{ parent-theses }

The Body Senses

2011-04-15T07:34:00.003+10:00

West of Alice Springs, last October, Bettye and I stopped to look at the ochre-pits where the Arrernte people had gathered ceremonial ochre for generations. We walk in from the road. The experienced world amazes, always... After marvelling awhile at the vertical striations of rich and varied colour in the stream bank, we decided to go on, up the track to the ridge and its eventual juncture with the Larapinta Trail.

Walking along the stony creek bed, Bettye suddenly paused and exclaimed, “This is why I love the wilderness! It’s so enlivening to walk on these stones...”

We walked on in silence, making our way up the ridge. There’s a deep well of attention, which envelops me sometimes when I’m realising something.

Thinking the body-senses...

This is ankle-turning country, this is snake country, and I’m all alert. Sensing... Seeing and hearing, of course, but these are less important at the moment. Rather, I am living especially in the body-senses of touch, life, movement, balance... Underfoot, the stones keep my attention held there — we feel our way along the track — even my eyes are fingering the terrain, while my feet are sensing the securely embedded stone, the stone that slips and slides, the stone that’s wedged amongst the others... Thus we touch our way forward...

Bettye had already mentioned the revelation in her of the sense of life — that sense of well-being that opens awareness to the inner condition of the body. “It’s so enlivening to walk on these stones.” It’s true. A walk along a city street is much more tiring than this. We sense the body’s health in the wilderness — that it is hale and hearty.

Then there is movement and there is also the sense of movement. Without this sense we would be unable to experience and monitor our own body’s movements. Contemporary science refers here to propriocentric awareness. Walking along that creek bed, climbing that track to the ridge, I am more self-aware of being in movement than on a flat path.

And of course there’s the sense of balance. Couldn’t manage without it, clambering along that creek bed. The deep relationship between movement and balance suddenly becomes clear to me. Walking as the balance between impetus and the ability to pause — impelled out of balance, then catching oneself. Freedom is experienced in poise between impulse and constraint...

I stand and sense my feet on the stones, noticing the dynamic relationship between ball and heel, side and arch. Touch, life, movement, balance — and the essential experiences gained through these senses on the trail towards being embodied — yes, to sense the wonder of this particular homecoming. Of entering the home of the body.

As I walk on, I’m now thinking of Ghilgai, the Steiner school where I work. Of the playground, and its uneven slope... Of the steps, varied, unpredictable... It is a happy pedagogical accident that the drought, and then the rains, have eroded the hill, as we call it. The children are truly being educated in their body senses as they run about at playtime. Maybe I can relinquish my vain dream of seeing it levelled off and ‘safe’...

So much of our learning is incidental. It occurs through these incidents and instances of a good experience of being alive, registered through these body-senses in which we are mostly unconscious.

These are the senses that enable us to know our place — in the body, in the world. They are sometimes also called the ‘lower’ or ‘inner’ senses. We could call them the senses of orientation. The task in the early years of childhood is to exercise them, to live into the body through them, to know ourselves at home there. If we reflect for a moment on the lives that are lived by so many children in our society — lives spent indoors, or when outside on smooth lawns and even paths, inside cars, in front of flat screens, touching undifferentiated substances — then we will begin to recognise a childhood at risk.

The Sleep Issue

2010-09-10T10:22:00.001+10:00

The baby’s crying.

This must be one of the worst experiences we can have — to be tired, craving a break from it all, to maybe have some sleep ourselves… And the baby’s crying.

There is another experience we might have… That wonderful silence when the baby is asleep. It comes as a gift… Then we have a dilemma — whether to rush about doing all sorts of stuff we think is important, or to rest…

This issue is about sleep and babies. About your sleep, and your baby’s sleep — because both are important aspects of a family’s well-being. There would be no books or articles about sleep — and certainly no such thing as sleep clinics — if there were no problems with sleeping. But adults increasingly report that a good night’s sleep is elusive — and then the baby comes along…

You might want your child to allow space for your needs — but babies don’t work like that. It isn’t their brief to meet your needs in this regard. The solutions however may not come out of preoccupation with the problem, but rather out of appreciating the wider world of having a child in your life. I think here of a guiding aphorism for my life, from Dag Hammarskjöld’s diary Markings:

"To say Yes to life is at one and the same time to say Yes to oneself... Yes — even to that element in one which is most unwilling to let itself be transformed from a temptation to a strength."

Parenting is exhausting, especially when a baby is not sleeping (actually, your baby will be sleeping, but perhaps not as you would wish!). But we can exhaust ourselves further through our versions of ‘no-saying’ and ‘me-saying’. There is a path towards reality that proceeds from wonder, via reverence, through an awareness of wisdom-filled harmony with the world, to self-surrender. This is a path of conscious loving, of devotion to the truth of the world. We still are likely to be tired, but renewed strength may come when we can say Yes.

[John Allison - editorial from September issue of { parent-theses }]

The Vocation of Parenting

2010-07-22T21:25:00.004+10:00

What is the source of all this interest in parenting? I don’t recall my own parents reading books or attending workshops to learn about being better parents (and often it showed). Until Truby King published his book Feeding and Care of Baby almost a hundred years ago it wasn’t a significant public issue. Before then, wise men and thinkers generally had a great deal to say about the significance of childhood and upbringing. For instance, we frequently credit King Solomon with the statement, “Spare the rod and spoil the child” – but in fact you won’t find that exact phase in the Bible. Rather, it is an adaptation of several Proverbs, represented most clearly by “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.” (Proverbs 13:24). I think my father knew that one; punishment was the foundation of discipline for my generation, to the extent that this word ‘discipline’ is now often associated with those difficult experiences.

Plato said some important things, two and half thousand years ago. And then in the late 17th century, John Locke wrote about early childhood education, but his essay Some Thoughts Concerning Education was not at all a practical manual for parents. His concept of the mind as a blank slate (tabula rasa) to be inscribed upon leads us to the principles of behavioural conditioning, however. Jean Jacques Rousseau was idealising childhood in the late 18th century, and his view of the innate goodness of the child has had an important influence on modern attitudes towards childhood. But again, his writings are a philosophical rather than practical guide to daily parenting matters.

I believe that our preoccupation with parenting directly parallels the development of popular psychology; when Truby King was developing his practices, Freud and Jung were touring the United States, and suddenly the human psyche, its challenges and its development – its problems – were all the rage. And have continued to be… It was in the midst of this thrilling realisation that life is a problem that Benjamin Spock wrote Baby and Child Care; and over in England, Donald Winnicott was articulating his fruitful insights and very sensible suggestions. Since then, however, parents seem to have become increasingly uncertain about their roles and responsibilities. We could spend a lot of time considering the reasons for this… Suffice to say, some see it as a real problem, and while I agree that problems arise through the practised uncertainties and passing fads that now fill the spaces left by the demise of common sense, I’m convinced that we are wanting, needing to become conscious about what we are doing, how we go about it, and why. This is new territory, and the way through it is a creative pathway.

Rhythm and Routine

2010-06-04T08:07:00.001+10:00

Whenever I consider the significance of rhythm in my life I find myself thinking about breathing. About day and night. The movement of seasons. The phases of the moon. Ebb and flow of the tides, the booming of waves on the rocks below a beach-house where I lived for a while (and slept so deeply). Expansion and contraction. Openings and closures. Nodes and interstices. Out-reaching, in-gathering. Letting go and letting come. These constant movements, which are also shaping and forming… And immediately I notice we have a problem in contemporary life, which seems so arrhythmic. I see this is connected with stress.

The mystery of rhythm is its relationship with form. Rhythm gives shape even to time. We can’t really talk about rhythm without recognising boundaries — rhythm measures the movement between boundaries, and also across boundaries. There is an inside and an outside — a kind of membrane that pulses with life. “Form is the envelope of pulsation” (a Tantric saying).

I note two effects of living in rhythm, in time-space. One is that I am less exhausted. The other is that the moods of my soul are given shape and definition. Boundaries. When I consider this more deeply, I am convinced that rhythm facilitates a spacious relationship to experiences, and then other things may enter and ‘speak’.

"All gratification in life is founded on the regular reappearance of external things. The alternation of day and night, of the seasons, of flower and fruit, and everything else that confronts us at regular intervals so that we may, and should, enjoy it: these are the very springs of our daily life. The more openly we avow these pleasures, the happier we are. But if these phenomena revolve severally before us and we take no part in them, proving unreceptive to these precious gifts — then the greatest evil, the most dire sickness breaks out in us, and we look upon life as the most repulsive burden."

~ Wolfgang Johann von Goethe

Rhythm and routine then are sources of health — we rest in the familiar, the repetitive. Yet routine tasks can seem a burden, especially when you feel tired (as most parents do). Where does our distaste, our hatred even, of mundane work come from? Was it when you were forced as a child to do chores? Were you made to work as punishment? Or was it because you were scolded for just not getting it right? Even though you were simply trying to be helpful, was it because you were a ‘nuisance’? Whatever happened to that little child in you who loved imitating Mummy and Daddy, enthusiastically doing what they did? Somehow, work became a chore rather than a joy. And now, how can you find your way back into the Kingdom of Good Works? Recognising that rhythm and routine is good for you may not be sufficient motivation — what can rekindle that joy, that willingness?

~ Editorial to the Winter issue of { parent-theses }

Playing, Being, Working

2010-04-13T06:30:00.008+10:00

A child is playing and nothing else exists for her in that moment. Few adults can give such attention to their immediate situation, so willingly, for so long. And it is real work.

Play enables the child to live into a whole world. It is a world of her own making which borders on to the world we think is the real world. Through manifold creative acts the child pushes back these boundaries, to increasingly inhabit the world we know but all too often have forgotten how to understand. Play is a participatory pathway into the reality of this so-called real world.

