The Hundred Names of Love

Dear Members of The Waldorf School of Santa Barbara Community,

Thank you to all the parents/caregivers who met this week with teachers for conversations about the children. We are grateful to unite with you as we hold the children in reverence.

Speaking of reverence, in a recent letter to his parents Mr. Gebeau shares this heartening image of school play. "A group of first graders was helping me and each other learn how to Hula Hoop at recess. We all had so much fun without fear of teasing or ridicule. I share this moment with you to point out how important trust, reverence, and love is in the social exchange at home and at school. Children and adults thrive when we hold reverence and space for each other."

For more on reverence, consider reading this essay by Teddy published last week in Waldorf Today:

https://www.waldorftoday.com/2021/03/sages-disguised-as-melon-growers/


With gratitude,

The WSSB Admin Team

PS The pensée of the day is by Mary Oliver:

"Teach the children. We don't matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones – inkberry, lamb's-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones – rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.

Attention is the beginning of devotion."

PPS The poem of the day is by Annie Lighthart:

The Hundred Names of Love

The children have gone to bed.
We are so tired we could fold ourselves neatly
behind our eyes and sleep mid-word, sleep standing
warm among the creatures in the barn, lean together
and sleep, forgetting each other completely in the velvet,
the forgiveness of that sleep.
Then the one small cry:
one strike of the match-head of sound:
one child’s voice:
and the hundred names of love are lit
as we rise and walk down the hall.
One hundred nights we wake like this,
wake out of our nowhere
to kneel by small beds in darkness.
One hundred flowers open in our hands,
a name for love written in each one.