Wonder

Dear Members of The Waldorf School of Santa Barbara Community,

Yesterday a kindergartener told us he saw the northern lights over the holidays. Then he told us this again. And again. “I saw the northern lights—in Iceland!” he all but shouted. “They were blue and white and blue!” he elaborated, clearly feeling no adultish chagrin about repeating himself. “And they were purple and gray and shaking!” Around the wonder of a child it is difficult not to feel that wonder yourself. You are, for a few moments at least, moved again by the glamour of things. Moved by sycamores. Mushrooms. Rain. The sound of walking on gravel. Moved by the aurora borealis. Poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote: “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” Writer Thomas Carlyle spoke of “the great Fact of existence.” And Emerson adds: “We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body."

In this new year together may we all, for the sake of the children and each other, strive to keep our appointments with wonder. In addition to keeping a weather eye open to challenges and then carefully striving to meet those challenges, may we remember that praising and participating in the beauty of existence give us the strength we need to protect existence and carry on as parents and members of our communities. May we remember, with G.M. Hopkins, that despite it all “nature is never spent."

In gratitude,
The WSSB Admin Team

PS The Thought of the Day
“The whole object of real art, of real romance—and above all, of real religion—is to prevent people from losing humility and gratitude which are thankful for daylight and daily bread; to prevent them from regarding daily life as dull or domestic life as narrow; to teach them to feel in the sunlight the song of Apollo and in the bread the epic of the plough. What is now needed most is intensive imagination inward, on the things we already have, and to make those things live.”
- G.K. Chesterton