A child playing is ordering the world. Play is an experiment into the nature of reality. Things are either obedient to her imagination, or not. Play is a brave adventure into the possibilities and limitations of things. It is the true basis of problem-solving.

A child playing is discovering her relationship to the world. The encounter refects back into her developing sense of self.

A child playing is working out real situations. Play brings these situations into a coherent narrative that makes sense. In the world of play any thing can become anything. And everything. There is nothing missing within the whole world of play. It is always as minimal and elaborate as necessary. It is what it is.

A child is playing. Our responsibility as adults is to protect and nurture this world of play, this realm in which anything is possible. Which leads to everything that works…

[The new issue of { parent-theses } on the theme of Creative Play is now available]

The Glorious Summer of the Awakening Self

2009-12-07T20:13:00.005+11:00

One summer’s day, when I was just three years old, I stood alone in a farmyard along the Kaikoura Coast and knew there was Mystery in the world. It was an experience of anticipation and apprehension: of the self, and of the world. The New Zealand novelist Maurice Gee makes use of an evocative juxtaposition of two common images in several of his books — the creek and the kitchen: "I’d run home from the creek to the safety and security of the kitchen; one the place of safety and affection, the other the place of adventure, danger, excitement." This is how I too see my childhood. The light and the darkness of the world existed in polarities which felt like a natural circumstance.

So I stood there, in that farmyard, in warm long sunshine, seeing the light flossed by thistledown and the bright-winged insects hatched for a brief existence in the summer air. I had walked out of the house of the folks my parents were visiting that day, down a path and away through the wooden garden gate beneath the trees. I wandered about, under the brooding macrocarpas, amongst and through the wooden out-buildings. Bruce Chatwin writes of these first adventures:

"Children need paths to explore, to take bearings on the earth in which they live, as a navigator takes bearings on familiar landmarks. If we excavate the memories of childhood, we remember the paths first, things and people second — paths down the garden, the way to school, the way round the house, corridors through the bracken or long grass."

I think we remember such things because they are adventurous; that juxtaposition of anticipation and apprehension heightens our perceptions. So I still recall my impressions from that day, along each path I took: the smell of sun-warmed fuscous manure and straw in the doorway of the hayshed; the lanolin musk of the pile of old woolsacks; the pungent odours of thick oil and creosote oozing from rusted drums against the back wall of the barn; worn leather harness hanging on nails amidst odd bits of machinery and tools; the tractor standing on its cul-de-sac of off-set chevron tracks imprinted into dry mud; the rusting plough and chain harrows; the cawdling of magpies, and the sudden barking of the sheepdogs…

And there is something else in that memory of place — awareness of events as further paths. There may have been a few earlier memories, but this is my first experience, as I walked from gate to yard to shed to barn, of mood… Now I look back, marvelling at this awakening, hearing in my heart each summer’s call: Receive the light.

What every child needs…

2009-11-18T21:54:00.008+11:00

The greatest need of children today is to have real adults in their lives. Promoters of resilience often say that just one adult is enough. But we need to be clear about what we mean by ‘adult’ — for it is not a matter of qualifying merely through age. There any many adults today who seem to have remained at an adolescent stage of development. In his remarkable book The Soul’s Code, James Hillman states it uncompromisingly:

"Parents’ deficit attention to the individual call they brought with them into the world, and the hyperactivity of their distraction from this call, betrays their reason for being alive. When your child becomes the sole reason for your life, you have abandoned the invisible reason you are here."

This is rather provocative — very often the child does become the sole reason for our life, yet Hillman suggests this is a diversion from our real mission. To grasp this, I think we need to understand that word ‘sole’, and see that at its extreme, losing oneself in parenthood is a shortcoming. Hillman then asks a rhetorical question, before proposing his answer:

"And the reason you are here as an adult, as a citizen, as a parent? To make the world receptive to the daimon. To set the civilisation straight so that a child can grow down into it and its daimon can have a life. This is the parenting task. To carry out this task for the daimon of your child you must bear witness first to your own."

That Greek word ‘daimon’ has a deep psychological, even mythological significance. Hillman uses it in the sense of the individual human spirit — that seedlike essence or ‘genius’ of each person’s being that we each have a responsibility to realise — make real —more fully. Throughout his book, he makes intriguing observations about so-called adults who have not succeeded in this task of becoming, and also about those who have.

The child wants us — needs us — to fulfil ourselves. Our example will be the teacher and guide for their development, the encourager of their will to be. Of course we must endeavour to protect and nurture and succour our children. But we also have a greater raison d’être — to grow down into our own lives and establish our meaning in the world. To be, or not to be, muses Hamlet. The answer is, always, to be is to become — to continue to learn, to continue to develop…

In those thought-provoking terms used by Donald Winnicott, we could say that to be an adult is to become a facilitating environment.

~ John Allison 2009: a seed-thought for further development from the December issue of { parent-theses } journal.

Parenting as a Vocation

2009-10-26T20:55:00.007+11:00

In a recent BBC television documentary, ‘Bringing Up Baby’, the guiding principles of three of the twentieth century's most influential childcare manuals — Dr Truby King's book Feeding and Care of Baby, Dr Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care and Jean Liedloff's The Continuum Concept — were explored. Watching, and at times aghast at some of the attitudes and practices depicted, I reflected that parenting was really only discovered during the past 100 years — essentially, before that, we did what previous generations had done.

The years leading up to the appearance of Truby King’s book just prior to WWI coincided with other breaks in traditional values, leading to what we call the Modernist conception of the world. These changes occurred in the arts, humanities and sciences simultaneously. And this period also coincided with a popularisation of psychological thought, through the tour of the United States of America undertaken by Freud and Jung.

Without digressing too far, I want to suggest that human consciousness changed around this time. Fifty years later this change was in full swing, and we find two men — Spock in the US, and Dr Donald Winnicott in England — saying quite radical things about parenting. Yet another fifty years later many of their ideas now seem rather sensible.

I especially find Dr Winnicott refreshing still. He had a unique, often provocative but — upon reflection — very perceptive way of putting things:

"Each baby is a going concern… The baby was conceived in you and from that moment became a lodger in your body. After birth the baby became a lodger in your arms. This is a temporary affair. It will not last for ever, in fact it will not last for long. The baby will only too soon be at school. Just at the moment this lodger is tiny and weak in body, and needing the special care that comes from your love."

A going concern. A lodger. There are other ways of saying much the same thing. When the mother of my children and I were young parents, for instance, we felt inspired by the words of the Middle Eastern poet Kahlil Gibran, with their evocative biblical cadences:

"Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth…"

Ah, those were the days… We recited these words at christenings, just as we also quoted his wise words about relationships at weddings. In essence, Kahlil Gibran too is saying that the baby is a going concern, a lodger; however, these days I rather like the straightforward turns of phrase that Winnicott had a special talent for. And he certainly could turn them out… One of his best phrases for instance is the good enough mother — a term then subsequently by Bruno Bettelheim to include the important participation of fathers: the good enough parent.

Just consider for a moment what ‘good enough’ means. Contrast it first with not being good enough… Then consider the guilt trip you’ve probably suffered from in regard to projections about being a perfect parent. Now decide for yourself, here and now, that between the unacceptability of not being good enough, and the impossibility of being perfect, it’s pretty good to be good enough.

[The rest of this article can be downloaded from my website www.johnallison.com.au]

Positive Thinking

2009-09-28T20:31:00.015+10:00

There’s a passage by Francis of Assisi, in which he points out that ‘those who love you, who serve you, who give you food and clothing, do good indeed to your bodies; but those who persecute you, who are angry with you, who injure you, do much more good to your souls.’ And he goes on to say that ‘all people are therefore your friends, and no one is to be called an enemy; all are your benefactors, and no one does you harm: you have no enemy except yourselves.’

Now, I don’t think this excuses us; it certainly is not a justification for nastiness. Nor does it validate any vicarious pleasure we might derive from seeing someone suffering at the hands of another. But I do think it is a healthy way to look at our own circumstances. If something happens to me, and I blame someone else, perhaps even seeking revenge for the act, apart from a certain smugness and self-righteousness I might feel for a while, in fact I accomplish nothing satisfactory.

There’s an old saying that ‘the sword I would thrust through my enemy’s heart, I have already thrust through my own’. If, instead, I try to understand the degree to which I have conspired in my self-harm, how I have put myself into the situation with such thorough- going effort, then I also find in that situation an opportunity for growth. The other person, towards whom I could readily develop quite a lot of grievance, is really someone I’ve decided I need for my development. I’ve actually asked for it. Not consciously, but certainly conscientiously. That is, my reluctance to do the work voluntarily leads to it being forced upon me. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross speaks of how we avoid our development through acts of denial, anger, and bargaining; if we would come to terms with these theatrical displays, we would then hear the still, small voice of conscience telling us the truth.

This is not a simple attitude-shift. It’s difficult, and most people attempting it will need support. But it is the way to move from being a victim to being a victor over our own circumstances. Everyone knows how tiresome a victim can be; yet we can quite readily inflict the story of how hard it is for us — especially for ‘poor me’! — upon anyone at hand. How much more interesting it is when we hear how previously-undiscovered powers were found in rising to the occasion. And even more interesting, the revelation of those powers through which we caused the occasion!

There’s another saying: ‘If you want revenge, first dig two graves.’ And: ‘If I do not forgive, I harm myself a second time’. If we incarcerate grievance, it may become carcinoma. Why would we want to do that to ourselves, unless we have indeed decided to thrust the sword through our own hearts? If we get away from the hiss of the Sword, then we can come to the Word. What words then can be spoken, which change situations? Usually they are questions rather than statements. Such questions may begin from ‘Why have I set this up for myself?’ leading to ‘How can I change this situation, to make it a win-win for everyone?’

