Happy Earth Day! It was in 1970 that this day was initiated, giving voice to an emerging consciousness about our environment, channeling the energy of the anti-war protest movement, and placing environmental concerns at the fore. By the end of that year, the first Earth Day culminated with the creation of the U.S. Environmental  Protection Agency, and the passage of the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts. Pulling from the BDA archives an article in the Spring 1970 (No. 94) Biodynamics journal called “Earth Day: In Perspective," Philip S. Very notes, 

“Although Bio-Dynamics has been espousing the prin­ciples of proper ecology for decades, some of us in our hearts probably wondered how many "out there" were listening. It appears that an audience is now "out there" which keenly wishes to know how they might best live a life closer to the earth, and how they might keep it fertile in order to improve the nutrition and health of the individual. An audience is growing now "out there" which is beginning to develop a consciousness of the earth as a living being, one which we should hold dear." 

In the present, this day represents for the BDA and its members an important time for honoring the earth, cosmos, and community from which our lives gather wisdom, energy, and sustenance. We are nearing the end of our annual Member Appeal, and are pleased to share that 412 people have joined or renewed their memberships during this appeal. We are so close to meeting our goal of 500 people! Please remember, BDA membership renewals operate on a rolling basis: renew now to keep your membership valid for a year past your current expiration date!

This coming May we are launching the BDA Pen Pal Program. We're also extending invitations to Author Conversation Salons for all membership levels moving forward. Members can also enjoy a discount on online education, like Claudia J. Ford's upcoming course on The Sacred Feminine. Last but not least, take a look at the opportunities members can contribute to the success of the 2019 Biodynamic Conference. 

​Again and again we must ask: What is a festival such as that of Easter for the greater part of mankind? It may be said of a very many people that when they are in the circle of their friends who still want to gather together to keep the festival, all their thinking about Easter runs along the lines of old habits of thought; they use the old words, they go on uttering them more or less automatically, they make the same renunciation in the same formula to which they have long been accustomed. But have we any right to-day to utter this renunciation, when we can observe on every hand a distinct unwillingness to take part in the great change that is so necessary in our own time? Are we justified in using the words of Paul: “Not I, but Christ in me!” when we show so little inclination to examine into what it is that has brought such great unhappiness to mankind in the modern age? Should it not go together with the Easter festival that we set out to gain a clear idea of the destiny that has befallen mankind and of what it is that alone can lead us out of the catastrophe — namely, super-sensible knowledge? If the Easter festival, whose whole significance depends upon super-sensible knowledge — for knowledge of the senses can never explain the Resurrection of Christ Jesus — if this Easter festival is to be taken seriously, is it not essential that men should bethink themselves how a super-sensible character can be brought again into the human faculty of knowledge? Should not this be the thought that rises up in men's minds to-day: All the lying and deception in modern culture is due to the fact that we ourselves are no longer in earnest about what we recognise as the sacred festivals of the year?

We keep Easter, the festival of Resurrection, but in our materialistic outlook we have long ago ceased caring whether or not we have a real understanding of the Resurrection. We set ourselves at enmity with the truth and we try to find all manner of ingenious ways of accepting the cosmic jest — for indeed it would be, or rather it is a jest that man should keep the festival of the Resurrection and at the same time put his whole faith in modern science which obviously can never make appeal to such a Resurrection. Materialism and the keeping of Easter — these are two things that cannot possibly belong together; they cannot possibly exist side by side. And the materialism of modern theology — that too is incompatible with the Easter festival. In our own time a book entitled “The Essence of Christianity” has been written by an eminent theologian of Central Europe, and is accounted of outstanding importance. Yet throughout this work we find evidence of a desire not to take seriously the fact of the Resurrection of Christ Jesus. There you have a true symptom of the times!

Men must learn to feel these things deeply in their hearts. We shall never find a way out of our present troubles unless we develop understanding of the enmity cherished by the modern materialistically minded man towards the truth, unless we learn to see through things like this, for they are of very great significance in life to-day.

