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Inspiration

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During the course of my life Rudolf Steiner's work has been the most influential. At first, during my late teenage years,it was indirect. While in boarding school I befriended 5 boys, all students of a Waldorf School, and the effects of the Steiner education greatly distinguished these friends from all my other friends. Today, looking back, I can say that the care, that had gone into the development of the whole human being, as it manifested in their warmth as humans, their bright and openminded intelligence, as well as their many creative and artistic impulses, made them stand out like beacons by the sea. Of course none of that was known to my conscious mind. Later, in my mid twenties, after immigrating into the United States I was working as an artist and also raising bees. A beekeeping neighbor introduced me to 9 Lectures on bees by Steiner, assuming that I already was well aware of his( Steiner's) work. It were these nine lectures that set me onto a path of spiritual - philosophical inquiery and changed my life profoundly.

One cannot imagine the body of Steiner's work without becomming aware of another great individual, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe is widely known for his fine poetry and other literary achievments, but hardly for his scientific work, even in Germany.Steiner was entrusted in his younger years with the editing and preparations for publishing of the complete works of this famous German writer. The fusion of artist, scientist and spiritual searcher as it manifested in Goethe, influenced Rudolf Steiner and consequently the curiculum in our Waldorf Schools. Questions about the duality of human nature as presented in Goethe's great drama "Faust" and Goethe's scientific and artistic inquieries into the living nature of the natural world are of an immense value for the education of young people, who are meant to become true world citizens and stewards of our living planet.One could say, that today at the dawn of the 21st. century, with all it's human and environmental challenges, we all might take a moment and have a look at the genius of these two men and what they had to offer to humanity.

to be continued.