Such questions are mild, compared with the statements we could make. But there is steel underneath, for to ask a question paradoxically requires some inner certainty. There is more courage evident in asking an open question than in wearing armour and laying about oneself with a sword. Especially with your teenager, try it…

~ John Allison 2006, revised from an article first printed in the Little Yarra Steiner School Newsletter and reprinted in the Sophia Mundi Steiner School Bulletin.

The Art of Parenting

2009-09-06T08:52:00.003+10:00

What does it mean to practise an art? Erich Fromm states that there are two aspects: the mastery of the theory, and the mastery of the practice. I would add that ultimately the mastery of both theory and practice involves the mystery of forgetting, or what the Italian writer Castiglione called Sprezzatura — translated in the sixteenth century as ‘noble nonchalance’ — that ability to achieve something with apparent ease. This state is beyond theory, beyond trying.

Living today requires great skilfulness. In calling parenting an art rather than a science, we are recognising that the essential unresolved challenges are calling for imagination even more than knowledge. We just have to consider whether the stunning increases we see in factual knowledge are delivering any real improvements in the quality of living. Certainly aspects of the quality — and quantity — of life have improved. But are we living well? When I reflect on the issues people are struggling with, they are nearly all to do with family and other relationships. And here, knowledge is not enough.

Although on any particular day some twenty million Aussies get on quite well with one another, what we witness via the media provokes an increasing anxiety about the state of society and our relationships. It looks as though the human personality is falling apart — as though our faculties are being frayed and separated. In traditional society, however, human beings were still integrated, not so much through conscious effort as through the ordered tightly-woven fabric of social ‘norms’ — those common threads of religion, culture and habit. What we call customs.

It isn’t so comfortable today in this regard. With personal independence we have gained some differences: for instance, a high degree of individualism, often demanded as of right where once it was a privilege. Our claims of rights now seem disproportionate to any sense of obligation.

One solution is often heard on talk-back radio — the restoration of traditional values and social obligations. In this scenario, everyone presumably would adhere to the values of the person stating the case. The opposite view is a post-modern relativism that looks for answers applicable to the given situation only, understanding the truth of everyone’s truth, and the need therefore to negotiate only provisional solutions.

The proponents of both these views are often characterised by the same projections of frayed personal faculties — tendencies towards a cold intellectual detachment, or else sentimentality and emotionalism, or perhaps wilful and exuberant outbursts of anger, even violence. One outcome of this splitting of the personality is fundamentalism.

While through science we are developing a prodigious talent to analyse things, to take things apart, I think the challenge of ‘getting it together’, to find a holistic relationship with things, is an artistic concern. And the principal faculty for any artistic creativity is imagination.

Families

2009-06-22T17:53:00.005+10:00

Families are places of miracle, catastrophe, and transformation. In a way, every family is a geographical location for extraordinary events. The range of these events is always so surprising. Sometimes — especially when adolescents are around — the homes of families can resemble railway stations. And at other times — or even simultaneously —they can resemble stations of the Cross.

No one is unaffected by their family. Everyone has experienced this, and in what I want to say, there is no judgment, no inference of things or people being better or worse, no absolute right or wrong. Families are a central location, a first and last gathering ground, where the past shapes the present in special ways, in shaping the future… A place where we practice becoming more human.

As I looked round the room at my daughter’s wedding reception in London three years ago, I saw… What, exactly? Families, family, both familiar and unfamiliar. I feel we need new words for the relationships in modern families. One word we could use well would be the Maori word ‘whanau’. It means the extended family, the ship of life or canoe we travel in — not only blood relations and the legally-joined relations but also the long-term associations of friends and acquaintances.

So, for instance, in our particular whanau we find a young woman who stayed at our house every Friday night for some years, so her solo-parenting father could have some time out. She was a bride’s maid at the wedding. And there is our children’s first music teacher, who came to London for the wedding, just as she had come to San Francisco two years earlier for my son’s graduation recital. She read a poem during the wedding service.

And seated at a long table at the reception were the seven parents (birth- and step-) of the married couple. And there were all their extended families, some in the room, the others arced across the surface of the earth in spreading patterns, like those weather systems that spiral out across the various regions of the world. For instance, we were aware of the five-year-old grand-daughter of the bride’s father’s wife (coincidentally the daughter of his god-daughter!), who really wanted this wedding to happen because at Christmas she had met the six-year-old daughter of the groom (from his previous marriage) on an island off the New Zealand coast, and they had become inseparable friends. Baffled — like you probably — by these complexities of relationship, for them this marriage meant they would be ‘cousins’.

And through all this, there are the individuals also whom one or other of us befriends, who become like brothers or sisters to us. There is no reason, no bloodline, unless it be a spiritual ‘bloodline’… A mystery to cherish.

All these people are family… And to be so, they had experienced miracle, catastrophe and transformation. Former nuclear families, in which the miracle of young married love had occurred, where births had occurred, had suffered various chain-reactions and melt-down. The equations never make the fall-out comprehensible. Lethal amounts of fission materials irradiate homes, bodies, souls. No one enjoys such catastrophes. But the resilience of people, and the capacity to not only survive but to create new futures – these are remarkable qualities. Transformation happens. The new life opens up…

A wedding — like a funeral — is an opportunity to recognise the significance of family. A point at which certain absolute values are acknowledged, either through observance or breach. History I suppose is about time, but it is also a geographical phenomenon. We establish our presence in places, and get our bearings, define ourselves, set ourselves apart, disperse, gather together — these all are spatial relations. A family is such a place.

A Christmas Meditation

2008-12-11T08:46:00.030+11:00

Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere offers us an opportunity to become more conscious about this festival. The sun stands high overhead, really putting the heat on us. Inwardly we can feel the heat also, subjecting ourselves to the judgment that echoes in the murmuring of conscience as we review the year and think about New Year resolutions. That is another tradition, which may or may not be observed today. Yet it isn’t a bad thing to reflect, and maybe it’s quite appropriate at this turning point of the turning of the year…

Rudolf Steiner recommends an activity of reviewing the day backwards. I think it’s also a valuable annual process, to look back over the main events. Among various reasons for picturing events in reverse order, I will consider just one. In the common experience of time, our reactions to any unexpected events obscure the original impulse; the consequences dominate our minds. When conflict occurs, the issues of the hurt caused and who is to blame for it usually becomes an obsessional concern, the only focus of attention. When we look back, we tend to get caught up in the drama; we replay the event in our minds, and years of emotional patterning attach their self-justifying grievances to the issue.

In practising this review, we can learn non-reactiveness, by going from the consequence, back to the event, and then back to our intentions. We learn to stand in the event and ask ourselves: ‘Could I have done otherwise?’ In other words, perhaps we can consider what was needed rather than what we wanted.

Sogyal Rinpoche, in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, suggests that if we make our way back through any conflict to the moment immediately before we reacted, we will know — in the living light of truth — the purpose and meaning of the event. This then can become an enlightened state of being, through which we see the truth:

The Child Luminosity, also called the Path Luminosity, is the nature of our mind, which we can gradually stabilize through meditation, and more and more completely integrate into our action in life.

Sogyal Rinpoche goes on to state that this Child Luminosity is a personalised reflection of the cosmic Mother Luminosity, the very ground of our being as humanity:

The Mother Luminosity is the name we give to the Ground Luminosity. This is the fundamental inherent nature of everything, which underlies our whole experience, and which manifests in its full glory at the moment of death.

We are in the presence here of a deep Mystery. Let’s look at it from another perspective. In a verse for Michaelmas from his Calendar of the Soul, Rudolf Steiner evokes this same mood of self-consciousness that arises in the moment of recognising the Mother Luminosity:

Nature, your maternal existence

I bear within my will’s being;

And my will’s fiery might

Steels my spirit-striving

So that it may bring to birth

A feeling of Self

To bear myself in me.

The ‘mother’ gives birth to the ‘child’… Out of the encounter with world-processes, that ‘fundamental inherent nature of everything,’ a feeling of self is born, making it possible to bear myself — in other words, to say ‘Yes’ to the voice of conscience. Subsequently, in the Christmas verse, Steiner represents this tender feeling of self as the spirit-child; the universal impulse living in my will engenders in my heart the Child Luminosity:

I feel, free of enchantment

The spirit-child in my soul’s womb;

In the heart’s bright radiance

It has engendered the holy cosmic Word,

The heavenly fruit of hope,

That grows rejoicing into world-distances

Out of my being’s divine ground.

Practising the review is intended to lead us back past our characteristic reactions (by which we are ‘enchanted’) to that primal innocence of our original intentions. Then, in sleep there is a mysterious process through which we come to terms with things; an experience of selfhood that is born continually in us. We are in the presence of that witness to our actions, speaking in us as conscience.

These are images from the spiritual sources of Buddhism and Christianity respectively, and I do not want in any way to offend anyone who subscribes to different beliefs. There will be similar archetypes to be found in every faith. There also are existential parallels, for instance in Transactional Analysis, where we find a non-religious approach to the same experience. For in Transactional Analysis we note three principal modes of being human: the parent, the adult, and the child. The parent can manifest in positive or negative (nurturing or controlling) modes; and the child can appear either in positive or negative (free or adapted) modes. The ‘Christmas transaction’ could be understood therefore in terms of the Positive Nurturing Parent enabling the Positive Free Child to be.

So let this be a Christmas invocation: may you give birth to the Free Child, that True Child, within your soul, so there might be peace on earth for all human beings of good will.

~ John Allison, revised and adapted from { parent-theses } and ‘A Teacher’s Book’

A Teacher's Book

2008-11-24T07:56:00.017+11:00

Accompanying the Child
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I have used this painting as a background to my workshops over the past year, realising that it articulates exactly what I am trying to say about the task of parenting, or the task of teaching (or indeed the task of consulting).

