IN the 1920s, Rudolf Steiner created a sort of liturgy of the natural and spiritual year in the form of fifty-two short verses. Experience—my own and others—testifies to the powerful effect that a short meditation on the relevant verse throughout the course of the year can have in respect to awakening and sensitizing the soul to each season’s unique quality and gesture.
Below is Dr. Steiner’s original Seelenkalender, or “Calendar of the Soul” verse for this week followed by my translation into English. I have opted to follow, whenever a conflict arose, the spirit over the letter in my translation efforts, attempting to convey the “mood” before the propositional content.
FORTY-FOURTH WEEK OF THE YEAR 44. Ergreifend neue Sinnesreize Erfüllet Seelenklarheit, Eingedenk vollzogener Geistgeburt, Verwirrend sprossend Weltenwerden Mit meines Denkens Schöpferwillen. ∇∆ LO! The shimmering weft of senses made manifest by inner light arrayed before the seeing soul, the Spirit’s birth, a secret sprouting from the solid Earth to scale an airy ladder wrought of my own self-willed and self-creating thought
HIVE
All day we leave and arrive at the hive,
concelebrants. The hive is love,
what we serve, preserve, avowed in Latin murmurs
as we come and go, skydive, freighted
with light, to where we thrive, us, in time's hum,
on history's breath,
industrious, identical . . .
there suck we,
alchemical, nectar-slurred, pollen-furred,
the world's mantra us, our blurry sound
along the thousand scented miles to the hive,
haven, where we unpack our foragers;
or heaven-stare, drone-eyed, for a queen's star;
or nurse or build in milky, waxy caves,
the hive, alive, us - how we behave
POET LAUREATE CAROL ANN DUFFY , PATRON OF THE NATURAL BEEKEEPING TRUST
Dear Max
Thanks for the follow-up podcast with your co-author and interviewer. Explaining how sacrifice of the subjective content of Imagination is prerequisite to experiencing the objective content of Inspiration in the right way, was a fine foundation for what followed. You found a good way to respond to 'the search for analogous paths' - firstly, being clear about the eye of the needle, the convergence of all paths eventually having to pass through the same and single (guarded) portal , and secondly, qualifying your statement, by saying that there are as many paths as there are individuals (and - in that sense - that 'each path is the right path', as unique as its journeyman). The 'individual way' , the way of ethical individualism, applies equally to each of us - as indeed it had applied to Barfield and Coleridge and Steiner (Steiner, who expressly advised against superstition of any and every kind). With 8.5 billion of us (and counting... thus as many analogous paths), 'looking for analogous paths' might risk becoming an end in itself.
spirit over the letter indeed.
Fully penetrating (perhaps rather 'becoming fully penetrated by' ?) 'unspent' texts
(those texts which call us back again and again, the ones we can't leave alone, sensing that their substance-in-full remain unrevealed, unyielded, yet un-sacrificed into cognitivity)
is aided by multiple translations over time....even as the reader/meditant develops/'in-forms' cognitive means. To translate ever better seems to involve a kind of transmigration and completely inventing the text afresh - a fresh catenation in another voice. One literally 'gains' in translation.
Thanks.