s work, the Goetheanum and what it represents, and the collective wisdom developed by those inspired by Rudolf Steiner, some of which we experienced here at the AGM. That expanding community I will say is much larger than the numbers of the membership would indicate. In aggregate, they constitute a kind of inverse endowment that does not accrue interest, but rather radiates interest—interest in each other, in biographies, destinies, transformation, regenerative and healing impulses, and a social world that actually practices threefold principles. Hopefully, our endowment generates consciousness, lifts souls, and supports initiative.

That makes us collectively the endowment managers.

That is our shared responsibility and commitment, each according to her or his willingness as a member of the Society, and it is not a task without risks and uncertainty.

If we are successful, the world will be a better place—and we cannot afford to fail. Too much is at stake.

One thing I have learned is that you cannot work against the spirit of geographic place. That means we need to know what is the particular task of the United States as Virginia spoke about in “Why Anthroposophy Needs America” [see page 20]. What gifts and transformative opportunities belong to the US that can then add to the evolution of world consciousness? How do we connect with the wisdom of people from First Nations who understood this land long before Europeans arrived? What can we learn from the insights of the transcendentalists, the visionary industrialists, abstract expressionists, and social entrepreneurs all of whom were seeking to understand human nature and serve society?

And in turn, what gifts do we, working out of anthroposophy, have to offer those in the US who are immersed in, maybe oppressed by the power of, commercialconsumer culture which sees the human ego as the last best frontier? Yes, the US is the leader in technology—I know, I live in the heart of it. But modern technology embodies light and shadow, the human and the inhuman.

What from our cultural history, and the insights of Ru-

dolf Steiner and others working out of his impulses in the practical fields of medicine, education, agriculture, the arts, finance, and others, can we offer of a healing regenerative nature? Can we be the invitation for those seeking a way back to themselves and to their communities? Not because we have the prescriptions, but rather because we are committed to supporting others on their journeys.

We live in crazy over-mediated times. Our capacities for inner quiet, and right thought and action, are challenged every day, it seems. We can take a lead in making life more human. But, we must lead by example and with humility, because it is the best way to leave people spiritually free and still move forward. We must understand that as we create our agreements or governance, our “social contracts,” we must do so as equals. And finally, as we serve in the economic realm, we must do so out of a sense of compassionate interdependence. This is the practice of threefold; as we inhabit this world together, no one is exempt from any of the three. Thinking so, acting so, confusing or distorting them, is the foundation of a lot of discord. And really, who wins in such conflict, and who loses? We must find the way to have power with rather than over others. We have a lot of work to do. In many ways making threefold conscious and practiced is the central work of the Society. How can we embody and practice threefold principles for ourselves and in community? How might this imagination reach and inspire an ever-widening circle? One reality that I have discovered is that the more widely we want to work transformatively in the world, the more deeply we need to transform ourselves. There is an inescapable correlation. How do we live the dance between I and world with integrity?

My experience tells me that all of this transformation unfolds through relationships patiently cultivated, through shared inquiry, through open hearts and minds.

All of this is reliant upon communicating in and through our being, that is to say who we are, grounded in selfknowledge and tuned to awareness of others and the world—this is no simple task. But it is the task we call “communicating anthroposophy” and it is what is being asked of us.

I ask you to join in working toward this future actively in your community as it is, and to seek others who are also striving regardless of whether they are members of the Society or simply have a sense that the world is out of balance and are seeking company in figuring out a better way to be.

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initiative!

We also know that throughout history when uncertain events have occurred, such as hurricanes, tsunamis, 9/11, community emerges in response. If this is the case, why wouldn’t we build community in advance, not to prevent uncertainty, but rather to be prepared to ameliorate suffering, to make the consequences more bearable and human. Part of this work is recognizing the strength in our own vulnerability. Such trust will serve us well.

From interest to engagement Rudolf Steiner’s name and work have touched many beyond our Society. Our work is to move from this visibility to real presence in those wider circles, in order to add our voices and to listen deeply. We must also move from interest in others to real engagement with others, even if it is uncomfortable. And we must live the legacy of Rudolf Steiner’s insights in order to be of service to others. This is already happening in the organizations and activities across our decentralized network of shared connection; they are meeting the challenge of being sustainable in a competitive world. But person-to-person, never underestimate the power of asking someone (with their permission): What do you really care about? What really matters to you? What are you longing for, for yourself and your community? There is a quality of the healing Parsifal question in this. And lastly—and probably most important—to live with the ideals of what the Society and each of us stands for, in order to become a real invitation to the next generation to know, interpret, and make Rudolf Steiner’s work and the Society their own, even if it does not look the way we might expect it to.

This is the work I am committed to doing and supporting, and I ask each of you to take it up in your own way, for the sake of the future that is coming toward us and calling us forward. I look forward to serving us as a bridge to the international community, in giving voice to the Society and as one who cares deeply about the profound value of relationships.

So I ask, what is the story we want to be able to tell about what we have done three, seven, or fifty years from now? How will we have managed the “endowment” on behalf of Rudolf Steiner, each other, and the world? I hope we can live these questions together as a Society.

Thank you.

John Bloom is General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America and vice president for corporate culture of RSF Social Finance in San Francisco.

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Tierra Viva: the Santa Fe Biodynamic Conference

by Laura Scappaticci In November 2016, the beautiful Santa Fe Expo Center teemed with the youthful energy and the deep explorations that the organic and biodynamic farming movement are bringing to the world today. With nearly 800 participants from 45 states, 20 countries, and six continents, the conference brought together many different disciplines, ideas, and people.

As a conference exhibitor, the Anthroposophical Society was one booth among many, including biodynamically-grown cotton products, a new line of biodynamic chocolate, and the Rudolf Steiner Health Center in Ann

Arbor, Michigan. During our time at the ASA table, Deb Abrahams-Dematte and I offered ASA materials like being human to people who were completely new to anthroposophy, as well as those who had heard of anthroposophy, and wanted to deepen their understanding. Society members stopped by with warm wishes, offering enthusiasm about the open nature of the conference.

One conference participant, Nate Downey, owner of PermaDesigns in Santa Fe, was introduced to biodynamic farming through his local farmers market. Nate purchased some carrots and offered them to his son and his friends as an after school snack. They loved the carrots and asked for them again and again. This convinced Nate of the benefits, right down to taste, of biodynamics. Nate wanted to grow tastier, healthier food, and says that he learned hands on ways to use biodynamic ideas and methods in his work and personal life. The spiritual aspects of the conference, particularly Chris Tebett’s talk on water, affected Nate on a deep level, and he says that he is “much more a convert as a result of the conference.”

Particularly present throughout the conference was the connection with the indigenous people of Santa Fe. Pueblo blessings and invocations were offered, alongside eurythmy and the singing of hallelujah in four parts. Thea Carlson, co-director of the Biodynamic Association, observed that “the conference helped the biodynamic agricultural impulse to become rooted here on this continent in a new way. I am inspired by all of the connections between indigenous agriculture and biodynamics that were initiated and shared through this conference, and I am excited to explore how the Biodynamic Association can continue to nurture these connections and

collaborations into the future.”

From the fun and social Young Farmers Reception, to the depth of the workshop content, and breadth of knowledge among the keynote presenters, the BD conference was a wonderful demonstration of the ways diverse interests and people can connect to a common cause rooted in Steiner’s work.

Laura Scappaticci (laura@anthroposophy.org) is Director of Programs for the Anthroposophical Society in America.

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initiative!

Harvesting Fall Color at the Fiber Craft Studio

by Chris Marlow The Fiber Craft Studio, an initiative under the umbrella of the Threefold Foundation in Chestnut Ridge, NY and The Nature Institute of Ghent, NY held a collaborative weekend workshop at the Studio on the weekend of September 16-18, 2016. Henrike Holdrege of the Nature Institute and Chris Marlow from the Fiber Craft Studio led twenty participants in experiences of color: Henrike, through her background in optics and Chris through her experience in plant dyeing. This collaborative course came about after Chris experienced a week long course, The Roots of Sustainability, at the Nature Institute in June of 2016, and saw the possibility of working together.

The sustainable plant-dyeing activity, accompanied by encounters with Goethean color theory, stimulated the artistic considerations that are possible when dyeing yarn for a knitted project. Experiences of colored shadows, smoke in the sunlight, and after-images all contributed to deepening our understanding of color. In between, we created dye pots, striving to see the warmth and coolness of certain colors in dyed samples of yarn.

Using weld (Reseda luteola), onion skin, madder root, and brazil wood, we created primary colors. Then, through over-dyeing with indigo, we saw the many possibilities to create secondary and tertiary colors.

The alternate rhythm of observation, reflection, and then activity with the 18 •

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dye pots was an effective way to heighten our awareness as we worked (see the response from one of the participants, below). The experiences we had with color in the form of light and then as dye pigment on fiber brought understanding and also many questions. We all agreed there could be much more to research in a future workshop or in our own research.

The participants left with 6 ounces of dyed yarn that were dyed with the intention to create a knitted item. We thought about warm and cool colors, color harmonies and values of light and dark colors that would be best suited for our planned projects. It will be wonderful to see some of those completed projects and to continue in this exploration.

“Thank you so much again for the wonderful weekend.

It was the first time that I was able to ‘feel’ the color.

Though it was not the first time that I was dyeing, my relationship with the colors changed completely.”

The Studio works out of anthroposophy in the realm of fiber crafts. We are a research and teaching studio; we have a dye garden and we study the many indications from Rudolph Steiner in the realm of clothing, color, and the Waldorf Curriculum. We offer workshops to the public and we are in the 20th year of our Applied Arts Program, a part-time teacher education program for Waldorf handwork teachers; the tenth cycle of the program is enrolling now. A four-year, part-time program for Waldorf Handwork Teacher Education begins July 24–August 4, 2017. Learn more at www.fibercraftstudio.org.

Chris Marlow (chris@fibercraftstudio. org), co-director of the Fiber Craft Studio, graduated from the first Applied Arts Cycle in 1999, and taught handwork at Green Meadow Waldorf School for fifteen years and at the West Side Community School in NYC for two years.

Past issues of being human are free online in PDF format at www.anthroposophy.org/bh

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arts & ideas IN THIS SECTION: More than thirty years ago Virginia Sease was called to the Goetheanum’s Executive Council where she brought a US-American and English-language perspective; now she turns the mirror back onto this side of the Atlantic.

Terry Hipolito brings his own breadth of vision to a review of Robert McDermott’s masterful cultural survey Steiner & Kindred Spirits.

Out on our Pacific coast a strangely significant European named Kaspar Hauser was remembered last fall; Penelope Baring tells us why.

Our Gallery celebrates the inspired work of the Free Columbia Puppet Troupe.

Free Columbia was also central to an installation called the Lazarus Project; included was an opera of sorts leading thoughts from ancient Egypt to tomorrow, from smartphone to “artphone” to “heartphone.”

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Why Anthroposophy Needs America a reflection by Virginia Sease At the Annual General Meeting of the Anthroposophical Society in America, in the Threefold Auditorium in Chestnut Ridge, NY, on October 8, 2016.

Dear Friends, we have at some time in our life decided to become members of the General Anthroposophical Society, which actually means the Universal Anthroposophical Society, because this society is for universal humanity. Within this universal society we may experience especially two aspects which belong to all countries, all peoples of the world today. But they will manifest in a manner which expresses the specific circumstances of their language, their geographical location, their nation or people. We will focus on America but mainly upon the United States of America.

The one aspect is anthroposophy, which could come to expression as philosophy, as a huge body of knowledge reaching into many artistic, scientific, and practical directions initiated by Rudolf Steiner.

The other aspect concerns the nature of the being of anthroposophy. Rudolf Steiner described this being in The Hague on November 18, 1923 at the founding of the Anthroposophical Society in Holland. Later in 1924 he added further characteristics. For me, it is somewhat amazing that Rudolf Steiner only brought this description ten years after the formal founding of the Anthroposophical Society, from February 2 to 4, 1913, following the separation from the Theosophical Society. We may consider the ten years as a period of grace to allow the new impulses to be born and to become somewhat established.

First we will look at a part of the very lengthy report of this event from February 2 to 4, 1913 in the News for Members, edited by Mathilde Scholl.

With all the forces of the intellectual or “Gemüt” soul the super-human being, Philosophia, was taken hold of by a departing cultural epoch. She [Philosophia] was regarded as a being passing in the flesh among people; but however becoming more and more pale and shadow-like, this most splendid figure [Philosophia] seemed to appear to a then forward-striding modern humanity of the 5th cultural epoch ... But there is a new Sophia which is now approaching the longing of a new culture ... Not Philosophia, the child of the intellectual soul—but Anthroposophia, the daughter of a higher level of knowledge, Spirit Self. Deeply embedded into our human consciousness soul, woven with the forces of our own I-being, thus we see how that seed as Anthroposophia has to fulfill its earthly destiny.1 It seems very important now, in retrospect, to perceive exactly how Rudolf Steiner approached this particular theme at the end of the lecture in Holland. First he mentions how essential it is to not only read or to listen to anthroposophical knowledge but to experience the content of anthroposophy with our heart, with our Gemüt [this is difficult to translate; perhaps “heart-warmed thinking”—VS]. Then, more and more, anthroposophy appears to us as something living, as having beingness. We will become aware of how something knocks on the door of our heart with anthroposophy and says: “Let me in, because I am you yourself; I am your true human-beingness” [German: Wahre Menschenwesenheit]. Anthroposophy does not just want to tell us something, but with this true human-beingness anthroposophy wants to fill the human soul and the human feeling [Gemüt]. Then, when we let Anthroposophy into our heart after she has knocked, then Anthroposophy brings to us, through what she herself is, true human love.”2 1 [transl. V.S.] “The Hour of Birth of Anthroposophy or the New Sheath for Immortal Spirit Form.” [“Die Geburtsstunde der Anthroposophie oder der neuen Hülle für die unvergängliche Geistgestalt.”] Mitteilungen für die Mitglieder der Anthroposophischen Gesellschaft (1913-1914), No. 1, zweiter Teil, April 1913; (hrsg. Mathilde Scholl), S. 331. Not yet available in English translation. This quotation was not mentioned in the lecture at the Annual General Meeting in October 2016. (V.S.) 2 Rudolf Steiner. The Supersensible Human Being, Conceived Anthrosophically, CW 231, Dornach 1999, Lecture of 18 November 1923.

Following this description from 1923, we find that in July 1924 in Arnheim Rudolf Steiner presents a strong indication as to how the total newness of anthroposophy can be regarded. He speaks about how in the spiritual world, in the first half of the 19th century, a very large number of souls before they descended into a new incarnation were united spiritually through a kind of cultus, a ritual through which powerful cosmic imaginations represented what he could designate as the “new Christianity.” Rudolf Steiner mentions further that the souls were united in order to bring together “cosmic substantiality and cosmic forces”3 which carried cosmic significance and was the prelude to what could be carried out on earth as teaching, as anthroposophical action. We can regard the description “cosmic substantiality” and “cosmic forces” as a cultic, a ritual way of expressing “beingness”—the being of anthroposophy. This may signify for us that the spiritual being Anthroposophy, sometimes referred to as Anthroposophia, could be born into the world almost simultaneously with the Michael stream. Both Anthroposophy as being and the Time-Spirit, Michael, have a universal task as of the 20th century, which extends for all human beings also into future centuries. This task is summed up in the Christmas Foundation Meditation4 in the trinitarian call: Practice Spirit Recollection. Practice Spirit Mindfulness.

Practice Spirit Beholding.”

We can now turn more specifically to the United States, although Rudolf Steiner always refers simply to America, and it was seemingly not always positive. However, basic aspects contain a forward-directed approach. I will share with you a shock which I experienced many years ago while reading some of Rudolf Steiner’s lectures to the workers at the First Goetheanum. He describes: “At first the Americans develop a materialistic caricature of anthroposophy and later, in a more instinctive way, they will work their way through to a spiritual comprehension of the outer world. But true Americanism [Rudolf Steiner often quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson in this connection] is actually what will eventually unite with Europeanism which will find its direction in a more spiritual manner. The radiant period of the American civilization will be in the Age of Aquarius.”5 In a lecture on October 3, 1905 (GA 93a), Rudolf Steiner identifies the Age of Aquarius as beginning approximately in the year 4400 A.D. and describes it as “the spiritual culture.” Also he adds that in the sign of Aquarius, in the 3 cf. Karmic Relationships, Vol. 6, CW 240, Dornach 1986, Lecture of 18 July 1924.

4 cf. The Christmas Conference, London 1990, CW 260.

5 cf. On the Life of Human Beings and of the Earth. On the Nature of Christianity, CW 349, Dornach 1980, Lecture of 3 March 1923.

future, the new Christianity will be proclaimed. This is linked with the 6th Post-Atlantean epoch when human beings will be inwardly so purified that they themselves will become a temple for the divinity. Of course, this means an enormous responsibility even for people living today: the American civilization may not be permitted to be annihilated or to self-destruct. This must not be understood as nationalism, rather every country, every people, every language can determine why and in what manner anthroposophy needs their special configuration to assist in the great challenge of becoming universally human.

Do we see any signs of progress in this challenge of becoming universally human? Yes: today the question that anthroposophy can answer is not just whether the human being has a supersensible, spiritual nature, but how is that the case, how does it work?

This question connects with a general awareness of the possibility of reincarnation. Since we are in an analytical age most people comprehend that the body cannot reincarnate. Who helped them to understand this? Strangely enough the great promoter of materialism who may have inspired cryonics—I am not referring to a human inspirer, but rather to an ahrimanic impulse. The technique of cryonics represents in some places in the western world a huge business enterprise today. At the moment of death, the corpse is put into deep-freeze with the conviction that in years, perhaps decades, to come, a cure for the specific illness which caused the death will be discovered. The body would then be unfrozen, healed, and the person would be fit for life. Even if the technique were successful, it would mean a total displacement in life: no childhood to become accustomed to a new age, no friends, probably no family, etc. Would there be consciousness? An interesting factor here is, however, whenever someone—especially a wellknown writer—takes up a theme and brings it to expression in a novel we know that the subject lives in the public domain, such as Mitch Albom’s best-seller novel For One More Day 6 demonstrates.

These aspects of awareness are there in human beings, even if they are only dull feelings or, with more intellectually inclined persons, points of conjecture among many other points of conjecture. Why are these conjectures there? It may be because we are more than one quarter of the way into the Consciousness Soul Age which extends to 3573 AD and (as of 2016) we are 137 years into the Michael Age which may last until 2300 or 2400 AD. Today, perhaps, more than ever in the United States, we are challenged to recognize that we are a country of 6 Mitch Albom, For One More Day, New York 2006. winter-spring issue 2017

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arts & ideas immigrants coming either today or in the last 400 years— each bringing a language, a culture, and often a religion with them. What has it meant for these immigrants and for those born here in the United States? We may say that it requires a constant adjustment—geographically but also seen spiritually—to the forces of the being which Rudolf Steiner identifies as the geographic double.

For people born here even yesterday, it signifies the chosen place for ahrimanic beings, whom Rudolf Steiner describes as connected with the electromagnetic forces which are very strong in America, especially where the mountains run North-South. These geographic double forces sink into the intellect and the will of a person, but they cannot achieve access to the feeling, rhythmic system, the heart and lung sphere.7 Before Europeans came as small groups beginning around 1607 A.D. to North America, the First Nations peoples already dealt with these forces through their wisdom of the elements and the totality of the nature forces. But many of the immigrants in the 17th and 18th century died because the geographical double forces were too strong and they succumbed to illness with little resistance.

We can refer especially to two streams of human beings who have chosen America and have planned an incarnation here as of those early days. Through the years here in the United States I have focused on the one stream represented by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and others. In the case of Ralph Waldo Emerson, we know through Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual research that this individuality can be traced to a significant European incarnation at the transition from BC to AD in the person of Tacitus; then in the Middle Ages in Italy as Mathilde, the daughter of Beatrice of Tuscany, with a following incarnation as Emerson in the time frame of 1803–1882 AD. How did Emerson overcome the forces of the double?

His instrument was his thinking. He believed that the human being is what he thinks all day. He also had a strong sense for the universally human. Our culture in the United States is based significantly on this. The United States of America was founded intentionally with the ideals which are the garments, so to speak, of Anthroposophy: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. They are trinitarian in their inner nature: Life—the right to live; Liberty—the right to develop; The Pursuit of Happiness (not the happiness for itself, but the pursuit)—the 7 cf Rudolf Steiner, Individual Spiritual Beings and their Influence in the Souls of Human Beings. Spiritual Beings and their Effects, Volume 2, CW 178, Dornach 1992, Lecture of 16 November 1917.