To accompany a child requires such attentiveness, but to accomplish this requires a ‘living field’ to be opened up between the parameters of shelter and challenge. Getting it right — this activity of parenting, of teaching — is an art. Many years ago I read one of the most important books for my life: Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving. He asks, what are the necessary steps in learning any art? And he suggests there are two aspects: ‘one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice’. Now, often today we shrink from the word ‘theory’; too much in this domain seems academic, abstract, mind-jarring. But the word derives from the Greek word theōrein = to behold, to contemplate. This is the activity I seek to develop in my work - a way of seeing things. Then, to establish intelligent praxis - a way of doing things…

I want to tell you a story — one you can find in both the Catholic and the Orthodox Old Testaments (the Protestant Church having declared it apocryphal). Tobit is blinded, and his son Tobias undertakes a journey to Media, to collect a sum of money his father had deposited some time earlier. Azariah, a relative who offers to accompany the youth on his journey, is in fact the Archangel Raphael, sent to protect and guide him.

Over in Media, a young woman Sarah prays for death. She despairs because each of her seven newly-wed husbands has died on his wedding night. This would trouble anybody. Raphael’s mission from God is to heal Tobit and free Sarah from the demonic curse afflicting her.

En route to Media to collect the money, Tobias is attacked by a giant fish which he kills, and then removes its heart, liver and gall. In Media he meets Sarah, entreats her family to be allowed to marry her, and is instructed by Raphael to first burn the fish’s heart and liver on their wedding night to drive away the demon. And yes, it works.

Then, collecting the money and returning to his father, Tobias uses the fish’s gall to cure his blindness. Raphael reveals his true identity and departs.

You can recognise this story in the painting to the right by Francesco Botticini, ‘Youth with Archangels’, which departs however from the original Biblical narrative in two aspects. Tobias carries the actual fish, not its organs — perhaps because in a visual depiction, organs would be a rather obscure reference to say the least. And there are now three Archangels — Michael, Raphael, Gabriel — accompanying Tobias across an apparent wilderness area with a typical north Italian landscape in the background.

Michael strides ahead, wearing armour and carrying his sword at the ready; in his left hand he holds a golden orb which might represent the Sun (with which he traditionally is associated), and the way towards the future. In other paintings, Michael is more typically depicted spearing the dragon — like his earthly counterpart St George. But one feature is in common — he gazes sharply out of the pictorial space at the viewer, as if saying, ‘I have my mission, and I know what I’m doing — what about you?’

To the right, and slightly nearer the viewer, rosy-winged Gabriel, Archangel of the Annunciation, walks bare-footed across the terrain and holds a lily in one hand. This lily and the white robe evoke traditional associations with the Moon, the past, and the forces of generation and birth. But it is the look that Gabriel casts back over his shoulder that attracts attention — an anxious gaze that seems to say, ‘Why did we ever leave the Garden of Eden? And where’s the big bad wolf?’

I need to explain this a little. Gabriel is the sheltering guardian of conception, childbirth and early childhood, who inspires both nurture and protection. The world is a problem, full of danger, and the loss of primal innocence. The wish to remain in Paradise is implicit in this mood. And it is in contrast to the challenging gesture and gaze of Michael. I want to suggest that these two gestures — of shelter and of challenge — are complementary gestures that represent the range of the parent or the teacher. ‘Come here,’ we say gently, offering comfort and care. ‘Wake up!’ we say, confronting the emerging Self of the child. When the child is young, we tend the developing soul with the protective, dreamier gesture — then, as they grow older, it is important that the child experiences the other, sharper injunction…

These two gestures establish the parameters — the human boundaries as it were — for the real work of accompanying the child. For together they form an ‘in-between’ space, a dynamic place where we find Raphael tending the youth. Now, we know a few things about Raphael. He is the Judeo-Christian equivalent of Mercury, messenger of the gods, the great communicator, and also the healer — he bears in his right hand a small casket or jar such as might hold a potion or remedy. His robe’s silvery-grey colour suggests this connection with the metal quicksilver (mercury). Just look at this activity of attentiveness! Such a focussed look of intent devotion, and the trust illustrated in the remarkable way that Tobias’s hand rests in the cupped fingertips of his companion… As though saying, ‘I am with you — let’s go along this way together.’

And the first two gestures — indeed, those beings — make this communion-presence of the third possible.

[Adapted from A Teacher’s Book – Immortal Books 2008 ISBN 978-0-9750553-6-6]

Climate Change is a Fact of Adolescence

2008-11-23T20:54:00.010+11:00

When children are still little, the joys and sorrows of life are like passing weather. An emotion-cloud comes over the horizon, they get rained on, it passes. The sun beams down on them and they shine in its light. A turbulent little squall whips up, and they are all over the place, and then it abates. So, for instance, in the sand-pit a little child might suddenly be in conflict with a neighbour, yet a few moments later they are happily playing together again.

This weather of the soul is external to them. It comes over them, and then it passes. Such weather-patterns continue into the early school years. Around the age of twelve, however, there is a distinct climate-change. Now, they are completely caught up in the weather — the highs and lows, the wind-shifts, the tropical cyclones — suddenly they each become storm-centres, or high-pressure regions… They are their weather in a very personal way. There they are, right in the middle of it but, because they are in it, surrounded by it and looking out through it, they tend to experience it as coming at them from outside. It is all your fault.

These little weather-systems are very volatile, very regional. And, from within them, another curious attitude arises. When, for instance, in grey wintry Canberra we see on the weather map that it’s just great in Brisbane, or always 30˚ in Darwin, then we have to find something else that’s wrong with being in Brisbane or Darwin… So too with these proto-adolescent climatic regions. They feel an affinity with similar weather-patterns, but then this might be disconcertingly ephemeral because each pattern is constantly changing; they feel disgust towards any differing patterns, and they feel bewilderment regarding those peers where some affinity but also some difference occurs.

Affinity — disgust — bewilderment. Life can be pure sunshine, or it can be a storm. Or a whirlwind. All so constantly subject to change. This is so very difficult for the proto-adolescent. You think it’s hard! Try being in one of those weather-systems… Everything has become personal, everything is changeable, and it’s always your fault. When a little child awkwardly bumps into a table, injuring their body, they might admonish the table — ‘Naughty table!’ — for having hurt them. The twelve-year-old will do the same with emotional hurt, for this personal weather-system is in fact a rather clumsy attitude-body, and so when they bump into another attitude with it — you, for instance, or very often a younger sibling — they quite naturally project their anguish.

So, previously the child has existed in the values-atmosphere and weather-patterns of the parents. This atmosphere is a generalised realm of ideas, feelings, attitudes and values and impulses which has enveloped the child just like the atmosphere encompassing the earth. But now the twelve-year-old child starts to spin into their own intense, ever-contracting, localised weather-system that embodies all its own patterns. This is a specific event emerging from the meteorological background of the family.

One notable ‘emotional weather’ phenomenon developing at this time is ‘acid rain’. Suddenly your child is sarcastic, even cynical in attitude. When you are exposed to this acid rain, it stings. And it is really corrosive. Just like the acid rain corroding the temples and statues of the Parthenon in Athens, it starts to dissolve the beautiful marmoreal images you hold of family ideals. Now, we cannot solve the problems of atmospheric pollution through blame and recrimination; we have to learn to work together with the new conditions, and this takes some understanding on our part.

For instance, we need to recognise that the newborn attitude-body at the heart of this weather-system is just as vulnerable as the physical body of the baby. The baby can only flail about with its little limbs, can only grasp with its fingers. It has to learn to direct its movements, it has to learn to let go of what it grasps. So too the attitude-body of the adolescent flails about initially, and grasps instinctively, locking on to issues often quite obsessionally. Control of the attitude-body’s unpredictable movements takes time, effort, and skill. And letting go is something to be learned.

Pictures like these — of the weather-system, of the newborn attitude-body — can really help us see what’s going on. And because they are living pictures, they can develop. So, for instance, the weather picture might lead us to acknowledge that if the weather is squally and we forget to take a coat or umbrella with us and then we get rained on, it’s hardly the weather’s fault, is it? The weather is just doing its thing.

However, we might also note that as a storm pattern develops, it forms a centre — a still, relatively calm centre that we call the eye of the storm. This centre, which is an inward intensification within the weather-system, becomes a reference-point in which the self develops throughout these years. It’s an encouraging thought in the face of adolescent climate-change.

[Note: Adapted from an essay published in my free journal { parent-theses }. It also presents the foundation idea for a parenting workshop I offer. Contact me via my website www.johnallison.com.au]

Secreting the Seeds of Responsibility

2008-10-25T23:27:00.008+11:00

What is it about the springtime? We have increasing light and the first warm days but… It can be a time of sickness and depression. There’s a clue in the story of Snow White and Rose Red — the bear tells them that in the winter the wicked little dwarfs (not the good ones) are frozen deep within the earth, but then they get free and come up to the surface, and whatever they find that belongs to people is not so easily regained. What does the dwarf horde? Gold, pearls, jewels. In the picture-language of the soul, these are the treasures of our thinking, feeling, and willing respectively. To be the steward of our own treasures, we need the eagle’s acute perceptiveness and the bear’s steadfast vigilance, not to succumb.

Because a school is a kind of social hothouse, problems often become very apparent there. And I have noticed that when a child is not ‘meeting our expectations’, for parents it can easily become the school’s fault. Teachers of course may see it as the parent’s fault. Meanwhile, the child is blaming everyone!

Significantly, we all (the children included) feel bad about it. Now, in considering what is happening in the child between the twelfth and sixteenth years, we need to recognise that the dis-eased symptoms we can see there are part of a normal development. It is just a phase of behaviour for a basically healthy child. What is pathologically abnormal is to exhibit such behaviour throughout life.

