Many years ago, as part of the Learning to Learn Project, we worked with teachers using a biographical-pedagogical approach, and we often used Hubert Reeves’ work, The Hour of Dazzle (published by Gradiva). In the chapter The birth of meaning, he mentions Guy Béart’s phrase – Tell me about myself, that’s all that interests me – as being “the recipe for true pedagogy”.
In fact, if our students could consciously express what they would like to receive from us teachers, they would certainly say that we should tell them about themselves: we want to know who we are, what we have in us that makes us unique, what we are capable of in order to know where we are going… In fact, the foundations of Waldorf pedagogy imply a deep knowledge of who we are and its purpose is to lead human beings to awaken to their spiritual entity in order to change the world!
But this is in line with the purpose of my contribution and the source that inspired my title: I’d like to talk to you about spring, because “that’s all I care about”!
Since March 13, my dear colleagues at the Jardim do Monte School have been working intensively with students and parents to implement the Distance Learning Plan, trying to maintain the connection they have built with children and families so that the primordial questions intrinsic to human nature can continue to be answered.
For my part, in privileged confinement, surrounded by the exuberance of spring, I got used to “being” in this space, in the absence of all those who turned it into a school.
Every day I walk through the rooms, empty of people, but still overflowing with the feelings that inhabited them, and in each one I glimpse the hands that touched the objects, the gazes that contemplated the drawings in the painting, which remain there, waiting for tomorrow, the flowers that need to be watered, the windows that need to be opened, the breeze that enters carelessly, runs through the space, ruffling the curtains, the life that waits for life to continue…
I smell the scents of spring and go out, remembering the children who used to run outside, embracing nature with shouts and laughter.
Green dresses all of space! Or rather, endless shades of this extraordinary color that speaks to us of the Earth, conveying myriad encounters between light and shadow!
I walk slowly up the slope, holding on to the rosemary that grows tall, careful not to step on the marigolds that are creeping through the flowering lavender. The paths that show us possible routes have almost disappeared under the euphoria of growth. The trees, at the height of their new shoots, intertwine their branches, some still in the dazzle of being dressed in fragile petals that the wind delicately makes fly, they create little shelters of shade and, suddenly, an orchid appears, and another, and another, looking at me almost amused, from the height of the perfection that makes them unique. I look at them closely: tiny insect-like shapes, symmetrically arranged, confident that the fascination of their colors will seduce any eye! And they’re right, looking at them up close is a temptation that guides us daily to the space they occupy, vertical in the delicacy of their size.
I arrive in the forest and the near-silence before suddenly fills with sounds that force me to look up: the songs of different birds are mixed with their flitting about in all directions. I recognize doves, goldfinches, blackbirds, red-breasted nuthatches, finches and, of course, flocks of sparrows proclaiming a carefree way of life that makes me smile… How easy it is to feel carefree, walking through greenery and chirping, comforted by the freshness of the air that sudden rays of sunlight penetrate, opening up small patches of sky that soon fade into the compact of leaves that shine, announcing the light that covers the forest’s shadow.
And suddenly everything opens up: I’ve reached the top, the King of the Mountain, so named by the children ever since they turned this place into a school. The trees generously give way to bushes, where the green, surrendered to the light, turns yellow and even white in the flowers that cover them and then, welcoming their warmth, reveals itself in the almost red-orange of the berries that make up the scenery.
I breathe, awake again to the space around me: the landscape opens up into green hills under the immensity of the sky populated by the whiteness of the clouds that sail aimlessly, invisibly blurring into new shapes that soon blur again… The swallows fly, scraping the top of the hill, because all they care about is the light! Carried along by their fluttering, I see the usual serenity of grazing cows on the hill in front of me, surrendered to the fullness of life that springs up around them. Further on, there are the horses that we usually see from school, sometimes engrossed in grazing, sometimes busy in irreverent races that fill us with joy… and once again, carefreeness…
I contemplate the immense sky that completes the existence of life on Earth and I am in it! I remember the question our late friend Georg Külewind asked us when he first worked with us: What is closest to me? We took it into the night and the next morning no one could answer it! The answer is simple: my ATTENTION! Much later, in a lecture by Steiner, I read that in everything I look at, I AM: “Man, as a soul-spiritual being, is really inside what he looks at. Awareness of what we look at comes about because our organism mirrors in it the reality we look at…. We are part of what we look at…” (Occult Reading and Occult Hearing, p. 18,19). That’s why the world needs our gaze to be revealed!