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right to transform.

There are various streams, but we will consider only one other major one. Rudolf Steiner describes in a lecture from December 12, 1920,8 how around the time of the Mystery of Golgotha there were non-Christian souls who are incarnated in the present age in America. They experienced a longer time between incarnations because of a complicated manner of thinking. Therefore they stand in regard to their bodily nature in an estranged situation and as a result lean towards materialism and a sectarian religiosity. When one tries to come to grips with this strange phenomenon it becomes somewhat elusive because the chances for error are substantial. These souls lived an extremely ascetic life, even with a tendency to mutilation of their own physical body as part of their practice. A very illustrious example are the so-called “Pillar Saints.” They stood motionless on the top of a pillar often in the desert under the burning sun. They were dependent on people bringing them food and drink in order to survive. In the ensuing incarnation, after a long period in the spiritual world, they live in an opposite manner. We may think of two indications: the materialistic aspects of combative sports and the lust and drive for money. They carry over the materialism into sect-like religious groups through such things as chanting, swaying, and shaking, whereby they experience bliss in moments similar to excarnation.

Rudolf Steiner, however, brings this materialism in America into a very interesting observation. He mentions how spiritualism is “an American product”9 which desires to approach the Spirit but in a materialistic manner. Also, he points to something which we can apply to consideration of our theme: “In America where materialism is so wide-spread, basically it is on its way to the spirit; but when the European becomes a materialist, then he dies as a human being. Thus, this crass American materialism will grow into the spiritual. That will occur when the sun comes into the sign of Aquarius ... the correct and right Americanism that will unite with Europeanism, which will find its way more in a spiritual manner.”10 But what is happening now which points to the future and belongs in the sphere of the Michaelic culture and therefore directly to anthroposophy? Rudolf Steiner describes it as something in the West which is totally spe8 cf Rudolf Steiner, The Human Being in Relationship with the Cosmos, 2: The Bridge between the World-Spirituality and the Physical Aspect of the Human Being. The Search for a New Isis, the Divine Sophia, CW 202, Dornach 1980, Lecture of 12 December 1920.

9 cf fn. 5.

10 ibid.

cial. This aspect concerns how Europeans and Americans tend to view life after death, post-mortem life.

The European says: a life after death is promised to me by my religion but I do not need here in this unsatisfactory earthly life, in this solely material life, to do anything in order to make my soul immortal. Christ died so that I can be immortal. I do not need to strive after immortality. I am immortal, Christ makes me immortal ... [But] in the West, especially in America, we can see how in sometimes the most trivial religions and world-views, there is something striving upwards which has completely materialistic forms but connects with something which will be life in the future in regard to immortality. That is the belief in some sects in America that one cannot live at all after death if one has not exerted oneself in this earthly life, if one has not done or accomplished something through which one achieves this life after death ... What one wants to carry through death must be developed here ... and one will try to arrange one’s life here so that something which one does here can be carried through the gate of death.11

In my understanding of this fact, it can mean that anthroposophy—as philosophy and as Being—can meet these souls even if the souls are unconscious regarding the meeting. It is here that I perceive a task—even a responsibility—for members of the Anthroposophical Society, namely to help our fellow human beings to open the door consciously when Anthroposophy knocks, which lets strength flow into the one who knocks, but also into the interpreter, and into anthroposophy as well. This may sound “too big” and it probably is, but it depends upon our attitude of awareness and also whether we have the will-power and the wakefulness ahead of time to identify what is living on the surface of the soul in the other human being. This may need only a word from us to find the orientation to allow anthroposophy to connect in consciousness within that person.

At such a moment the word we will speak will be English. In my visits over here in America in the past 33 years, I have sometimes mentioned a few specific factors concerning anthroposophy and the English language. I would like to refer to just a few of these factors in connection with our present consideration. First of all there is a special trait in America which stands out: people speak with each other even if they are strangers much more frequently and openly than in other parts of the world. When European colleagues return from a visit to 11 cf Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Science as Knowledge of the Fundamental Impulses of Social Formation, CW 199, Dornach 1985, Lecture of 21 August 1920.

the United States they often remark that the people “over there” are so friendly and helpful. How does this happen?

In part it comes with the English language and the manner in which the thought penetrates through the word, as it were; how it, so to speak, comes out on the other side.

And therefore one can understand each other not only from the intellect but also from etheric body to etheric body. Rudolf Steiner regards this phenomenon as futureoriented.12 This is significant for anthroposophy which is “at home” in the etheric realm, as are also Christ and Michael. This, of course, does not mean that there will be an immediate access to these beings. On the practical side here, Rudolf Steiner indicates that the people whom we meet even casually and perhaps for just moments may meet us again at night when we sleep. This possibility can be aided through our review of the day [Rückschau]. Perhaps they will see more clearly our inner disposition and if we are working earnestly with anthroposophy. Then because of this meeting with us they may be enabled to perceive in waking consciousness the knock of anthroposophy on the door of their heart.

Probably we will not know about this knock on the door of their heart, but it is the right of every single human being today in the Michael Age to experience at least a first meeting with anthroposophy, and we have perceived the words: how something knocks on the door of our heart with anthroposophy and says: “Let me in because I am you yourself; I am your true human essence.”

America naturally has various predispositions which we have looked at briefly and which can enhance the work, the mission of anthroposophy. Exactly here the Anthroposophical Society is so important as we can join our endeavors together which encompass not only an administrative arrangement, but also a spiritual one.

For the being Anthroposophy will perceive the individual and will rejoice to discover that individual also in the Anthroposophical Society. I believe that the Anthroposophical Society is the true home for this two-fold aspect: the philosophy/world-view anthroposophy, and the Being Anthroposophy.

May the Anthroposophical Society in the United States of America continue to shine forth as it has since its first impulse in this country at the beginning of the 20th century!

Virginia Sease is a member emerita of the Executive Council of the General Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum.

12 cf Rudolf Steiner, Contemporary-Historical Examinations: The Karma of Untruthfulness, Part One. Cosmic and Human History, Volume 4. CW 173, Dornach 1978, Lecture of 18 December 1916. winter-spring issue 2017

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arts & ideas

Steiner & Kindred Spirits Steiner and Kindred Spirits, by Robert McDermott. SteinerBooks, 2016.

Review by Terry Hipolito This is Professor McDermott’s long awaited volume on Rudolf Steiner. Many readers of these pages of a certain age will certainly recall the earlier (1984) The Essential Steiner (and a revised second edition, The New Essential Steiner, 2009) which made the most crucial of Steiner’s thoughts, with informed and erudite commentary, available to those of us striving to get into focus a clear picture of anthroposophy.

McDermott’s unique qualifications as an anthroposophical editor and commentator are still in particular evidence in this new volume which consists of wholly original writing. McDermott, in his scholarly life, has specialized in nineteenth century American philosophy and in Asiatic spirituality, especially Tibetan Buddhism and the Indian traditions surrounding Krishna. He is familiar with the works of German Romantic philosophy, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Sri Aurobindo, Rabindranath Tagore, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, C. G. Jung, Mahatma Gandhi, Desmond Tutu, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and many others. His probably unique expertise with these traditions and authors together with a profound study of anthroposophy give Rudolf Steiner and Kindred Spirits its primary strength. These nineteenth and twentieth century savants add a dimensionality to the consideration of anthroposophy that one simply cannot find elsewhere.

The result is a unique perspective on anthroposophy as a profoundly cultural phenomenon, instead of, as is more usual, a monolithic accomplishment in spiritual science.

Kindred Spirits employs this vast and diverse cast of thinkers to shed light on the equally vast and diverse work of Rudolf Steiner. I have spent several years grazing in the lush pastures of anthroposophy and have yet to encounter so nourishing a source for considering the cultural milieu of anthroposophy as McDermott’s new work. We have of course had many close readings of Steiner’s works and syntheses of their contents; and we have also many speculative studies which attempt to put spiritual science into practice.

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But never, it seems to me, has there been a volume which places Steiner so fully into his cultural context. In McDermott’s book this context is not merely full but overflowing.

There are far too many important insights which this study inspires to attempt even a full list in this space, much less a discussion of the list. The following, however, should give an indication of the structure of this study and some sense of its scope: The book has twelve chapters, the first two of them introductory and the final one concludes with “Spiritual Practice.” Between these are nine chapters on discursive topics, generally ranging from the abstract to the concrete. The third chapter places Steiner in the context of the spiritual philosophers of the so-called American Renaissance: Emerson, William James, and Royce. The fourth chapter takes on evolution of consciousness with a discussion of Hegel as the overall originator of the topic and including Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin. These thinkers are really only introductory; a full discussion of Steiner’s theory of evolution includes consideration of the planet, of the human race generally and of separate human cultural streams. This background makes it clear how much Steiner has contributed to the still strangely neglected topic of the evolution of consciousness.

The fifth chapter compares Krishna, Buddha and Christ.

These are topics which Steiner discussed and included in his overall vision; McDermott is perhaps uniquely qualified to compare these very diverse figures and to show how they truly interacted in the twentieth century and still continue to do so. The sixth chapter examines the immemorial topic of wisdom. The modern history of this topic is in itself vast. McDermott takes up the resurgence of Sophia in our times, Roman Catholic “sophiology,” the divine feminine and feminism, and of course Rudolf Steiner’s doctrine of Sophia, especially including Anthroposophia.

The succeeding four chapters are on more traditional topics: good, evil, and suffering; social justice; education; art and aesthetics; and ecology. The topic of good and evil compares Buber, Jung, and then Steiner’s descriptions of Lucifer, Ahriman, and the Christ. Social justice builds to threefolding by consideration of Gandhi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., the Dalai Lama, and Desmond Tutu; this is a must read for all of those for whom threefolding occurs as a monolith outside of time and tradition. The chapter on education compares

Dewey, Montessori, and the Waldorf movement; it is in essence a history of pedagogy in the twentieth century.

The discussion of art and aesthetics limits itself largely to Rabindranath Tagore and Steiner, with special consideration of art as a spiritual activity. There is emphasis in this chapter on eurythmy, on the architecture of the first Goetheanum, and on the sculpture of the Representative of Humanity. The eleventh chapter is on ecology, a topic which did not exist, at least by that name, in Steiner’s day.

McDermott convincingly shows that Steiner, although he was active before the ecological movement, anticipated it and is in some ways still in advance of it; the twentieth century, for example, hardly began to deal with biodynamic agriculture. This chapter includes consideration of Teilhard de Chardin, and the contemporary ecologists Thomas Berry (1914-2009) and Sean Kelly.

The final chapter is entitled “Spiritual Practice.” It is an ambitious essay, worth the price of admission by itself, including discussions of Sri Aurobindo, the Dalai Lama, the Catholic Mass, Emerson, Jung, and Teilhard de Chardin. It concludes with consideration of the Act of Consecration of Man as celebrated in the Christian Community, and just how this is anthroposophical; finally there is a personal essay from McDermott on his own faith and how it has been influenced by the Christian Community and anthroposophy.

McDermott’s profound and clear study of Rudolf Steiner seems likely to remain relevant and useful for generations. He shows forcefully and perhaps definitively the intellectual and cultural milieu in which Steiner created the manifold of topics and activities involved in the development of anthroposophy. This it seems to me marks the first of two necessary steps for anthroposophy, now a century on from its birth, to join finally the mainstream of world culture. Rudolf Steiner and Kindred Spirits creates the cultural context which informed—that is, gave formation to—anthroposophy beginning a century or so before 1925. McDermott’s work is, in short, indispensable for anyone truly wishing to comprehend anthroposophy as a product of world culture.

As fascinating to me, and perhaps as important absolutely, is McDermott’s extension of anthroposophy into contemporary life, which it seems to me is the second of the essential steps to place anthroposophy into world culture. He is exemplary in explaining the nineteenth century background but also successfully seeks to project anthroposophy into the twenty-first century.

This is especially true in the chapter on ecology, a topic which did not clearly exist in Steiner’s time and which has obviously not yet concluded; McDermott here includes a description of Sean Kelly’s “integral ecology.”

Professor Kelly is a colleague of McDermott; although he is apparently not an anthroposophist, he is clearly a fellow traveler, and his ideas are entirely relevant to and illuminative of McDermott’s project. There is a need for more such perspectives on anthroposophy as it still influences developments in contemporary culture.

In this way McDermott’s fine example might serve as inspiration for further work investigating how cultural developments since 1925 intersect with the findings of anthroposophy. For example, in several passages Steiner seems insistent that mathematics provides bedrock knowledge.

Meanwhile developments in the twentieth century such as group theory, fuzzy logic, and category theory strongly suggest, it seems to me, that anthroposophy’s relationship to mathematics might fruitfully be reconsidered. Much the same might well be true of the revolutionary developments in physics since 1925, as the very boundaries between physical and spiritual science seem to have become increasingly questionable. Less obvious perhaps is a relation between physical and spiritual evolution. In spite of embellishments on Darwin such as “punctuated equilibrium” and “evo-devo” there is still no explanation I know of how, for example, the development of fangs and efficient hunting techniques might develop at once randomly and in parallel. A final example should more than suffice for this essay. The entire discipline of linguistics has developed within the general phenomenon of structuralism since 1950; one aspect of this has not been fully explored, although the Indo-European languages alone abundantly illustrate the evolution of tense, number, and agency, no doubt among many other steps in the evolution of consciousness.

These are just a few, although vast, areas that seem to me to call for thorough research. It is owing to fine work such as McDermott’s that such questions can enter the light after the long night of positivist materialism.

Terry Hipolito (tahipolito@earthlink.net) had his intellectual introduction to anthroposophy through the first edition of The Essential Steiner. Professor McDermott’s background in philosophy and religion qualifies him, almost uniquely, to appreciate Steiner as spiritual historian, which was Hipolito’s primary focus when he emerged with flightless wings from the chrysalis of graduate study.

Hipolito became (anathema) a software developer, part of the artificial intelligentsia, and student of medieval literature, but he remains fascinated by and indebted to McDermott’s unique qualifications.

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arts & ideas

Now West: Kaspar Hauser. A Touchstone for Humanity

by Penelope Baring When we proposed to our Santa Cruz Monterey Bay Branch of the Anthroposophical Society that we host a Michaelmas festive event on the theme of Kaspar Hauser there were some who asked “Who?” Kaspar Hauser is not as well known in America as one might think. He is certainly well known in the Camphill setting as the patron, in a way, of the handicapped individuality. He is known in the Fellowship Community where Ehrenfried Pfeiffer spoke of him a number of times, based on questions he had asked Rudolf Steiner about this mysterious human being. He is also known in the field of psychiatry, especially concerning child abuse, including the abuse of institutionalization. Books by scholars such as John Money (Kaspar Hauser and Psychological Dwarfism) and Leonard Shengold (Soul Murder) have cited Kaspar Hauser as the first documented account of such abuse and even coined the term “Kaspar Hauser Syndrome.” Plays based on his life and books such as The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster have been written. Suzanne Vega has a song called “The Wooden Horse.” Nevertheless Kaspar Hauser has been more or less forgotten in this country.

For this reason, if no other, we at Camphill Communities California decided to host this Michaelmas event, calling it “Now West: Kaspar Hauser.”

Our main speaker was Eckart Böhmer. Eckart is a champion for Kaspar Hauser. His life work has been in his service.

This goes back to childhood years when, growing up as the son of a Goethe Institute father, living in one country and culture after another, Eckart felt that his life was saved from depression in mid adolescence through seeing the Werner Herzog film Kaspar Hauser. Much later, after gaining a degree in theater arts and production, Eckart set up his own theater near the town of Eckart Boehmer inside a giant redwood tree.

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Ansbach in Germany, not even realizing at first that this was the very town where Kaspar Hauser lived and died. Kaspar Hauser was murdered at the age of 21, five years after being released from his childhood incarceration. Eckart Böhmer offered to organize a Kaspar Hauser festi- Kaspar Hauser in 1830, by Johann Friedrich Carl Kreul val for the town, which itself had very little sense for this history. By now, 20 years later, Ansbach has hosted ten Kaspar Hauser Festival events that now draw three and a half thousand people every other August for a week of plays, films, lectures, concerts and tours. And not only for anthroposophists. There are many who are drawn to this mysterious life and death.

Eckart gave us three lectures, which were all deeply researched and contemplated, based both on historical records and on Rudolf Steiner’s indications. He outlined the two crimes that were committed against Kaspar Hauser: There was the exoteric political crime of child abduction when the newborn baby of Stephanie Beauharnais was removed and a dying child put in his place so that the machinations of court politics and power could unfold making sure that he would never inherit the throne of Baden.

And there was the esoteric crime, carried out when the child was four years old, when he was put into a dark underground cell without human contact for twelve years.

Eckart described both in great depth and detail. The second crime in particular is of in—continues on page 31

Gallery: The Free Columbia Puppet Troupe Nathaniel Williams has helped create seven puppet theater projects since the intensive art-and-anthroposophy program Free Columbia began. These projects included all the elements of puppet-theater, from conception and design to touring and performance. “Momo, the Time Titan” was the most recent, in summer 2016. These four pages present images from several of the Troupe’s productions.

Above, Sarah Parrilli and puppets from the Ramapo Salamander production Right, from the Ramapo Salamander production Below, Nathaniel Williams, director of the Free Columbia Puppet Troupe

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Clay sketches

Emma Wade Stringing up Guido

Michael Balin with Figaro from Momo

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Mattie Barber-Bockelman and Gabriel Rodriguez in Momo

Guido and Momo hanging out...

The Momo poster

Emma Wade and Nao Kobashi in Momo winter-spring issue 2017

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Above and left: The Peacemaker Project at the Henry Hudson Riverfront Park in Hudson, NY (photo: Fumie Ishi)

2011 Performance of Ludwig Tieck’s Booted Tomcat at the Basilica, Hudson NY

The 2014 Free Columbia Puppet Troupe and the puppets for the Peacemaker Project (photo: Fumie Ishi)

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terest to anthroposophists in the light of Rudolf Steiner’s remarks to Ehrenfried Pfeiffer that “if Kaspar Hauser had not lived and died as he did the connection would have been severed between the spiritual world and the earthly.”

This has been a long-standing puzzle, since Rudolf Steiner has also said that had he not been abducted and had ascended the throne of Baden, he might have been able to found a Grail Kingdom in southern Germany and fulfill the ideals of the French Revolution by creating a truly threefold governance. How could Kaspar Hauser have both failed and succeeded? Was it so, as Karl König, the founder of Camphill has said, that his actual mission was to be the “Guardian of the Image of God” through the darkly clouded 19th century, during the time when the Christ Being was being suffocated in the etheric sphere by deepening materialism?

This is not the place to outline the entire lecture content. The sixty people who attended were privileged to experience a real spiritual researcher who, in his very being lives and breathes the question I have described. Did Kaspar Hauser fail or did he succeed in what he was meant to do? Eckart has come to insights that are questions in themselves and will continue to unfold.

The whole event was embedded in the experience of the Word. For those who were present on Michaelmas Day, the day of Kaspar Hauser’s birth, we heard an hour of poetry in his name. On the Friday evening Glen Williamson presented his wonderful one-man play “The Foundling Prince.” And on the Saturday evening we experienced a dramatic reading of “…and from the night Kaspar” by Carlo Pietzner. Eckart’s lectures were also dramatic pieces.

He spoke in his native German with translation by Richard Steel. Because Eckart is a trained actor and because his heart beats so strongly for his subject we all were glad that he could present in his language, for even those who didn’t understand were deeply moved by the glowing warmth of his words. Eckart’s final plea was: “Be childlike and joyful, filled with wonder.” That is what is needed.

The success of this event has convinced us that Eckart should come again, in October 2018. This should be a big, very public festival that invites many to take part in the ongoing story of Kaspar Hauser.

Penelope Baring (penelope@usbaring.com) lives at Camphill Communities California, in Soquel near Santa Cruz. She has been active in Camphill for many years and represents the General Section of the School for Spiritual Science on its North American Collegium.

