Summer Reflections
Journal Entry, August 4, 2005
by Susan Silverio
"The Child from Birth to Three: World Citizen" is the title of the course that Cynthia Aldinger and I offered at Rudolf Steiner Institute last week. I found that, just as in the kindergarten, there is hope and vision streaming through those who arrive each morning for class, and I am honored to serve as the midwife.
The Institute has the quality of a festival, lifted out of our daily lives and serving to renew and reorient our daily lives. And the Institute itself, after wandering from Maine to Quebec for the past two summers, has now found a home at verdant Green Mountain College in southwestern Vermont. We could look up from the course in Spiritual Embryology with Jaap van der Wal and see the hens pecking and scratching outside our window. On the day that I was preparing to present "People as Curriculum" including the inner life of the caregiver, I arrived at the theater building for class to find a team of gentle golden oxen yoked on the grass by the front door, the resident farmer giving them a slight brush with his crop to guide them, and a young woman stroking their tender noses between their magnificent horns.
As in the LifeWays Training, we found several continents represented among the students and their spouses who gathered there - Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Canada, and both coasts of the states. They are seekers with heartfelt dreams, intending to create homes and to open centers to care for children and their families - radical and counter-cultural activity to be sure.
In the course we explored the mysteries of the human soul coming to birth, and the wondrous process of the individual child raising herself into upright equilibrium and speaking. Through simple nurturing games, we explored how a spirit of playfulness in the caregiver can sustain the joy and complete communion that the child so recently experienced in the spiritual world before birth. Cultivating joyfulness in our daily work raises it to become the Domestic and Nurturing Arts. --Susan Silverio
