November 21, 2020

Dear Members & Friends,

We are grateful for this community of consciousness! From the extraordinary communities and schools and farms, to the healers and artists and activists, to the conversations of study groups where so much inner life and depth is quietly discovered and share, to the class meetings of the School for Spiritual Science, mostly in abeyance for now. A pattern which scarcely catches the eye is quietly alive in the world, and we are blessed to be aware and so to be a part of it.

Soon the strange and novel events of this year will be intertwined with familiar festivals, mass shopping events, and end of year appeals. And always we are preparing for the fuller birth of our humanity within us...

THANKSGIVING THOUGHTS

Thanksgiving is almost here. It is a harvest festival, of course, though not strictly part of the ancient cycle of holidays; perhaps it is a late Michaelmas? It is in any case a much loved holiday in the United States. It brings together the dearest people, the most treasured food, and hopefully the most grateful behavior all around.

This year, if you are following the public health advice to keep your physical gathering small, along with the Zoom and phone calls, you might also be missing someone who is among the hospitalized or the 250,000 early-departed in the consequence of this pandemic. This is almost 100 times the human cost of the terrorist attack of “9/11”—which we still memorialize each year, even as we forget many of our original impressions.

Back in the autumn of 2001 there was initially much human questioning. Why would people commit suicide in order to take others’ lives and destroy property—notably the “world trade center” and the military command center of the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world?

There was also in some circles the weighty imagination of the victims as sacrificial offerings. A few recalled the curious connection of Joseph Beuys, the artist and social philosopher inspired by anthroposophy, who had pictured the twin towers of the World Trade Center daubed with shoe polish and labeled Cosmas and Damian, twin brothers, Syrian Arabs, physicians in the coastal city of Aegea who accepted no payment, and Christian martyrs under the Roman emperor Diocletian. 

Around the same time (1974) Beuys had flown to NYC, been wrapped in felt and put in an ambulance, and delivered to an art gallery where he spent eight hours a day for three days in a large cage with a coyote, “America’s spirit animal.” This “Action” was called I Like America and America Likes Me. 

If we take our current time in the sense of a mystery drama, of performance art, none of what is happening seems so strange. Our democracy is openly questioned. Our hospitals are in danger of being overwhelmed. It has recently come home to many of us that some people with resources are thinking further ahead than most of us. 

The psychological threat we offer each other out of our so-slowly-maturing egoity is echoes now as a physical threat of contagion. The stock market booms while “essential” workers are at risk, and many “blue-collar” workers are lining up at food banks for the first time or waiting for eviction notices and the end of unemployment insurance. 

If all this were staged, credibly, it would be staggering. But it is on stage, and we can follow the path of wonder, reverence, harmony, and devotion to a place of open minds and hearts and will, where understanding may be available. 

A bit of interesting language meditation could be helpful just now, on the words “thinking” and “thanking.” It’s an obvious pairing also in German, denken and danken. It seems like a souvenir of the ancient way of language still found in Hebrew, where a word “root” is made of consonants (typically three in Hebrew) through which vowels move in order to give new meanings. With the sense of the vowels that we have from eurythmy, such lingering word groups as “sing-sang-song-sung” come to life in most interesting ways. 

Anyway, there is no thanking without thinking: what am I thinking of when I feel grateful? But there can be, and often is, thinking that is not thankful: both good, clear observation, and cold, selfish calculation come to mind. Thanking the man who named the types of clouds, Goethe put them in poems, nimbus, stratus, cumulus, and ended by reminding that the now distinguished phenomena need to be brought back together into a whole reality. 

Physically together or entirely alone, physically, next Thursday, perhaps we can try to put the phenomena back together into the wholeness that so easily escapes us. Some phrases: “America, love it or lose it?” “The great reset” — toward more humanity, or less? And “we shall meet, but we shall miss them; there will be one vacant chair...”

Moving toward winter, our photos show a changed palette in our nearby arboretum. Under bare trees the bushes are still green, capturing the late sunlight unimpeded. Attention shifts to the textures of bark and new buds that will wait through the winter.

John Beck
Editor, being human
editor@anthroposophy.org
Anthroposophical Society in America