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arts & ideas

“Come Forth!”: A Report on the Lazarus Project

by Laura Summer, Jordan Walker, and Sampsa Pirtola The Lazarus Project (Pilot Installation) was the result of the inaugural artist-in-residency at Free Columbia (www.freecolumbia.org). The Lazarus Project exhibition and events took place May 14-21, 2016, at Inky Editions, a 5,000 square foot printmaking studio in Hudson, New York.

The installation was a collaboration between American producer Jordan Walker, painter and Free Columbia co-founder Laura Summer, production designer and multimedia artist Tim Kowlaski, and Finnish multimedia artist Sampsa Pirtola (performing together with the Heartelligency International artist group, mainly on video). The exhibition incorporated elements of painting, video, placebased installation art, and participatory performance.

The Lazarus Project explored two questions: What if we, as a culture and as individuals, have been largely sleeping through life, and one day are called to wake up? What would it look, sound, and feel like to arise from our slumber and “come forth” into the world, awake? Our collaborative exploration of these questions has led through themes as diverse as virtual reality and transhumanism, popular understandings of life-after-death, historical and contemporary initiation, and the role of art in social life.

The announcement for the Project described it this way: Today each of us is asked to weave meaning from a world of complex, increasingly digital information.

Imagine if we are the weaver of our own burial shroud

at our deathbed, naked of material possessions. We are all wrapped in this cloth of our own making.

Might we not all be asleep in a sleep that looks like death? Are we not surrounded by the fabric of our own possessions and our beliefs, bound by our desires, obsessions, assumptions?

What if a wise voice, a higher companion, called our name and said, “Come out”? Would we let the things which bind us be unbound? Would we step out of our dark tomb into the light? Are we ready? Are we finally ready?

This installation was done to learn something about the form of collaborative installation and about our subject.

After the pilot installation in May 2016 we hope to continue working with the theme of Lazarus in other venues.

The shroud-like environment of the installation shaped by translucent cloth walls included seven series of paintings and seven video segments from the TRAShOLD OPERA, recorded at its recent premier in Berlin, largely shown on four surfaces of a constructed cloth pyramid.

All of the paintings and prints in the installation were done Pyramid: detail with video and viewer amid veils

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by Laura Summer, and all of the video installations were by Sampsa Pirtola. Each of the seven painting installations had a relationship to each of the seven videos in terms of form, movement, and the experience of meaning.

The Project featured eight successive nights of related performances, lectures, films, videos, conversations, and a dispersal of 96 monoprints. These included a lecture by Nathaniel Williams; two films about “Die Wise” by responsible death advocate Stephen Jenkinson; “Grandmother Earth,” an interactive art project by noted contemporary art critic Linda Weintraub; a Hole Earth performance-art “dig” by Robert Leaver; a variety of musical performances by Jen Zimberg (acoustic guitar singer-songwriter), KAMALOKA (experimental electronic music), multiinstrumentalist Peter Alexanian, and MC Matre (hip-hop speech art with Seth Jordan as DJ); and culminating with a performance of the entire TRAShOLD OPERA on the last evening, a contemporary tale about death, initiation, and the development of the “heartphone.”

The investigation that resulted in the Lazarus Project began with a statement by Orland Bishop to Laura when she was visiting Sampsa in Sweden in July 2015, “I am interested in the image of Lazarus.” We wondered what this could mean. What is death, what is initiation for our time? How does our culture understand these things? How can art help to move things along, open them up? So we started to investigate. Because we are art-

ists, we explored this theme by painting, drawing, poetry, and making collages and videos as well as by more usual research approaches such as reading and online computer searching. We read much that Rudolf Steiner had said about Lazarus, that he became John the Evangelist and, much later, Christian Rosenkreutz.

Many questions guided us through the making of this installation, such as these Laura wrote early on in the process:

Laura Summer: “Dance” (above); “Face of Lazarus Emerging” (below)

What happens in the tomb? In the wrappings? In the cocoon?

In the seed? Does material substance become a chaos soup? Without form, so that the intentions of the truth can form you again? Were there moments, or maybe a space, when you, Lazarus, were only the intention of God? When your substance was re-aligned and made whole? Is that why He waited? Does it take time?

Or is time not applicable?

Sampsa and Laura contacted Jordan after several months of dialogue, and he agreed to come aboard as a producer. Two months before opening, Tim Kowlaski was approached to help design and build the installation. Katrina Hoven completed the team when she arrived to document the exhibition with photographs and video.

If you are interested in bringing this work to your community contact Laura Summer at laurasummer@taconic.net. A much more extensive report is in the Art Section Newsletter; details at the end of the following commentary by David Adams. winter-spring issue 2017

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arts & ideas

THE TRAShOLD OPERA: The Heartelligency of Lazarus Commentary by David Adams This combined live and projected-video performance, an “opera without singing,” is a curious imagination—a quirky, contemporary reworking of the events and inner meanings of the story in the Gospel of St. John of the raising/initiation of Lazarus, infused by anthroposophical insights and the unusual creativity of Sampsa Pirtola.

Some might even call it a kind of trivialization or tooirreverent treatment of the archetypal first initiation performed by Christ Jesus on the soul of Lazarus/John the Evangelist, but it seems to me to be more of an artistic transformation of the processes of the story to relate to the somewhat different, contemporary struggles of the artist (and all human beings) to spiritually awaken, using a kind of “initiation template.” The poster for it described the opera as a “multimedia performance about death, initiation, and the heartphone.”

The term “opera” was used to indicate the attempt to make a Gesamtkunstwerk (total, multimedia artwork), but in a different way than a traditional opera. Its somewhat punning, hybrid title makes various references, which the authors want viewers to interpret for themselves. The term “TRAShOLD” could suggest “Threshold” and “Trash Old” (including the idea of discarding or overcoming one’s

John McManus as representative of Paradise, Inc.

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own psychological “old trash”)—both with meaningful references to the content presented. “Heartelligency” seems to be a kind of amalgam of “heart intelligence” (the “heart thinking” that Steiner urged us to develop) and “agency.”

Sampsa tells me that the Paradise Corporation in the Opera represents a form of “Heart Intelligence Agency.”

The Opera used a combination of contemporary pop imagery (including cell phones and corporate R & D [Research & Development] departments) combined with ancient Egyptian mystery-religion imagery to reflect aspects of a contemporary process of spiritual initiation, as understood by anthroposophy.

I want to add here some further interpretive comments as well as some details from the performance in Hudson, especially from the central monologue at the end of the long first act (or scene) spoken by the representative of Paradise, Inc. who seems to represent a divine presence in our post-Mystery-of-Golgotha era.

Sampsa’s performance-identity / alter ego “Immanuel,” a kind of “Everyman” figure also representing Lazarus here, first emerged at the beginning of the first act/scene while being carried on a bicycle by Osiris and Anubis toward the viewers in a slowly-moving, ritualistic procession advancing through a video-projected, painted, ancient Egyptian landscape of pyramid and sphinx as varying

to a much bigger realm of networking—the distance music sounds. Both Egyptian figures are apparently lost between one another felt seemingly smaller. The and without spiritual direction in the changed initiation quantity of communication exploded! When conditions of modern times. The ongoing video the smartphone was developed, it awakened action was projected onto the cloth face of the us to our individuality in new ways. . . . pyramid constructed in the hanging, shroud[Paradoxically] while communicating with one like installation. Anubis and Osiris were two another, we could finally be alone! of the most prominent ancient Egyptian gods It was like we needed the other to help us to associated with the initiation and after-death feel ourselves. . . People could exchange their processes. Lazarus was dressed as an Egyptian fantasies and their virtual realities. It brought pharaoh. us to a new kind of identity—it helped to bring As Sampsa separately explained to me, “Ima new kind of consciousness into being. The manuel is Lazarus,” but “what we mean with story of transcending our humanness began.

Lazarus is the quality that he goes through. . . .

Artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and The model of what Lazarus went through is used the internet of things were going to make our here to describe the form of process that the life better than ever before. But this process Immanuel character goes through. . . . It is not required people to be truly detached from their trying to be . . . an exact historical or spiritual environment. The form took over the content, and the feeling of detachment people were description . . . but an artistic and creative image experiencing became the price required for of the qualities involved in this form of initiation Above, Laura Summer, “Heartphone,” the glory to come. Individuality went over the process. This experience can also be happening image 6 of a series of 7. top and, as the pendulum inevitably in the future.”

Below, video stills; from top, Lazarus cycling with Osiris & Anubis; After the lights briefly went out, The Tour de Hades; Anubis and Osiris Free Lazarus from the Coffin. swings back the other direction, people felt the need to be collective the scene changed to a white room, and again. we saw the representative from Paradise, So today’s smartphone inevitably led Inc. (played by John McManus), dressed to the next step in the evolution of all in white and speaking to Lazarus, communication: the artphone! who in the Hudson version was presThrough the artphone people related ent only within a sarcophagus on the to their environment and each other ground with a large drawing of him on again. Any object could now be used top of it, see photograph previous page), to communicate! . . . Anything you “Hello, friend. I see you are lost in time experience through your senses could and space. It seems that the old gods do now become a “phone.” You could not know where to take you anymore. I send a message with stones, shoes, think I might be able to help.” turtles. . . . This was the expanded The representative then launched concept of the phone! into a long monologue starting with a People expanded their creativity and kind of fanciful history and future prowere finding ever more extraordinary jection of forms of human communiways to make a call. The artphone tore cation that explained much of the plot down the old forms of communication and meaning of the Opera, progressing and brought about new forms of community. Society was no longer from the spoken to the printed word, driven by the old economical to the telephone, to the “untethered” ideologies, but by the higher inner mobile/cell phone. The representative potential of each individual. continued, But the artphone had its problems, This is our current development too. People began to lose themselves in communication. This is also in the constant drive for the social. where we—Paradise, Inc.—step in.

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arts & ideas you never knew where or what the phone was and if you were in the middle of someone’s call.

someone to complete a “simple” training program of more than 5,000 steps: “The main goal is to travel as widely as possible and experience how you and your cycle move At this point a Paradise, Inc. employee suggested a through different elements and across different surfaces. new type of communication/phone operating with “intuEvery surface activates a different micro-component of the ition, inspiration, or imagination” so that “you no longer heartphone . . . When you are able to ride your tricycle on need to have the physical realm to make a call! All you water, you know that your heartphone has been activated!” need to communicate is inner substance! . . .”

This moving-on-water image seemed to suggest developing Now, after years of development, the heartphone some direct knowledge and capacity with the etheric forces exists! Paradise Incorporated is at the threshold of of life. releasing this revolutionary communication into the Finally, the representative made his appeal to Lazaworld! To complete the product development process, just one step remains: The heartphone must be rus: “Sir, we think you are the one who has the potential activated. to activate the heartphone! If you can manage it, every human will manage it. . . . Once the heartphone is actiThis sort of abbreviated history of human communivated, it is a free gift, available for every human being. . . . cation that the monologue presented also reflected someYou are free to decide for yourself, of course, but if you do thing of the almost addictive contemporary fascination not take this task on, this will happen to you.” with cell phones and so-called “smart Thus ended the first act/scene, phones.” The Opera, and specifically and immediately the second act began the Paradise, Inc. representative, used with a doubtful Lazarus confronted technological/mechanical imagery (the with a vision projected onto a wall in bicycle and the telephone) for a future, the installation, the vision of a huge apparently telepathic, soul-to-soul form “trash pyramid.” This was explained of communication that, according to by the representative as a kind of imRudolf Steiner, will only come about age of what Lazarus’s soul otherwise by meditative purification and develwould become. On top of the trash opment of the human astral body, spepyramid was a woman looking simicifically of its latent organs known as lar to Immanuel, but dressed in trash chakras/lotus flowers; in other words, “clothing,” and singing softly in the by initiation. background. Horrified by the potential In an early, later-changed script for Above, the Trash Pyramid with Anubis and Osiris. the Opera, the Paradise, Inc. represen- Below, The Milkweed Corridor, part of the overall installation. reality of his life and said to be wondering if he will ever be able to truly tative explains that the problem in socilove, Lazarus agreed to try to activate ety is that it is dualistic (“bipolar”), and the heartphone. the smartphone and the artphone repThe pleased representative then inresent the two extremes of this society. structed him on the next steps, “Anubis The two-wheeled bicycle is the symbol and Osiris will guide you through the of this, and thus, in order to activate Escapist Land [also known as Ecstathe new heartphone, one needs a spesia], where the Psychology Police will cially invented tricyle “to cycle on the help you leave the past and take on the three wheels of the culture: Culture, future. At the Flee Market you will be Economy, and Politics.” “The heartgiven the tricycle. Farewell for now, I phone truly connects people through will see you on the other side!” inner listening,” the representative said, In the all-video third act/scene “and by making the three wheels of the Lazarus’s transformation began, as consociety move to the same direction.” versing with the Psychology Police agent To activate this new heartphone, helped him to let go of his inner trash the representative continued, requires and find his way to his true feelings.

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Opera rehearsal, Act 1

Lazarus then needed to flee this, which he did by obtaining his special tricycle at the “Flee Market” and riding off on it. His excitement at riding the tricycle in this Escapist Land lifted him up into the air, soon biking dangerously toward the moon and sun. He eventually realized the danger, started to fear that he would be trapped or captured in this “Ecstasia” [we could also say “luciferic”] reality, and ended up falling down from the sky.

We could say that the all-video fourth act/scene that sends Lazarus under the ocean to compete in the “Tour de Hades” was a fall in the opposite, ahrimanic direction.

It was only in the sixth act, where Osiris and Anubis reappeared on either side of Lazarus inside his dark sarcophagus, that redemption/initiation was achieved. This was a threefold sarcophagus with each one inside the other like Russian dolls (or the threefold lower components of the constitution of the human being). Osiris and Anubis freed Lazarus by “peeling” each sarcophagus away one after the other. The Paradise, Inc. representative then reappeared to call Lazarus back into life, reassuring him of his success in activating the heartphone by saying, “You have it.” Then in the final, seventh act (all-video), Lazarus is able to freely bike on water, realizing he has activated the heartphone, and also taking Osiris and Anubis with him.

I have two final reflections about this artistic transformation of the contemporary “everyman” Lazarus.

The gilded tip said to be present at the top of the original ancient Egyptian pyramids could be seen to relate to an “alchemical” understanding of the transformation of Lazarus through his initiation process. There also seems to be a reference to the initiation Midnight Sun experience, reflected by the “sun-disk” placed behind the tip of the Trash Pyramid in the installation in Hudson. Gold is the metal that relates to forces of the sun. Sampsa has also stated that one of his ideas was to work with the qualities of alchemy, an understanding that “Lazarus needs to transform his trash pyramid into spiritual gold.”

Finally, it occurs to me that one could see the de-

velopment of Lazarus in the Opera as a kind of partial image or analogue of the initiation process of the new Mysteries of the Will, whereby the light of new understanding and being emerges from the individual’s will achieving a tri-fold, “whole-soul” (i.e., thinking, feeling, and willing) penetration of the various outwardly sense-perceptible “surfaces” of the world to reach, initially, the etheric (water) and astral (air) realities of “cosmic world thought” that lie behind them—as Lazarus had to ride his tricycle over so many different surfaces.

This “Lazarus initiation,” as it also might be called, involves working with, mastering, and elevating the process by which our will in sense perception (percept) continually “contacts” and is related with our thinking (concept) in a usually unconscious way nearly every second of our lives. Rudolf Steiner first spoke about this modern, Christian “will-initiation,” which he also called a new kind of a “light-breathing” yoga practice, on November 30, 1919, in the sixth lecture of The Mission of the Archangel Michael (CW 194), as well as on a few later occasions. It has been much further elaborated in books by Yeshayahu BenAharon, especially The New Experience of the Supersensible (1994 and 2007) and Cognitive Yoga (2016). Steiner tells us that the resurrected Christ’s union with the earth and his original raising/initiation of Lazarus to a higher existence have made this new initiation process (here represented as the “heartphone”) potentially available to all humanity. ...

For much more information on what Steiner also called a “radical break with previous initiation practices” and the Temple Legend, see Steiner’s Freemasonry and Ritual Work: The Misraim Service (SteinerBooks, 2007; CW 265), pp. 379-448 and 470-473.

Editor’s note: this commentary was edited for space; the full report is in issue #46 of the Art Section Newsletter; to subscribe or see a pdf see www.northamericanart section.blogspot.com.

David Adams (ctrarcht@nccn.net) has been a frequent contributor to being human.

Katrina Hoven, Sampsa Pirtola, Laura Summer, Tim Kowalski, Jordan Walker winter-spring issue 2017

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research & reviews IN THIS SECTION: Another significant gathering was held in Ann Arbor, Michigan: the Natural Science Section of the School for Spiritual Science in North America, celebrating Rudolf Steiner’s further development of Goethe’s holistic science impulse.

Frederick Amrine shares his lecture to that gathering; its very important insight is that anthroposophy has been well developed on the discovery side of science where “beauty” is a well-accepted criterion.

Douglas Sloan taught education and history of religion at Columbia Teachers’ College; here he looks to our animal companions and our deep and unmet responsibilities to them.

Adonis Press brings us a remarkable book of poems— Honeymoon of Mourning—which have found an ideal translator in Matthew Dexter.

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Evolving Science & the Task of the Natural Science Section A report on the annual conference of the Natural Science Section at the Rudolf Steiner House in Ann Arbor, MI, from December 1–4, 2016

Aside from considering new developments in science, this year’s Natural Science Section conference focused on the task of the Section and on building an active scientific community around our work on Goethean science. Our efforts were blessed by the fact that a special constellation of key people agreed to participate in the conference. We were also inspired by memories of pioneering individuals on the other side of the threshold such as Ernst Katz, Seyhan Ege, Stephen Edelglass, and Georg Maier, and we were encouraged by the good wishes of colleagues such as Mark Riegner, Walter Goldstein, and others who were unable to attend. Those of us who have been carrying the work and attending the annual conferences of the Section over the past years felt that our focus on building the inner capacities necessary for the further evolution of science also contributed to the special quality and success of the conference.

The Rudolf Steiner House in Ann Arbor provided an ideal setting for the conference. With its welcoming, helpful staff and spaces permeated by many years of anthroposophical activity, it is well suited to a conference of up to 25 people.

On the Wednesday evening before the conference began, Andrew Linnell gave a thought-provoking talk on technology and its role in human evolution. The conference began on Thursday with efforts to approach our theme through work based on the content of the First Class. Led by Barry Lia, John Barnes, and Douglas Miller, we considered the path and inner development of the scientist, steps toward establishing a qualitative science, and Rudolf Steiner’s suggestion that “the lab bench must become an altar.” On Thursday evening, Friday and Saturday, we heard stimulating talks that were open to the public: • Fred Amrine on beauty as a fundamental aspect of good science and “What is scientific about Spiritual Science?” (see next article) • Craig Holdrege on overcoming the limitations of superficial abstract thought and encountering the actual beings of Nature • Johannes Kühl on approaching the etheric through light and electricity • Arthur Zajonc on the practice of contemplative inquiry and physics today • and Gopi Krishna on Goethean science and Dewey Larson’s reciprocal system.

In addition, each participant reported on his or her own scientific work.

Beside those already mentioned, those who presented were: Frank Fawcett and Jerry Kruse on the forthcoming book by geologist Dankmar Bosse about human and earth evolution, and on collaborative work in geology; John Petering and Judith Erb on teaching chemistry through phenomena and song (!); Jennifer Greene on water research and its application in waste water treatment; John Bowditch on bringing science and technology alive in museums; Jeremy The hall at Rudolf Steiner House, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Strawn on spreading enthusiasm for projective geometry; and Michael Shope on designing and setting up a scientific experiment. Barry Lia presented his research on the hidden morphology of the retina in relation to behavioral specialization and the ancient notion of an etheric streaming from eye to object. Each presentation was followed by lively conversation, which also bubbled up freely over meals shared in the dining room and on invigorating walks in the nearby arboretum.

The mood of the conference was pervaded by a sense of being part of a momentous development in the evolution of modern science and an awareness that we are working at thresholds, the crossing of which will require the total engagement and transformation of our own being. Associated with this was an awareness of forming a working scientific community, which became particularly apparent toward the end of the conference when we decided to take up a study of, and contribute to a commentary on, the eighteen lectures Rudolf Steiner gave on Interdisciplinary Astronomy (CW 323), which Fred Amrine has re-translated and which will soon be published

by SteinerBooks. The plan is that our next annual Science Section conference in 2017 will focus on this challenging work. We have already reserved the Rudolf Steiner House for November 9-12, 2017 for the conference. Another promising outcome of the conference was that Mark Riegner and John Petering have agreed to work together on editing a new science journal.