Dear Colleagues and Friends,   
 
For five days next week, 1100 Waldorf early childhood educators from around the world will gather at the Goetheanum in Dornach to celebrate 100 years of Waldorf education, and to look at the past, the present, and most importantly, the future of our work with young children and their families around the world. Inner Freedom and Social Responsibility will be the focus of our work together. 

On Thursday, April 18th, we will have a special Waldorf 100 celebration, accompanied by the lighting of candles in a great circle around the Goetheanum, with music and words of celebration. As a central element of this celebration will be a verse given by Rudolf Steiner, called "Victorious Spirit". 

We would like to invite our colleagues around the world to join us on that day by speaking this same verse as you begin your day, or as you meet with your colleagues:  

Victorious Spirit, 
Flame through the impotence of irresolute Souls,
Burn out the egoism,
Ignite the compassion,
That selflessness,
The life stream of mankind, 
Well up as the source
Of Spirit rebirth.

In this way, a great spiritual wave can encircle the globe throughout the day, and we can all feel joined together in celebration and commitment toward the tasks of the future. 

with warm greetings from IASWECE - Clara Aerts, Stefanie Allon, Erika Henning, Silvia Jensen, Susan Howard, Philipp Reubke, and Lourdes Tormes

"Victorious Spirit" in various languages 

Chinese - Danish - Dutch - English - Finnish- French- German- Hungarian- Italian- Norwegian- Polish - Russian - Spanish- Swedish - Ukrainian 

Visit our Website for more information on IASWECE and the World Conference!

by Jeannie Hargreaves (Sophia Institute student, Waldorf Program)

Abstract

​In our modern education system the debate among educators and parents continues to focus on the differences between unstructured play vs focused structured activities in preschool and in Kindergarten classrooms. It has become a hot topic in many schools whom claim one learning program is ideal over the other and without academics children will fall behind in elementary grades. Many public and private early education programs have turned towards more structured academic learning activities with less time for free and creative play than ever before. Based on current findings, many child physiologists, educators and pediatricians are raising concerns about the increase in academic focused activities and the lack of free play or recess periods in school today. They are saying children with access to play-based programs have higher executive functioning and will be healthier, wealthier, and more socially stable throughout their lives as a result. Although children whom learn a specific skills such as reading, math or how to play an instrument may be ahead of the non-academics in those areas, the lack of free choice activities overall hinders the child’s brain functions and can have a negative effect on their ability to learn basic life skills. 

By Ulrich Meier

​In the past 100 years there has been a comprehensive change in social awareness in the field of reflection on gender roles. There was still immense pressure 50 years ago on children, adolescents and adults to make them unmistakeably aware of how they had to see themselves and behave as a girl or woman, boy or man! The sole determining factor of who we could be and become was our biological sex from which our social roles and understanding of ourselves had to be derived.

Then there was the different value placed on feminine and masculine roles arising from the tradition of androcentrism, a way of thinking which over a long period of time placed the man at the centre of our view of the human being. The sexual focus on the respective other sex also belonged to the field of gender role identity which could not be questioned in any way. If girls or boys became aware that they felt sexually attracted to members of their own sex, they had to expect a lack of understanding, exclusion or even prosecution under the law.

What a different stage the debate has reached today! The front page of the January 2017 special issue of National Geographic reads: “Gender Revolution. The shifting landscape of gender”. The term gender has been used since the 1950s – in Germany from 1975 – to describe a person’s gender as a social construct. It was an attempt in the social sciences to look for a term to express the gender characteristics of a person as influenced by society and culture as distinct from their biological sex.

The advance of individualism in the twentieth and twenty-first century appears to open ever new ways of enabling identity to be formed outside set standards and enforced decisions. If to begin with the debate about changes in the definition of roles was still focused on people with a biologically assigned female or male body identifying with the respective other gender role (transgender), the discussion now is also beginning to include the identity of a person outside the usual (binary) system of masculinity/femininity (genderqueer).

But many different possible variations of transition and mixed forms arise from the differentiated personal experience of the search for identity. Here questions of drug-based and surgical intervention are being discussed with increasing openness – as well as the possibilities and freedoms of sexual orientation.

At which level do I shape my identity?

