Courage, Love and Meaning: Tools for Resilience in the Here and Now

21st April 2020. Wendy Cook, Dartington

Currently we need courage to face every day as we hear the news ofan increasing significant death toll spreading around the Planet. This tends to be of the older members of the population. Courage to be prepared to participate in the act of ‘Suffering on behalf’ –a truly Easter Experience –and facing the possibility of huge changes on many levels for our society in due course. Time to stop and think, watch and listen –the polarity –the almost deafening sound of birdsong –is it the birds’ jubilation in not having to compete with the din of road traffic and overhead aeroplanes? The blossoms this spring also seem to express an exuberance that is almost theatrical. Steiner tells us ‘that the birds sing to help the flowers grow’. People are noticing his phenomena. As an 80 year old living in the attic of a large detached house (occupied by other ‘retirees’) I am supposed to be self-isolating. This is quite challenging as I am a very social person and belong to several groups and do not have much literacy in technology. I have spent my life cooking and gardening and find it well-nighimpossibleto only cook for myself. I am continuing to cook, albeit on a much smaller scale and smuggling out meals to friends who in return do shopping for me. This small service allows me to do something creative and of service.I was born at the beginning of the last world war, a child of two rather cultured Mancunian parents forced to move to a horticultural area in a small village in Bedfordshire. The soil was good and I experienced the wisdom in being able to grow one’s own food, make one’s own clothes and Christmas presents, share with neighbours.Cooking was important –vegetables, we always had about five vegetables in any meal. I spent many summer holidays picking fruit on fruit farms.This current crisis has shown up the weaknesses and lack of real resilience in what has developed in our food production and distribution.

The applause for our National Health workers, garbage collectors, postmen etc is well deserved but so far I have heard no acknowledgment of our farmers and horticulturalists. It is as if a real lack of consciousness has fallen over the question of ‘Where does our food come from, who grows it, who harvests it and who prepares it?’ Notice the anomaly of having to hire private planes to bring over Romanians (still capable of doing this important work) to harvest our Essex grown lettuces! That we depend to heavily on doctors and hospitals is a relatively recent development that science has all the ultimate answers and authority. The current crisis shows how little we understand ourown bodies and the vast invisible world of microbial activity; living in a society that seems to only deal with symptoms and not causes. Not fully understanding our own place in our intricately fashioned environment. We do not seem to realise that our spiritual consciousness co-evolved with our biological bodies and that the vastly important immune system continues to evolve with the evolution of our ‘I am’.Thus we seem to have broken so many laws that no other creature would do –destroying its own means of survival. Our most life threatening illnesses have a ‘cold’ gesture where the body temperature drops, rather than hitherto illnesses have been accompanied by fever. The present pandemic attacks the middle realm, the lungsand by extension the heart –the whole feeling realm. The intellectual soul development has largely avoided the feeling realm but now we are seeing that important aspects of life that are repressed will resurface with gained energy! And human warmth is being expressed whilst other freedoms are dismantled.Communities, schools and gatheringcloser, suppressed. No touching. This seems to perpetuate the phenomena of entropy –of fragmentation.In my book ‘Foodwise’, I traced the various epochs of human nutrition linking them to an evolving consciousness (guided by Steiner and Dr Rudolf Hauschka’s wisdom). This long process brought the more insubstantial (etheric) human being (nomadic groups led by Shaman) characterised by the term ‘Milk and Honey’through the agrarian ‘Bread and Wine’ to the present epoch (characterised by the Mineral) where mineral supplements are often

taken. This has led toa hardening and coarseningof our ‘gravity laden bodies’.(This concept refers mainly to the Western trajectory of development)We can experienceseparation, from environment, from each other, loneliness and isolation being emphasised by the current situation.Easter and a very rare conjunction of planets involving Mars, Saturn, Jupiter and Pluto, has served as a backdrop to this crisis; a lack of real leadership which is currentlygiving muchattention to thelack of PPE units, and the government’s mishandling of this issueNo visible Parliament in London in this time of crises.Now the world needs a new spiritual/physical road map. This so called pandemic has laid bare the paucity ofperspectiveon the human/planetary project, but it also an opportunityto bringin a healing vision, one that answers the question ‘What are we doing here?’Thisshould link us to our roots in the past but with aclear orientation to the future.A future which is capable ofnavigating a healthy relationship o technology but not being subsumed, dominated by AI, a path which can restore the dismembered sheaths of humanity and Nature.To address Parsifal’s unasked question ‘What Ails Thee?’To join Osiris’dismembered body by the feminine gift of healing.In his book on this subject ‘Humanity’s Last Stand’, Nicanor Perlashas much good advice and early on in the book (p.5) he states:-‘The way forward is dramaticallydemonstrated by Agriculture itself. The Medusa like torch of death of AI is THWARTED in Agriculture which will become a refuge for real humansnot fake digital humans including their robotic versions The developmentof humanbeings, if you look at Anthroposophical Cosmology, by evolutionary processes that recapitulate themselves in a different and moreenhanced form at specific points in human history. The food we eat and the agriculture we practicehas been an important back story to this evolutionary process. However this recapitulationhas stopped during our time. NOTHING IS BEING REPEATED now. This is because we have reached this point of HUMAN FREEDOM and it is unpredictable what humanswill dowith their freedom. What human beings

on this planetdecide to do NOW will affect what happens in the epochs to come. The human being is new becoming a powerful agent of transformation. But we need to drop our masks which separate us from the unity of world consciousness,form alliances with other global identities’.‘Ifweallow things to take their own coursein the manner in which they have taken their course under the influence of the worldconception which has arisen in the 19thand early 20thcenturies –MATERIALISM,we shall face the ‘War of all against all’towards the end of the 20thCentury.We would see the gradual development of a type of humanity devoid of every kind of social instinctwhich would talk all the more of ‘social questions’. ‘(RudolfSteiner lecture: The Remedy for our Socially Diseased Civilisation, Dornach 6 Aug 1921)Now the questis finding the purpose in our Higher Selves that understands, cares for and loves the PROFOUND INTENTIONS embedded in the whole fabric and evolutionarythrust of the Universe.Nicanor Perlas, ‘Humanity’s last stand.’‘If we take the 24 hours of a digital clock, we can say that for 23hours and 50 minutes, humanity was deeply and overtly spiritual. In the last 10 minutes, humanity became more and moreinfected with materialism that acted like a highly virulent virus spanning the planet’.‘Will you WAKE for PITY’SSAKE?’‘Sleep of Prisoners’, Christopher Fry