At the Science Section’s business meeting on Sunday morning the four members of the Section’s Steering Group—Jennifer Greene, John Barnes, Barry Lia, and Andrew Linnell—agreed to continue on, joined when needed by Judith Erb in their regular Monday morning conference calls. We were also pleased to hear that the conference had broken even financially. Thus at a time of tremendous challenges we left the conference with gratitude toward our hosts in Ann Arbor and with renewed courage and confidence in the importance of our work.

John Barnes, Jennifer Greene, Barry Lia, Andrew Linnell and Judith Erb for the Natural Science Section’s Steering Group

The Beauty of Anthroposophy, or: What’s Scientific about Spiritual Science?

by Frederick Amrine Science involves the interplay of intelligibility, discovery, and justification. Intelligibility runs the gamut from prediction to the apprehension of cosmic wisdom; science renders phenomena meaningful. Discovery is the moment of insight, eventually yielding a testable hypothesis. Justification is an odd word: originally it was a theological term (as for example in Pauline “justification through faith”). But it is the proper term for the testing of a scientific hypothesis.

Now this prevailing model is beset with difficulties. For example, there is no method for discovery; it is treated as extra-scientific. Science is viewed as beginning with the testing of a hypothesis; as the great biologist Peter Medawar put it, hypothesis formation is a “logically unscripted” moment. Another related problem is the reduction of intelligibility to rational reconstruction (what David Bohm calls “axiomatization”)1: we want to reduce our 1 David Bohm, “Imagination, Fancy, Insight, and Reason in the Process of Thought,” in Shirley Sugerman, ed., Evolution of Consciousness: Studies in

intuitions too quickly to mathematical axioms, and indeed have come to see the axioms as primary, whereas they are properly derivative from insight. This leads to the hypertrophy of justification (David Bohm again) at the expense of intelligibility. Moreover, as Thomas Kuhn has demonstrated so brilliantly, scientific practice does not conform to the methodological stereotype of falsification.2 “Normal science” tries furiously to explain everything in light of the prevailing paradigm, even though it is only falsification that yields scientifically valid (if negative) insights.

There have been notable failures of replication, especially recently: in one egregious case, researchers at the University of Virginia were able to replicate only 39 out 100 central experiments in the field of psychology. And truth as “conformity to appearances” has been undermined by the psychology of perception: there is no “neutral observation language,” as for example in Jerome Bruner’s discovery of “perceptual readiness”; we see what habit accustoms us to Polarity (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1976), pp. 51-68.

2 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 50th Anniversary Edition (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012). winter-spring issue 2017

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research & reviews seeing, rather than what’s actually there.

Much more could be adduced here, but this much already makes clear that something different is needed. So let’s expand the discussion by bringing in three additional concepts: sublimity, beauty, and elegance.

Sublimity is not a standard scientific category; I propose it as such. Archetypally sublime experiences have been the Alps, a storm at sea, and, in Kant, the mathematical concept of the infinite. The sublime awakens wonder in the cognitive sense, and awe in the aesthetic and moral senses. Hence the famous quote from the end of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781): “Two things fill the soul with ever-renewed and ever-growing admiration, the more frequently and constantly reflection applies itself to them: the starry sky above me and the moral law within.” Buckminster Fuller saw Einstein’s Theory of Relativity as “the metaphysical mastering the physical,” which again would be a manifestation of the sublime. The sublime is not a standard scientific concept, but it should be.

Beauty, however, is very much a standard scientific category! Beauty is about harmony in all its guises, and especially about the harmony between parts and wholes.

Hence Kant approached aesthetic and biological forms with the same concepts in his Critique of Judgment or Third Critique of 1790, and inspired Schiller’s Essay on Aesthetic Education (1794), which inspired Steiner in turn. Kant, Schiller, and Steiner view beauty as a direct manifestation of moral ideas. Beauty hovers between sublimity and elegance: you feel awe at seeing hitherto unapprehended connections (tending to the sublime), and you sense unity captured within multiplicity (tending toward elegance).

Over and over we hear of the centrality of beauty to great science. For example, James W. McAllister quotes the physicist Paul Dirac: “When Einstein was building up his theory of gravitation he was not trying to account for some results of observations. Far from it. His entire procedure was to search for a beautiful theory … The real foundations come from the great beauty of the theory … It is the essential beauty of the theory which I feel is the real reason for believing in it.”3 Or S. Chandrasekhar quoting Hermann Weyl: “My work has always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.”4 “So far, no predictions of general relativity, in the limit

of strong gravitational fields, have received any confirmation; and none seem likely in the near future,” writes Chandrasekhar, but according to Paul Dirac, “What makes the theory [of general relativity] so acceptable to physicists … is its great mathematical beauty” (148). “If you listen to scientists talking, or read what they write outside of peer-reviewed articles, then a very different picture emerges,” writes David Orrell;5 “there is a general acceptance that beauty and truth are mysteriously and inextricably linked. Indeed, the central drive of science often seems to be as much a quest for beauty as for truth, on the understanding that the two are to be found at the same place…the rallying cry of fundamental physicists is, ‘Let us worry about beauty first, the truth will take care of itself!’” In his important study The Copernican Revolution, Thomas Kuhn boldly claimed that the reason for the shift from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican paradigm was primarily aesthetic: “… in the absence of increased economy or precision, what reasons were there for transposing the earth and the sun? … as Copernicus himself recognized, the real appeal of sun-centered astronomy was aesthetic rather than pragmatic … as the Copernican Revolution itself indicates, matters of taste are not negligible. The ear equipped to discern geometric harmony could detect a new neatness and coherence in the suncentered astronomy of Copernicus, and if that neatness and coherence had not been recognized, there might have been no revolution.”6 At regular intervals, various mathematical and physical societies poll their memberships, asking: What is the most beautiful mathematical formula of all time? And there is always a clear winner: Euler’s Identity. (Leonhard Euler, who lived from 1707 to 1783, was the Mozart of mathematicians; great mathematics streamed through him effortlessly.) It runs as follows:

3 James W. McAllister, Beauty and Revolution in Science (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999), pp. 15-16.

4 S. Chandrasekhar, Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987), p. 65.

5 David Orrell, Truth or Beauty: Science and the Quest for Order (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012), pp. 3-4.

6 Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1957), p.

171.

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e iπ+ 1 = 0 And indeed, it is a gorgeous formula, rich and strange for all its brevity. Every aspect of mathematics is represented in archetypal form: you have the constant of analysis, “e,” and hence calculus; the unit imaginary number, “i”; a geometrical constant, “π,” which is arguably the first irrational number; the first natural number, “1” (which is also the identity principle for multiplication); and the first integer, “0” (which is the identity principle for addi-

tion). You have the all-important operations of addition and equality. But it is also strange: what to make, for example, of “π” as an exponent? And what does it mean?

Benjamin Pierce, who was a professor of mathematics at Harvard University and the first American mathematician to achieve international prominence, said of Euler’s Identity: “Gentlemen, that is surely true, it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don’t know what it means. But we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth.” Note that we needn’t understand an insight fully (yet) in order to recognize it as scientific—indeed as great science. This contention is potentially very consequential for anthroposophy.

It is extremely revealing if we make a simple algebraic transformation of the formula, rendering it more elegant: e i π = -1 The result is more elegant, but far less beautiful. Truly a Goethean Urphänomen!

In his splendid study The Emperor’s New Mind, Roger Penrose quotes from Jacques Hadamard’s Psychology of Invention the Mathematical Field: “But with [the great French mathematician Henri] Poincaré we see something else, the intervention of the sense of beauty playing its part as an indispensable means of finding … this choice is imperatively governed by the sense of scientific beauty.”7 And Penrose himself adds: “… aesthetic criteria are enormously valuable in forming our judgements … the strong conviction of the validity of a flash of inspiration … is very closely bound up with its aesthetic qualities. A beautiful idea has a much greater chance of being a correct idea than an ugly one” (421).

If we look up “mathematical beauty” on Wikipedia, we find that a beautiful proof “derives a result in a surprising way”; that it “relates the apparently unrelated,” and that it yields “new and original insights.” But notice that these are all consonant not with justification, but with discovery! This is an all-important insight. Results that are both novel in these ways and especially fundamental and encompassing are called “deep.” Moreover, in Poetic Diction, Owen Barfield argues that beauty in literary language is what calls forth “a felt change of consciousness.”8 Likewise, Penrose argues that mathematical truth is not something that we ascertain merely by use of an algorithm. “I believe, also, that our consciousness is a crucial 7 Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989), p. 421.

8 Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), p. 48.

ingredient in our comprehension of mathematical truth.

We must ‘see’ the truth of a mathematical argument to be convinced of its validity. This ‘seeing’ is the very essence of consciousness” (418). It follows that science is fundamentally about the expansion of human consciousness.

We have arrived at a key contention and a key question regarding beauty in science. My contention is that beauty is to discovery as rigor is to justification. Hence, beauty is the rigor of discovery. The fundamental scientific value of symmetry, for example, is first and foremost an aesthetic criterion. We treasure the embedded rigor that has led to an elegant formulation, but I am moved to ask: Is the elegant really more rigorous than the beautiful?

We associate the notion of elegance, or parsimony, with William of Ockham (ca. 1287-1347). “Occam’s razor” (as it’s called) asserts that “With all things being equal, the simplest explanation tends to be the right one.” Let’s explore the role of elegance in the history of astronomy.

Retrograde loop of Mars (time lapse)

In his study The Ballet of the Planets, Donald C. Benson insists on the centrality of “elegance” in multiple passages9: “Science prefers theories of the greatest possible generality and simplicity.” (xiii); “the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience” (3); “the world is simpler than it seems, and every effort should be made to discover its simplicity” (4); [Occam’s razor quoted directly] (6); and [the heliocentric frame of reference] “contains no curves that are more complex than circles” (36). Above all things, he claims, astronomical theory should strive for elegance.

Thus we want to be rid of the deferents and epicycles of the Ptolemaic model (image next page).

9 Donald C. Benson, The Ballet of the Planets: On the Mathematical Elegance of Planetary Motion (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012). winter-spring issue 2017

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research & reviews failed to see their beauty?

Let’s isolate the paths of the planets. If one allows Venus to run its full cycle (approximately eight years), the result is the intensely beautiful “Rose of Venus”:

However, it is not wrong to do so; merely unaesthetic: “The motions of the planets can be described fully in either of these frames of reference [geocentric or heliocentric], but eventually it was discovered that the heliocentric frame of reference has the advantage of greater simplicity” (36). He states very clearly that “there is no logical flaw regarding either Earth or the Sun as motionless and charting the motion of the rest of the solar system accordingly” (35), and “The geocentric view is not incorrect— merely unduly complicated” (48). The heliocentric theory is preferred merely because the geocentric model is more complicated without compensating benefits (38).

But elegance can cast deep shadows. It is a short step from parsimony to reductionism, leading to loss of intelligibility. Meaning can be sacrificed to “efficiency”; parsimony can be a prelude to control and manipulation of nature. Hence Steiner fundamentally questions parsimony as an explanatory ideal.

The following rather comical illustration was printed in the New York Times on January 11, 2015:

Note the caption: the “strange, looping arcs” of the geocentric model are “absurd.” Can the author really have 42 •

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Mars is even more striking. Allowed to run its full course (about 79 years), the result is the stunning “Shield of Mars”:

There is a “compensating benefit”: the extreme beauty of the phenomena, which is integral to their intelligibility.

By the way, a 3-D visualization of Euler’s identity10 generates beautiful retrograde loops! (Image next column.)

An early account by Rudolf Steiner of karma as a form of memory is one example (of many that could be adduced) of a beautiful symmetry in anthroposophy. We have experiences, as a result of which we form personal memories, which change in turn the way we act upon the world. So much is straightforward. But one needs to imagine a similar process on the other side: as a result of our actions, a supra-personal memory is formed, and that changes the way the world acts upon us. Biographical 10 The image is from Wikipedia.

3-D visualization of Euler’s identity

events—in short, our karma—are anything but random.

They are the world remembering our past deeds and acting accordingly. The result is an elegant and symmetrical theory of the spirit as the unconscious of nature + cosmic memory.

Anthroposophy can also be very sublime. Take, for example, the workings of karma viewed from an evolutionary perspective: “According to Steiner, we typically alternate gender, and move from culture to culture across many incarnations, absorbing (or at least being given the chance to absorb) the best that each culture has to offer.

It is a deeply cosmopolitan vision: all of us, over time, wittingly or not, are gradually becoming citizens of the world and whole human beings.”11 Such a view sends shivers down the spine.

Now we’re ready to answer the question: “What’s scientific about spiritual science?” Anthroposophy is scientific because it is pervasively beautiful and deep. It fits all the criteria for mathematical and scientific beauty that we elaborated already: it’s “surprising,” it “relates the apparently unrelated,” and it yields “new and original insights.”

It also fits Roger Penrose’s description of scientific discovery as a “felt change of consciousness.”

But I would go even further. Unlike mainstream science, anthroposophy has developed and described a rigorous method for calling forth and controlling such changes of consciousness. Hence, anthroposophy fills a great lacuna in 11 Frederick Amrine, “Discovering a Genius: Rudolf Steiner after 150 Years,” being human, 1 (2011) 13-14.

scientific method by providing a methodology of discovery.

Above all, anthroposophy avoids reductionism— false elegance to the end of control—in order to maximize the neglected dimension of intelligibility, or meaning. Anthroposophy is the Shield of Mars and the Rose of Venus—dazzlingly beautiful, dripping with meaning, “adventure” in Whitehead’s sense!

But if anthroposophy is scientific, even deeply scientific, why does it appear unscientific to so many people on first encounter?

My own answers are: (1) anthroposophy is sometimes sublime, it’s almost always beautiful, but it’s rarely elegant in the positive sense of that term. And (2) anthroposophy as delivered is pure discovery, unaxiomatized. It’s because discovery is so rare in conventional science that we don’t recognize it when we see it.

So if anthroposophy is all about discovery, why isn’t it just metaphysics? Or, to put the question another way, does anthroposophy have a problem with “justification”?

First, we should recall that justification has become problematical within mainstream science, which often falls short, despite its claims. So there are challenges here on both sides. Chiefly, however, I contend that anthroposophy does “justify” itself, and in the best possible way: anthroposophy justifies itself outside the text through practical application. And this distinguishes anthroposophy from most other spiritual disciplines.

Anthroposophy as delivered was scientific, but it is scientific for us only if we work with it scientifically.

Barfield writes in Poetic Diction that at the highest level, there’s no distinction between art and science; there’s only a distinction between “bad art” and “bad science” (139).

In the same vein, I contend that the only real distinction is between “bad anthroposophy” and “bad science”—i.e., there is a distinction only when both have ceased to be processes of discovery.

There remain some residual questions regarding elegance. Should we care that anthroposophy is seldom elegant in the positive sense? Can anthroposophy be made more elegant? Is it perhaps our job to make anthroposophy more elegant? Should we try? My own provisional answer to all four questions is: yes.

Frederick Amrine (amrine@umich.edu) has been a student of anthroposophy his entire adult life. He teaches literature, philosophy, and intellectual history at the University of Michigan, where he is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in German Studies. His research has been devoted primarily to Goethe, German Idealism, and Romanticism. He is also a past editor of this publication.

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research & reviews

Redemption of the Animals The Redemption of the Animals: Their Evolution, Their Inner Life, and Our Future Together. An Anthroposophic Perspective. Douglas Sloan, PhD. Lindisfarne Books, 2015.

Review by Olena Provencher The modern Western materialist paradigm has devolved into post-modern disenchantment in which even the question of meaning is considered meaningless. The global ecological crisis has shown that reason alone is inadequate for solving contemporary problems. The ideal remedy to destructive materialism and its ecological by-product would seem to be a spiritual perspective, such as developed in Douglas Sloan’s compelling case for human responsibility towards animals in the light of Anthroposophy.

Previous volumes by Douglas Sloan, Professor Emeritus of History and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, include: Toward the Recovery of Wholeness: Knowledge, Education, and Human Values (1984), and Insight-Imagination: The Emancipation of Thought and the Modern World (2008). This is his first work on the plight of the animal kingdom in the world expropriated by humans.

Sloan begins with a brilliant and deeply substantiated critique of the modern mechanical worldview, and specifically on the Darwinian evolutionary perspective.

He writes that we long for feelings of “meaning, purpose, beauty … and subjectivity,” while utterly denying these in our theoretical “scientific thinking” (16). Sloan demonstrates how the scientific and philosophical proposals of Locke, Darwin, and Bentham have become an intellectual “military arsenal” of modern western consciousness.

Half-unconscious egotism irresponsibly succumbs to a “might is right” approach to values. The view of animals as unfeeling automatons, made for human “gastrocentric pleasure,” convenience, and entertainment constitutes what ethologists (the scientists who study animal behav44 •

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ior) refer to as speciesism: an acute expression of human superiority in relation to non-human species.

Sloan then offers a summary of Rudolf Steiner’s supersensory view of animals. Steiner’s disciplined clairvoyance, supported by his Theosophical studies, enabled him to generate an important, even urgent account of the origin and evolution of the human-animal relationship.

Sloan summarizes Steiner’s account of the unselfconscious proto-earthlings who originated in the spiritual realm and come to proto-Earth to begin their evolutionary journey. These proto-earthlings, whom Sloan refers to as “human archetypes,” are shown to be the ancestors of both humans and animals.

Sloan traces the evolution of animal types from the archetypal “primate” form to non-primate mammals, to birds, and cold-blooded vertebrates. Such an account enables us to visualize, contrary to Darwin, an archetypal human body-structure in animals. Sloan explains that pets survive after death. The budding individual souls join an elemental being which Steiner called the Salamander, as its temporary carrier, and from that energic, nurturing vantage place, assist human souls in attaining true compassion.

While relying on Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science, Sloan’s extensive scholarship includes dialogues with ethologists, sociologists, and ethical philosophers such as Konrad Lorenz, Peter Singer, Tom Regan, Martha Nussbaum, Robert Bellah, Frans de Waal, Matthew Fox, and Andrew Linzey.

The chapter on factory farming and biomedical research is definitely hard to read but it is necessary because it radically exposes the human evil that causes horrific suffering to innocent animals.

This important book concludes with Sloan’s plea to the reader to take a fully humane position of guardianship and servantship towards animals.

My only critique of this book is connected with Sloan’s final proposal of guardianship. I recall that a very similar proposal was already made, based on the reexamination of Genesis, within the framework of orthodox Christianity, particularly through the work of eco-feminists. Carolyn Merchant, for example, formulated the egalitarian ethics of a partnership of humanity and nature, very similar in spirit to Sloan’s. (C. Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture, Routledge, New York, 2003, 228). The partnership-guardianship proposal cer-

tainly introduces the idea of equality between human and nature, but her book is not about animals. On the other hand, the ethics of guardianship may be porous to the very same human evils of domination which Sloan so passionately raises; it leaves unclear the boundaries of human rights over animals.

Then what is the point of this critique? Sloan’s deep engagement with Steiner’s esoteric narrative, which traces phenomena to their ultimate roots, could come to fruition in a more integral proposal, such as an idea of a parental relationship towards animals. Parental, for we gave the animals their initial forms, and we are (or are supposed

to be) at a more mature stage of individual development.

Such reading would also steer us away from notions of superiority and othering still pervasive in our relation to animals. My critique, however, is minor in comparison to the merits, the main of which is the general direction of the book: its strong and courageous impetus towards the reenchantment of the world. That seems to be the only cure for the meaninglessness that breeds violence and self-indulgence toward Earth, and perhaps especially toward animals.

Olena Provencher is a Doctoral Student, Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness, at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS).

Honeymoon of Mourning Review by Christiane Marks

By Maarten Ploeger, translated by Matthew Dexter.

Adonis Press (adonispress.org) 2016, 104 pages, paperback, $20 This extraordinary cycle of 90 poems, or “poetical prose” as he modestly calls it, was written by Maarten Ploeger, a retired Waldorf teacher, to help him navigate the first rough months after his wife Maria’s death. They bear eloquent testimony to the beauty and joy behind painful events courageously affirmed and embraced. In Matthew Dexter the poems seem to have found just the right “co-poet” to render them from Dutch into English.

