PSC

            Over the last few years, I’ve been traveling a lot either for work or pleasure. The pandemic has grounded me, and for many reasons it has been a positive experience. First of all, I’m fortunate to be in my little house with a garden in the back and the American River Trail across the street. I have been able to connect with my house in a new way, to clean out shelves and closets, to scrub the grout on the floor tiles, to notice areas of clutter, and, of course, to cook every day, grateful for fresh produce, as well as oranges and eggs from my neighbor.

            Weeding and pruning have created an attachment to the garden. Being home I was able to experience the bursting of the lilacs, the fruit trees, and, most notably, the pink blossoms of the dogwood tree planted over the ashes of my sister Janet. Today, I pruned the azalea bushes.

             I take a daily walk, sometimes two in a day. I often meet a friend part-way, and we walk by social distancing and share our lives. Coyotes have crossed our path, turkeys have gathered to impress each other with their tail feathers, hawks have flown overhead, and woodpeckers have been busy making holes in the bark of their favorite trees. The views of the river as I cross three bridges is a welcome sight.

            I have a mask from my time in India, and I’ve made a cotton one to be used when I’m near others. I haven’t gone to a store in the last three weeks and have been grateful for deliveries from our local market. 

            My daily rhythm includes a one-hour face-time with my 9^th grade grandson, who has disabilities resulting from his stroke. Being home has given both of us an opportunity to work on his assignments. Usually, I would work with him only once a month, but now it is a five-day-a-week occurrence. I have been able to build each day on the previous day’s accomplishments, and I’ve used observation exercises to perceive how he thinks, what helps him connect his thoughts, what questions to ask to draw out of him, thoughts he didn’t know he had. He had chosen as a project for his geography class the topic of caring for people with disabilities as an example of social justice. He watched videos of people dealing with disabilities. I watched them as well. He had a complex series of questions to answer, and as I helped him do that, I could see that he was becoming more confident in recognizing his own disability and becoming familiar with concepts such as advocacy, accessibility, and social justice. Of course, I’m working with just one student each day. I think of the teachers who are handling an entire class.

            Teachers at independent and public Waldorf schools have jumped into the challenge of connecting with the children in their classes. Rather than overly relying on screen time for the younger children, they have created projects, crafts, nature experiences, and personal connection. They have used screens where needed, and especially in the older grades. However, color, shape, observation, movement, and handwork have been helpful tools.

            I look at this experience of sheltering at home as an opportunity for time, gratitude, and perspective, and I wonder about the future.

Betty Staley

Andrew Cuomo, the beleaguered governor of New York State, made an offhand remark the other day in one of his regular press briefings. “I don’t think we get back to normal,” he said with one of his philosophic sighs. “I think we get to a new normal.”

So, I have begun to ask: What is to be this ‘new normal?’ Here are some things that were not so normal as late as New Year’s Eve 2019 and yet three months later have very quickly become the norm – at least for now.

While there are plenty of things I would not like to see stick around that relate to the current pandemic, there are other things I would. These are briefly jotted down, in no particular order.