While it is natural for the twelve-year-old to be rather self-obsessed, and to blame everyone else for any problems, continuing this into adulthood is a sad symptom of a blockage, an ‘adolescence-fixation’. A person who continues to grow will gradually move from ‘blame’ to ‘responsibility’. Blame, fault, and guilt lead inevitably to a kind of paralysis, a victim-mentality which holds everyone else to ransom for failing to meet the victim’s expectations or needs. To break this crippling cycle we must learn first to admit responsibility (which is not the same thing as being ‘to blame’), and then to encourage responsibility in others. To be responsible is to be capable of a response. This is enabling rather than crippling.

It isn’t easy to change patterns. We need to recognise that we, as parents, are quite ordinary people struggling with our own issues, often with insufficient or inadequate ‘tools’ for the job. People haven’t yet learned a lot about being parents (or teachers for that matter), nor even about being truly human. We all can learn a little more, for our own sakes, and this would help us help our children.

It’s hard being a parent. It’s hard being a teacher. It’s hard being human. Unresolved grief leads to fixed grievances, and then to a desire for punishment and revenge. Acknowledged grief, however, leads to mutual grieving, which can lead towards a transformation. Grief is a stone in the heart; grieving is a flowing river. Therefore, one thing we can all try to do is not to blame either ourselves or others for how things are, or have been, but rather begin right now to acknowledge some responsibility for change, to decide that things shall not continue in the same way. Then, in changing, we might learn how to support change in others rather than only demanding change. We could decide to support each other constructively to identify issues and find some effective solutions to the problems we observe. We can do this if we are dealing with our own issues.

Living into the Future 2

2008-10-13T20:48:00.014+11:00

I am writing this on a computer. I often research information on the internet. I do not ever want to suggest that we should reject Information Technology — the real question with all technology is its effective and appropriate use. Let’s consider then what is required in processing information. I have mentioned three filters essential as the basis for humanising data: morality, sensitivity, discernment.

These qualities are developed out of what we call, in Steiner education, willing, feeling, and thinking — the faculties of the soul. Then there are seven life processes — breathing, warming, nourishing, secreting, maintaining, growing, and generating — evident in our life/physical functions. Now, these processes are also active, as it were subliminally, in the assimilation and transformation of our experiences — that is, in learning.

Learning first requires a rhythmic balance between taking in and letting go, between attentiveness and reverie, remembering and forgetting, between waking and sleeping. This breathing must permeate the whole of our experience. Then we have to warm to what we receive, if we are to incorporate it — otherwise the facts will leave us cold. We also have to digest information, and finally secrete what may be useful and excrete the useless. These are four distinct though interpenetrating learning processes. The three further stages involve being able to make use of the assimilated material. We practice a newly acquired skill, use new information repeatedly, in order to keep it, or we will otherwise lose it; this is just in order to maintain the basic capacity. Developing or growing the skills is an extension of this into a further stage of facility. Then, there may be a truly creative stage where something new is generated, freshly born from what was first assimilated some time before.

So these are the seven stages in information processing. There are real consequences for human life if we do not cultivate the right functioning of the life processes. So too with the learning processes. Information pollution can shock and even sicken each of them. We sense disturbances to the life-processes as an inability to get a grip on things; we can surmise their basic health when we are readily able to take things on board. Now, Waldorf education is concerned with these processes — they are essential to the activity of learning, and must be nurtured and strengthened. This is a progressive task, which underlies all the determination of Steiner teachers to use particular methods in teaching, and to introduce both the content of the curriculum, and the many and various tools of technology, at the most appropriate times. They are convinced that all information processing must be established thoroughly in its basis first, before progressing to the most complex tools.

I recall a handcraft teacher, paraphrasing Rudolf Steiner, saying, ‘The child who can knit a few stitches together in Class 1 might be enabled to knit a few thoughts together at puberty’. I think it really is like that. It’s this metamorphosis of human capacities that is so interesting. A few years ago, one of my former pupils, now in her thirties and a remarkable adult educator, told a group of parents that it seemed that everything she did in the Steiner school was concerned with processing — methodically taking in and then letting go, enthusiastically engaged in assimilating each experience, rhythmically practising each new skill, and growing and developing all kinds of capacities. Then, she concluded, a person has the basis to do anything they want to. This would include any facility in using a computer, which she said she just did when she needed to, like everything else.

[to be continued]

Springtime Awakening

2008-09-12T15:57:00.006+10:00

Ah, the buds in spring. The first warm wild wind… Emerging from winter, we long for the returning light and the warming sun, only to succumb to the flu. And it seems to me that ‘dis-ease’ brings us back to ourselves, just when we want to drift towards the promise of summer. Then we become aware that the sought-after transformation cannot only be in Nature — it has to come from within.

‘Know yourself’ — this injunction from the ancient Greek Mysteries. What does it mean? One thing I do know: I have had many troubles, most of which never happened. Another thing I know is what Dag Hammarskjöld has said: ‘To say Yes to the world is at one and the same time to say Yes to oneself’. And I know a third thing, again learned from a wise person, John the Baptist: ‘Metanoîte’ (or ‘Repent’) — that is, ‘Change the tenor of your mind’ (‘Think again’).

There is a ‘letting go’ that must precede the ‘letting come’ — and then I can experience a feeling of wisdom-filled harmony with the phenomena of the world, a growing sense that I was born to live and witness the events of our time.

In the winter when the ground is frozen hard, the wicked dwarfs have to stay in their caves because they can’t work their way through, but now that the sun has warmed the ground and thawed it out, they break through and come up and ferret around and steal. And when they get their hands on something and carry it away to their caves, it’s not very likely to see the light of day again.

So states the bear in the story of Snow White and Rose Red, as he leaves them at the end of the winter. And we know what the wicked dwarf in this story gets hold of: gold, and pearls, and jewels. If we live into these images born out of the Rosicrucian wisdom of the past, we see they are truly treasures of the human soul — the bright gold of our thinking, the lustrous pearls of the feeling soul, and the fiery jewels of the will.

In the springtime, we can be susceptible to the pillaging of forces beyond our control — losing the soul’s self-possession. However, the true eagle-being of the spirit can discern what is happening; and the lumbering bear — which is each of us, not having yet found our royal nature — is adequate to the task, just so long as Snow White and Rose Red remain true companions. That is, when the reflective activity within the white cells of the brain unites with the impulses living in the red cells in our blood…

Educating for Life

2008-08-30T18:11:00.008+10:00

When you first heard about Rudolf Steiner (or Waldorf) Education, you might have decided to go to a talk about it, presented probably by a teacher. Let’s consider what was involved in getting to this event, from a practical viewpoint. First, in making that decision, you’d maybe considered a whole range of possibilities. These may have included going to your workplace, or doing the housework, gardening, shopping, playing sport, going for a walk, socialising, and so on. Instead you went to a talk — perhaps at an Open Day — and to do so you must have known about it as a possibility amongst all the others.

So you decided on this particular journey. Not only did you think of it, but you also had to plan and prepare for it. Maybe you had to consult your map, remember to buy petrol, make various alternative arrangements. Then you could set out… And you came there. On the way you might have had to deal with all kinds of contingencies. There would be consequences for decisions you had to make, things you knew you’d have to accept responsibility for. Still, you made it. And life is like this. It’s a journey — a lot of journeys actually — all within the context of that greater journey we call a lifetime.

Now, we can think of education in various ways. Is the mind a kind of computer that has to be programmed — do we call that education? Is the body an animal that has to be trained — is that education? These are two common views, and both are inadequate. If we think of life as that great journey, perhaps even thinking of a lifetime as one part of an even greater journey, then education becomes another issue altogether. The analogy holds — you have to have thought of that journey, then have planned it, and then have prepared for it. And then you’ve set out. You’ve been born, in other words.

But, as the poet William Wordsworth put it: ‘Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting’. In Waldorf schools we are convinced that life is such a journey, and that its essential direction has been mapped out, planned and prepared for, by the spiritual human being who, in being born, forgets exactly what was decided on. The real task of education (Latin ‘educare’ = to draw out) is to help the child re-cognise and re-member his or her intentions (ie to get it, and to get it together).

There is some useful equipment that has to be gathered up, some basic skills to be picked up on the way, so that the re-membering human being can effectively get to where they’re wanting to go. As developed faculties, these include having your wits about you, being able to sense what’s happening around you, being aware and sensitive to any subtle nuances of feeling, having the initiative to respond appropriately in each situation, and being able to actually do something. The rest of so-called education — all that reading, writing, arithmetic, and so on — is toiletries and personal items we have to pop into the travel-bag as we go out the door. They are definitely things we will need in life, and are actually quite important, but they are not life itself.

Living into the Future

2008-08-10T19:54:00.007+10:00

We are constantly informed that access to information is the issue in education. I think that this really is rubbish — such statements demonstrate the degree to which politicians and educationists alike have been captured by commercial interests. In the developed world, information is easily accessed, and the necessary skills are easily acquired. I believe the real issue is the screening and processing of information.

The greatest challenge related directly to access, and the basis for processing, is how to screen the enormous amount of information we are bombarded with daily. We suffer from information pollution. We can be dumbed-down by the content of much of it, but we are dulled-down by the sheer quantity of it, regardless of its quality. The cost is a loss of sensitivity in all our senses — we then may end up disconnected rather than connected. And I would suggest that real connectedness — the experience of being in the picture, the activity of belonging, of feeling present in our lives — is critical for effective living.

We need to develop screening techniques. We can first decide to eliminate or reduce some of the pollution entering our homes, and our schools. For instance, because little children really have no filters in their consciousness, I believe that they must be protected. That is why I recommend that they should have no access to those powerful opiates of the senses: television, videos, DVDs and computer games. It takes time to have the right filters properly installed — I mean those mental ones — which can effectively screen information.