That what makes a man a man and a woman a woman is not simply determined by the sex we are born with barely needs saying anymore. Rather, the body serves as one specification among others which gives us our identity. If I relate – positively or negatively – exclusively to the physical level, this does not necessarily mean by a long way that the social and emotional component is experienced as coherent with that. And if I only make a distinction between the physical and social side of gender roles, without asking about what arises from the centre of the personality itself, this is ultimately still not about the actual goal of self-determination which has come into view since we started to leave external gender assignment behind us.

Let us begin with a few basic thoughts on the current state of the debate which are increasingly – and in the face of surprising resistance – emerging as common sense. The first thing is that it should be assured with all the resources of democratic culture that no one is forced to live with any other identity or sexual orientation than the one that seems coherent to them.

But then the following should also be considered: before hormone treatment is given or there is surgery to correct the physical facts, the question should be asked whether the corresponding decision has been taken with the greatest possible degree of inner freedom.

Both things play a particular role when we are dealing with children and adolescents – after all, the process of discovering our gender role already starts in early childhood. I see an important characteristic of this discovery process in the emotional uncertainty and openness with regard to our own existence which, we are told, should manifest itself clearly as either feminine or masculine.

It is doubtful whether it has always been like this. In Judeo-Christian culture other roots can indeed be found in the Hebrew Bible in this regard: the human being of the first creation appears there in the likeness of God as both masculine and feminine and thus knows no necessity to differentiate by sex – on whatever level.

The corresponding place in Genesis 1:27 should actually be translated literally as: “And God created the human being in his own image, in the image of God created he the human being; male and female created he the human being.” That only changed with the separation of the sexes in the second account of creation (Genesis 2) when the human being was literally separated in the well-known image of the rib. For each woman and each man this separation physically means a reduction of what was originally perfect – a wound of one-sidedness which can give rise to suffering and pleasure in equal measure.

This fundamental uncertainty does not fit with the old picture which endeavours to create apparent certainty based on the biological facts at birth which the newborn has to fit in with for the whole of their life.

It is precisely in the uncertainty that the strength of identification with masculine and feminine connoted characteristics lies which each person has to struggle for and which is constantly called into question. Hence it could become an ideal of education to support children and adolescents in the openness and insecurity of the search for their identity instead of making their own discovery more difficult through demands and assignments from outside in order to give them an ostensible feeling of security.

But the question remains: how can the I become free to give itself its respective identity with regard to biological sex and social gender? The gender concept can make a crucial difference in moving forward here because it adds to the view of the physical characteristics a second level at which the “deeply experienced identity” allows for a source of self-understanding as a man or woman which is more appropriately suited to the individual circumstances.

Not Venus or Mars, but moon and comet

As long as 100 years ago Carl Gustav Jung and Rudolf Steiner emphasised aspects of femininity and masculinity which can take us a step further in the search for an identity in freedom. Both views of the human being have in common that the polarity and tension between what is archetypally feminine and masculine is present and related to one another in each person. The opposites are neither distributed across different individuals nor are they simply neutralised or levelled out. On the contrary, it is precisely the distinctness of the two principles which establishes the creative coexistence which uses the different natures as a stimulus.

C.G. Jung referred in his theory of archetypes to the contrasting pair of animus und anima. It is located in the male and female soul with its orientation towards the unconscious. He says about the anima as the feminine side of the masculine soul: “Every man has always carried the image of woman in himself …” Its counterpart is the animus, a collection of unconscious masculine attributes and potentials in the unconscious of the woman. On the basis of the depth dimension of such masculine and feminine aspects, the respective other gender part can be integrated and a balance of the polar archetypes found in the inner maturation process of individuation.

Rudolf Steiner in his anthroposophical understanding of the human being turns his eye from the depths of the soul to the heights of cosmic development. Surprisingly this does not lead him to the polarity of Mars and Venus, the symbols already used since the fourth century for the designation of man and woman.

In a lecture of 5 March 1910 he talks about the “Mysteries of the Universe: Comets and the Moon” (GA 118). His basic thought is that “masculine and feminine as they exist on earth are born out of higher cosmic opposites”. He was thus deliberately seeking a relationship between the microcosm of the human being and the macrocosm of our solar system. And he was not seeking an allegory or theme but a developmental movement, a process.

