To Know the Whole
Dear Members of The Waldorf School of Santa Barbara Community,
Earlier this week, in honor of Dia de los Muertos, the students -- with their teacher guiding them -- experienced the ofrenda created by Senora Marcela, Ms. Melissa Stever, Maestra Mora, Ms. Mónica Ballón-Kalinowski, and Ms. Leida Tolentino. The Dia de los Muertos altar was arrayed with marigolds, shells, candles, calaveras (decorative sugar skulls), papel picado (decorative paper), likenesses of the Virgin Mary, and photographs of the beloved dead. Afterwards the students ate special bread and drank hot chocolate under the sweetgum tree in front of school.
How to articulate the beauty and helpfulness of such an experience for a child?
Such altars, as you may know, are not spooky; rather, they are “thin places,” shrines of tenderness; and can conduce to the health of a human being -- child or adult -- as much as rest and a hearty meal. For the reality of death -- a reality so easily swept under the collective psychological rug -- is not only being acknowledged but honored, reverenced, celebrated. How relieving this must be to the children who indeed suspect death, wonder about it, but perhaps are shy about saying so.
Here we see how Waldorf education returns what our time so easily confiscates: a sense of the whole. Waldorf education recognizes the whole of the child (the head, heart, hands); the whole of the year, with the rhythms of its changeful seasons; the whole of the interconnected Earth, with its human creatures and non-human creatures; and the whole of being: life and death, dark and light, the effable and ineffable. To know the whole thusly, one could say, is to be held. And such a held-ness -- that our children know that they are held -- is something we dearly crave for them. An aphorism from Rudolf Steiner is apt:
You rest in the divine world You sense yourself in divine peace Your soul experiences divine peace Divine peace streams in you On a related note, we thank everyone involved in the creation of this year's Halloween Journey, which was a great nourishing joy for all. We bow to Ms. Nelson and Ms. Angela; the faculty and staff; the students who helped; and the many dedicated hard-working parents! What a blessing this year's journey was! And what a blessing our WSSB community is! Thank you!
In gratitude,
The WSSB Admin Team
PS The poem of the day is from Denise Levertov:
To Speak
To speak of sorrow
works upon it
moves it from its
crouched place barring
the way to and from
the soul’s hall...
PPS The thought of the day is from Thich Nhat Hanh:
"The day my mother died, I wrote in my journal, 'A serious misfortune of my life has arrived.' I suffered for more than one year after the passing away of my mother. But one night, in the highlands of Vietnam, I was sleeping in the hut of my hermitage. I dreamed of my mother. I saw myself sitting with her, and we were having a wonderful talk. She looked young and beautiful, her hair flowing down. It was so pleasant to sit there and talk to her as if she had never died. When I woke up it was about two in the morning, and I felt very strongly that I had never lost my mother. The impression that my mother was still with me was very clear. I understood then that the idea of having lost my mother was just an idea. It was obvious in that moment that my mother is always alive in me.
I opened the door and went outside. The entire hillside was bathed in moonlight. It was a hill covered with tea plants, and my hut was set behind the temple halfway up. Walking slowly in the moonlight through the rows of tea plants, I noticed my mother was still with me. She was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often, very tender, very sweet . . . wonderful! Each time my feet touched the earth I knew my mother was there with me. I knew this body was not mine alone but a living continuation of my mother and my father and my grandparents and great-grandparents. Of all my ancestors. These feet that I saw as 'my' feet were actually 'our' feet. Together my mother and I were leaving footprints in the damp soil. "