• “How are you?” has become a real––rather than a routine––question. Emphasis is placed more on the word “are”.
• Social consciousness is up – way up. “Social distancing” is actually mis-named. “Physical distancing” it is for sure, but socially you may feel closer to people around you because you have become more mindful of them. Random greetings of strangers––in parking lots, on street sidewalks, in elevators––have grown more common, I think.
• Wearing a mask not to protect yourself but to protect others: This represents a small example of an immense potential in shift of consciousness. If you track the three ideals of Rudolf Steiner’s Threefold Social Organism historically in this country, you may notice a sequence of unfolding over time. First, especially during the earliest colonial days but even into the last century, we in America valued freedom above all, even to a fault (as in “free” enterprise, which isn’t actually free but is treated as though it is). Then, sometime in the 1990s––perhaps earlier but certainly after the 9/11attacks––emphasis shifted from the ideal of freedom to the second ideal of equity, even if it cost us some measure of freedom. In the name of greater security, for instance, we came to accept limitations to our freedom––for instance, in the way we traveled, especially by air or across a foreign border––and these restrictions were equally applied. To be sure, we have a long way to go in establishing this ideal of equity across all segments of our society. Nonetheless, I discern some new steps already being taken to practice to a greater degree something of Steiner’s third ideal: fraternity, especially in the economic sphere. The latest pandemic has brought home the reality that “I am my brother’s and my sister’s keeper.” Wearing a mask to protect one’s social siblings rather than oneself is a small but significant step in that direction. Again, we are a far cry from making this the basis of our financial and economic life, but already some of the “fraternal” principles that we have resisted as a society for decades are being enacted by acclamation (at least for the short term and at least in certain parts of the country), for instance in the financing of health care, protection from eviction, forgiveness of small business loans, extension of unemployment payments, and enlargement of child care benefits. 
• Briefly, perhaps to the point of sounding trite, we are shifting from a culture of “ME-consciousness” to a culture of “WE-consciousness” and, more importantly, a culture of “YE-consciousness”. This was the ultimate task that Rudolf Steiner identified as being the mission of the human race for as long as we inhabit this earth. Yes, we struggle first for ME-consciousness (otherwise called “freedom”) but ultimately, we give it away for the sake of the other–– in “YE-­­consciousness” (or what is better known as agape, the highest form of love).
• Crime, at least certain kinds of it, is down. So is gambling and drug use.
• The Paris Accord is being enacted de facto – even in the one major country that backed out of it de jure.
• Put differently, the earth is healing itself. We have been simply unwilling to do it, despite all of the warnings and scientific studies . . . and so nature has stepped in to do it for us.
• People are singing spontaneously more often with each other––albeit at a distance––in the streets of Brooklyn, from the balconies of New Orleans, on the porches of homes where old people live in protective quarantine. In general, there is more spontaneous creation of visual and performance arts. Some is “virtual”, but a lot of it is “real”, even if organized via social media.
• We are practicing the soul/spiritual discipline of distinguishing the essential from the inessential. Rudolf Steiner recommended this practice as an effective exercise for the strengthening the “I” in relationship to the astral body. “I will” replaces “I want”.
• Family life is greatly enhanced. This is both positive and not so positive, depending on how family members treat one another. The potential for good, however, is limitless. Just last week Governor Cuomo reported that after two decades as a father he was finally discovering who his daughters really are.
• “Work life” and “home life” are much more integrated, at least in some cases. A day thereby can become much more coherent, woven of one cloth. Despite the potential for chaos and for strife, kids get to experience––and perhaps even respect––what their parents do when they’re not being parents.
• By the same token, parents have become much more involved in the education of their children.
• Rush-hour traffic is greatly curtailed. This is one of many examples of how social stress can be greatly reduced (especially if your commute involves lots of red lights).
• People are paying a lot more attention to their health – especially to the organs of heart and lung. We may hope to see the currently lowered levels of smoking stay in place once this pandemic has receded. In the meantime, our physical (as well as spiritual) immune systems are getting a work-out as never before.
• Appreciation of essential services and professions is up; attention to inessential services and professions is down. On the “up” side I include nurses, priests, farmers, grocers, delivery services. (I will let readers fill in their own examples on the “down” side so as not to insult any one profession.)
• We see how economic competition, despite apparent initial advantages, in the end works against the interests of all involved, even of the so-called “winners”.
• Instruments of war (and perhaps the funds that sustain them) are being redirected in service of peaceful civilian purposes.
• We have greater awareness of the fact that when it comes to human health, walls don’t keep things out, and they don’t offer that much protection, either.
• Finally, and perhaps most important to those who work in Waldorf education:

While we would not choose to convert our school programs to “distance learning”, this technological medium may, from one perspective, actually be nudging us to become ever more Waldorf in our teaching, in the sense that we are having to rely much more on what our students can experience by themselves (albeit with our guiding questions) than on what we can tell them or discuss with them in a classroom setting. Inevitably, we are having to become all the more experiential, all the more “student centered”, ultimately all the more

“e-ducational”––in the original meaning of this term––through our pedagogical practices. 

            We may here glimpse something of “the new normal” in a future approach to the life of education –– and of life as a whole.

Douglas Gerwin

I have been living intensely with the question: how long can we consider what we are doing in distance learning  to be Waldorf education ?  At what point does it become a Waldorf program, preferable, in our opinion, to any alternatives the parents may have, but no longer really an education in the sense we have come to understand that term?