During the first 6 - 7 years the child requires protection from any information which is not the direct experience of healthful living in their immediate environment. The body and its forces — and particularly the will that is embedded in the body — develops most strongly through the active yet relatively unconsciousness experience of what we have traditionally called goodness. So the appropriate ‘Information Technology’ (IT) programme in the home and kindergarten is real action — doing wholesome stuff and being in-formed by experience.

Genuine education in the primary school years is concerned with the careful development of all the senses. These are the true information gateways; we don’t want to have information super-highways or freeways built through them. The senses are developed healthily through the experience of what is beautiful in the world and in human life — the experience of purity of form, tone, quality expressed in harmony and proportion. In this period, artistic activity, concerned with the wholeness of imagination, is the basis for real ‘Information Technology’.

From around the age of 12, and throughout the high school years the faculties concerned with discerning the truth are cultivated. Here, in the education of these intellectual faculties, everything that is conventionally called Information Technology gradually becomes relevant. Students can now begin to effectively process information.

Morality, sensitivity, discernment — these are the fundamental filters that need to be installed to deal with information pollution. A filter must be such that it separates the good from the bad, the beautiful from the ugly, the truth from lies. We can readily see how each of these faculties can be subverted through a premature exposure to pollution. The human being is a slow developer — how slow, I have tried to suggest in this new take on old information.

Warming to the Winter

2008-07-25T03:45:00.009+10:00

I’m old enough to remember open fires, and the ‘marching armies’ (apparently for others they were 'fairies') of incandescent soot moving across the fire-bricks at the back… And although I will readily concede that fires are not particularly efficient, and are environmentally unfriendly, in my childhood the fire was a friendly companion to my fantasy. Looking back, I would say that I was warmed through by more than physical heat.

I day-dreamed my stories — I lived in reverie, imagining everything was possible and even more, that it was actually happening… Warmth and potentiality seem to be related somehow. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus went so far as to claim, ‘This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or humans has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever will be an ever-living Fire, with measures of it kindling, and measures going out.’ Clearly he was fascinated, as I have been since childhood, with the transformative mystery of fire, of heat, of warmth… So I gaze at a fire and everything is imaginable. I warm to these possibilities.

Little children respond so readily to warmth. They flourish in its presence, expanding just like it does into the available space. Their interest in the world kindles enthusiasm for existence. Breathing opens up a space, and warming fills it. Children warm to being here through their explorations. And it is like this throughout life — warmth draws us into the situation, whereas coldness causes distance. Warmth is relationship. The ultimate warming experience is love — between the tender touching towards another person through interest, and the blazing intensity of passion, love opens the world to joy.

Warmth is not heat. I prefer to reserve this word ‘heat’ for the physical intensity of those 37°C days in summer, or for those occasions when I’m under pressure and really ‘feeling the heat’. Heat is felt at the surfaces — it scorches — but real warmth suffuses, permeates, soaking through into the deepest and often darkest places. And this warmth encourages — wherever warmth penetrates, there I can feel my presence is supported. So the other day I walked out into sunshine; the air was cool, but the direct sun soaked right through me, even it seemed right into my bones. And I was content.

But winter reminds us, when we discover how cold the air can be around our ears, and even chilling the skull, that little children need protection not only from the demonic summer sun, but also from the cold air of winter. Until they are three, their fontanels at the top and back of the head are open and the brain is unprotected. Yet their warmth sense is still undeveloped, and they cannot discern the cold. We have to perceive the risk and cover them.

We also create inward warmth by enriching life. A collection of autumn leaves, red berries, nuts and seeds — these awaken interest in a child for those natural rhythms of death and rebirth. Participating in the seasons with our children prepares another kind of soil — the rich humus of the soul, in which the deep purposes of life take root. Winter invites inwardness, and we discover rich depths of sensitive awareness through cultivating this inner life. Into reverie, into the warming and enwarmed heart we sow the seeds of the future…

Tell Me a Story…

2008-07-12T16:21:00.007+10:00

We can readily recognise how stories nurture all the life processes, without us ever noticing. How the phrase, ‘Once upon a time…’ opens up an inner space, in which anticipation, and its quickened breathing, expands, contracts, expands… How children, warming to the prospect of the tale, and wanting the tones of their Mum’s or Dad’s voice to warm them through, long to relate to what’s coming: Yes! Tell me a story… How the story is so nourishing, and how its essential truth is distilled and secreted into the child’s personality.

The celebrated children’s writer Margaret Mahy has written a fine essay on imagination, in which she refers to the way in which stories help shape our experience:

I am going to propose that there is a code in our lives, something we automatically recognise when we encounter it in the outside world, something personal, but possibly primeval too, something which gives form to our political responses, to our art, our religious feeling, sometimes to our science and even to the way the weather forecast may be presented as a little drama…

I am referring to story, something we encounter in childhood and live with all our lives. Without the ability to tell stories, or live prescribed stories, we lose the ability to make sense of our lives.

This is the basis for story-telling in the Steiner curriculum. We recognise the value of stories as cultural heritage, as imaginative truth, as inwardly-lived experience. I often refer to a particular story to illustrate this — ‘The Goose Girl’. It is a macabre story of usurped power that ends like this:

The old king asked the false bride — who only was a serving girl — what punishment a person deserved who had behaved in such and such a way… And while he related the whole story, he asked what sentence such a person merited.

Then the false bride said, “She deserves no better than to be stripped naked, and put into a barrel which is studded inside with sharp nails; and then two white horses should be harnessed to it, and she should be dragged along through one street after another, until she is dead”.

“Ah, it is you,” said the aged king. “You have pronounced your own sentence, and thus shall it be done unto you.”

If you have ever tossed and turned in bed at night, dragged ‘naked’ through the by-ways of your inner world, tumbled by your deeds, pierced through by conscience until your egotistical pride dies in you, then you may recognise the truth of this story. The Grimm’s Tales can be grim — but in our conscience we are relentless with ourselves. We do not explain the story — and we do not turn it into some kind of Disney syrup — but simply present it to the seven-year-old. This is true ‘soul-food’ for the nourishment of the conscience. This is its language.

Through repetition and memory, maintaining the life of the story, it sinks in; children will ask repeatedly for the same story. The story is growing in them. In fact I would suggest the story grows them downward into life. Through what marvellous changes and inner transformations does it make life meaningful? When experiences can be seen against the narrative of fairy tales, legends and myths — Odysseus finding his way home, Parzival’s quest for the Grail, Hamlet’s absorption with personal consciousness — we discern our way. And it becomes purposeful. We make our own story into a creative act. We are generating our life.

Winter Contrasts - in a dark time

2008-07-03T22:06:00.005+10:00

The American poet Theodor Roethke has a great opening to one of his poems: ‘In a dark time, the eye begins to see, / I meet my shadow in the deepening shade’. In winter we face this possibility of more than outer darkness — there is another kind of dark, which at its worst we call evil. At its best — when we are at our best — it can teach us. And what an opportunity it offers us!

It is natural for the inner life to loom large in winter, and there is rich nourishment in stories. The treasury of tales for children is endless; here I want to refer to just one — Rumpelstiltskin. You know the story — a miller boasts to the king that his beautiful daughter can spin straw into gold; the king locks her in a room of straw with a spinning wheel, and in the midst of her distress a little man enters the room and offers to do it — for a price. Three times he does this, and on the third occasion, having nothing else to give him in return, she promises that she will let him have her first child. The king, impressed by her apparent capabilities, marries her and a year later a child is born. As she celebrates, the little man appears and demands the child. She is so distraught, he allows her three days to guess his name; yet despite all help and effort she cannot guess. On the third day she expects to lose her child, but a messenger comes and tells her that in a hut in the forest he came upon a little man dancing and chanting:

Rumplestiltskin is my name
But no one knows it, to their shame.

When the little man appears, she names him: Rumpelstiltskin! In fury, he stamps his right foot into the floor, and in taking hold of his left foot and trying to free himself, he tears himself in two.

Evil does not like being named. There have been several documentaries on television recently revealing some of the acts of torture sanctioned by various regimes. Apart what Hannah Arendt called ‘the banality of evil’, what struck me was the extraordinary behaviour of denial by officials and politicians when confronted. In these moments, do they perceive themselves? They metaphorically, morally, tear themselves in two.

We have an obligation to protect childhood. ‘Deliver us from evil’ is an injunction for every human being. But we also have to prepare children for the fact of evil’s existence — stories enable children to experience moral challenges within their own imaginations, and then for the conscience to respond, strengthening, standing up, naming… Knowing.

Birth and Pain

2008-06-18T21:08:00.008+10:00

Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
~ Gabriel García Márquez

If we watch a maturing monarch caterpillar — that large black-and-yellow creature bristling with black hairs — we will be amazed by the way it carves at the edges of the swan plant’s leaves in a kind of culminating ‘feeding frenzy’. At a certain point, its body seems to become slightly indistinct — we rub our eyes in order to focus, but it is as though a slight haze is shrouding the caterpillar… Then, quite suddenly it fastens itself from its hindquarters, hangs in the form of a ‘J’, and — we probably have looked away at just this point, distracted, perhaps because we are in the presence of a mystery — a short while later there is a plump chrysalis, spring-green with a series of golden dots around its rim.

The chrysalis seems unchanging for the first week or so. But if we were to cut it open, we would find no caterpillar, nor yet a butterfly — just a fluid mush.

Slowly, the green chrysalis darkens, becoming nut-brown, then blackening — and the butterfly’s wings appear beneath the translucent shell. About two weeks after forming, the desiccated husk splits, and the monarch butterfly emerges. Though not yet resplendent — it is bedraggled, crumpled, struggling to get free. If we were to try to help it at this point, to cut it free, ease it from the chrysalis, its wings would be deformed, and we would deprive it of its full development.

Once free, it sits in sunlight, wings pulsating gently. The butterfly is pumping them up into their full expansive glory… Then it takes to the air and light and warmth of late summer.

