The sheltering embrace, acceptance, and openness to wonder that a child feels playing in nature are the maternal, feminine qualities that Laura Scappaticci found again in anthroposophy to support and guide her in challenging times.
Growing up in the 80s, my brother and I were sent outdoors to play for hours. We made mud stew in plastic orange buckets and climbed the maple tree in our front yard. The bright green caterpillar and strange looking chrysalis under our apple tree were full of mystery, life, and wonder. The world was vibrant, alive, and magical, speaking to us through its creatures. Our father, a Syrian immigrant, had a huge garden where he grew most of our produce. Our mother, a white American elementary school teacher, wary of the effects of television, limited our screen time and played songs on the piano while we sang and danced. When I was nine, our parents divorced. Split between houses with two busy parents, the fresh Middle Eastern food we used to eat was replaced by sugary cereals and boxes of macaroni and cheese, and outdoor play was replaced by the horror and action films we could now access on my father’s new TV. Consumer culture found us, and we succumbed to it.
By the time I had my first child, my mother, once full of wit and will forces, had died. Though many of my early imaginations of parenting came from her, she was not there to guide me. The reality of daily life and mainstream culture began to push in on our growing family, and it was hard to hold on to my idealistic picture of parenting. I imagined we would sing, tell stories, hug trees, bake cookies from scratch, and have a cohesive family unit. But at 33 and 37, my husband and I had not yet encountered Waldorf education and had no community to support us.
Destiny intervened through the whispered guidance of a midwife who told us to visit a tiny school in northeast Canada. When we walked in, we felt a presence, something natural and full of life. The wooden play items, the fresh foods, and the pastel-colored silks felt like a maternal embrace by a long-lost mother—one whom we had nearly forgotten existed. We had finally met Rudolf Steiner.
The Waldorf teachers guided us into Steiner’s understanding of child development. Like an attentive parent, Steiner saw children as they were and accepted them. His indications supported my “mothering intuition” which could easily have been suppressed by the force of mainstream culture and its emphasis on achievement.
Steiner’s child development framework is a disruption of the materialistic culture we live in, with its invasive focus on productivity, fame, and consumerism. It’s an acceptance of the natural, multi-layered unfolding of the human being. Just as my childhood experiences taught me to trust the natural unfolding of nature, the caterpillar to the chrysalis to the butterfly, Steiner taught us to trust the natural unfolding of our children’s bodies, intellects, and emotional lives.
This trust in an unfolding process is inherently feminine, an echo of the trust that a mother, the Divine Mother, was asked to place in her own womb. From his study of the embryo to his impassioned pleas for humans to connect with the spiritual world, Steiner asks us to trust ourselves, each other, and the intractable connections between humans, the earth, and spirit.
The Feminine in Anthroposophy
Viewing Steiner as a mother softens the potentially restrictive intellectualized structures within anthroposophy. Accepting the feminine in anthroposophy is accepting the natural, the whole, the materially unknown but instinctually knowable. This acceptance is also a form of resistance, much like resisting the pressures of modern-day parenting. These tender feminine intuitions counteract the forces that invite us to leave our questions behind and be led by a culture with transactions and self-interest at its core–a culture that would lead us away from the still, small voice inside us that connects us with ourselves and spirit.
With the course correction and invitation into unstructured play that we learned from Steiner, our children’s natural inclinations shined through. We got out of their way and let them grow. Now, even as teens, they draw and paint unprompted, despite their cell phones. They write and make music, rather than only listening to songs already perfected through sound engineering and auto-tuning. Steiner birthed these ideas and inspired us to take them up as a family. Steiner, as a mother, resisted the destructive forces of materialism, consumerism, and even patriarchy through his trust in the spiritual world. When we invited this trusting resistance into our home, it birthed something messy, unproductive, off key, splattering, and sputtering. It created life.
Because of Steiner’s trust in human and spiritual processes, as well as his maternal instincts and mothering, I see anthroposophy as a living garden found both inside myself and right outside my door. When I listen to our mutual mother, I hear his urging to go dig in the dirt, fill buckets with muddy anthroposophical stew, and stir them forward and backward with a stick. Then I trust what rises to the surface and I give it love, knowing my muddy hands and smiling face will delight the man who mothered me.
This year we are bringing you a series of articles titled “Rudolf Steiner as…” to honor the 100th anniversary of Rudolf Steiner’s death—sometimes an essay, sometimes simply a thought or reflection—always, an aspect of his being.