The question of length is, of course, not really the most pertinent. It is a proxy for a point at which an ineffable quality of relationships gets lost, perhaps irretrievably, until such time as an actual personal encounter becomes possible again. I dare say that we don’t really know the answer to that question. I read that there are those who demand that schools shutter themselves because there is no possible way of doing Waldorf education through the internet. Others believe that this is the beginning of a whole new way of practicing Waldorf education. I don’t feel that I have a great deal of clarity yet. I live with this question and try to observe the actual experience, allowing it to percolate into consciousness in its own time. I can say that the one student who missed a lot of time before school dispersed, and who therefore has been only “visible” to me as a computer image for a couple of months now, feels less fully available (to me) as a presence.

We are now passed the etheric cycle that I mentioned in Ruminations #2, and I expect that new challenges will arise both for the teachers and for the schools. The habit bodies of parents and students will lose the immediacy of the physical locations and the people who inhabit them, and I expect that greater doubts will manifest among those who have to keep the schools afloat financially. I hope I am wrong.

Today, while sitting in the cemetery above my town from earlier than previous sunrises, I found a new way of working with the images of my students. I offer it as my little Easter egg gift to those who want a spiritual technology to counter the electronic one.

Begin by contemplating four lights:

The natural light of the sun, especially at sunrise and sunset.
The light of the mind, that allows you to see in the sense of understanding.
The light of the computer screen: controllable, available, and cold.
The warm light that can pour out of your solar plexus and see the other person.

Now take each student: (I use the plural to avoid gendered pronouns. Forgive me.)

1. See their face as it appears on your computer screen.
2. “Pull it out” into a three-dimensional bust, perhaps down to the top of the shoulders. See it as vividly as you can, recreating their appearance.
3. From your solar plexus, let a gentle river of warm light flow and engulf the bust. Allow the river to split as it meets the bust, and let little eddies of light gently swirl around the countenance of the child, feeling the qualities present. Pay special attention to the moment where your warm light meets the gaze of the student. It can feel overwhelming, but it is also the closest I have felt to being with my students since we stopped meeting in person.

Wishing all of you a wonderful day. Feel free to respond to any of this. It isn’t meant as some party line for anyone to follow, but as a contribution towards meeting the moment.

Warmly,

Elan

I am really thankful to those who have sent me photos of sunrises and sunsets.

Here is a sunrise from Germany:

Dear Friends,

At the beginning of this crisis I was worried about my students. I am not so worried about them now. Sure, their childhood and education have been interrupted by this bizarre episode. But they have the protection and guidance of angels. Those that chose to come into the world at this point in time will be given tools and opportunities to overcome the challenges that have been put in their way. We hope to God that we play a beneficial role in those opportunities, that we are one of the good tools; but even if we fail, the children will have other resources.

The adults? Now THERE is a bigger question. We are free, which means we have to create the space and the movement to generate the ideas and inspire the actions that can meet the moment. Spiritual work is always a free deed, beset by our every form of personal weakness. And when we spend our days teaching, preparing, “meeting”, and otherwise being available through the medium of electronic devices, the inner determination needed to make room for spiritual work becomes that much more difficult to muster. Electronic devices beget a nervous energy, and a kind of irritability that makes internet trolls something we can readily understand, even if we choose to avoid becoming one. I don’t like using mechanical imagery for human soul activities, but it often feels like Zoom meetings (even lessons) create a soul “frequency” that saps energy and require a concerted effort to recover from them. On top of that, well-meaning people inundate us with content, best practices, funny videos (and Ruminations like these) to the point where we feel overwhelmed and exhausted by the thought of all the things we haven’t read or streamed.

Moving on: I would like to dwell mainly on relationships, especially in connection with the question of rhythm. Relationships really ARE rhythm, and rhythm really is a relationship between, at the very least, two elements: ebb and flow. But the secret of healthy rhythms is that there is always a third element. In the rhythm of night and day we have the dawn and dusk; in the rhythm of quiet breath at night, there is a moment of rest after the exhalation; in healthy farming there is the fallow year; in conversation there is silence.

In a healthy life of soul, between activity (thinking, feeling, and acting) and rest, there is boredom. Boredom, good boredom, generates a vortex in the soul, inviting imagination. Among the many forms of harm that humanity has inflicted upon itself through the creation of the wired and wireless world, the disappearance of good boredom is one of the most consequential. Sure, we get bored today, on occasion, when every streaming option from Netflix to YouTube, email, text, and computer game have been tried and ruefully discarded. But it is a nervous, exhausted, depleted kind of boredom. Good, effective boredom is peaceful, even if there is almost always a tinge of guilt that comes with it.

