Too much like the weather here in the Northeast, I’m oscillating between sunny, golden days and days of dark, gloom…and the first pre-Halloween, multi-inch snowfall since the Civil War! Yesterday it began snowing midday. We were finishing up an intimate little training session at the Brooklyn Waldorf School. We had planned to return to Yorktown Heights, to Cat’s mother’s home for Saturday evening and Sunday before returning to the school to work on Monday morning with staff and teachers.
We took the train to Croton-Harmon, skirting along the Hudson River. Snow fell and thick vapors rose off the wind-rolled waters. When we came out of the station, there were no taxis. In fact, there were to be no taxis. As the snow accumulated on branches still aleaf, it began snapping limbs and dropping them on the earth below. Roads, slick and sloppy, began collecting pileups of cars round hidden bends and on steep hills.
We had no choice but to buy a ticket back to the city, lug our bags back through Grand Central, wind our way with and against every other soul navigating the trek over to the S-train to Union Station where we boarded the C-train. We’ve come to know the C-train this trip. It’s the local train that stops at Franklin Street, the nearest station to the Brooklyn Waldorf School new location. It’s a ride all its own, in my experience, such as it is. Riding the C-train is like traveling down a rabbit warren gravel road in a cheek-to-jowl tin can. Still we both nearly slept through our stop. If one of us hadn’t wakened with a jolt, we’d still be riding out somewhere beyond Euclid, Queens and the Mad Hatter!
I was in a dark brood. There was a dying going on and the seed pouches were yet unnamed. A chapter—I nearly was so grandiose as to say era—was ending, the golden few years of traveling out into the world, off to Australia, New Zealand and Korea, called to and calling at many a foreign port and vale to share my trainings, off on a journey where what I was saying and doing was recreated anew at every stop, where dying was easy and birthing filled with enthusiasm. What a different dying that was!
We’re here in Brooklyn, Cat and I, returning to the Brooklyn Waldorf School once again. This is the third year I’ve come to the school, at least twice each year. This school has shared in my own becoming over that time and has over and again given me the chance, the opportunity, the gift of sharing that becoming. We’ve traveled together an arc of unfolding, building on each session, then seeing the fruits coming out of what we’ve done. Cat had joined that journey this last year, coming as a witness a year ago January and, then in June, she shared her Playback, unfolding her work as a contribution to enlivening the social atmosphere and work.
We were meant to come in August but, in the teeth of the Irene’s threat, we backed down and postponed our visit until this weekend. As it turns out, we’ll meet on Halloween.
Death is in the air; it’s there in my brood. And though this only occurred to me yesterday, a week or so ago, I began mulling and weaving together some thoughts and quotes relating to death and our social work.
Die and become! The social forces are death forces. Empathy is so difficult because it is a dying. The plant dies; the future seeds endure. All knowledge is wrested from death. If time reverses after death, is that true after empathic knowing? How do we die willingly? How does one span dying into seeding? What need die that we might perceive what is growing in what is? And the new Michaelic yoga?
And then this poem that has been a treasure since I first shared it with a fourth grade back in 1986, Russet Leaves by Brien Masters:
Russet leaves! Russet leaves! Triumphant on high,
Touched by the crimson summer’s sky,
Embers aloft, as the dragon’s wide eye,
Russet leaves, fear ye, fear ye to die?
Nay child! Nay child! To die fear we never,
We fear neither besom, nor blast of the weather;
We rejoice when the scowling squall snips our frail tether:
Nay child! We’ll pelter down, pelter together.
Russet leaves! Russet leaves! Stout oak’s trumpet choir,
Shrink you not from the clay and the dung of the byre,
To be muted and choked in the smoldering fire;
Russet leaves will you bow, bow deep as the mire?
Yea child! Yea child! We’ll gladly be tossed,
And rotted and ditched, or crunched by Jack Frost,
Or sandwiched ‘twixt layers of kitchen compost:
Spring’s green voice will proclaim: We never are lost!
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