He emphasises that to begin with sun and earth do not have any varying influence on either sex. Both are at a stage of development in the solidification process from spirit into matter which is described as the intermediate human stage. Comets, in contrast, represent a less solidified, the moon a more solidified stage of development.

That Steiner does not thereby deliver a cheap typology for the old biological definition of man and woman will become clear from the following sentence. We should not think that the contrast between the effects of the comets and the moon “only comes to expression in all the things that for example constitute man and woman in humanity, but we have to be clear that there are quasi masculine characteristics in each woman and feminine characteristics in each man”. He discusses the benefits which can lie in such differing solidification – in dissolving or binding processes – using the example of various differing phenomena.

Not rigid identification but flowing transitions

Neither the dissolution of traditional certainties nor the polarity between masculine and feminine as set out also in this article has of necessity to trigger fear, rejection and thus discrimination. The rich field of images of gender role components designated as feminine and masculine offers enough “material” from which each of us can help ourselves, that is understand ourselves, out of the centre of our being in various biographical phases and in the flow of identificational relationships. Obviously the physical determinants – even if they appear to show increasing openness – are much more fixed than the ever new identity, determinable out of the flexible spirit, with which an individual can clothe themselves.

What an opportunity to offer the generation of our children and grandchildren to allow them benevolently and with humour to have the experiences they are seeking as their identity changes, including in the field of gender roles, benefitting the growth, maturity and breadth of their personality!


About the author: Ulrich Meier is a state-approved child care worker and priest in the Christian Community. Since the autumn of 2006 he has been in the leadership of the Christian Community seminary in Hamburg. More ...

By Claudia J. Ford, PhD

We are in a downward spiral that we are called on to transform to a sacred spiral. Our contemporary agricultural system is a major driver of global warming and climate change. The specific dysfunctions of ecologically imbalanced, socially unjust agricultural and food systems manifest in how we currently treat land, water, soil, air, plants, animals, and each other. Industrial farming systems are among the primary forces behind biodiversity loss, declining animal and public health, smallholder land dispossession, pollution and environmental degradation of ecosystems, and entrenched food injustice. The belief systems that underlie the way global society is shaped are regrettably characterized by principles and practices of winner-take-all competition, social Darwinism, unbridled neoliberal capitalism, extreme wealth divergence, oppression, colonialism, hoarding, and scarcity. The negative, damaging characteristics of the way society is organized are felt acutely in the environmental sectors, especially constraining the ability of humans and the environment to maintain sustainable, regenerative agriculture and healthy, just food systems. Current social norms correspond to a period of destruction on personal, social, and biosphere levels.

Yet, these destructive characteristics that presently have prominence in how society is shaped are an historically recent phenomenon. We are called to acknowledge and remember other paradigms that support co-creative, reciprocal, and respectful relationships with land and with each other. These relationships, specifically within agricultural and food systems, require that we dismantle regimes of oppression and destruction without replicating those same patterns. Small-scale agriculture has the potential to enhance community-driven and localized solutions to environmental degradation. The food system has the potential to be the nucleus for re-imagination of localized, post-carbon communities. Egalitarian influence over agricultural and food systems requires that we elevate the social and environmental values of agriculture above the market logistics and profit motives.[i] We are called on to heal societal, individual, and land traumas perpetuated by living under oppressive systems while simultaneously transforming those systems. The ethical costs and injustices of industrialized agriculture are intolerable, so we are tasked to make sacred, again, our concepts of nature and our relationship to Earth.

An important premise of sacred agriculture is the prospect of simultaneously paying attention to the economic, environmental, social, and spiritual opportunities and challenges of healthy farms and food production. A reclamation of the principles and practices of The Sacred Feminine — wholeness, community, creativity, cooperation — is critical to balancing the unhealthy structures of society which have brought the environment and humanity, individually and collectively, to the brink of catastrophic change. In order to move away from the edge of environmental disaster and the breakdown of agricultural, food, and social systems, while transforming these systems to healthier more balanced arrangements, we are required to embrace new philosophies and new paradigms for how we treat land and each other. The wisdom of the sacred feminine, represented by Sophia, consists of principles and practices that can help make these human behavioral shifts possible.