The translations read well, not like translations at all, which is in itself high praise; they communicate beautifully the voice, the emotions, of the poet, the struggling and evolving widower, who is determined to see the pain and the loss as “rising up / from the depths of our love / as menhirs of fate / inscribed with secret signs / we cannot comprehend / although they / do comprehend us.” (“Sickbed”). It is fortunate that Adonis Press has made it possible for these poems to reach the wide audience they deserve.

The subjects of the poems vary widely, as a selection of the titles shows: “Going Out,” “Ebb and Flow,” “The Scream,” “Art of Words,” “Unmasked,” “Webmaster.”

This diversity of subject matter illustrates what many have experienced that when we are open to their presence, those we have lost to death turn out to be following us through

our entire day’s activities and even on our travels, as several of the poems show (”Traveling,” “Panama Muse,” etc). The poems, appearing in approximately the same order in which they were written, also illustrate the cyclical nature of mourning: Life will seem to have smoothed out with gentle and pleasant memories prevailing, when suddenly the curtain tears open, revealing moments of anguish again (“The Scream,” “Unmasked”). What can we do except go on, feeling that this time around, picking ourselves up was perhaps a little easier, and will become easier still.

Some phrases in these poems deserve to be memorized or copied out and stuck in our mirrors: “Heaven is no place / is consciousness.” (“Heyday”), “Your end demands our beginning” (“Pearl Dew”), “Love is limitless / not bound by one life” (“The Scream”), “Thinking of you turns / into thinking in you” (“Sun Sphere”). The impression that after a fresh loss the everyday world at first seems “incomprehensibly normal” (“Going Out”) will also resonate with many who have lost someone close.

Is this anthroposophical, Steiner-inspired? Yes, of course, but Ploeger is never heavy-handed or preachy. Yes, he has read “Steiner et al” (“Print Collection”), but he knows the resulting knowledge is only useful after it has “settled in the heart.” These poems demonstrate how you allow that to happen; they bring Anthroposophy, lived Anthroposophy, to a wider audience.

Christiane Marks is a writer and translator with special affinity for the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. winter-spring issue 2017

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news for members & friends

of the Anthroposophical Society in America

So, friends, what should we write about the Youth Section?

What do we want people to know?

What questions are we living with ourselves?

I could imagine writing up a very little something around the theme of our question: “What do we have to do with one another?”

—Sea-Anna Vascillas

we a creative action group that engages in HugeHeartedYouth participants on stage at Fall Conference 2016 Movement?

This idea of “Associating Anthroposophy” …I would like to bring up the principles of Moral by connecting it to young people (perhaps by Imagination as a process of transformation, the need offering out of anthroposophy insight into more for patience and inter-generational collaboration, “our generation” concerns) or perhaps through and our conversations around the fire as an example and with the help and relationships of indigenous of YS work in action. — Virginia Herman spirituality. (I am currently blown away by the Aztec compatibility of Steiner BUT ALSO In just attending the Biodynamic Conference out FORMING deep TIES to Native Americans. in Santa Fe, which took some steps towards bridging Offering a place for their words, dance and songs to the language of biodynamics with that of our be honored and preserved.) indigenous communities and those working within Advocating the society make creative strides the agricultural realm who towards being more speak differently yet have the welcoming, aim of “healing,” I have many embracing, reaching questions: out, and connecting How do we continue in a meaning fuldiscovering, knowing and structural way. — expanding that which is the Andrew Toothacker heart of anthroposophy of being fully human without isolating our brother and sister communities?

How can we be conscious and clear and welcoming in order to partner in something worldwide we all know in our heart of hearts?

Best, Megan Durney

I feel we need to express the significance of such an assembly and make a case for it. Such a collaboration doesn’t arbitrarily come about.

It’s willfully manifested.

We have the opportunity to engage consciousnesssoul with consciousnesssoul. And that when there is recognition of the spirit of youth, that spirited youth is

What is the mission of the Youth Section? Are we a support group for transient alternatives who get hyped on each other once a year OR are

EACH ONE A LIGHT, by Frank Agrama 46 •

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empowered to form a new relationship with the spirit of our elders and build a complete humanity.

Steiner gave the image of the Janus head as having significance for the Youth Section; that in a single image is expressed the looking ahead, the forward striving of the youth and its potential, and that in the looking back through experience and expectation is the Elder who may be its guide, and, ultimately, that these are but two halves of one totality. — Carlos Cadena

If we sincerely wish to improve upon the current structure we’re living with in the Youth Section and Anthroposophical Society at large, I personally believe that it is of the greatest import to develop a living feeling and deep knowledge of how and why these systems have assumed their current form. — Mason Howerton

“Yeah yeah, I hear what you say, I hear it. But when you say What is significant is youth, what do you that people regularly seek mean? What are the each other’s company to youth and where are work with spiritual truths, these people from the that they practice honest youth?” tolerance, empathy, and a Silence in the ‘GROUP EXPANSION’ by Frank Agrama thinking that lives. room. Blank in my Find a few people who want to come together to head, even though the words that the woman just work with anthroposophy in whatever way seems pronounced are still resonating. Everybody is looking right and want to do regularly. at me, waiting for an answer that I can’t give them.

To develop a living, vital, and healthy movement But I have to answer, something needs to come one should not start by trying to find a form, but out. I’m there, speaking about how important it rather focus on the authentic relationships between is to organize a gathering for the Youth Section, you and your companions, and in these relationships but actually I have no idea what it is about. I don’t a form will unfold out of it. Life will make a form know what the youth is, so I definitely can’t tell from the inside out. There are conditions that will where to find the people who compose it. And I just support this. realized it. I don’t remember what I finally said to We come together in joy that woman, I probably mumbled “I don’t know”, We seek anthroposophy each in our own way followed by an uncomfortable silence. Thing is, I We seek loyalty that is not oppressive knew I had a lot to say on the subject, I just never We seek speech that has reality brought these questions to my consciousness. But We seek relationships that are enduring she gave me the push I needed to start thinking So the human heals. about it. You know, it’s funny how I always end up

— Nathaniel Williams in anthroposophical places, gatherings, projects. I (News for Members spring-summer 2009) never read anything from Steiner, I am not one of winter-spring issue 2017

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‘SPARK’ by Frank Agrama these people who can quote him and share all of his complex theories. Therefore, I can’t talk about anthroposophy because I don’t have a clear idea of what it is about. My understanding of it is not based on some analytical study.

But I have lived it. I’ve been raised by parents who carry it, who shared it with me not through words but through their being. I went to a Waldorf school where they didn’t tell me that I needed to learn about all the different stages of human evolution because it was related to my own development. They made me live this relation.

These people are all around the world. So, I am sure that there are a lot of other young people who don’t necessarily know about anthroposophy, or who don’t completely understand it. But something could resonate in them if they hear about it, or if they experience it. People who have these same dreams, hopes, ideas, this giant creativity, who just need to meet other creative spirits to be free. They live everywhere. They speak French, German, English, Spanish, or another language. They are interested in arts, technology, architecture, 48 •

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gardening, or something else. When we look at them like this, as separated individuals, we can’t see what connects them all.

But when they meet, that’s when the connection happens, that’s when the magic begins.

That’s what I would have liked to answer that woman. — Gésaël Drouin-Vigneault Who are we? That is a great question. What are we doing together? That is also such a great question. To be honest, I only know a little about who we are as individuals and as a group.

See, the thing about the Youth Section of the Anthroposophical Society is that it seems to be ever-changing, filled with diverse individuals, doing very different things with their lives. It is not stagnant. It is not a fixed group of young folks that all have the same goals and have been working on the same things for years. Folks come and go, the initiatives change and shift, people join up and actively participate for varying amounts of time before moving on to other things. Some faces I recognize as having been around for a while, while

place. Though I try my best to not be judgmental about it all, in our media-centric society, I have found it difficult to fit in. I worry and think about things that many of my peers do not. So, it is quite refreshing to be collaborating with other young folks, working out of anthroposophy, not afraid of questioning things, yearning to understand life more deeply, seeing the spirit-filled world with fresh eyes, and at the same time confidently discovering how to openly be themselves. My connection to the Youth Section and the individuals I am working with inspire and influence my whole life, push me to be more organized, timely, and fill me with eagerness and energy. That’s why I am here. I am witness to the effects of taking part. Somehow it makes me feel whole. I feel the reaching connections of spirit and soul across the expanse of our country, from East Coast to West Coast, into Canada and across the ocean. In this way, I feel a part of something much bigger and greater than myself. It gives me hope.

— Ethan Sudan

‘READY TO SPARK’ by Frank Agrama

others are new. Take myself, for example. I am new to being directly and actively involved with other Youth Section members, even though I am not new to anthroposophy. My spiritual work has mostly been on my own, or accompanying my studies at Camphill Academy. I have been to a handful of Youth Section events and conferences off and on starting back seven or eight years ago, but up until this past fall I have never been involved behind the scenes, never involved in phone calls and emails, never before collaborating in planning events and writing articles. But here I am.

I speak to others about my current involvement in ‘Youth Section work’, but what does that really mean? We are spiritually-striving youth, who have somehow find our way to each other, and enjoy collaborative engagement, study, art, music, deep and real conversations about our world, about our future, about our place in the Anthroposophical Movement.

We have found our way to one another. We desire to find ways of continually encouraging young people to take up anthroposophy into their lives in an active way and to provide opportunities and places where we all can find and meet each other, connect and converse, not only amongst ourselves, but also across generations.

Here’s what I know most of all: when I keep this connection to the Youth Section alive, living and breathing, I have found as though a new, driven purpose has awakened within me—not just in the work I am doing with the Youth Section, but also in my own life. In our media-centric society, with so many younger folks these days overly immersed in what’s happening on the latest television show, or what someone else said on Facebook about what to me seem mostly insignificant and trivial matters, I often feel out of

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The Modern Alchemist Spirits of light you shine out of the darkness of night you bring to me thinking’s might so that I can join Michael in his fight against the spirits of soul darkness What lives in me shines into the world What lives in the world reflects itself to me Let the rays of Michael shine through me, exist around me work into me In soul realms two powers continually vie one through darkness of night, the other through brightness of day, to harness my humanity to their chariots of clay or fire Through my head a spiritual fire burns, Through my limbs a spiritual clay forms and in the warmth of my heart beating to the wisdom of Michael the fire of my head and the clay of my limbs dissolve into each other In my Heart I am the Alchemist who never dies who knows no limits of understanding Who feels no boundaries of existence, who does what can be done by Micah Edelstein day of the dead festival 2016

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Each One A Light Upon The Other As we gathered round the fire on the last night of the Annual General Meeting in Spring Valley, we had a conversation that found its way, guiding us together, towards understanding one another. Each one a light upon the other, each of us, living as striving conscious beings, does indeed stand, full of a sacred power. A sacred power, like a flame, a flame, holding within itself infinite capacity.

I speak, of the capacity, to receive the other. To hold silently, with open ears, open mind, open heart, and with seeing eyes. As my eyes look onto the other, and I let them live as they are upon my beholding, the other, as you, as me, is in a sense, lit. Lit by my light, my light.

I bless them with my open reception, and am equally blessed, to behold them, as they offer, from their own sense.

They offer, also, from a space, a space that is illuminating, inspiring, beholding, giving, forming, exploring.

Still, as we roll through the waves of light, we move, and are moved and we must move. For I hear you, and I feel you are totally on a different page, and our friend over there is really offended, and you have to be clearly speaking youth truth, and I can see how true it is for you. Still, our friend there, I know how true their truth is to them, and it is so contrary to yours. “How can this be?”

The light you shine from your heart, the light you absorb, its bouncing around all of your ideas and the color is tinting one way. My light is bending, and I’m trying to pour some flow into the stagnant spaces. The conflict I am experiencing engages my focus, and my friends are stretching in themselves, to move through these rocks. By sheer love we warm these forms past their illusive hardness, and feel free and real.

— Frank Aleph Agrama

An Appreciation of Torin Finser

by Carla Beebe Comey & John Beck Excerpts from introduction of Torin Finser by Carla Beebe Comey (Council Chair) at the ASA Annual General Meeting, Spring Valley, NY, October 2016

As General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America, Torin participated in over 130 events and conversations with groups, branches, members of the Youth Section, and individual members. I wonder if there are very many members that have not heard him speak or attended a meeting with him during his nine-year tenure! In 2012 alone he visited thirteen states, four countries, and in some way personally interacted with over 1,500 members.

During his tenure, a few of the accomplishments achieved include: the inaugural publication of being human, the reorganization of the ASA administrative structure, the founding of the Michael Support Circle, a widening of the scope of the AGMs, an invitation for participation as opposed to “membership,” and the opportunity for organizational membership/participation.

Torin also stood at the helm through the “tipping point” and encouraged the development of transparency with regards to our finances. He worked alongside the Finance Committee throughout the painful reductions to our budget, and the changes to our financial policies, so that we would exist within our means rather than balance our budgets with unforeseen bequests.

But I would especially like to note that at the center of all of his work has been the cultivation of relationships—with members of the Society, with the ASA staff and with colleagues—all the while with an awareness of the relationships we must necessarily build within the wider world community. In January 2010, at a meeting with members in Harlemville, he read from Rudolf Steiner’s Third Letter to Members: In anthroposophy it is the truths it can reveal which matter. In the Anthroposophical Society it is the life that is cultivated.

I think many of us that have worked with Torin would agree that he has taken this deeply to heart. He has frequently served as a voice of conscience and reminded us that we stand within the wider world—that the truths of anthroposophy and the life we cultivate within the So-

ciety have much to offer the world today.

In many ways it is ironic that his time as General Secretary has come to an end. We have done much of the serious work of putting our house in order over the past nine years and now we are poised to cultivate the “life” of anthroposophy in the broadest sense of the meaning, just as Torin has been encouraging us to do.

Allow me to thank you Torin, on behalf of many, I am sure, for all of your service.

Thoughts from John Beck, editor, being human

My concern as editor and communications director since 2009 has been to try to find ways to speak about anthroposophy and present the Society and movement so that our present friends and members could find the substance of their commitments and initiatives reflected back to them, and at the same time people new to Rudolf Steiner’s work could see it well enough to say, this is a good thing.

As a fine writer, thoughtful speaker, and warm conversation partner, Torin was in complete harmony with this dual concern and was generous in supporting the evolution of our communications work. He made his own writing available, and he represented anthroposophy in a humane, matter-of-fact way that allowed esoteric aspects to reveal this importance quite naturally.

Manner is a large and rarely acknowledge aspect of communication, and Torin’s manner told people that anthroposophy is something to welcome into home and heart.

After years in which “the initiatives” seemed to be slipping away from the core of anthroposophy, Torin’s credibility in Waldorf education, with parents as well as teachers and graduates, was extremely helpful in restoring active collaborations.

The General Secretary’s work includes relations with colleagues at the Goetheanum. An ability to participate fully in German is no longer required, but German and English engage the world with significant differences.

Torin was able to play a welcome and collaborative role in Dornach at a time when the General Secretaries as a group were being taken more fully into the leadership.

As a colleague I would sum up Torin’s gifts: warmth, self-effacement, lived knowledge, community feeling, and an enduring sense of responsibility. Thank you! winter-spring issue 2017

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Anthroposophy is Taking Root and Bearing Fruit in Post-Katrina New Orleans

by Margaret Runyon Via the occasional check-in on the pages of being human, you have learned of some of the wonderful and poignant events that have taken place in New Orleans in the decade since August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina roared through, and the levees failed.

You may recall that it was only weeks before Katrina that our circle of seven members in New Orleans became an officially recognized Group of the Anthroposophical Society. We suffered varying degrees of damage to our homes and properties; some could move back after several weeks, and for others it took as long as two years. Within a month after the storm, Rita Amedee was broadcasting Biodynamic field spray out her car window, along the debrisfilled streets of the desolate city. And in November 2005, the Waldorf School of New Orleans (then the Hill School) was the second school to reopen in the city, in a new, high and dry location—albeit with only 1/3 of the students and half the faculty who’d been there in August. Also within weeks of the storm, the Society’s Central Regional Council began organizing a Songtrail Pilgrimage that brought 35 members and friends to do physical and spiritual work in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast at Easter 2006.

In the months and years that followed, many other members of the anthroposophical movement came with their expertise, inspiration, and energy to help bring vibrant life back to the school and surrounding community; and local members made destiny connections within the movement, as well. In 2009 Jackie Case, an architect who served as Board Chair and then Administrator at the Waldorf School (and whose family’s renovated 19th

Most of our Study Group: (L-R, back) Jackie Case, Steph Smith, Heidi Porter (w/ photo of Inge Elsas), Margaret Runyon, Patty Carbajal, Jeff Feldman; (front) Kitty Davis, Rita Amedee, Renee Lattimore

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century commercial bakery now houses WSNO), traveled with her husband Mark Redding to the Camphill Special School at Beaver Run, and returned with the resolve to found a special needs school in New Orleans: Raphael Academy was born.

Our Study Group, now in its fourth decade, continues to meet every other Sunday evening. We open each of our studies with a meditation for the dead, so it is notable that in our small circle of Society members, we experienced four significant deaths in four years: Rita and Roy Amedee’s son, Timm, crossed the threshold in November 2011. Inge Elsas left us in April 2012, having joined the Society that January at age 96. Renee and Burt Lattimore lost their son Burt in November 2014, and Patty Carbajal’s husband Daniel Reinhold died suddenly in April 2015. We feel the power of these colleagues and loved ones working from beyond the threshold, and we are grateful for their blessing on our endeavors.

In 2015 we commemorated ten years since flood waters covered 80% of New Orleans. And of course it was nearly seven years ago that the BP oil disaster posed another horrific existential threat to our region. While there are pockets where devastation remains evident and residents still struggle with re-building, much of New Orleans is now booming. The healing intention directed toward us, the labor of thousands of volunteers from around the world has had a tremendous impact on all of New Orleans; and the anthroposophical work that has been, that is being done here is a vital part of this. We sense that in this moment, New Orleans is on the verge of an evolutionary leap.

Not surprisingly, there is an upsurge in interest here

Waldorf School of New Orleans students singing.

for sustainable living and a healthy relationship to the earth. We experience a commensurate interest in what Biodynamics offers to heal our land, and to enhance food and ecosystem vitality. We are striving to get the word out and would love to be able to offer more practical experience of BD to this receptive audience.

So many bright, energetic, and experienced people are moving to our city! Among these “New” Orleanians are enthusiastic new parents, faculty, and staff at both our schools. Both the Waldorf School of New Orleans and Raphael Academy are literally bursting at the seams in their current locations. WSNO has had to move their Early Childhood program to a second site. Of course this need for space and a permanent home for each of these initiatives comes at the same time that real estate is skyrocketing in much of New Orleans, and land (especially land with a school building on it) is virtually impossible to find and afford. Yet each school has found a prospective home, and now each, consulting with Panorama Fundraising, is charting the path to making that happen.

The Waldorf School of New Orleans is working with Alembic Community Development toward tenancy in a 90-year-old parochial school complex in the diverse, culturally rich and centrally situated Seventh Ward neighborhood, a location with room to grow and flourish for many decades to come. The erstwhile Saint Rose de Lima church building is being converted by Alembic to a stateof-the-art proscenium theater for a leading local equity company. As the other primary tenant in this development, WSNO will be part of a premier arts and education center. Alembic has put together the initial financing and will build out the property to suit its non-profit tenants.

WSNO will initially need to provide furnishing, fixtures and equipment for the three-story 23,000 sq. ft. school building, as well as landscape the play yards and grounds.

The school will then have ten years to build capital, after

which WSNO can exercise the option to purchase the school complex, securing a permanent home for Waldorf Education in New Orleans.

Raphael Academy’s vision is bold and timely. Founder and Director Jackie Case (honored by New Orleans CityBusiness as one of 2015s Business Women of the Year), working in association with the Camphill Association of North America and particularly with Beaver Run’s Claus Sproll, has grown Raphael’s program in just six years to encompass middle- and high-school classes, and “The Guild” young adult program. Her dream, enthusiastically shared by Raphael’s board, faculty, and parents, is to establish nothing less than an urban “Camphill Village” that is very much part of New Orleans: where differentlyabled individuals are fully integrated, functioning members of a dedicated community within the unique city where they live, learn, and work. A huge first step toward realizing this vision was the securing of four contiguous lots at the foot of Jackson Avenue (a primary street, two blocks from Raphael’s current location) by a small group of investors. The challenge now is to raise capital to buy out those investors and build a facility on this half-acre site that will serve as the “town center” of the village.

