Reverie – And Other Gifts From The Heart

Cornmother

Cornmother

By Mark Haberstroh
A Christmas Special, From Lessons Along The Way, Mark Haberstroh, 2012

Reverie

There ought to be a mathematical relation between every breath we take and an increased measure of gratefulness. Perhaps it can be quantified by writing B²=2G, where G, with few exceptions, is ever greater than B. However, having made the point, the point is thereby missed. No moral perception can or should be quantified, thank Goodness, although we often take the simplest things for granted and miss their moral lessons. From the other side those simple things are our miracles in the everyday. The linearity of logic clears a singular and straight path to the goal, but excludes Life through its passage. This is the sacrifice for freedom. The taproot draws directly the earth’s cool water, yet the root system increasingly differentiates and refines its branching into a smallness so delicate and minute as to approach the invisible. Here life flows through root tips in waves that cannot be touched or measured on a dial. This, the secret place of incipient transformation, is where matter leaves matter behind and so loses itself, leaving an echo that allows the impress of spirit, of receptivity to the divine. The shadow of what was becomes filled with the New. Somewhere a distant trumpet sounds in the depths of worlds, not heard by outer ears but by the devoted heart, marshalling elementals in that first movement of life in rivers of spirit flowing toward physical manifestation. Growth becomes musical experience.

Of like nature are those ever-so-quiet whispers of thoughts into the mind, hardly heard … as if in a dream where the reticent unicorn flees from the periphery of vision. Having barely touched with silver hoof our dream’s soft edge, he leaves us with longing for pure and noble deeds. Those whispers are the shy voices of Angels who await our opening, who await our efforts to raise ourselves into a shared resonance, a crescendo of soul and spirit gliding into more light-filled spaces, born aloft by the breath of a gratefulness that builds wings bearing us to higher things. This might be Grace.

It is a miracle that I can place one foot in front of the other while breathing in the cool night air, lovely Sylphs and all. Their interpenetration can be felt as a gentle shock, yet setting fear aside, the message becomes clear through mutually conscious assent, and in unison we chime, “We are one, yet know we are not. Thank you.” Striding forth in consciousness overcomes the Maya of separateness and aloneness, which is the beneficent darkness that must be endured to know who we are. This welcoming darkness is of the earth, our Mother, and the healing bosom of sleep. We work toward the light of the Father that irradiates and activates … and with the Help of the Son we bind ourselves in freedom, bearing Witness as the three cast their healing shadows in the human soul and through the world, giving us the rose, the honeybee, or a hummingbird as well as Piety, Truth, and Virtue. And along this path of cognitive metamorphosis the soul’s heart becomes inwardly lit, and the dark is not so dark anymore. – Mark Haberstroh

Lessons Along The Way

[http://lessonsalongtheway.weebly.com]

The Christmas Festival in the Changing Course of Time

The Christmas Festival In The Changing Course Of Time  By Rudolf Steiner

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Lecture by Rudolf Steiner, December 22, 1910, Berlin. GA 125

Published by Anthroposophic Press in 1988, translated by Ernst Katz and edited by Marguerite Miller Click to Buy this Book!

Offering a review on the Now I See bLog related to the Christmas season was felt to be appropriate, especially amidst the line-up of very serious, contemporary books currently presented on the bLog, or soon Coming. Each Christmas season, a non-fiction story from any source, including lectures, articles or books, can be offered. This year the selected lecture by Rudolf Steiner fits perfectly under the previously-established category: Steiner’s Works. This special Christmas review will continue on the Now I See home page through Epiphany, January 6, 2013.

Rudolf Steiner begins this lecture with reference to the city in which he was then living, Berlin: “When we wander this time of year through the streets of large cities, we find them full of all sorts of things which our contemporaries want to have for their celebration of the approaching Christmas festival. And yet, if we contemplate what will take place in the coming days in large cities such as ours, we may well ask: Does all this correspond rightly to what is meant to flow through the souls and hearts of men?” Such preparations and celebrations “… fit in poorly with all the other happenings of modern civilization around us, and equally poorly with what should live in the depth of the human heart as a commemorative thought of the greatest impulse which humanity has received in the course of its evolution.” He recalls a genuine mood that prevailed during the Christmas season as late as the time of his own childhood, when small groups of actors would perform plays of “The Holy Story” and “The Three Kings” that required many weeks of rehearsal. There was awareness then that the whole human being, including his mind and morals, must be cleansed and purified if he wished to partake in art in a worthy way. People then naturally felt man’s path from heaven to earth through the Fall – and the re-ascent of man through Christ from earth to heaven – and they understood what was meant when the Tree of Knowledge in paradise was mentioned.

Since neither the Christmas mood of old nor the modern celebrations are appropriate, how then is Christmas to be experienced in our time? Today we must have the opportunity “… to find again the divine-spiritual world, precisely by an even stronger and more meaningful deepening of the soul … We need ways which will lead us to a wellspring in human nature that lies deeper, to a wellspring of human nature which, in a certain sense, is independent of external time.” New moods and deeper feelings for the Christmas season can awaken in us “… if we consider what can be born in our own soul when our innermost wellspring is so well-attuned to what is sacred, so purified through spiritual knowledge, that this wellspring can take in the holy mystery of the Christ Impulse … When Christ will be born in our own soul at the Christmastide of our soul, we may then look forward to the Eastertide, the resurrection of the spirit in our own inner life … The child of light, whom we have nurtured throughout the entire year by immersing ourselves in the wisdom-treasures of Spiritual Science, is to be born.”

The symbols illustrated on the book cover shown are explained in Signs and Symbols of the Christmas Festival, a lecture by Rudolf Steiner, Berlin, 1906, GA 96. The symbols are placed on the new Christmas tree, and the star at the top of the tree signifies the star of mankind developing itself. In the Signs and Symbols lecture Rudolf Steiner also stresses: “Man lives on toward a state when the light shall be born in him.” – Review by Martha Keltz

This excellent lecture can be read and studied on-line at: http://wn.rudolfsteinerelib.org/Festivals/Christmas/ChrFes_index.html, or purchased from Amazon.com.

And now, a little bit about RUDOLF STEINER (1861-1925): Philosopher, scholar, scientist, and educator, he was the founder of Anthroposophy, a modern spiritual path or science. Out of his spiritual researches, he was able to provide indications for the renewal of many human activities, including education (the Waldorf Schools), agriculture (Biodynamics), medicine (Anthroposophical Medicine), special education (the Camphill Movement), economics, philosophy, and religion. In 1924, he founded the General Anthroposophical Society, which today has branches throughout the world.

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