Greetings friends – The question for me is always, where do I start? For this 1st installment of the write-up for the ‘All Souls Southern Tour’, what came was to just be real, to be vulnerable, to start with the genesis of my own All Souls healing journey. And so it is:
Verse for Our Beloved Dead by Rudolf Steiner:
May my heart-love reach to soul-love.
May my love’s warmth shine to spirit light.
Thus, I draw near to you.
Thinking spiritual thoughts with you,
Feeling cosmic love in you,
Willing in spirit through you –
Weaving with you
One in experience.
I have always had an ‘Ancestor Shrine’. A kind of altar table layered with pictures, Mass cards, candles, crystals, bells, art offerings & the letters I written to the dead over the years. My Strega Nona taught me to place a fresh glass of water there every morning with a greeting. Starting with the Michaelmas season I often feel a pull to consciously tune in more. Sometimes I awake with the idea to bring a favorite food or an urge to sit there in meditation, or offer my research or reading; this ‘altar’ is after all, right next to my computer in my study where I do all my spiritual scientific work. Last year I began to know that I could recite the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ with my parents in mind. For many years it was difficult for me to engage with them, as the karmic knot was too tight, too painful. But my angel insisted, & so I push thru, & little by little the forgiveness & healing expands into all worlds.
As fate would have it a few years ago I was asked to come out to Nashville & Knoxville TN. to bring various anthroposophical programs, & I knew it was another opportunity for me to do some ancestral healing.
I have spoken about how my mother’s people came to the Knoxville/Milan/Skullbone TN area from Ireland. They raped & pillaged into the Chickasaw tribe, intermarrying, but then proceeding to become founders of the KKK in that area. Feeling the shame of the ‘sins of the father’s’, I had avoided the South all my life, going only once before when I was in a band, stopping in while on tour, for a family reunion after my mother had died.
I often imagine that my parents are still in the Kamaloca phase in their life between death & rebirth. Our dear Dr. Steiner shares with us that the human soul spends the beginning of this journey in what he refers to as the ‘Region of Burning Desires’ (in Hindu it is called Kamaloca, or in Christian verbiage-purgatory). On average we spend 1/3 of our lives in sleep, the little death, & so it is that we spend this same ratio purifying our passions, coming to terms with & reviewing our recent life on earth. This is a crucial time to reach across the threshold to help those on the other side in this phase closest to earth, especially since they are experiencing our time together. And so I offer them this Steiner Prayer:
I look to you in the spirit world
In which you are.
May my love mitigate your heat.
May my love mitigate you’re cold.
May it come through to you and help you
To find the way
From the spirit’s darkness
To the spirit’s light.
I am so grateful to my Southern friends, who have allowed me to meet this part of myself, thru the work that I share, to do some deep healing; welcoming me into their communities, which I see as my chosen family.
Coming this time for our ‘All Souls Southern Tour’, there was a big shift, which I will go into tomorrow.
Thanks for walking with me on the path…
~hag
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POD (Poem Of the Day)
~The clouds cut
A formless form
Into the heavy throne of some kind of queen
Only never my mother.
& yet a clue unfolds & holds
The encoded map
Star clusters speaking the scope
Of the stream, sunk
In the occlusion of tears & corals
Pried away from glistening birds
Weaving treasures into stinging prayers
& future symphonies.
~hag
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21 November 2019 – “Speaking with the Stars”: Look for Bella Luna waning in the east next to Regulus the next few mornings.
A very obscure meteor shower known as the Alpha Monocerotids is currently plowing streams of dusty particles that sputter off comet nuclei when they approach the Sun. The peak occurs TONIGHT starting around 10:50 pm CST. The shower’s radiant is in the obscure constellation of Monoceros, the Unicorn, not far from the bright star Procyon, the easternmost star in the Great Winter Circle. Procyon will be low in the eastern sky at 10 pm.
Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures on this day
ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
164 BCE – Judas Maccabeus, son of Mattathias of the Hasmonean family, restores the Temple in Jerusalem. This event is commemorated each year by the festival of Hanukkah.
1676 – The Danish astronomer Ole Rømer presents the first quantitative measurements of the speed of light.
1694 – Birthday of Voltaire, a French Enlightenment writer, historian, & philosopher famous for his wit, his criticism of Christianity, especially the Roman Catholic Church, as well as his advocacy of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state. Voltaire was a versatile & prolific writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, & historical & scientific works. He wrote more than 20,000 letters & more than 2,000 books & pamphlets. He was an outspoken advocate of civil liberties, despite the risk this placed him in under the strict censorship laws of the time. He adopted the name Voltaire in 1718, following his incarceration at the Bastille. It is an anagram of AROVET LI, the Latinized spelling of his surname, Arouet, & the initial letters of le jeune (“the young”). According to a family tradition he was known as le petit volontaire (“determined little thing”) as a child, & he resurrected a variant of the name in his adult life. The name also reverses the syllables of Airvault, his family’s home town in the Poitou region. Voltaire perceived the French bourgeoisie to be too small and ineffective, the aristocracy to be parasitic and corrupt, the commoners as ignorant and superstitious, and the Church as a static and oppressive force useful only on occasion as a counterbalance to the rapacity of kings, although all too often, even more rapacious itself. Voltaire distrusted democracy, which he saw as propagating the idiocy of the masses. As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma, & the French institutions of his day.