And eleven years ago, some wondered if New Orleans would be able to come back at all…

We warmly (and humidly) invite you to visit, and see for yourself this remarkable city, and all that is planned.

You’ll leave with a heart full of joy, rhythm in your step, and a stomach full of great food!

WSNO future home, St. Rose of Lima school, built in 2915, and inset, left, its current location, the ground floor of a renovated 19th century commercial bakery.

Raphael Academy: three high school students with lead teacher Megan Riley, and above, small, the Academy’s home.

Contacts: Raphael Academy, jcase@raphaelacademy.org Waldorf School of New Orleans, info@waldorfnola.org, enrollment@waldorfnola.org Margaret Runyon (mrunyon@bellsouth.net), since writing this article, has become Enrollment and Outreach Director for the Waldorf School of New Orleans. From 1999-2012 she was on the ASA Central Regional Council.

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Shining Hope and Intention

by Deb Abrahams-Dematte Love and gratitude to all of you, our members and friends. You are the Anthroposophical Society. Guided by the insights of Rudolf Steiner, and activated through our open-hearted meetings with one another, we create the vessel through which we bring warmth, care and invitation to human and spiritual beings, in pursuit of a better world.

This collective effort, this shining of hope and intention that love will transcend fear and hate, and that human beings can and do care for one another and the planet, is our responsibility. The brave and tenacious acts of inner growth, right livelihood, healthy people, families, communities, food, land, and world. This is what we can do.

“In doing so, in coming together, through experiencing the super sensible together, one human soul is awakened most intensively in the encounter with another human soul. This causes a real communal being to descend in a group of people gathered for the purpose of mutually communicating and experiencing anthroposophical ideas.”

—Rudolf Steiner, Awakening to Community, lecture IX

arise in consideration of the destiny and future of the Society as a whole.

My soul and the great World are one.

The individual and collective work around these themes brought an emergent and deep picture of our work as a Council and together with our members and friends as we move forward into 2017 and beyond. You’ll be hearing more about this in the coming year.

“Together we seek to do nothing less than lift human souls into super-sensible realms so that we may enter the company of angels.” (Awakening to Community, Lecture IX)

Your care, participation and gifts to the Anthroposophical Society in America make this work possible.

Thank you for your generous support in 2016.

2016 End of Year Appeal Update We are thrilled and grateful to report that we’ve exceeded our goal, receiving 301 gifts for a total of $43,841.

Your gifts provide critical support for the operations of the Anthroposophical Society in America. We can’t do this work without you – many thanks!

Deb Abrahams-Dematte (deb@anthroposophy.org) is ASA Director of Development.

The Anthroposophical Society is the vessel for this coming together, and your on-going participation and support make this possible. Thank you!

I’m just back from a Council meeting weekend at Rudolf Steiner House in Ann Arbor. It was full of inspiration, intention, deep listening and visionary planning for our work into the future. This was one of our two face-to-face opportunities each year to work together in this focused way. Our wonderful General Council is a devoted and hardworking group of volunteers who put great care and positive intention into their work, in service to the Society and anthroposophy in the world.

The Council, with the Leadership Team and editor of being human, were asked to work prepare through the Holy Nights with Steiner’s verse which begins: The wishes of the soul are springing The deeds of the will are growing The fruits of life are ripening We lived with these words from an individual perspective, and then were challenged to replace “I” with “we,” and see then what images and inspiration would Archangel Michael by Margarethe Woloschin

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A Note from the Director of Programs

Southeastern Meeting in Decatur, Georgia

by Laura Scappaticci

by Kathleen Wright

There is not a facet of human life our work with Steiner’s philosophy does not deepen. As a meaningful life movement, we have so much to offer. In each of my early encounters with anthroposophy, I found a path to a meaningful way of relating to the world: in my garden, in my parenting, in remedies for feverish children, in my inner development, in compassionate listening and equanimity, in my relationship with the spiritual world.

Through ASA programming, I imagine a core theme emerging of personal transformation leading to world transformation. By working with this theme, the ASA can bring unified programs to members at all stages of life and all levels of interest and understanding of anthroposophy.

A series of introductory courses and workshops can appeal to new folks, while a Death and Dying conference can reach out to those with experience and interest in threshold work. Co-sponsored webinars with AWSNA join us with parents who have found a meaningful education through Waldorf schools. “Anthroposophy, Inc” receptions through the Council for Anthroposophical Organizations offer a more meaningful connection with money and management.

This thread of meaning connects us to other consciousness movements, and at the same time sets us apart with anthroposophy’s whole life approach. I look forward to offering connection, collaboration, and transformative education to members, friends, and all those interested in this amazing life philosophy.

Editor’s Note: This is an extract of Kathleen’s full report on the September 9-10, 2016 meeting; she continued with detail on reports of the groups represented. We will report on the subsequent Mid-Atlantic and Northeast area meetings in the next issue.

Laura Scappaticci (laura@anthroposophy.org) is Director of Programs for the Anthroposophical Society in America.

SAVE THE DATES

The next fall conference and annual general meeting (AGM) will be October 6-8 in the Western Region.

The inaugural gathering of the Southeastern Area of the Anthroposophical Society’s Eastern Region took place at the Academe of the Oaks, the Waldorf High School, in Decatur near Atlanta, Georgia on September 10th. Over 25 Society members representing the groups and branches of the Southeast attended. The states which comprise the new area are: North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi. The idea for three smaller areas grew out of the difficulties the former Eastern Regional Council was having with such a huge area to cover. There now will also be a Middle Atlantic area and a Northeast area. Elizabeth Roosevelt, Interim Program Director for the Society, presided at the inaugural Southeastern meetings.

Friday night before the meeting, Stuart Weeks spoke on “Awakening to the Genius of our Land.” The “Genius” of our land is Columbia, which means “dove”; she represents the ideals of America. Our first informal national anthems included “Hail, Columbia” and “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.” Walt Whitman called himself the “poet of Columbia” in his poem “Song of Exposition.” Stuart recited this poem for us, as well as writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Unfortunately, the ideals of America have too often been overshadowed by its history of aggression and war, the genocide of the native Americans and the enslavement of the African people. Stuart mentioned some of the sorrows of America today.

Hope for America lies in what anthroposophy can bring. Rudolf Steiner said that anthroposophy could arise like a natural instinct in Americans. We see this embodied in Emerson, who wrote “We will walk on our own winter-spring issue 2017

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feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds… A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself to be inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.” Steiner said in America he could have developed anthroposophy through the work of Emerson, as in Europe he based it on Goethe’s work. Stuart recommended Virginia Moore’s book Emerson, Rudolf Steiner, and the Fire in the West for all those interested in learning more about this topic.

Keller, Booker T. Washington. We truly have a rich heritage. He asked us to contemplate who is the Being who brought us here? What is the social organism that lives among us here? Who is the Being of the USA? Who is our Being in the Southeast?

Anne Nicholson did eurythmy with the group and spoke about the eurythmy program in Chapel Hill. A few women are involved in a part-time eurythmy training in Spring Valley, while working regularly with a mentor, Christina Beck, in Chapel Hill.

After lunch Linda Brooks-Cooper led a drawing activity and Stan Evans gave a fascinating talk about his indexing work for the Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner.

Angela Foster spoke about Atlanta’s new lending library which has 219 books so far.

The Destiny of Anthroposophy in the Southeast

Southeastern Area Meeting Following breakfast and the singing of a lovely song “If the people lived their lives as if it were a song,” the Saturday meeting began in the Loft at the Academe of the Oaks. Elizabeth Roosevelt called the meeting to order and gave a short introduction about how the new groupings came into being. The followed a year of meetings around the Eastern Region to determine what the region needed to function better.

Reports from the various groups were given by those present and some reports were sent in by persons unable to attend the meeting. Group reports included: Atlanta, Chattanooga, Nashville, Chapel Hill, St. Petersburg, Gainesville, Marietta, Gadsden. (A separate article on the group reports follows.)

Some concerns that were voiced were the need for “reaching the periphery”; greater communication among branches; creating email lists and a directory with people and their interests; reaching younger generations; creating a receptive environment; spreading the word about biodynamics; and creating a website for our area.

Stuart asked who are some of the literary geniuses and leaders of the South? People volunteered: William Faulkner, Martin Luther King, Wendell Berry, George Washington Carver, Jimmy Carter, Rosa Parks, Helen 56 •

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The remainder of the day focused on our future together. What is the southeast like? Warmth of soul, warmth of the weather, lots of sunshine; “so much heart”; tradition, family, and agriculture; politeness, importance of titles “Miss Lisa’, Rev. Smith”, etc. Florida has much fluidity, a melting pot of cultures. Stuart Weeks recalled that after Booker T. Washington gave an amazing inspiring talk concluding that in the South we can create “a new Heaven and a new Earth,” southern belles threw flowers at him.

One participant recalled remarks made by Marko Pogacnik when he visited the South some years ago. He said that because there has been much suffering in the South, slavery, the Civil War, and so on, we must heal the earth here, work with the elementals, create sculptures and stone formations.

Then what would a thriving southeastern area look like? How can we support each other? What shall we do next year? People shared that a thriving area would need good communication and knowing that we are welcome in one another’s communities. Groups could coordinate traveling speakers’ venues and share expenses. Barbara Bittles, Katherine Jenkins, Kathleen Wright, and Bob Hare volunteered to work on communications. Anne Nicholson has begun a GoogleGroups email exchange (anthroposophysoutheast@googlegroups.com) and a website. Please join it! Where will we meet next? Ellijay, Georgia, and northern Florida were both suggested.

Most attendees departed for home at the end of the

meeting, but some remained for evening events and were joined by people from the Waldorf community and the African American community in Decatur. Reverend Giles, who was severely injured during the Civil Rights movement, opened with a blessing on the gathering. Before the talks, all were treated to several very uplifting songs from the Oh Happy Day Gospel Singers, three members of the Bright Family.

Stuart Weeks and Travis Henry gave short versions of presentations they would make the following day at the forum on race. Stuart Weeks began by saying that Love and Hate are like opposite sides of the same coin, a “love story aching to be told.” He recalled that Martin Luther King had said that “unearned suffering is redemptive.”

And he spoke of how the next day’s racial forum would bring together three movements: Booker T. Washington as a “Refounding” Father; anthroposophy; and the Twelve Step movement. These three represent the great healing contributions of Africa, Europe and America.

Travis Henry lives in the Berkshire-Taconic community in New York. Some time ago he realized that America needed two statues to complement the Statue of Liberty, for Liberty (freedom) is just one of the great virtues America is supposed to espouse. The other two are Equality and Brotherhood. And so tomorrow at the forum Travis he would be presenting a large poster of the second statue. He calls her Usawa, which means “Equality” in Swahili. She is an African woman posed with her hand over her heart looking to the horizon. She has wings upon her shoulders and looks as though she were about to take flight. While the Statue of Liberty was made of bronze, the Statue of Equality will be made of titanium and her eyes will be of silver symbolizing wisdom. She is modeled after the Greek statue of Nike who symbolizes victory.

She will be the same height as the statue of Liberty and will be standing on a globe. The audience was in awe at the

beauty of this new statue.

After speaking further about the statues, Travis said that at the forum the following day people would be asked to take a moral inventory with regard to their attitudes and behavior toward race, write it down and then burn it. Travis told us a bit about his struggle with an addiction and how a Twelve Step program changed his life. He has written a book about his journey entitled The Golden Path: How to Make a New Anthroposophy: A Twelve Step Approach. Contact Travis at traversetravis@gmail.com.

Kathleen Wright (kathleenwright51@gmail.com) served on the Eastern Regional Council and edited the Sophia Sun newsletter for North Carolina for a number of years.

Ruminations of a Council Chair

by Dennis Dietzel Editor’s Note: Dennis was succeeded on the General Council in 2016 as Central Region Representative by Marianne Fieber-Dhara, and as Council Chair by Carla Beebe Comey.

After six years of service to the General Council of the Anthroposophical Society in America, I would like to share a few thoughts and a challenge. I am deeply grateful to the members, employees, and my Council colleagues for the opportunity to work for this remarkable organization.

Early in my service the question arose for me: “What is the Anthroposophical Society?” and a closely related question, “What is anthroposophy?” The way I chose to look at these questions was to imagine away some aspect that hollows out the very heart of the thing. One might say the Society is about Rudolf Steiner and his teachings; or some particular part of his life work, such as the Mystery Dramas, eurythmy or the Foundation Stone meditation.

After considering these and many aspects of the question, the thing that rang most true for me and that seemed closest to the heart of anthroposophy is the human being.

If the human being were taken away, then there would be no Society and no anthroposophy. The very story that is being told in anthroposophy is from the point of view of the human being and is about the evolution of the human being from the past into the future. It would be an interesting but different story to tell from some other point of view, such as that of an angel. Had Rudolf Steiner been an angel he may have founded the Angelosophy Society winter-spring issue 2017

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(excuse the bad humor; those who know me well are used to this), but thankfully he was a human being and told our story. The Society is all about the meetings of human beings with each other, with the earth and with the spiritual world. Without these meetings in all their various forms, there would be no need for a Society. How do we play our part to bring about a future worthy of the human being?

Of course, we have the words and example of Rudolf Steiner and many others to help us understand and deepen these experiences with each other and the world, but the extent to which anthroposophy is present in the world now is up to each of us. As a Council member, I have had the opportunity for many meetings with anthroposophists, and I think back with awe and delight at each one of these encounters. They have not all been easy or smooth, but each one has taught me something; and I am deeply grateful for the experiences of the last six years.

It would have been my wish to visit every gathering of anthroposophists in the U.S., but time and money have prevented that. When the Council meets we usually try to arrange a visit with the local group or branch in the city in which we are meeting, and those have been particularly rich. We sometimes hear that the Society is lacking in diversity. Relating to racial diversity, that would be true; however, my experience has been that anthroposophists are an incredibly diverse group in their relationship to spiritual science and to life in general. We are passionate, deep thinkers, and active in the world in many different ways.

Working with the Council itself has been eye-opening. Like many who may read this, I was not particularly connected with the national work before coming on to the Council. I assumed Ann Arbor was some engine of activity driving the future of the Society, but when I arrived at my first meeting I soon realized that it was Marian Leon, John Beck, and a small office staff. The message soon became clear to me that the Society in America has as many centers as there are groups, branches, and members, with Ann Arbor being important, but only one of those centers.

It has been a great pleasure working with Council colleagues. The dedication and commitment to anthroposophy and the Society is inspiring and keeps one going through the difficult patches. I think of those meetings where we had seemingly come to a dead end, and someone would offer a direction none of us had thought of that would lead us to a solution. I will miss those colleagues, but know that the work is being carried on by able and creative people.

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loquium that happened in Ann Arbor in August, 2012.

It was a gathering of 100+ leading members of the Society who met to discuss the future of the Society and left behind hundreds of yellow sticky notes with ideas and visions. Many left with a feeling of frustration and incompleteness that it was a missed opportunity. My takeaway from the event was that in the membership of our Society incredible initiative exists, which is way too large and important for a central office to organize and carry out. The agricultural parallel would be, it is much better to have ten farmers on 1,000 acres, each one following their own best practices on their 100 acres, than to have one farmer who follows one practice on the whole thing. One failure in ten still leaves nine standing. In the US Society we have 3,000+ members, some with tiny backyards, some with an acre overlapping someone else’s acre and some with 100 acres; each carrying an important piece, with the whole much greater than the sum of the parts.

And now the challenge I promised. Most anthroposophists have a work of Rudolf Steiner’s that they love, that inspires them in their life work. I believe our future depends on our ability to reach beyond our love for the work of Rudolf Steiner to a love for each other. We may often rub each other the wrong way, but unless we learn to love each other, the world will view us as a small cult around an extraordinary man. Even Rudolf Steiner got caught up in politics, as shown in this portion of a letter from him to Marie von Sivers: “...It seems that the Novalis Branch is not really getting off the ground. Its members complain that the chairman cannot give them enough. The chairman says that he is still having difficulties understanding my Theosophy. That is why he is explaining the Gospel of St. John to his members.” (From letter to Strasbourg, 18 February 1911, Correspondence & Documents.) There are many such letters in this collection that reveal Steiner with his human shortcomings. However, we know if any one of these difficult individuals approached Rudolf Steiner with a personal problem, he would give his undivided attention and love, often offering a verse or other inspiration to help the person. It is that example of love, and how we offer it to each other, that will help us weather any difficulty; and as we can learn from Rudolf Steiner (The Work of the Angels in Man’s Astral Body, October 9, 1918), in order to work with the angels, we must first learn to love each other.

Dennis Dietzel (dennis.dietzel@gmail.com) lives in Roseville, MN, with his wife Marianne. He is a Class Holder and continues to serve on the Central Regional Council.

__Oregon__

Me and the cows

Glamour shot

Me & Anthroposophy

by Christa Lynch I currently work for Threefold Educational Foundation and School. My official title here is Housing Manager and Conference Coordinator, but in the world of small non-profits, titles are merely a suggestion and really only there to give us an easy answer to the question, “What do you do?” Similar in some ways to the condensing and one sentence synopsis Waldorf graduates are constantly coming up with for the question, “Eurythmy? What is that?”

Eurythmy is how I ended up here in Spring Valley and perhaps my first encounter with anthroposophy. When my older sisters were kindergarten aged, my parents had just moved themselves and their three children clear across the country from Massachusetts to Portland, Oregon. By chance they went to a Me and Mom family event sponsored by the then very young Portland Waldorf School. By the time that I was born, some four or five years later, my parents had become so deeply connected with the school, its community and its driving force, anthroposophy, that it was eurythmy that helped them finally decide if my name should be Sophie Christa or

what was finally settled on: Christa Sophie Lynch.

After twelve years at the Portland Waldorf School and eighteen years growing up with two dedicated anthroposophists, I needed to see what was outside of the Waldorf world and for about seven years I explored Arizona, state college, and generally the world outside of my Waldorf bubble.

As the cliché goes, I was struggling to find what I was looking for, not even sure what it was, working in a coffee shop, attending college part time and generally feeling a bit lost, when all of a sudden I saw someone in my life from a new perspective and something finally clicked. A regular customer whose latte I had been making for years, parked so I could finally see the bumper sticker on the back of her Subaru; it said “eurythmy.” Until that day I hadn’t known that there was a small budding Flagstaff Waldorf School and that when they had a eurythmist in town they offered evening eurythmy classes for their parents (and homesick Waldorf alum). It was almost that quickly that I remembered everything I was trying to rebel against and could finally begin

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to meet it in a new way.

Mere months later everything I owned was packed into my own Subaru and I was on my way to move across the country to join the JJ class at Eurythmy Spring Valley. It was in the first weeks there that I learned about the Society and was encouraged to become a member. I let most of that information go over my head, I was there to be a eurythmist, not an anthroposophist!

As I completed the first two years of eurythmy training, I found my pull towards the administration that supports eurythmy and Waldorf schools. Instead of completing the training I dropped out halfway through and began working for Threefold.

Over these past five years of living at Threefold I have come back to the question again and again, “Should I become a member of the society?” After that initial introduction to what the society was in eurythmy training, I barely heard any more about membership. There was

a part of me that kept thinking that if membership was something I should be considering, surely someone would be letting me know about it. That surely here in Spring Valley of all places it would find me, instead of me having to find it. Of course in some ways it did find me, but I had to take steps to meet it, to ask about the society, to show interest. Now, after my 30th birthday, as my relationship with my mother keeps shifting, I can ask her, “What is the society anyway? Should I be a member?” Of course she would never tell me “yes” or “no,” but as always she helps me to find my own way. And here I am, a new member of the society, still trying to figure out what the society is anyway, but more importantly what anthroposophy means in my life and how I can work with it inwardly to bring it into the world.

Christa Lynch (christa@threefold.org) is Housing Manager and Conference Coordinator for the Threefold Educational Foundation in Chestnut Ridge, NY.