In the absence of boredom, the new beginnings we generate run the risk of being derivative. To borrow from the musical world: we don’t generate new themes, only variations. In spiritual practice as Rudolf Steiner describes it there is the moment when the mind, fully awake, relinquishes the image or understanding that has been built with great effort, only to face the complete absence of everything: no light, no image, no sound, only a great void. If in the course of preparation sufficient forces have been created, those forces now stream out form one’s soul and slowly illuminate the spiritual beings that surround us all the time. From them, genuinely new beginnings can be made on earth. We can even employ those beginnings in the service of others.

I would like to draw a parallel between this darkness of spiritual training and boredom in relationship to others, especially students. In the ordinary course of school life, there are natural rhythms of teaching and free periods. You are with your students, and then you are not, and then there is lunch, and recess, and another period, and dismissal. At some point you get to your study at home and, if you are lucky, sit there for a few minutes and stare into space. I usually need about 20 minutes every evening to let the day float by  me before I begin to work. Those 20 minutes are designated boredom time. No internet, no preparation. Over longer periods of time, there is the weekend, the vacations, the summer.

With these online classes, I don’t have anything nearly as substantial with which to work a good boredom. A colleague objected to my characterization of relationships from a distance causing people to grow more abstract in one’s mind, and suggested that distance learning is an opportunity to see others whole; that the distance allows a perspective that is very difficult to get when you are with another person all the time. But young children are not yet whole in the same way as are adults; there isn’t yet a whole there in the same way. On a Zoom call, they sometimes feel very two-dimensional. And the effort required to build colleagues into wholes without meeting them regularly has, to this point, proven greater than I have been able to manage.

So, here is what I have figured out about boredom so far: take a walk. The Japanese speak of a walk in the woods as taking a “forest shower” and in German there is a word for the special silence you can experience in the woods. Live into the special qualities between you and the natural world, not in grasping for it but by letting it envelop you. When I walk with my dog along the railroad tracks, I feel what I call “nature blanket.” I release my mind from tasks and let it meander aimlessly.

A little after the walk is a great time to think about the students or the main task facing you. I find that seeds of thought land in my “soul-garden” while I am out for a walk, and they now need to be noticed, watered, and tended if they are to grow.

And here is where it gets tricky: online classes require longer silences, longer boredom periods, and also longer periods of reflection to generate new ideas. It takes great spiritual effort to “see” our students when the cold visuals and audibles of the screen are all we are given. Learning to love, to raise ourselves to the point where we can give what is needed, requires the opposite energy from the nervousness that these devices generate.

One reason for that became clearer as I read Catching the Light  by Arthur Zajonc. Seeing is the result of the entwining of two lights: the outer light of the sun and the inner light of the mind. When the outer light has been replaced with electronic light, our seeing is compromised. We are entwining the mind with pseudo-light. When we watch a movie, we know that we are being told a story that was produced to be told in this fashion. But when we speak with people on Zoom, our sense of them is twisted by the intermediary “translation” of their visages into pixels. It’s ok when we are trying to focus on “stuff,” but with our students, stuff is just the garment, the vehicle for education. We need to see THEM, and that is so much harder now.

Elan

Dear Friends,

The experience of teaching my 6th grade via Zoom and Google Classroom has been a rich source material for observations both about myself and about a host of questions, some of which I began mentioning before: relationships; living vs trapped light; the experience of time; isolation as a physical experience and isolation as a soul/spiritual experience.

We will begin with the good.

The first good difference is that I am surprised at how easy it has been to move to this online mode. Just the fact that we can begin at 10 instead of 8:15 means that the students are more rested and focused.  The possibility of matching our working hours to the students’ biorhythm is in itself food for serious reflection on the unhealthy nature of making the school day fit the workday of other professions. I fully understand that there (probably) aren’t viable alternatives, but in an educational system that aims for health, this is a problem. By 10, they seem ready to go. I don’t see yawns and sleepy faces nearly as much as I was seeing before.

A second good surprise is the advantages that online tools offer for some subjects. This may be completely obvious to teachers who have been using technology for years, but for me it is new. I teach astronomy at the moment, and by sharing my screen with the students I can show them various aspects of astronomy quite vividly, often more vividly than I would have been able to do with my words and drawings at school. The movement of the stars, for example, is much easier to show with the amazing Star Walk app than with diagrams and narratives. Likewise, the “dance” of the sun’s rising and setting points is simpler to demonstrate in this manner than I ever remember it being with blackboard alone.