When I plunged my gaze into the splendor of spring, I experienced the reflection of that gaze in the rebirth of life in every part of that splendor, in the enchantment of its shapes, colors and movements. But in fact, at the very moment I looked, I penetrated the process behind the observed reality. Within this process, what is revealed to us is the beginning of perishing and not of life. This happened the moment the seed, fertilized by the earth, began a new cycle of life. The blossoming that surrounds us at this moment will soon perish, it is already the harbinger of the end of this cycle. The hatching of life takes place in the darkness of the seed, which takes shelter in the darkness of the earth, where the awakening of the future is contained for true Rebirth, true Life, thanks to the union between the spiritual element of the Sun and the astral Being of the Earth. The exteriority of spring can actually be the great illusion about life!
In The Gospel According to John, Steiner, in the 13th lecture (July 6, 1909), speaking of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers that have penetrated the human entity, which lead us to see physical reality as the only possible reality, and consequently to forget the spiritual origin of any and all physical phenomena, warns of the seriousness of the occurrence of this truth: the “deception regarding the external impressions of the sensory world… which we must recognize as illusion… and we must learn to see their true form behind the external aspects.”
In the context of this occurrence, physical death is the greatest illusion, the undoing of which required the emergence of the Christic impulse, i.e. the suffering of physical death by a spiritual and therefore innocent being. It was through his suffering that “the knowledge of the true form of death” was revealed, which is not perishing, but the restarting of Life in the spiritual world: “Just as a plant springs from a seed, so life springs from death, which is a seed of life and not a destructive element.”
Easter is always celebrated in spring. In addition to the temporal aspect of the year on Earth, there is another aspect that helps us to experience spring in its cosmic meaning. In order for Christ to come and redeem death, it had to have appeared on Earth, apparently contradicting the image of the Father who created Life. But, in fact, it was from the illusion into which the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces plunged humanity that the need to redeem this image emerged, in other words, to resurrect the principle of the Father: the spiritual origin of all physical phenomena.
“This was Christ’s mission on earth: to replace, through the event of Golgotha, the false figure of death with the true one,” Steiner tells us. “The new Sun of Life would never have risen if death had not come into the world and allowed itself to be defeated by Christ.” This is how we understand that the Father sent the Son to reveal his true nature, reawakening the Father’s principle in human memory. This is how Easter, celebrated in spring, acquires its cosmic significance. By immersing ourselves in its splendor, we plunge back into the Spirit of the Father, who underlies all the phenomena that sensory reality offers us.
The meaning of the meditation to be done morning and night, which Constanza Kaliks brought us a few years ago, takes on a very special significance: when I wake up to the world around me, I, being in everything I look at, am in the Father; when I fall asleep, removed from sensory reality, the Father is in me, watching over the continuation of life in my physical-etheric body.
I’ll end on a note that, for me, highlights this slow awakening in humanity’s consciousness to the existence of the Spirit of the Father, redeemed by the Son who now embodies the Being of the Earth: Earth Day was celebrated for the 50th time on April 22nd. Although little has been said about it, its significance has not passed in vain for those who cultivate this slow awakening throughout their lives, in the daily celebration of the Earth. This is the case of Jane Goodall, the woman who dedicated and still dedicates her life to LOOKING at chimpanzees, sharing her existence with these beings, turning it into a form of unconditional love for the Earth itself. I noticed that on the National Geographic Magazine channel on the evening of the 22nd there was a program about Jane Goodall’s work, as a way of marking Earth Day. So I had the privilege of seeing how a constant and dedicated gaze enabled this woman to perceive the divine in the eyes of these animal brothers and sisters (Steiner speaks of the animals closest to man as souls who, at the time of the moon’s separation, sought bodies too soon to incarnate, settling into forms that were too rigid) and to serve him so fully that today, through this service, she has brought hundreds of people together to work towards the same goal of preserving life on Earth, with real projects that have brought about beneficial and essential changes in many parts of the globe.
The times we are living in are times of redemption, of the Christification of memory, of a return to the Spirit of the Father who entrusted us with the Earth. It is through him that the future will be fulfilled and his will will be done on earth as it is in heaven. This week’s Soul Calendar bears witness to this:
… “The world is everywhere
Like a divine primordial image
Of whose truth (I) am a reflection.”
Leonor Malik
May 2020