New Members of the Anthroposophical Society in America, recorded 8/16/2016 to 1/29/2017 Leonard D Ablieter, Fall Creek OR Frank Agrama, Los Angeles CA Ronald Alston, Clarkston GA Stephen E. Amsden, Inverness FL Jody Anderson, Avondale Estates GA Russell W Bevers, Medford OR Anthony Bezich, Lake City CO Rachel Sarah Blanton Melas, Harrisonburg VA Clair A Boswell, Denver CO Terrance J Bradford, Canyonville OR Emily C Butler, Ithaca NY Mary Carlson, Fairbanks AK Rosa Castellanos, Harper Woods MI Boyd Collins, Mansfield TX Michele E Conyers, Napa CA Ivan Crnic Jr, Lakewood OH Gleice Da Silva, Glenmoore PA Vernon A Dewey, Denver CO Adele DiMarco-Kious, Cleveland OH Ivilisse Esguerra, Chestnut Ridge NY Dane Felton, Lititz PA Robert Filocco, Metuchen NJ Yohanna Kimberly A Finser, Mill Valley CA Patrick C Foster, Decatur GA Uta Gabler, Santa Rosa CA Elene Raiza Galilea, Copake NY 60 •

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Jane Ghotlos, Willits CA Sean P Goddard, Fairfax CA David Good, Sunnyvale CA Sachi Gowe, San Francisco CA James Kenneth Greenlow, Washington DC Nicola Groh, Gloucester MA Kate Hammond, Santa Rosa CA Scott E Hicks, Catawissa PA Jacob A Holubeck, Wilton NH Ralf Homberg, Kimberton PA Mason Howerton, Glendale CA Pascale Huber, Petaluma CA Alexa Krakauskas, Englewood CO Timothy J Laferriere, Lincoln MA Ruth Lawson, Woodstock NY Sarah Lee, Forestville CA Jeanne S Lofgren, Pittsburgh PA Phil Lunsford, Clinton MI Brian D Lynch, Ellijay GA Christa Sophie Lynch, Chestnut Ridge NY Katie McCarthy, Garden City NY Amy McGehee-Lee, Frisco TX Nathan McLaughlin, Hudson NY Christopher BJ Montigny, Santa Barbara CA Christopher Nelson, Seattle WA

Brenda Novick, Greenbrae CA Anita Pindiur, Chicago IL Has Pineda, San Rafael CA Joseph Raucci, Cheyenne WY Carolyn H Rich, Chapel Hill NC Denise Richert, Belmar NJ Jeffrey T Rudy, Roselle IL Conradine Sanborn, Saint Paul MN Laurie Schmiesing, Mountain View CA Keith G Schrag, Ames IA Terry Shelton, Farmville VA Kim L Sinclair, McKinney TX Ava Sonnenthal, Philadelphia PA Justin Stern, New Orleans LA Tonya Stoddard, Santa Rosa CA Stephanie Temple, Enterprise AL Blake Tereau, Cardiff CA Noelle MS Thompson, Penryn CA William E Trusiewicz, Stephentown NY Jeanette Voss, Lexington MA Yanhong Wheeler, Monsey NY Meredith H Whitehead, Fair Oaks CA Hollan E Whitham, Richmond CA Benjamin Williams, Shelton WA Arielle E Wolter, Gouverneur NY Qiaowen Zhang, Spring Valley NY

Members Who Have Died Gloria P Bowman Auburn AL died 01/02/2017

Eva Kudar Fair Oaks CA died 09/29/2016

Emily F. Paolilli Lancaster PA died 02/24/2016

Adriaan DeWit Chagrin Falls OH died 03/20/2016

Richard Latessa New York NY died 12/19/2016

Dorothea S. Pierce Housatonic MA died 08/09/2016

Carolyn Getson Akron OH died 11/05/2016

Mary Delle LeBeau Sylmar CA died 12/15/2016

Mary Smith West Chicago IL died 05/17/2016

Joan A. Gregory Fair Oaks CA died 09/08/2016

Harriet Myers Ewing NJ died 08/31/2016

Stef Stahl Toledo OH died 10/07/2015

Joanne Karp Spring Valley NY died 11/25/2016

John J. Obuchowski Hartmut Von Jeetze Mount Pleasant MI Chatham NY died 09/11/2016 died 10/17/2016

Rebecca Lynn Christina Watterson March 4, 1960–May 21, 2016

by Robert Karp Under the full moon in the late afternoon of May 21, 2016—an auspicious holy day in the Eastern world that commemorates the birth, death, and enlightenment of the Buddha— Rebecca Lynn Christina Watterson crossed the threshold surrounded by her loving children, family members, and friends. She was 56 years old.

Rebecca was a member of the Christian Community, the Anthroposophical Society, the School of Spiritual Science, and the Michael Youth Circle. She was a sensitive soul imbued with deep religious feeling, a keen devotion to the truth, and a heightened conscientiousness in regard to all her actions. She loved beauty, quality workmanship, and noble thought. She also loved speed skating, Irish music and dancing, fencing, and was part of a close knit squadron of virtual airplane pilots!

Rebecca had a great love of clear,

deep thought, and when she recognized someone as having spiritualized their thinking to some degree her admiration knew no end. She particularly loved Rudolf Steiner’s epistemological works, and was able to help many a newer student of anthroposophy navigate their way through the labyrinth of concepts in the The Philosophy of Freedom.

Rebecca was classically melancholic and carried the world’s suffering deep in her being. Fully incarnating into her physical body, into the body of her destiny, and into the body of the world-condition presented her with many challenges and much suffering which she transformed at the end of her life into an extraordinary quality of courage, strength, and wakefulness. She radiated a great blessing to all who had the opportunity to spend time with her in the days, weeks, and months leading up to her death.

Rebecca first encountered the name and work of Rudolf Steiner in her early 20’s through Howard Pautz, one of her college professors, and had an immediate sense of recognition. Shortly thereafter she attended her first Act of Consecration of Man in the Christian Community in Denver, was profoundly moved by it, and began to attend the Christian Community twice a week.

She quickly became a devoted student of anthroposophy, and Diethart Jaehnig, the Christian Community priest in Denver, became a mentor of great significance in her life.

She attended the first international “Rethink Conference” organized by Diethart in 1984. Young people from all across Europe and United States attended this gathering, and there Rebecca met many individuals who would become lifelong friends. Years later Rebecca helped steward the further development of Rethink and organized several follow up conferences.

In her late twenties, Rebecca traveled to Europe to learn German and study for a time at the Seminary of the Christian Community. She then worked at a Camphill Village in Scotland and afterwards returned to Stuttgart, Germany to undertake a training in Bothmer Gymnastics which she finally completed in 1992 through, as winter-spring issue 2017

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she described it, “a great act of will.”

In her thirties Rebecca returned to Denver and there met and fell in love with Bruce Cooper. Rebecca and Bruce had three children: Elena (now age 22), Ian (now 20), and Brinan (now 12), who continue to thrive and radiate the many gifts that result from being raised by a mother with such a close relationship to the spiritual world. In her early forties, Rebecca needed to supplement the family income and took a job in the mail room of a large investment bank. Her capacities were quickly recognized and she found herself in the bookkeeping department and discovered there that she had a natural love and talent for bookkeeping.

After her divorce from Bruce in 2004, Rebecca moved from Chicago to Milwaukee and completed an Associate’s degree in accounting; she did the books for a number of anthroposophical organizations including the Seminary of the Christian Community, the Christian Community in Chicago, Great Lakes Waldorf Institute, and Tiny Green Trees Childcare Center. She also served as the Operations Coordinator of the Biodynamic Association in the United States.

Rebecca was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006 which she overcame over the course of a year through surgery and chemotherapy. In 2014, however, the cancer returned, now as cervical cancer, and spread quickly throughout her body. Early in 2016, when she knew she had six months or less to live, she moved to Denver to be nearer to her family and the close spiritual community she knew and loved there.

Rebecca is deeply missed by her mother, her devoted siblings Melinda and Martin, her children and a circle of close friends spanning the world. Our sorrow is lightened by the embrace of her warm and radiant 62 •

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spirit from the spiritual world, a true Christ-bearer, lighting the way into the future for us all.

Another close friend of Rebecca, Marijke Vermeulen, shared these thoughts which seem to me like a fitting conclusion to this memorial: I see her struggle to incarnate in her body, in her will; and on the other hand I see how it was her path to dedicate her life very much to the physical realm. In spite of her challenges, she had at the same time such a talent to work with the physical body and she had a beautiful, athletic stature. It is amazing, for example, that she chose the Bothmer gymnastic school as her main education, where she had such a focus on the work with the physical body.

The same signature I experience with her talent and love for bookkeeping. It is such a down-to-earth thing; everything so exact and correct. Money has much to do with the will. She was deeply aware that numbers and figures are mathematical and physical and spiritual at the same time and this filled her with joy. She also gave birth to and raised three beautiful children. And helped give birth to spiritual initiatives such as Rethink, to bring ideas down to earth or help them to have their physical foundation (in the bookkeeping).

I see her destiny in the tension between the physical and the spiritual and the will to connect them. All this is reflected beautifully in her name. In Jones’ Dictionary of Old Testament Proper Names, Rebekah or Rebecca originates from the Hebrew Rivkah, from the verb rbq, “to tie firmly.” The NOBS Study Bible suggests the name means “snare,” “noose,” “tied up,” “secured,” even “beautifully ensnaring.” W.F. Albright held that it meant “soil, earth.”

Sheri Reiner November 17, 1950–July 12, 2016

by Michael Hughes Sheri Reiner was born in New York City and her early childhood was spent in Brooklyn. Her parents were first generation Americans. Her father ran a small family-owned neighborhood grocery store. I believe her mother probably kept the books, as when Sheri and her brother were older, she worked as a bookkeeper. Her mother loved music, had sacrificed a possible singing career to have children, and gave to Sheri a love both of music and singing. As a teenager, to the consternation of her parents, Sheri frequented Greenwich Village, an epicenter for music and poetry and the ‘counterculture’ in NYC. In the mid-sixties, Sheri matriculated into the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan. Here she had the good fortune of having Daisy Aldan as a teacher.

Daisy taught literature, poetry, and creative writing, and was a source of inspiration to many students. Sheri received special kudos from Daisy, who once described her as “one of my three muses” amongst her many students.

Daisy invited Sheri and Curtis Wheeler (who also became a eurythmist) to an evening of her translations of Albert Steffen’s poetry, some of which was also expressed in eurythmy. Thus it was through Daisy that Sheri was introduced not only to poetry writing,

but also to eurythmy and the works of Rudolf Steiner, sparking a clear call of destiny.

As a young person Sheri said she “had a wish to meet everyone,” so it is not surprising that soon after high school she left home, traveling the country. While on the west coast she became seriously ill, and after recovering at her parents, she moved to Spring Valley and lived with the Scharffs in the early days of the Fellowship Community (a community of all ages centered around the care of the elderly). During this year she also began eurythmy lessons in Lisa Monges’ living room, and took part in the preparatory group for the ‘72 Youth Conference in Dornach on “The Threshold,” which she then attended.

Immediately following the conference she began the three year curative education training course in Glencraig Camphill, Northern Ireland. These were important years as well as challenging times, an intensive new life in a different country, and important and lasting friendships were formed.

In this community of special needs people, the cycle of the year and celebration of the festivals was important and central to the life, a practice Sheri took up for the rest of her life.

During these years, the first part of her twenties, she wrote two papers which pointed toward her path and goals. The first was entitled “The Search for the Human Soul” and the second “Art as the Bridge Between Two Worlds.” The conclusion of this second paper was this:

“If man strives to develop, to discover the Truth in all earthly manifestations—in the Kingdoms of Nature, in Man himself, in the relationships that all things have—through experiencing all that he meets, he acquires knowledge. He becomes ever more conscious. When he strives to create out of this experience, to create with the intention of doing good, of aiding all that lives, of giving through his deed—he must sacrifice his own personal self and reveal that which is more than himself: what is true and eternal. He manifests the ideal which becomes real through his deeds. Art is conscious creative active sacrifice for our fellowmen, for the earth and for the stars. It is deed. Awareness of truth stands behind it. Deed is in its hand.

It is imbued with love. Its purpose is love. The healing of mankind lies in the individual’s creative power.” So, not surprisingly, the world of art and eurythmy continued to tug at her.

Needing to wait a year following her three year curative course to begin a eurythmy training, Sheri pursued another great interest and attended a year-long course in color studies and painting with Anne Stockton at Emerson College in Sussex, England. It was here that we met, thanks to the

prompting from a mutual friend, Robert Logsdon. Our angels obviously collaborated, for we had both independently applied to and were accepted to the same eurythmy school, and so we had this year to meet each other and to celebrate our wedding on Whitsun, 1976. Then it was off to our eurythmy training, which took place in two Camphill communities, in the South and North of England. Eurythmy is an intense training, and illnesses plagued Sheri, but with great determination and support from our teachers, she managed. Following this, we moved to Germany for a short period, so I could begin a therapeutic eurythmy training. While there, Sheri gave regular eurythmy classes, including her first course in color eurythmy—a natural fit!

In late spring 1981 we visited the Camphill community in Northern Ireland, and there Sheri was christened, at age thirty. We then returned to the U.S., visiting a number of places. The enthusiastic children, with the blend of races and socio-economic situations at the Detroit Waldorf School, spoke most strongly to us, and we took up positions there.

That summer we were in Spring Valley for the large conference with the Vorstand / Executive Council from Dornach, experienced the death of our friend Peter Menaker, a talented speech artist, and attended the first of numerous pedagogical conferences.

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high school, encouraging frequent performances with a curriculum that spanned from the Old Testament to Motown music, from large group forms (including a Thornton Wilder play in eurythmy) to solo graduation performances. We also taught at the Ann Arbor Rudolf Steiner School in its beginning years and at Kinship Homes, for special needs people.

Sheri took the initiative of teaching adult eurythmy classes not only in the schools, but also in a parent’s house and out into public spaces. We performed eurythmy as a duo, with other eurythmists, and even prepared joint programs with the eurythmists living and working in Chicago. Annelies Davidson would inspire us from afar, and sometimes join us. During these years Sheri was also one of the founding members of the Detroit Branch of the Society, was central in the festivals committee and a member of study groups. When the Waldorf Institute moved to Spring Valley, Sheri brought to the fledgling Branch a pageant out of Goethe’s fairy tale The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, inspiring new memberships in the Anthroposophical Society and giving an added impetus to several of the participants towards their own artistic trainings (Julie Lamb and Hilary Hafner, eurythmy; Katherine Thivierge, creative speech). After seven years of this “pioneer” work we were ready for a year of further artistic work in Europe, and Henry Barnes helped us secure funds for this.

Upon our return to the States a year later, we jointly took a position at the Live Oak Waldorf School in Northern California, to begin a eurythmy program there. We worked there for twelve years, participating deeply in the school. During this time we also taught at the nearby Mari64 •

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posa Waldorf School, offered adult courses and performances, performed ourselves with other eurythmists, and were engaged in the life of two area Society branches: Gaia Sophia in the foothills, and the Sacramento Branch in Fair Oaks. Sheri continued to have health challenges which ultimately led her to stop teaching in the schools and increase her own studies and work in art. In these years she continued her anthroposophical participation, worked in our garden, and took up weaving, often dying her own colors. Early in the millennium she also joined a three-year painting course with Leszek Forczek.

In 2006, I took a teaching position at the Haleakala Waldorf School on Maui to start the eurythmy program, where we arrived on Michaelmas day. Soon after, a dear colleague, Keith McCrary, who had initiated courses for adults (AWE, Adult Waldorf Education) invited Sheri to teach eurythmy in these courses. This work of AWE has introduced or deepened for many people their relationship to anthroposophy and has also provided a number of teachers to the school movement. In ensuing years Sheri’s work expanded into painting, creative speech, and anthroposophical studies, all areas she had dedicated herself to over decades. Sheri also began working with a homeschooler on the Waldorf curriculum, emphasizing the art in the education.

In late 2011, a hardness in one of her breasts led to a diagnosis of an invasive cancer and breast removal.

Thanks to the incredible support of friends, we were able to visit a cancer clinic in Mexico, where Sheri was given alternative treatments to chemo and radiation, and therapies she could take home and add to. Through this Sheri was able to continue both her

teaching as well as her own artistic strivings. However, in 2015 we knew the cancer was again spreading and in April 2016 she began to experience a general loss of energy. Shortly before her passing, her homeschooler wrote to her that she had “brought art into his life, he learned to love colors and to bring beauty into everything he did.” The final weeks were at home, under hospice care, and Sheri had a peaceful passing on July 12, 2016.

Throughout her adult life Sheri was deeply engaged with Anthroposophia, eurythmy, the world of color, and transformation of soul. Already at the end of high school she had recognized her path, and she was deeply moved at that time by the Hamburg cycle Rudolf Steiner had given on the John Gospel. This relationship of the two Johns, their unique roles at the Mystery of Golgotha, and their profound commitment to human and earthly evolution lived strongly in Sheri’s soul over decades. She now joins other active helpers across the threshold seeking in love to further humanity’s great endeavor of transformation.

Dorothea Ann Pierce (née Sunier) October 30, 1925 - August 9, 2016

by Christi Pierce Dorothea was born into the Sunier family in central California, a beautiful agricultural valley at the foot of the great Sierra Nevada mountain range. Here her childhood was shaped by the contrast of valley floor and mountain heights. From her earliest years, Dorothea was an artist, continuing a tradition from her mother’s side of the family: her great-uncle Felix Schurig (1852-1907) was an accomplished artist who emigrated from Germany to the United States and was often commissioned to do portraits; her great-grandfather Carl Wilhelm Schurig (1818-1874) was a painter and illustrator of some renown, and also a professor of art at the Dresden Art Academy. Dorothea graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a teaching credential from Fresno State College. While still in college, she worked as an artist drawing advertisements for women’s fashions.

She then pursued this career in New York and San Francisco. She taught fashion illustration at the prestigious California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in Oakland, as well as the Stevens Academy of Design in San Francisco.

In 1954, Dorothea married and took the last name “Pierce,” giving up her career in advertising to have a family. She had two children, Ted and Christine, and together with her husband, Mel, who was first involved in television advertising and then became a real estate broker, lived in various parts of California. They ended up in Santa Barbara, where Dorothea had family connections. Throughout all of these years, Dorothea always

drew, painted, and worked in clay.

Art was her love and passion. She was also interested in metaphysical ideas and was constantly searching amongst the philosophy and religion shelves in the library. She read books

by Krishnamurti, but when she finally went to hear him speak, she was not impressed. She kept searching.

At the age of 42, Dorothea discovered her first book by Rudolf Steiner in the Santa Barbara public library. Now she felt that she had finally found what she had been looking for! But several weeks later, she was diagnosed with ALS (commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), a progressive, nerve-degenerative illness for which there is no known cure. She was told she had two years to live.

Upon being given this death sentence, Dorothea sat by the ocean and wept.

She asked God if she couldn’t have some more time to study the work of Rudolf Steiner, as she had only just discovered it! Her prayers were answered, and to the amazement of everyone in the medical establishment she lived for almost 49 years more. Although the disease did take its toll on her health, and also on her marriage that ended in divorce after 23 years, Dorothea never complained. She was

grateful for every day that was granted to her. And she spent every one of those days studying anthroposophy.

Dorothea was a devoted student of the work of Rudolf Steiner. While still living in Santa Barbara, she joined the Anthroposophical Society and the School for Spiritual Science and became a faithful member of the Helen Hecker group. She helped to organize talks and performances by visiting speakers and eurythmists. She offered her home for monthly Christian Community Church services for the local community. She went to Europe for several years and spent time in Dornach, Switzerland. She trained in Hauschka’s artistic therapy in England and in Germany. She lived for a time in the Netherlands, where she formed a close relationship with the painter Liane Collot d’Herbois, who travelled twice to the United States to stay with Dorothea. Collot’s method of painting became Dorothea’s path also. Liane Collot d’Herbois stated that it was due to Dorothea that she wrote her first book Colour. Dorothea lived for some years in Wisconsin, and then she moved to the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts in 1994, where she

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continued to paint, teach, and serve as a mentor in Collot’s methods.

Over the years Dorothea exhibited in various galleries. In 2013, an exhibit of her work was held at Camphill Ghent, NY. A retrospective of her work was held in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in December, 2016, sponsored by Art Oasis Gallery. Dorothea’s work is in private collections, medical offices, Waldorf schools, Camphill Communities and Christian Community churches in the United States and Europe.

To view Dorothea’s artwork online, go to: www.ArtOasisGallery.com/ collections/dorotheapierce. (Photos are courtesy of Art Oasis Gallery.)