The sacred feminine paradigm is characterized by principles of non-dualistic thinking and practice, the equal value of humans to each other and to nature, abundance, shared powers, valuing a diversity of worldviews and modes of inquiry, ceremony and ritual, transformative justice, service, and compassion. The sacred feminine should be understood in an interdisciplinary manner including and giving equal respect to multiple practice methodologies, diverse ethnographic and cultural lineages, different ways of learning, and new models and archetypes of community and of leadership. There are clear relationships between sacred feminine paradigms and the historical and lived knowledge of indigenous peoples. Respectful agricultural epistemological exchanges are possible if we adhere to principles of appropriate attribution and social justice, so that we are deferentially building on and adapting the wisdom of ancestral and indigenous knowledges.

Sophia is one of the universal Great Mothers. Sophia is the goddess who stands for wisdom, skill, cleverness, and grace. Sophia represents an awakening. When we engage the ancestral wisdom of the sacred feminine for food system transformation we are awakened to full participation in a shift of our food systems and farming methods out of dysfunction and into wellness and health. We are both returning to and moving towards the wisdom of sacred agriculture, asking to be guided by Sophia into the sacred spiral of just, healthy food and agricultural engagements.

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When college is held up as the one true path to success, parents—especially highly educated ones—might worry when their children opt for vocational school instead. - By Meg St. Esprit

Toren Reesman knew from a young age that he and his brothers were expected to attend college and obtain a high-level degree. As a radiologist—a profession that requires 12 years of schooling—his father made clear what he wanted for his boys: “Keep your grades up, get into a good college, get a good degree,” as Reesman recalls it. Of the four Reesman children, one brother has followed this path so far, going to school for dentistry. Reesman attempted to meet this expectation, as well. He enrolled in college after graduating from high school. With his good grades, he got into West Virginia University—but he began his freshman year with dread. He had spent his summers in high school working for his pastor at a custom-cabinetry company. He looked forward each year to honing his woodworking skills, and took joy in creating beautiful things. School did not excite him in the same way. After his first year of college, he decided not to return.

He says pursuing custom woodworking as his lifelong trade was disappointing to his father, but Reesman stood firm in his decision, and became a cabinetmaker. He says his father is now proud and supportive, but breaking with family expectations in order to pursue his passion was a difficult choice for Reesman—one that many young people are facing in the changing job market.

Traditional-college enrollment rates in the United States have risen this century, from 13.2 million students enrolled in 2000 to 16.9 million students in 2016. This is an increase of 28 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Meanwhile, trade-school enrollment has also risen, from9.6 million students in 1999 to 16 million in 2014. This resurgence came after a decline in vocational education in the 1980s and ’90s. That dip created a shortage of skilled workers and tradespeople.

The Philosophical Roots of Waldorf Education

Waldorf Education Approaches its 100th year in 2019. This book provides an innovative opportunity to understand the ideas and philosophy behind this extraordinary educational method. Now Waldorf Education is the fastest growing independent educational movement in the world, with over 1,100 schools, and even more kindergarten programs, in 63 countries around the globe. Introduced by Rudolf Steiner in collaboration with Emil and Berta Molt, CEO of the Waldorf Astoria Cigarette Factory, following the chaos in Germany after WWI, the recognition that a new social order was needed sparked the enlightened industrialist to act through education with Steiner’s insight as a lodestar to the endeavor. Goals of the philosophy were to develop in the young new and flexible thinking to inspire genuinely new thoughts to produce social forms unique to the 20th century and the coming new Millennium.

Fred Amrine is a professor of German literature at the University of Michigan and an accomplished author and translator.  He brings to life the path of philosophy in a wonderfully accessible way that precedes Steiner’s signature work, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. This work provided the crucial underpinnings for the curriculum in the Waldorf school, a curriculum that leads to clear thinking, educated feelings, and moral action in the young throughout life. More ...