The Soul Seeks Beauty

Dear Members of The Waldorf School of Santa Barbara Community,

Here at WSSB one finds little houses of make-believe. Along a fence, in the garden. And these houses -- made of sticks, leaves, rocks -- are often graced with a feather or flower, two eucalyptus seedpods beside the front door. In fact, these houses of make-believe are so delicately made, they often look like altars. Ralph Waldo Emerson says, "Beauty is its own excuse for being." Elsewhere Emerson writes, "The world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty. This element I call an ultimate end. No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty."

At WSSB we aim to provide a "beauty-attuned curriculum" (words from our mission statement), knowing that beauty-full work -- whether that means carefully setting the table in kindergarten or adding certain blues and oranges to a geometry drawing -- is a primary necessity for the wellbeing of the human soul. In other words, an approach towards life that makes and honors beauty is, despite what we might hear, eminently practical, eminently utile. Human beings cannot live on bread and screens alone. Here’s Charles Darwin, one of the most influential of scientists (whom the students study in Grade 8), echoing this truth (and these are words he wrote at age 72):

My mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years... Now for many years I have almost lost any taste for pictures or music… My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts...

If I had to live my life again I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week… The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

Did Darwin's late-in-life realization affect his understanding of evolution, of natural selection? Did he perhaps intuit that weaving beauty into life conduces to humanity's survival and flourishing? For us, this weaving -- which distinguishes us from other schools in the Santa Barbara area -- is foundational, basic, a given. We know that the soul seeks beauty (something we experienced this week during the Rose Ceremony for Grade 1), and no reason can be asked or given why.

On a different note, please keep our beautiful children safe by driving slowly and carefully on streets nearby and in our parking lot. Thank you!

In gratitude,

The WSSB Admin Team

PS The poem of the day is by Waldorf founder, Rudolf Steiner, a verse many of our students know well:

To wonder at beauty,
Stand guard over truth,
Look up to the noble,
Resolve on the good.
This leadeth us truly
To purpose in living,
To right in our doing,
To peace in our feeling,
To light in our thinking.
And teaches us trust,
In the working of God,
In all that there is,
In the width of the world,
In the depth of the soul.