>>Reprinted by permission. This article originally appeared in Orion
>>(Autumn 1999). 187 Main Street, Great Barrington, MA 01230,
>>www.oriononline.org.
With hats off to Jane, I've secured permission from the author to
post this wonderful article on Rudolf Steiner's Calendar of the Soul
on www.gardeningforthefuture.com. A short 'exerpt' appears below. The
complete article will appeart on www.gardeningforthefuture.com as
demand warrants.
-Allan
Deep Green
The One Life within Us and Abroad: Rudolf Steiner's Calendar of the Soul
by Gertrude Reif Hughes
Maybe it's because I'm an academic, or maybe it's the famous ability
of mortality to concentrate the human mind-or perhaps it's just a
personal idiosyncrasy-but I know that I feel a clearer connection
between my own inner life and that of the planet in autumn than at
any other time of year. The waning light poses a challenge. Will I be
able to compensate for the growing cold and warm to my tasks? Am I
ready? Fall asks something of me. Spring, whether because it's so
beautiful or, for a teacher, so impossibly burdensome, overwhelms me
every year. But fall, with all its warnings and wanings, stirs me to
take initiative, make a contribution, find my own powers and use
them. Fall and winter open a space for me to fill.
"The course of the year has its own life," said Rudolf Steiner in the
1918 Preface to his Calendar of the Soul. As human beings we can
"unfold a feeling-unison" with it. We can breathe out with the year,
from spring's sprouting and blossoming to high summer; then we can
follow the year's in-breathing as it moves through autumn to the
depths of winter. The fifty-two verses of the Calendar, one for each
week of the year, follow the year's cycle, and allow us to perceive
the changes around us in terms of our own inner activity. The verses
alert the soul, says Steiner's Preface, to "the delicate yet vital
threads...between it and the world into which it has been born."
Coleridge called those threads "the one life within us and abroad."
Robert Frost wrote of inner and outer weather. The Calendar connects
them at a deep level, an esoteric one. "
Written in German in 1912, translated since then into
numerous languages, the Soul Calendar has supported and inspired
hundreds of meditants and others interested in connecting themselves
to the cycle of the year. I first encountered the Calendar when I was
thirty-two years old, some thirty years ago. I'd been meditating for
five or six years and was already earnestly committed to
anthroposophy, the name given to Steiner's varied life work, but I
found the verses uncongenial as meditative material and unappealing
as poetry. Though I'm a professor of literature, with a specialty in
poetry and Romanticism, I didn't recognize that the Calendar develops
Romantic themes concerning how nature and the human life of
imagination intertwine. Still, it was the academic life that
ultimately brought me back to the Calendar. Academic life, and the
death of my mother, who had been a devoted reader of the Calendar as
well as a profound lover of nature. In memory of her, I decided to
open the Soul Calendar once more.
"
To be continued at www.gardeningforthefuture.com