Robert (Bob) Monsen August 24, 1947–September 28, 2016 “You Better Listen When I Tap You On The Shoulder From The Other Side”

by Gary Lamb The first time I visited Bob at his home in Pescadero, California, I was captivated by several circles of massive redwood trees near his house. When I stepped inside one of the circles and gazed up to the lofty heights of the redwoods, they reminded me of the conversations Bob and I often had, and I said to him, “Now I know the source of your lofty thoughts!”

Bob was diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer in July, and died peacefully in his sleep shortly after midnight on September 28, the day before Michaelmas. He is survived by his wife of 41 years, Janet Ferrare; son, Cassady Monsen; daughter, Ruby Monsen; and granddaughter, Phoenyx Nist-Ferrare.

Bob was an independent and generous person, and always tended to take a leadership role in whatever he did. He had an innate sense and 66 •

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desire for community-building, and was appreciated and loved by his family, the local community, and his anthroposophical friends. He was a voracious reader and had a deep love for poetry and music. He could play the bass guitar, harmonica, and piano “by ear.”

Bob was born in Modesta, California, on August 24, 1947, to Karl and Margaret Monsen, and grew up in nearby Fresno. His sister, Deborah Monsen Chung died in 1993.

In his youth, Bob loved to play baseball. While attending Hoover High School in Fresno, he was a star pitcher and first baseman. He received a baseball scholarship to Colorado State University, but attended only one year before returning to his hometown and Fresno State University to continue his studies. His main interests in college were poetry, music, and “antiwar demonstrations.”

Following college, Bob was the boss of a fire fighting crew in the Sierra Mountains called the “Hot Shots.”

He went on to operate his own landscaping business for a couple of years, then started a company called Construction Services which he owned and managed for more than 40 years.

While Bob could write spiritually refined poetry, he also could express displeasure about job complications and give directions to his construction crew in colorful expletive-deleted terms that would sound like cursing from most people. But, from Bob, it took on a poetic, endearing quality.

Bob found his way to anthroposophy through Waldorf education.

When his children were approaching school age, Janet took an interest in the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, located in Redwood City at the time.

When she mentioned to Bob that she would like the children to attend the

school, he agreed to pay the tuition as long as she didn’t ask him to get involved with the school. It wasn’t too long, however, after Ruby and Cassady were enrolled in the school, that Janet could see that it was in difficult financial straits. She went to Bob and asked him if he could give the school some ideas out of his business experience. Bob went to a board of trustees meeting to share his ideas, and the trustees were so impressed that they asked him to join the board, which he agreed to do. He eventually became the Board Chair and served in that capacity for twelve years.

At one of the board meetings, he heard someone mention the word “anthroposophy” and asked what it meant. The response he received was that it was the basis of the school, but it was difficult to explain and that he probably wouldn’t find it interesting.

He responded that it if it was the basis of the school it would be irresponsible for him not to know more about it.

He joined a local study group, and eventually joined the Anthroposophical Society, the School of Spiritual Science, and the Social Science Section.

The article “Reality and Process: Waldorf Schools, Budgets and Community” by Robert Lathe and Nancy Whittaker was the initial inspiration for Bob to begin an accessible-toall tuition approach at the Waldorf School of the Peninsula in the fall of

1993. Bob developed the program further after reading Steiner’s “Anthroposophy and the Social Question,” which describes the Fundamental Social Law, which posits that working for others, rather than self-interest, is the true basis for a heathy community life. For Bob, this new approach to tuition meant not only a shift in how to work with finances, but also how to strengthen the culture of the whole school through “conscious conversations” between school representatives and parents.

A few weeks before his death, on his birthday, Bob told Janet he had a “visitation” from “Death” while sitting outside on the deck. Death told him that she would receive him whenever he was ready, but she asked him to do one thing before then, to gather all the beauty he received from nature through his senses—the sights, sounds, and smells—and bring it to her. Bob said, “It is like a wedding, and I will bring the bouquet.”

During his last few weeks, I called Bob once a week. In one of our final conversations we spoke about how much we enjoyed working together over the years with Waldorf schools.

We agreed that we would continue collaborating after he crossed the threshold. The conversation ended with his saying: “When I tap you on the shoulder from the other side, you better listen.” I promised I would.

Janet told me that Bob died peacefully with a well-worn, taped copy of “Anthroposophy and the Social Question” at his side.

For those who would like to make a contribution in memory of Bob and his work, please send it to Institute for Social Renewal, PO Box 3, Loma Mar, CA 94021, or donate online at www.socialrenewal.com.

Eva Kudar (d. September 29, 2016)

by Nancy Jewel Poer Eva Helena Kudar was a wonderful Waldorf kindergarten teacher who went home to the spirit on Michaelmas Day, September 29, 2016. Eva was strong, brave and true; a splendid, tall, German woman with a mighty handshake, open arms and gentle, modulated voice that she never raised with the children. Her powerful presence and integrity kept them flocked around her. She suffered great deprivation in World War II as her struggling, school-teacher mother had to put her in an orphanage for a few years. Then, for three years, she was in a Waldorf school—until the Nazis closed it—and that made all the difference. There were daring escapes from the Russians and she barely missed being killed with nearly 300,000 when Dresden was firebombed.

She looked like a singer in Wagnerian opera—indeed, she was trained as such—but most of all she gave to so many children a wonderful example of high, human qualities for them to imitate in their most formative years.

She was strong, clear, decisive, gentle and just, compassionate, understanding, joyful, cheerful, positive, reverent, steadfast, and courageous. Thank you, and blessings on your journey, dear Eva, spirit-warrior of Michael for our time. May you inspire us from the spirit as you inspired and nurtured so many in this life!

Eva is shown at left in the group photo above with her first class in what became the Honolulu Waldorf school.

From the Sacramento Waldorf School Facebook page, 10/2/2016 Our community lost an important member this week, Eva Kudar.

She was a kindergarten teacher at SWS from the mid-70s to the mid80s and then went on to have her own home program. She was a kindergarten teacher for almost 35 years in total and helped to found the Mohala Pula Waldorf School in Honolulu.

Eva was the entry to SWS for many of our alums and they hold her with love and respect as we all do. She was also active in the training and educating of early childhood teachers and remained a wise voice in the community.

From the new Sacramento-area community newsletter The Weaver. winter-spring issue 2017

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Gloria Patterson Bowman Hartmut von Jeetze November 13, 1948 - January 2, 2017

from Dorothy Hinkle-Uhlig Gloria Bowman, who was a member of the Anthroposophical Society and a friend of mine in Auburn, Alabama, crossed the threshold recently.

After a lifetime of seeking the spirit she found anthroposophy and was a diligent, passionate student. Because of her previous spiritual work she quickly understood much. Full of fun and love and determination. We in Auburn miss her.

Gloria Patterson Bowman, age 68, died from ovarian cancer on January 2, 2017, in her home in Auburn, Alabama. Gloria is survived by her mother, Kathleen Roberts Patterson, of Auburn, AL; her sister, Beverly Stokley (Jay Stokley) of Opelika, AL; her son, Shayne Bowman, (Michele Bowman) of Cumming, GA; and her grandson, Gavin Reid, and granddaughter, Josephine Bowman. She is preceded in death by her father, James Lewis Patterson, of Auburn, AL. Gloria was born on November 13, 1948 in Philadelphia, PA. Her family later moved to Waverly, AL and Auburn, AL. She graduated from Auburn University with a degree in Fine Art. Gloria had a career in the newspaper/publishing industry as an artist, art director and advertising director. She was a member of the Auburn Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, and was a passionate member of several local groups, including the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, Alliance for Peace and Justice, Rudolph Steiner Group, Friends of Bill W., and many others.

She loved to travel and after retiring became a wellness practitioner, focusing on therapeutic massage and reiki.

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February 13, 1928–October 17, 2016

Hartmut von Jeetze, 88, of Chatham, NY, passed away peacefully at home on the morning of Monday, October 17th.

Born February 13th, 1928, in Pilgramshain, Germany, Hartmut was the son of the late Joachim and Dorothea (née Vierhaus) von Jeetze. Hartmut dedicated his life to establishing the work of Camphill Village communities for persons with disabilities, and to biodynamic and sustainable agriculture in the United States. He is predeceased by his wife Gerda (nee Babendererde), his brother Eckart von Jeetze, his sister Christine von Jeetze, and his sister Sophia Kunz.

Hartmut is survived by his sister Gabriele von Jeetze of Germany, his daughters Johanna Steinrueck of Minneapolis, Renate Varriale of Kinderhook, Barbara Paulsen of Denmark, Bridget von Jeetze of Chatham, Thea Garvie of Ghent, and Frances Kane of Minneapolis, as well as 16 grandchildren, 3 great-grandchildren, and several nieces and nephews.

Harriet Myers April 17, 1921–August 31, 2016

Harriet Hill Myers, 95, passed away peacefully on Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2016, at Morris Hall/St. Joseph’s in Lawrenceville, NJ, with her loving son, Christo-

pher, by her side. She was predeceased by her husband, Gordon Myers, and brother, Nathaniel Hill. She is survived by her brother, Carman Hill, and her son Christopher (Kymm) Myers, and granddaughter, Morgan.

Born in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, Mrs. Myers earned two degrees: a B.A. in singing from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and an M.S. in music education from Teachers College, Columbia University. Mrs. Myers sang soprano professionally in concerts and oratorio in Cleveland and New York. She was also a member of the Randolph Singers and can be heard on most of their recordings made for Westminster Records.

Mrs. Myers also taught elementary vocal music in the Ewing Township public schools for over 20 years.

She was on the founding board of the Waldorf School of Princeton and was active as the Eurythmy accompanist until the age of 93.

Carolyn Sue Getson April 12, 1954 – November 5, 2016

Carolyn Sue Getson, 62, of Copley, Ohio, died Saturday, November 5, 2016, with her husband Tim, brother Blake, sister-in-law Linda and brotherin-law Joe at her side.

She was born in Cleveland to Russell Frank and Margaret Ann (Winter) Getson. Carolyn was most proud to have taught two successive classes of students, from their first through eighth grades, at the Spring Garden Waldorf School in Copley. Carolyn was also a songwriter with a singular, poetic vision and a quietly uncommon style.

She is survived by her husband,

Tim Gilbride, whom she married on May 13, 1988; brother, Blake Getson of Columbus; brother-in-law, Joe Gilbride of North Ridgeville; sister-inlaw, Nancy (Jim) Casey of Corinth, Texas; nieces, Rachel Gilbride and Anne Casey; nephews, Dan Getson and James Casey; and grandnephew, William Getson.

Richard Hicks February 6, 1935–February 28, 2016)

from Margot Church Artist Richard Hicks, a sculptor, watercolor and mural painter, teacher, and former president of the Dakota Artist Guild, was a devoted anthroposophist. Born in Detroit, he found anthroposophy while teaching in Ann Arbor where he met Anthony Tafts and Ernst Katz and became deeply involved with Steiner’s ideas, Goethe’s Colour Theory, and Art History.

In 1970 Richard accepted a position as Art Teacher at Black Hills State University in South Dakota.

Anthroposophy had become the scaffolding of his commitment to his own inner development, but also gave him a more increasing sense of responsibility to his students. Without any support from like-minded friends or colleagues, he created classes of color composition to raise the awareness, insight and creativity of his students.

Summers Richard taught painting at the Rudolf Steiner Institute, and studied therapeutic veil painting with Marie Velandro. She had been a pupil of Collot d’Herbois.

And where else do we see the accomplishments of the Spirits of Form as clearly as in that borderline sphere where the etheric enters into the physical? It is at the same time puzzling and tantalizing. There one sees the Exusiai summon the forms of living

beings into appearance. Their activity is not to be found within the solid substance, the impenetrable part of earthly matter, but is manifest where the Forms themselves appear out of the light, ever so softly from the spiritual world.

In the beautiful Black Hills of South Dakota Richard worked from his own Imagination with the Colors by the Sun’s Activity: the Christ’s Light with which he had a deep and profound connection.

A very large sculpture, the “Journeyer” stands outside his church welcoming all who enter. This passerby may be imparting the words: “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes,

and death shall be no more, neither shall there be morning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” Revelations 21:4 A 2015 letter from Richard Hicks: When I taught art at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor, I was active in Dr. Katz' study group there.

The original impulse to anthroposophy came when I was a student at Al-

bion College and met Anthony Jaffe, musician, composer, and English teacher. He was a key figure in my life. In 1970 I came to Spearfish, SD, where I taught at Black Hills State University for 33 years before I retired in 2003. Being a student of anthroposophy, I came under the influence of Steiner's art impulses. After many years of experimentation, I studied with Marie-Laure Velandro, a student of Collot d'Herbois, and now do veil paintings and sculpture. I also study anthroposophy pretty much by myself although I have a few sympathetic friends. Nothing of a study group, however, exists. Also I study German and am at an intermediate level. Due to physical distance, communication would have to be electronic.

Now destiny has ruled that I must deal with cancer, which we are in the process of doing. Unfortunately, I have since discovered my type of cancer is not very treatable so we are facing the prospect of transitioning to the next world.

Yours truly, Richard Hicks PS: My doctor is Adam Blanning

out of Denver.

From his son: Richard Hicks had the heart of a servant. He set an example for us kids to help our neighbors and friends even when it was not convenient or comfortable. He volunteered to shovel neighbors’ sidewalks for years and helped them with yard work so that their property and their lives would be in order.

Dick was a high energy, anxious guy who needed to be productive to be satisfied in life. He was never content to simply watch tv after a long day at work, but instead helped with housework, picked us up after school and introduced us to myths, legends, winter-spring issue 2017

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and the Bible. Dick worked with his loyal tennis friends to resurface many tennis courts, and helped secure grant money to build new ones.

He had deep compassion for those in need. This led him to minister to sick and lonely people at the Dorset Home. He read stories to them, and the Bible, and led art projects there.

He also enjoyed working on art projects at Countryside Church and helping to lead people closer to God through his artwork.

Dick served as the moral anchor of our family. When we were angry after someone wronged us, he gently reminded us that God forgave us, and pointed out positive attributes of that person. He reminded us not to gossip.

Dick was a harmonizer and a quiet steady presence in our family and the community. He had a deep conscience and love of righteousness and God. Dick was empathetic and was always available to offer advice when I had a personal crisis. 1 learned later in life how rare and valuable this trait is. He took an interest in the lives of many members of his community and offered them advice, service, moral support and money.

Dick struggled with his art and public acceptance sometimes, and could have become bitter but instead chose to keep trying and remain positive. This set a great example for me.

After disagreements with my mother or others, he would quote “Blessed be the peacemaker” from Matthew 5:9, even if he did not agree with her. My father was quick to apologize when he wronged someone and he worked to make things right.

Dick had many facets. He was a skilled artist, but was also an athlete, teacher, musician, and mentor to many people in Spearfish. He believed life should be balanced, and 70 •

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encouraged his children and friends to lead balanced lives as well.

Dick loved to push his body to the limit playing tennis and for years enjoyed sweating after a grueling game on a hot summer day. He was very tenacious and had an incredible inner drive that could be observed at sporting events. At age 74 he biked 14 miles down Spearfish Canyon and then drove his family 100 miles to Angastora Reservoir where he swam several times on a 102-degree day. He was very tired and took a long nap the

next day. My father was very patient teaching me tennis and basketball, and often allowed me to win one on one at basketball.

Dick enjoyed opera music, and singing in the community choir gave him another creative outlet. He appreciated the beauty of nature and believed in being a good steward to our shared natural resources. This led him to pick up recycling for friends and drive it to Rapid City once a month before Spearfish offered a recycling service. He also picked sorted trash and recycling here at Countryside Church for several years. Al-

though Dick was cultured and an art professor, he was a humble person and was not above “grunt work” and was happy to help out wherever needed.

Richard was an intellectual who enjoyed reading and discussing history, politics, theology and mysticism. He could talk for hours with me about a wide variety of topics, such as Abraham Lincoln, and the Battle of Britain, and the Twelve Days of Christmas. Dick loved German music and culture and he studied the German language for years. He also knew a little Spanish and French, and he enjoyed practicing his language skills with friends and strangers.

Dick took a real interest in people throughout his life. Although he came from a troubled family background, he worked hard to overcome his inner demons. He served as a father figure to many people throughout his long life. He mentored young artists at the college, and invited them to see his studio and to dinners with his family. He played sports with me and my neighborhood friends when their own parents were emotionally unavailable. He volunteered to teach art in elementary school to crowds of eager students.

He enjoyed being a father figure to Korean exchange students and explaining American culture to them while eagerly learning about their own culture. He taught tennis players of all ages the fundamentals, and was excited when they made progress. He listened thoughtfully to the struggles of his many friends and he empathized with their pain and invested in their success.

Dick will be deeply missed; yet his legacy of service and his steady presence will never be forgotten.

Peter Julio Clemm February 12, 1925–November 28, 2015

Peter J. Clemm was born in Stuttgart, Germany and was early on listed for enrollment in the first Waldorf School. However his parents moved to Berlin and so he started his education in the Berlin Waldorf School.

He was only there for the first and second classes; when Hitler came to power in 1933, his godmother, Juliette LeRoi, insisted he be sent to England, since his mother was from a Jewish family. So young Peter was enrolled in The New School in London; it soon changed its name to Michael Hall. His mother also came to England; he spent some weekends with her and they went to Portugal each summer to be with his godmother.

When war broke out in 1939 they were in Portugal. His mother wanted him to stay there but he insisted that he return to England to his school, his friends, and his teachers. Peter graduated with the first 12th class and Francis Edmonds was the class advisor. He was technically an “enemy alien” so he could not join the British Army or continue his education.

After the war he came to join his mother and godmother in America.

He joined the American Occupation Army and was sent to Austria. Before he was discharged he was re-united with his German father and met his little five-year-old sister.

Peter came back to New York and married Karen Wachsmuth whom he had known as a child in Berlin. He went to Columbia University and received a Masters Degree in Metallurgic Engineering. Peter was hired

by General Electric and worked in their research lab for 15 years in Schenectady. During those years he and Karen were blessed with three sons, Timothy, Geoffrey, and Mark. When they started school Peter was unhappy with their education and decided to transfer to the Philadelphia Branch of GE so that his boys could attend the Kimberton Waldorf School.

Peter helped set up the first high school science labs for Kimberton and even taught some science blocks during his vacation time. This made him finally decide to go to Emerson College and take the Waldorf teacher training course. So the whole family went to Forest Row. Karen decided to return to Pennsylvania with the boys and Peter was not through with his training so they parted. He had thought he wanted to teach high school science but was so intrigued by the elementary curriculum that he decided to be a class teacher. There was no job for him at Kimberton when he was ready to return to the states, but he was offered one at Green Meadow School in Spring Valley, NY. For one year he taught German, French, and Bothmer gym, and the next year he became a class teacher and he took the class through to the eighth grade.

Peter had spent week-ends with Karen and the boys and he also took his sons on exciting trips such as rafting down the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River. But his main life was in Spring Valley where he met his second wife, Lucille Vogel, who was also a class teacher and music teacher at Green Meadow. Peter and Karen were divorced and Peter soon mar-

ried Lucille. They were blessed with a daughter, Rosalinda.

When Peter decided to take the Social Development Course with Coen van Houten at Emerson, Peter, Lucille, and Rosalinda went to Forest Row in 1977. While they were there they sailed to Norway to visit Thomas, another of Peter’s sons. From there they went to California where they taught at the Marin Waldorf School for six years. After that the family moved to Temple, NH, where Lucille was a class teacher and music teacher at the Pine Hill Waldorf School.

Peter did some metallurgical work for a while and in connection with that went to Japan and Taiwan.

But his main work was at the Lukas Foundation where he enjoyed painting and teaching woodwork to some residents. He sometimes substituted for house fathers. He went to several Social Science Section conferences from there.

Peter and Lucille retired to North Carolina in 1997. They lived there for 11 years and they hosted several anthroposophical study groups, mostly on Waldorf education.

Due to Peter’s ill health they decided to return to New Hampshire in 2008 to be near family and friends.

Peter celebrated his 90th birthday on February 12, 2015 and said that was enough. His memory was failing him and he was not well.

In October he fell and broke a section of his femur right beneath a hip replacement and he ended up in a nursing home/rehab center. Peter’s condition worsened. His daughter Rosalinda came home from Ireland to be with him and he seemed to have been waiting for her.

A week later, on November 2nd, he left this world behind and hopefully is at peace. winter-spring issue 2017

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