Birth is like this. It is a struggle. We know how difficult the first birth can be, and unfortunately this struggle is often avoided today by mothers fearing the pain of childbirth, or even thinking cosmetically. But while it is sometimes necessary, the choice of a caesarian will have its consequences. With vaginal birth, in its difficult passage through the birth-canal, the baby’s lungs are compressed and all fluids are expelled; the caesarian-born baby, however, often has to be separated from its mother and placed into an ‘isolette’, due to Respiratory Distress Syndrome. Antibiotics may then be necessary. Thus, the avoidance of one experience of pain can engender another.

The second birth around the seventh year can be accompanied by typical childhood illnesses, and often the child seems to regress in its development for a while, becoming insecure and ‘clingy’, and apparently weak, wanting to return to the safety and comfort of the mother’s life-sustaining presence. The suppression of illness at this time through immunisation is another form of well-meaning avoidance, yet some research suggests there may be consequences in later health problems. However, this second birth is generally less spectacular, and might pass un-noticed; life as such is a quiet process, in just the same way that metamorphosis in plants, or indeed in butterflies, is quiet.

With the third birth there is a lot to notice! The pain is apparent in all its manifestations. The adolescent’s soul is a ‘reaction body’, and from the inside, all this pain seems to be inflicted by others — hence the tendency to blame everyone else. There is a strong compulsion to take ‘pain-killers’ — any drug which medicates those adolescent conditions of anxiety and loneliness. Here the analogy with the butterfly is most apt: we may note the feeding frenzy, the increase in body size, the spinning of a cocoon of brooding emotion — which, if we should peel it open, reveals some real ‘mush’! — and then the struggle to emerge… And we feel powerless to help, perhaps realising the struggle is necessary.

The fourth birth is also often accompanied by pain, a raw exposure to the apparent indifference of existence, as though the soul-butterfly, now free to fly, doubts the wind and the dark and the cold, and the purpose of it all. In adolescence and young adulthood, an instinct to flutter in flocks creates some feeling of security, but there is an underlying tension — the uncompromising presence of individuality, sustained by awareness of winter upon winter of discontent, an existential pain — the angst of an isolated being in an apparently alien universe.

At each of these stages, the butterfly image is a true imagination of birth, and of struggle.

Snow White and Rose Red

2008-06-08T14:58:00.003+10:00

Among the numerous interesting processes in the human organism we find the polarity of thinking and willing. Their physiological basis appears very early, between the seventeenth to twenty-first days after conception, when two contrasting events occur simultaneously in the embryo. Through the midst of the generally undifferentiated cell material, a line appears, a groove which eventually folds to become a fine tube. This is the primal form of the spinal cord, with the brain stem, and ultimately the brain forming at one end.

At the same moment a rhythmic beating occurs, a pulsation in the midst of the cell formation, which in turn will become the primal form of the heart. ‘Form is the envelope of pulsation,’ a Tantric saying tells us. Thus we see it happening in the embryo: first there is a pulse, and then there is the heart.

This is a marvellous polarity: a line, a delineation, a clear differentiation of form, something hardening through the midst of the cellular structure; and pulsation at a particular place, movement without form, but formative. Here, by the end of the third week of pregnancy, we find in the human being the first signs of the presence, in terms of the fairytale, of the Snow White activity in us, and the Rose Red activity – the basis of what will become thinking and willing respectively.

Snow White always prefers to remain at home with the Mother; she tends to be quiet, reflective, conscious of what is happening. Rose Red however loves to run exuberantly through the woods, always active, adventurous, quick to respond. In Snow White we find the still calm centre of the brain / central nervous system activity; in Rose Red, we experience all that lives in the vital pulsing of the blood. Together, holding hands, they are whole, forming between them the weave of ensouled feeling.

In this regard, in each one of us there is the realm where Snow White and Rose Red are living still.

Walking, Talking, Thinking - part 2

2008-05-27T20:35:00.006+10:00

I walk along forest trails, absorbed in a kind of dialogue with myself, thinking it through, pausing occasionally to reflect on what I’m doing. I am home again an hour later, and the almost-two-year-old daughter of my god-daughter comes in to talk to me:

‘Kookaburra, John.’

‘Did you see a kookaburra, Georgia?’

‘Feed kookaburra, John.’

‘Did you feed the kookaburra?’

‘Kookaburra food.’ She runs to the fridge.

‘Do you want to feed the kookaburra, Georgia?’

‘Feed kookaburra.’ She runs to the sliding doors leading on to the deck. We go out to feed the kookaburra. Afterwards, Georgia’s eyes shine with joy: ‘Kookaburra!’

These endless sequences of phrases, transforming through time like minimalist music, the processing of experience in language simultaneous with language development itself. ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,’ wrote the philosopher Wittgenstein, and at this stage of development, this seems irrefutable. Just a year ago, Georgia was a beached seal on the living room floor, raising herself up and lunging forward in an ungainly yet marvellous fashion — raising herself up onto hands and knees, rocking back and forth, lurching forward again, often onto her face. Then up again, and…

Now she is articulating her immediate experience. This is the journey. In a year she will be thinking, as speech turns inward through the encounter with the world, to form images of its experience — thus becoming reflective, not just exclamatory. These essential developmental stages will be elaborated throughout childhood into her soul’s faculties of willing, feeling, and thinking, until one day Georgia might discover, as I have, that walking connects her with the world, talking with a companion, thinking with her self.

This journey, however, is not an easy stroll across a field. It is work. I remember watching my second daughter take her first fully independent steps, hesitantly balanced between poise and impetus, and how she suddenly became aware of a new possibility: her hands were free to carry things! Her delight in picking up a basket with her little dolls in it, and then learning to carry them along so freely, seemed to affirm this wonderful human capacity of walking upright. And perhaps this moment was the catalyst for the next stage, for it seemed that the action was immediately reflected inward, into her need to articulate the experience. It was as though, having found freedom of movement in physical space, the very ground she walked on then became the resistance that turned the impulse of movement inward, towards the inspiration of speech, that process of orientation in soul space.

And then there is that point in a child’s development at about the age of three, when they look out at the world, as though for the first time seeing it as something separate from them. It is a first epiphanic moment of realisation, of an awareness and celebration of self, and of the continuity of one’s own existence in space and time. From that moment on, children have life-long memories, and they can think.

It is my other children who demonstrated so clearly this revelation of self-consciousness in thinking. I can see my son — how he gathered together all the electrical extension cords in the house and used them to interconnect each room. Then he stood still and gazed at his handiwork, tracking the lines. That continuum of cables going from one room into the other, and then the way he surveyed the effect, gravely reflecting, was his moment of connecting thoughts together.

My oldest daughter’s moment, existentialist that she is, was enacted differently. I was in the garden, and she had been playing on the far side of the house. Suddenly she peered at me around one end of the house, calling, ‘Here I am!’ Then she disappeared, only to poke her head around the other end of the house to proclaim, ‘I still am!’

Moments of realisation of the continuity of existence… An orientation in spirit space. Georgia — almost two years old — is not yet exclaiming about such experiences. Yet they will come.

Walking, Talking, Thinking – part 1

2008-05-16T16:46:00.011+10:00

I pull on my boots and lace them up, sitting on a step at the back door. I’m pondering what I’m doing, what I’m wondering about. And it’s all about walking, talking, thinking. This is a progression, developed in us in our first years, before the age of three, during that time we cannot remember when so much happens. I picture some of the children I have known in their first years — my own, and those of my friends — recalling wondrous deeds…

For instance, learning to walk. Watch how a child pulls itself upright — in fact seems to be impelled upright, raised into uprightness by an immense yet focused intent — to grasp intuitively the relationship of equilibrium and movement, first in the legs, and then in every step, and then in the free possibilities offered to the hands. In these events I discern the intimate relationship between the inwardly active senses of balance and of movement, awakened in this first independent achievement of the child in establishing its presence in physical space.

Then consider — maybe knowing the basics of linguistic theory — the relationship between hand movement and the speech centre in Broca’s region (for a right-handed child, in the left hemisphere of the brain). Note the child’s eloquent gestures in learning to speak. Witness this search for words, how they are found with fluid but continually arrested movements of the hands. We might observe how the child’s firm rhythmical steps engender well-formed sentence structures, both clearly articulated and modulated. Previously, the child had words — but now, once free to move, he or she seems inspired with language. And in this cloud-burst of language-inspiration, syntax (word order) indicates relationship (between subject and object, for instance), and is the soul’s equivalent of the body’s experience of equilibrium and movement. Through speaking and listening, the child learns to feel itself aware in soul space.

Similarly, when thinking then arises inwardly as a reflection of the outer world and all its processes, this also is an experience of the relationship of equilibrium and movement, this time in consciousness. Thinking is speech turned inward through the encounter with the world, to wonder, and to form images of experience. We then become aware simultaneously of ‘self’ and ‘other’ — but in this duality are the seeds of a higher synthesis in thinking. Through this ability to mirror experience in consciousness, the child begins to perceive itself in what we can call a kind of spirit space.

And therefore to remember its experience. These are big ideas, but as I set out on my walk into the forest across the road, I sense the small applications, and thus the reality of such concepts — as I pause to speak, as I fall silent into thoughts. I notice how the walking does connect me with the world, the talking with my companion, the thinking with myself.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness…

2008-05-11T19:51:00.004+10:00

Autumn is a mysterious season. I once said to a friend that it was as though the leaves, which had been made of light through the alchemical magic of chlorophyll, were now giving it back, shining like small flames on the (mostly northern hemisphere) trees. ‘How can that be?’ he asked sharply, and I stayed quiet, an awkward and shy poet who had no rational explanation for the obvious.