1783 – In Paris, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier & François Laurent d’Arlandes, make the first untethered hot air balloon flight.
1789 – North Carolina ratifies the United States Constitution & is admitted as the 12th U.S. state.
1811 – Death day of Heinrich von Kleist, German poet & author, spoken about by Rudolf Steiner in THE INNER ASPECT OF THE MOON-EMBODIMENT OF THE EARTH. How can we fail to recognise that this man’s spirit in its entirety as he stands before us, is an actual living embodiment of that which dwells in the depths of the Soul, which we must trace back to something other than the life of earth if we wish to recognise it? Has not Heinrich Von Kleist described in the most significant manner what may live within a man (a description of which you will find at the very beginning of The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind), as something transcending him and driving him, and which he will only understand later on if he does not snap the threads of his life before! Think of his ‘Penthesilea’; how much more there is in her than she can span with her earthly consciousness! We should not be able to describe her at all, did we not take for granted that her Soul was immeasurably further advanced than the narrow little soul (although it was a great one) which she could span with her earthly consciousness. Hence a situation must arise which artistically introduces the whole process of the Drama. Indeed, it was necessary to prevent the whole transaction — which Kleist introduces with Achilles — from being grasped with the higher consciousness; otherwise the whole tragedy could not be perceived. Hence Achilles is called ‘her’ Achilles. What lies in the higher consciousness must be plunged into the non-conscious. Again, what part does this subconsciousness play in Katchen Von Heilbronn, especially in the remarkable relation between her and Wetter Von Strahl, which plays no part in the higher consciousness, but in the deeper strata of the Soul where dwells the forces of which man knows nothing, which pass from one to another. When we have this before us we can trace the spiritual nature of the world’s forces of gravity and attraction. For instance, in the scene where Katchen stands before her admirers, do we not feel what lives in the subconsciousness, and how it is related to what is outside in the world which has been dryly called the forces of our planet’s attractions? Yet only 100 years ago a truly penetrating and striving mind was not able to find his way into that subconsciousness. But it must be done to-day. And the tragedy of a Prince of Homburg strikes us in a very different way now. I should like to know how an abstract thinker, one who accounts for everything by reason alone, could account for a figure such as the Prince of Homburg, who carried out all his great deeds in a kind of dream-state, even those leading finally to victory. Kleist indicates very clearly that he could not possibly gain the victory by means of his higher consciousness, for as far as that was concerned he was not a particularly great man, for he whines and whimpers over everything he has to do. Only when by a special effort of the will, he brings up what dwells in the depths of his Soul, does he play the man.
1877 – Thomas Edison announces his invention of the phonograph, a machine that can record and play sound.
1905 – Albert Einstein’s paper that leads to the mass–energy equivalence formula, E = mc², is published in the journal Annalen der Physik.
1916 – Deathday of Franz Joseph I of Austria, spoken about by Steiner in The History and Actuality of Imperialism
The Emperor of Austria, who now belongs to the deposed royalty, before he was chased out carried around along with his other titles a most unusual one: Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slovenia, Galizia, Lodomeria, Illyia and so on. Among all these titles was also “King of Jerusalem!” The Austrian Emperor also carried, until he was no longer emperor, the title “King of Jerusalem.” It came from the crusades. It would be impossible to give a better example of meaninglessness than this. And such meaninglessness plays a much greater role than you imagine. It is a question of whether we can arise to a recognition of the present-day platitudes. It is made difficult because those who live in platitudes are the verbal representatives of the old concepts that stagger around in their brains imitating thoughts. But one can only achieve real thinking again when the inner soul-life is filled with substance and that can only come from knowledge of the spiritual world, of spiritual life. Only by being relieved by the spirit can one become a complete person, after having been constipated with platitudes. What I described yesterday as a feeling of shame will result in the call for the spirit. And the propagation of the spirit will only be possible if the spiritual/cultural sector is allowed to develop independently.
1927 – Columbine Mine massacre: Striking coal miners are attacked with machine guns by a detachment of state police dressed in civilian clothes.
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13 December 2019 Rudiger Janisch:
The 3 fold human being , the Foundation Stone & the 3 fold social organism 7 pm – 9 pm &
14 December 2019- 9 am – noon
Rüdiger has been working in Curative Education and teaching in professional training programs in Germany and the United States for over 40 years. A long-time student of anthroposophy, he serves on the Collegium of the School for Spiritual Science in North America. His contributions to adult education methods were recognized in the context of an international research project sponsored by the European Union. He has been a member of the core faculty of a joint ‘Training for Trainers’ program supporting Curative Education and Social Therapy in Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan. He has also taught as an adjunct faculty member of the M.S. Ed program in Waldorf Remedial Education at Antioch University N.H. Having taught many different aspects of anthroposophy and Curative Education, he currently is focused on action research and the development of artistic and experiential approaches to the spiritual scientific study of the human being.
Contact rjanisch@camphill.edu
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