with Sarnia Guiton, Joao Fiandeiro Santos and Peter Moore. April 13 to 27, 2019. The tour A Further Search of Knights Templar in Portugal still has places available for April 2019. The information with the itinerary and booking form are attached, and are also available from the website www.sophiaservices.ca or from Sarnia Guiton sarnia@sophiaservices.ca.

The booking deadline is the end of January -- it is suggested that you not wait until then if you intend to join this tour. Warm regards to all fellow travelers ... Sarnia Guiton
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Flyer & Itinerary --- Printer friendly Flyer & Itinerary --- Booking Form --- Code of Conduct

Meristem started three years ago with seven students. Their new home was the Rudolf Steiner College campus in Fair Oaks, California, United States. Taking its inspiration and guidance from the the success of Ruskin Mill in England, Meristem has grown rapidly. They welcomed 58 students when the new school year started a couple of months ago.

Meristem serves young adults on the autism spectrum by helping them develop practical life skills and increase social capacity. The three-year day and residential program uses a contemporary apprenticeship model to develop contextualized, transferable skills to transition young adults into work life. The Meristem method includes students working in agriculture, craftwork, independent living skills, and work skills classes with an emphasis on transformative movement techniques that help students overcome the spatial challenges that often accompany autism.

Entering the workforce is a hallmark of the program. The transition-to-work program develops vocational skills through work experience. Students grow and sell food from the campus farm, work in the culinary arts center, the campus café, or bookstore. With Meristem's emphasis on community life, they seek opportunities to partner with local businesses for work placements and internships, as well as to help graduates find work in the community or enter college.

Please take a look at the new video "Awaken the Possible". Want to learn more? It's easy, just visit Meristem at meristem.pro.

Knitting has been gathering a lot of attention lately by crafters and scientists alike. It turns out knitting and handwork provides a host of brain and wellbeing benefits to people of all ages. For students, in particular, knitting provides an essential learning medium.

A child who is knitting a hat or a toy kitten sees their will transformed into art. They see their focused, detailed work turn into something beautiful and purpose filled. They experience how the conceptual becomes concrete.

This is why Waldorf education founder, Rudolf Steiner, lectured on the importance of handwork for students just under 100 years ago. More ...

The Nant-y-Cwm Steiner School Kindergarten building in Clynderwen, Wales was designed by Christopher Day and and built by parents and friends of Nant-y-cwm and it opened in 1991.

It was designed with the young child in mind with little cosy corners, small peephole windows, soft rounded walls painted in soft colours. It has attracted many visitors, publicity and won architectural awards. -From Nant-y-Cym Steiner School.

Growing Seasons at Thoreau College is a 9-month residential program for young adults seeking to challenge and cultivate themselves through an immersive holistic curriculum designed to engage each participant as a whole human being. Each Growing Season is organized around a distinct theme of broad contemporary and perennial significance, this year’s being HUMANS & NATURE. Although thematically diverse, each season incorporates the same core elements of rigorous engagement with great works and natural phenomena, immersion in nature, artistic practice, community living, shared labor, inner development, and self-governance. A year ago  we welcomed the Founding Fellows to Viroqua, a group of courageous collaborators willing to spend a year co-creating Thoreau College. Over the course of the program we explored different organizational models, engaged and collaborated with community partners, and learned from the diverse life experiences and perspectives of the fellows. In the spring we completed a comprehensive strategic plan and formed a new Stewarding Circle, including our board members Jacob Hundt, Robert (Karp) Karbelnikoff and Liz Franklin, and welcoming former fellows Bryan Heystek and Magdalena Bermudez, to work together on the next phase of college development. During the summer months we presented at the Thoreau Society Annual Gathering, a meeting place for Thoreau scholars and enthusiasts to share their research and ideas. In September we began a thorough revisioning process, delving back into our core mission and vision for the college, creating our first small staff, and laying the framework for the next program, Growing Seasons at Thoreau College. Since then, we have been hard at work creating a new website, planning curriculum around the theme Humans & Nature, collaborating with community partners, fundraising, and reaching out to the world to find those young people seeking and searching for this immersive, transformative program! More ...