A third good surprise has been the ease of communications with some of the quieter children. The option to ask a private question about an assignment through the app means that students who are usually reluctant to expose their uncertainty have a socially safe way to let me know that they need more clarity or an extra session of individual video chat. And speaking of individual video chats, that is the fourth pleasant advantage: I have every student scheduled for two one-on-one sessions with me each week. With some of them, these afford me a lot more personal time with them than I ever managed at school. The chats can last just a few minutes, but some have gone on for 20 minutes and covered both the material and more general concerns or issues that arose. It feels good to be available to them in this way.

OK, now that I have practiced positivity, let’s unload a little, too.

Connecting with human beings through screens is a terrible way to educate. Teaching, as I mentioned above, is ok, but educating? Not so much.

I had my class go out to see the sunrise on the one clear morning we had all week. They will go out in the evenings to see the beautiful constellations in the sky after sunset if we ever get a clear evening. But we can’t do the astronomy sleepover that my former classes enjoyed so much (if only for the rite of complaining that accompanied spending an hour lying on our back on the tennis courts) and we cannot create the communal experience of stargazing that turned the sleepover from a teaching opportunity to an educational one. Sharing the hot cider and little treats between sessions of constellation-following was as much an aspect of that experience as any knowledge gained. Can’t do that now, so the bits of information tend to live in the very isolation that contextual learning is supposed to overcome. So I work to create context as best I can, but the presence of another human being cannot be faked with Zoom. I feel a little empty after these sessions, and miss the casual banter during snack time that allows intimacy to grow in the spaces between human beings. So much of education is being able to have an idle conversation with a student during snack or recess about what their breakfast was like or how their baseball game went the previous afternoon. Sometimes it is just the quick smile as you pass them by on the way to recess duty. We weave into each other’s life so that the content of the lessons is only one of many layers in our encounter, and out of those interactions a pedagogical fabric is woven.

It feels like we still have enough relationship “capital” to last for a little while. I would imagine that about four weeks (an ether-body cycle) should be relatively easy. After that, some facets might begin to feel faded, out of date. We can find interest in subjects together, but feeling each other as living human beings will become more difficult when we begin to “wash” out of the habit bodies of those around us. In my experience, even close and beloved friends become more like abstract ideas after a few weeks have elapsed from our last physical encounter. I feel them with me for about three days, and then a little less intensely for a few more weeks, and then they are loved in a different, more remote way. I dread my students moving to those remote regions of the soul. It is natural for that to happen over the summer vacation, and it is even good: it allows us to meet anew and for the teacher to make room for the new stage in the child’s development. But in the middle of the school year, it feels ominous. Will I become an instructor instead of an educator if I don’t meet these students in person? I find that it is growing more difficult to know how to “carry” them when I only see their heads on the screen.

This issue is related to the question of light I raised last week. I asked my students to make a concerted effort to experience natural light, especially during the transitions between night and day. Natural light comes into our experience and fades away from it gradually, softly. Electrical light is trapped and obeys our commands: all on or off at our request. Night turns into day and vice versa with the flip of a switch. As Joseph Campbell wrote, the twilight, around the fire, is when the myths and traditions were passed from generation to generation. We have lost those times. A strong spiritual effort is required if we are to allow soft light to live among us now. A gentle, caressing light that allows us to see softly. In the second teachers’ meditation Steiner uses the phrase “heart-warm touching.” I think that it is all the more challenging to develop this touching when we only meet our students on screens.

So what can we do?

Everything I mentioned last week is still good 🙂

I also began re-reading Arthur Zajonc’s book, Catching the Light. I cannot recommend it highly enough to anyone who wants to live into the dilemma of electricity as trapped light.

I end with an image from pre-sunrise on Thursday morning. Wish you all could have been there.

Dear Colleagues,

The extraordinary moment in time in which we find ourselves seems destined to become era defining. Like 9/11 or Watergate or the Kennedy assassination, we will look back and see how events led to this point, but even more clearly how this moment set in motion an entire new
configuration of thoughts. There is no reliable way to understand in advance what is about to unfold, how long it will take to play out, or how this turning point will seem in retrospect. We can just sense that, for one reason or other (more likely a whole host of reasons coalescing into
this particular configuration) the world has come to a standstill and awaits a sense of direction.