Children have no trouble with mystery. An apricot is a golden sun-ball, a fallen autumn leaf is a little piece of that sunset. And we are well advised to enter into their world, through a re-awakening of that most childlike quality — wonder. So each autumn I will return to this faculty for seeing the world of nature in a renewed way, for this is the time to gaze at the world and be amazed. But it is to gaze, not glance, that we are called. The world gives over its mysteries gradually. We have to develop what John Keats called, in a letter to his brothers, Negative Capability — that is, to be ‘capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ There is nothing negative in this, but it does require the capability to inhabit — initially — a field of apparent nothingness. So easy for a child, because for a child this field is teeming with presence. But for adult consciousness, there is a gap, which we have filled with theories — perhaps some of those promulgated by Richard Dawkins.

Rachel Carson, author of ‘Silent Spring’ and wonderful books about the sea, has commented: ‘If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder . . . he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, the excitement and mystery of the world we live in.’ An adult courageous enough to hold open the intellectual window of the mind and let being-ness and presence in…

Setting Up a Nature Table

2008-04-23T19:46:00.003+10:00

The concept is really simple — a small table in a quiet corner of the living area, which is the site for a continually developing display of gatherings and gleanings from nature. The table can be covered with one or more coloured cloths (which might also be changed to represent each passing season) — they could be draped over pieces of timber or stone.

But this is not just about a table — it’s about walking, in the garden, along the street, in the park, in the bush, along the beach — collecting ‘visible imaginations’ of the manifold shapes and presences of nature. Our guiding principle could be the various kingdoms — stones and crystals, a jar of coloured earth; leaves and fruits and seeds; shells and bones and fur and feathers; treasures from our own lives… So, discovering wonder…

And it’s about talking. But it’s less important to explain or categorise things than to be amazed by diversity and variation. Questions are better than answers. Talking about things can lead us towards the processes of nature, and towards a mood of reverence towards its transformations, towards living and dying and regeneration.

And it’s about thinking. Again, not categorisation (which is the end of thinking), but in seeing the marvellous ‘thinginess’ of the world and its remarkable processes, to then let wonder and reverence lead us to thoughts about the wisdom-filled harmony present in nature and its kingdoms.

And it’s about being together, accompanying your child in a mood of devotion — a mood that is for your child and with your child, towards the world and for the world.

Breathing - Letting Go and Letting Come

2008-04-16T18:15:00.016+10:00

In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman challenges what he calls the ‘parental fallacy’ — that is, the belief that ‘we are our parents’ children and that the primary instrument of our fate is the behaviour of our mother and father’. It is the mistaken belief that, just as the body emerged from the parent’s making, so too does the child’s soul and spirit. But, says Hillman:

The question eclipsing all others is: how does what comes with you to the world find a place in the world? How does my meaning fit with the meanings to which I am asked to conform? What helps growing down?

For ‘growing down’ is the task of childhood — coming to earth, entering the world. So, for instance in the Zohar, we find the injunction to the unborn soul: ‘Go now, descend into this and this place, into this and this body.’ It is not only an ancient Jewish idea; Plotinus writes: ‘being born, coming into this particular body, these particular parents, and in such a place, and what we call external circumstances … form a unity and are as it were spun together.’ Or my daughter could say, ‘Before I came down to the ground I already knew my friends — then I was born and I found them again…’

We do not bring our children ‘up’, or ‘raise’ them. We help or hinder them in growing down; and this impulse in children to grow down pre-exists. So how do we help and not hinder? Hillman is uncompromising:

Parents’ deficit attention to the individual call they brought with them into the world and the hyperactivity of their distraction from this call betrays their reason for being alive. When your child becomes the sole reason for your life, you have abandoned the invisible reason you are here. And the reason you are here as an adult, as a citizen, as a parent? To make the world receptive to the daimon [your individual human spirit]. To set the civilisation straight so that a child can grow down into it and its daimon can have a life. This is the parenting task. To carry out this task for the daimon of your child you must bear witness first to your own.

This is what teenagers mean when they call us hypocritical — they see we are not true. To become our true selves — this is the example each of us has to set, so that our children are inspired — a word meaning ‘to breathe in the daimon’ — not to necessarily become like us, but to become themselves. Their selves.

Parenting thus implies a ‘lightness of touch’ — a ‘letting-go’ and a ‘letting-come’, rather than cultivating the claustrophobic environment that results from excessive parental control, or the metaphorical agoraphobia that is a consequence of under-parenting. The life processes are present as world processes, and our first parental responsibility is stewardship of this offering out of the world. It begins with air and light, with a fragrant breeze of open spaces, with both movement and stillness. Systole, diastole… Breathing…

So breathe easy… But not negligently — let your child go, let the world come, but be mindful of the quality of the breathing. Do not stifle, but do not let the gale blow in… Make a home —in that place between ourselves and the world…

Autumn Light, Inward Breathing

2008-04-03T09:16:00.002+11:00

There is the first sign of chill in the night, and dew in the morning… In early autumn I notice the depth of sleep, and the richness of dream. Warmth, the clarity of light, and traces of mist already in the valley…

Do you keep a nature table with your children? Here is a source of wonder, of imagery, of story — here, an education of the senses can be nurtured, and an awareness of the rhythms of the year, and a first feeling for the seasons of life. Why is this important?

We have a feeding trough on the deck outside the dining room. The forest birds come down and feed (we never overfeed, so that they will not lose their instinct to forage) — crimson rosellas, king parrots, bronzewings, firetails, a shrike thrush… And numerous others in turn. Their antics as they jostle for a place are often amusing, and one day I murmured, ‘Anyone who watches birds couldn’t remain depressed. It’s so healing.’

So often our lives today are disconnected from such simple pleasures — from light and air, from seeing and breathing, from the steady pulse of the world-processes. Just try connecting, and notice the change in the family dynamics. However, don’t expect it to be immediate — perhaps your children have been addicted to other things such as TV and food, and replacement therapy is never straightforward, especially in its early stages. But as the days grow shorter, it’s tempting to allow these ‘drugs’ to intrude more into children’s lives, so some effort may be needed. Try setting up a nature table.

Wonder is part of a child’s birthright, an opening to mystery and enquiry. It is a path, via the senses, into the world, into a reflective mind — and therefore into a constant renewal of faith and hope. I use these old words for eternal values that need to be re-sourced, in order to counter the often-cynical values espoused by those who want to control our society. Faith. Hope. And that other one… Love.

Autumn - breathing the season

2008-03-22T09:41:00.003+11:00

To everything there is a season… I reflected on this as we passed the equinox in late March (I live in the Southern Hemisphere). This moment is perfectly poised between the utter out-breath of high summer and the deeply indrawn breath of midwinter — so delicately poised, yet the intentional motion is inward. For some of us, crossing this threshold into inwardness is an unsettling time, while for others it is a great relief after summer. We learn something about ourselves in observing this — it has to do with rhythm, and the way we ‘breathe’.

What is breathing? We can extend its physiological reality to all aspects of the way we live (this is true of each life process). In everything living we can identify a breathing process: a breathing in, and a breathing out. It is in the seasons of the year and the seasons of life; in the seasons of each day and of consciousness; in our sleeping and waking; in sensing and reflecting; in laughing and weeping; in sympathy and antipathy; in social interaction and in solitude. All these polarities, and the midpoints between…

We take a deep breath before confronting an ordeal, for both physiological and psychological reasons, and this is a kind of ‘yes-saying’ to whatever may come. On the other hand, there is panic. This word ‘panic’ derives from Greek times, when a simple goatherd-boy, for instance, out on the mountain with his flock, would suddenly feel the approach of the god Pan; fearful of being possessed — of being ‘inspired’ by the god, of actually breathing him in — he would succumb to wild panic.

There is hyperventilation, and there is also the momentarily-arrested breath in gasping with surprise. Then, in the anguish of loneliness, my breathing may become particularly shallow. While in doubt — especially self-doubt — breathing seems to be suspended. This inability to breathe deeply is a form of denial, an inability to say 'yes' to both self and world.

Through becoming conscious within the expansion and contraction of the breath, I find poise — presence, breathing in the light. Just think for a moment of its inverse — panic, hyperventilation, the incapacity of anxiety — and recognise the counter-force of presence. To be present means ‘to be before’ — if I am present, it is always in relationship to some other.

So in autumn, I am taking, so to speak, a ‘last’ deep breath of the world — deeply aware of its loveliness in the autumnal sunlight — before turning inward towards dreams and contemplation. Something is calling to me — it is my self. I want to be more attentive to my inner life, and as I do so, I feel more whole, and healed.

And when I reflect on the tasks of parenting, considering the life process of breathing, I recall sitting by the bed of a sleeping child before dawn, after a time of illness, sensing in her deep steady breathing the healing power of rhythm. A wonderful sense of peacefulness pervades the room. There are these moments when a child’s breathing seems like this, just between sleeping and waking, when a uniquely human yet spiritual presence taps upon a membrane of silence…

Introduction

2008-03-21T15:18:00.001+11:00

Until quite recently, parents usually brought up their children as they themselves had been brought up. But during the twentieth century many radical changes have taken place at spiritual, psychological, sociological and physical levels. Many time-honoured patterns ruling our lives have been disrupted, and nothing will ever be the same.

My intention is to share some views — theses — about parenting as a vocation: that is, a conscious search encompassing the human spirit, soul and body. My approach originates from the insight of Rudolf Steiner, through which I find a way into contemporary life and all its challenges. In doing so, I notice I am in fact drawing on a wide range of spiritual and psychological sources.

In each article I want to articulate particular ways of looking at childhood and the tasks of parenting; I am convinced that once we have a clear orientation in our minds, we can set a course, a direction, and then consider what tools and techniques might be useful. If you find these articles worthwhile and would like to share them, I am happy for you to pass them on. I ask only that my name remains attached to them.