Meadowlark Hearth is a fifth generation family farm on broken treaty land striving to become a Community Farm that serves the Earth and all its creatures while providing healing and sustenance to the human community. It serves as a venue for the Living Environment Foundation’s work of seed saving, therapeutic horticulture, farm education, and wildland preservation. Feel invited to see how LEF is doing with these goals toward Community Farming by reading the attached 2 page news and appeal letter.  The ten LEF board members truly appreciate donations of any size, realizing we need a broad base of support to accomplish complex goals. If each of you on our email list give five dollars, together the  amount would be over $6,000. We welcome suggestions, opinions, and questions toward the goal of Community Farming.  So far you are LEF's community! Please help expand the LEF endeavor by also sharing the LEF story with your family and friends. We welcome your visit any time of the year.  Let us know of interest!
 
Thank you for your time and best wishes for a warm thought-filled winter!  Beth for LEF
 
Meadowlark Hearth Living Environment Foundation is a Nebraska 501(c)(3) nonprofit.  Your contribution is tax-deductible. 
❑$5 ❑$10 ❑ $25 ❑ $50 ❑ $100 ❑ $250 ❑ $500 ❑ $1000 ❑ Other______________ Apply my donation to: ❑ General Support ❑ Seed Saving and Bio-Diversity ❑ Educational programs for farmers, youth and people with all kinds of special needs. ❑ Purchase and retain organic land in perpetuity. 
TOTAL Enclosed $ _________________ 

Mail checks to: Living Environment Foundation, 120024 Everett Drive, Scottsbluff, NE 69361 USA
 
Living Environment Foundation, 501c3 ----- education on the farm ----- www.livingenvironmentfoundationne.org

WHEN the candles are lit on the Christmas Tree, the human soul feels as though the symbol of an eternal reality were standing there, and that this must always have been the symbol of the Christmas Festival, even in a far distant past. For in the autumn, when outer Nature fades, when the sun's creations fall as it were into slumber and man's organs of outer perception must turn away from the phenomena of the physical world, the soul has the opportunity — nay not only the opportunity but the urge — to withdraw into its innermost depths, in order to feel and to experience: Now, when the light of the outer sun is faintest and its warmth feeblest, now is the time when the soul withdraws into the darkness but can find within itself the inner, spiritual Light. The lights on the Christmas Tree stand there before us as a symbol of the inner, spiritual Light that is kindled in the outer darkness. And because what we feel to be the spirit-light of the soul shining into the darkness of Nature seems to be an eternal reality, we imagine that the lighted fir-tree shining out to us on Christmas Night must have been shining ever since our earthly incarnations began.

And yet it is not so. It is only one or at most two centuries ago that the Christmas Tree became a symbol of the thoughts and feelings which arise in man at the Christmas season. The Christmas Tree is a recent symbol but each year anew it reveals to man a great, eternal truth. That is why we imagine that it must always have existed, even in the remote past. It is as if from the Christmas Tree itself there resounded the proclamation of the Divine in the cosmic expanse, in the heavenly heights. The human being can feel this to be the unfailing source of those forces of peace in his soul which spring from good-will. And thus, according to the Christmas Legend, did the proclamation also resound when the shepherds visited the birthplace of the Child whose festival we celebrate on Christmas Day. To the shepherds there rang forth from the clouds: From the cosmic expanse, from the heavenly heights, the Divine Powers are revealing themselves, bringing peace to the human soul that is filled with good-will.

Paul Klee was a Swiss-German artist influenced by Theosophy and by the art movements of Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. Paul Klee was born December 18, 1879 in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland. His German father was a music teacher and his mother was a Swiss singer. The boy, a talented violinist, naturally aspired to a musical career until he found more meaning in the visual arts. He was not a stellar student, but in 1898 was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He died on June 29, 1940. Klee was known for his writings and lectures on color theory and design. While working at the Bauhaus, Klee was influenced, directly or indirectly, to Theosophy by his colleague Wassily Kandinsky. He was also exposed to the concepts of Rudolf Steiner. Paul Klee was almost a symbolist, nearly an abstractionist, not quite an expressionist or a full-blown surrealist, and never wholly the Bauhaus technocrat. He made his own way around, through and between these epochal movements in modern art. As his most famous statement had it, Klee took a line for a walk. It snaked, looped, wandered off, and turned back on itself as it made its fitful journey through the worlds of his invention. On its way it found trees and plants, fish and camels, rooftops and roads, natural and human order, angels and woodlice. A donkey discovered in a wavering musical stave, a tightrope walker camouflaged amid a flickering field of dots, querulous beings and happy leviathans populate Klee's world. Some works are remarkably free and offhand; others have the intricacy of a Swiss watch. Klee could draw a whole city in a space smaller than the palm of your hand.