I don’t know anything about viruses and how they suddenly manifest in epidemics. Various sources blame a jump from wildlife to humans, the advent of a new electrification wave, nefarious government programs, predictable biological metamorphoses, or chance. What we can say with certainty is that fear, anxiety, and isolation have resulted. Alongside them, good will and generosity have also manifested, and many people have been learning new ways of doing what they do.

I want to offer a small contribution towards meeting the more difficult phenomena of the soul. These are exercises and meditations that I find helpful in managing the unknown. The root of all of them is the contrast between light and electricity. Rudolf Steiner calls electricity “captured
light” (or, as I would translate it for greater contrast, “entrapped light”) and points to what he calls sub-nature as the sphere of existence brought about by human ingenuity, a sphere which is dominated by materialistic, dead thinking. It is important to add that Steiner did not in any way advocate avoiding electricity or technology. To the contrary, he was keen to use the
newest innovations of his day. But he was under no illusion that this use would be pain free, and he was clear that the use of these innovations would take its toll on the human constitution. He specifically said, in his last written piece, that to overcome these sub-natural forces would mean that human consciousness would have to rise as far above nature as technology descended below it. This was a startling challenge even in his day, and when we consider what level of thinking we are dealing with in distance learning at the moment, it is clear that the challenge is immense.

So, with all of this as background, here are a few exercises you can do:

1. In the little booklet Light on the Path, which Steiner recommended to pupils in the early Esoteric School, there is a meditation: “Wisdom Lives in the Light”
   Live deeply into each word in turn (except “the” which can be omitted completely), speaking the sentence inwardly, slowly, with the emphasis shifting to a different word each time. Ponder
   “wisdom” as you hear inwardly “WISDOM lives in the light.”
   Then concentrate on “lives” as you hear inwardly, “Wisdom LIVES in the light.”
   Then:
   Wisdom lives IN the light.
   Wisdom lives in the LIGHT.
   Only do as much as you can manage without losing focus; don’t stress. There is tomorrow and the next day and the one after that. The mood should be quiet but not severe.
   
   When you have contemplated all of the above in one sitting, and please don’t skip steps and assume that you can begin where you left off (this would turn it from a spiritual practice into a materialistic one); instead, try holding all of these meanings at once. You can try to “hang” them all on one word, or even a sound and, however briefly, “see” the entire meaning together. There are more possibilities after that, but this will suffice to get going.
   


2. Particularly beneficial for building a relationship with natural light are the actual experiences of sunrise, sunset, and the starry night. Once a week, make a date with the sun at sunrise. Try to be outside while it is still dark, and experience the coming of the light until the sun rises about the horizon. Don’t bring your smart phone along; try to immerse yourself in the lighting up of the world as darkness recedes before the light. If you do it for several weeks in a row, you
   will notice that the point where the sun crests the horizon will move northwards (to your left as you face the East). This movement will continue until the summer solstice in June, and then begin moving to your right again.
   
   Corresponding to the sunrise, sunset is another experience that can become a source of meditative experience when we live into the subtle shifts in the qualities of the light, outwardly as well as within us.
   
   Finally, the starry night is a potential source of deep inner peacefulness. Right now, the time after sunset is the best time for seeing the most striking constellations (Bull, Orion, Cassiopeia, Big Dipper) as well as Sirius (the brightest star in our skies, in the South) and Venus shining brightly in the West. I took a 30-minute break from writing this letter to observe the stars, and came back refreshed and inwardly quiet.
   


3. Another way of contemplating light is in the sense of that which allows us to see, to understand, to grow. Choose a plant: flower, tree, shrub; try to look at its pattern of growing, at the way that it builds substance into a particular form. If you dare and are not intimidated by it, try drawing it. The point is not to create a work of art but to let your eyes and hand move along etheric forms. The etheric world is intrinsically healthy; plants don’t develop cancer or indigestion or heart attacks; they can get sick from lack of moisture or nutrients or from attacks by pests, but in themselves they are healthy. Following their growth patterns moves us in healthy forms. Out breathing changes and our mind clears.
   
   Those are three little ways of trying to balance our increased reliance on “fallen light.” I would be grateful if you care to share any experiences you have with them or with other approaches
   you have tried.
   
   Elan