A Swiss-born painter and graphic artist whose personal, often gently humorous works are replete with allusions to dreams, music, and poetry, Paul Klee, b. Dec. 18, 1879, d. June 29, 1940, is difficult to classify.
Primitive art, surrealism, cubism, and children's art all seem blended into his small-scale, delicate paintings, watercolors, and drawings. Klee grew up in a musical family and was himself a violinist. After much hesitation he chose to study art, not music, and he attended the Munich Academy in 1900. There his teacher was the popular symbolist and society painter Franz von STUCK. Klee later toured Italy (1901-02), responding enthusiastically to Early Christian and Byzantine art.

Klee's early works are mostly etchings and pen-and-ink drawings. These combine satirical, grotesque, and surreal elements and reveal the influence of Francisco de Goya and James Ensor, both of whom Klee admired. Two of his best-known etchings, dating from 1903, are Virgin in a Tree and Two Men Meet, Each Believing the Other to Be of Higher Rank. Such peculiar, evocative titles are characteristic of Klee and give his works an added dimension of meaning. After his marriage in 1906 to the pianist Lili Stumpf, Klee settled in Munich, then an important center for avant-garde art. That same year he exhibited his etchings for the first time. His friendship with the painters Wassily Kandinsky and August Macke prompted him to join Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), an expressionist group that contributed much to the development of abstract art. A turning point in Klee's career was his visit to Tunisia with Macke and Louis Molliet in 1914. He was so overwhelmed by the intense light there that he wrote: "Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever. That is the significance of this blessed moment. Color and I are one. I am a painter." He now built up compositions of colored squares that have the radiance of the mosaics he saw on his Italian sojourn. The watercolor Red and White Domes (1914; Collection of Clifford Odets, New York City) is distinctive of this period. Klee often incorporated letters and numerals into his paintings, as in Once Emerged from the Gray of Night (1917-18; Klee Foundation, Berlin). These, part of Klee's complex language of symbols and signs, are drawn from the unconscious and used to obtain a poetic amalgam of abstraction and reality. He wrote that "Art does not reproduce the visible, it makes visible," and he pursued this goal in a wide range of media using an amazingly inventive battery of techniques. Line and color predominate with Klee, but he also produced series of works that explore mosaic and other effects.

Klee taught at the Bauhaus school after World War I, where his friend Kandinsky was also a faculty member. In Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925), one of his several important essays on art theory, Klee tried to define and analyze the primary visual elements and the ways in which they could be applied. In 1931 he began teaching at Dusseldorf Academy, but he was dismissed by the Nazis, who termed his work "degenerate." In 1933, Klee went to Switzerland. There he came down with the crippling collagen disease scleroderma, which forced him to develop a simpler style and eventually killed him. The late works, characterized by heavy black lines, are often reflections on death and war, but his last painting.

n the face of an ongoing funding problems, the Mbagathi Rudolf Steiner School in Kenya, which caters for children from the most underprivileged backgrounds, is seeking more stable and innovative forms of sponsorship.

NAIROBI (NNA) – The oldest Rudolf Steiner school in East Africa has continued to face funding difficulties in 2018 following a drop of sponsorship income in recent years which led to a shortfall of five million Kenyan shillings (KES) (£36,300, €40,700, US$ 48,400) in 2017. The Mbagathi Rudolf Steiner School’s “unique commitment to support underpriviledge children” had also led to an ongoing struggle to find a sound financial basis for the school since the majority of parents are unable to pay the school fees, the school says. Most of the children at the “Mother School of East Africa” come from families where poverty affects many aspects of their lives; many are orphans. Food, clothing and school fees are daily struggles, and fear of a future in poverty with no real hope for change is a major hindrance. More ...