Die and become!

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!

Let this be background and context for the following post…

The Future in Boding

Does time only travel in the direction from past to future? It is certainly the only direction we ordinarily ever think about time. It's an endless string of present moments arising and falling away into the past. Yet, within the life of the soul, there are clear indications that there is something of the nature of time that approaches us from the future in that we have fear of what might happen, hope that it won't, interest in what will happen, and devotion to that which emerge in time in those little beings we call our grandchildren. All that we long for, all that we desire has something suggestive that there may, in fact, be not only one direction in which time flows, but two.

The idea living in the word ahnung, or boding, certainly suggests this as well.

Karl Konig writes: "'Ahnung' ('boding') is a strange word. It expresses an elusive feeling, which in certain--usually rather special--moments of life, touches our daytime consciousness. This feeling is sometimes so powerful it condenses into a mood in which anxiety and fear may be mixed. It is then a boding of an approaching ill, the boding of a sickness and much else."

Let us remember from our last post A.C. Harwood's wish for this boding, that it recover its neutral meaning and--these are my words--overcome its common association with "an approaching ill," and so forth.

Konig continues: "But a foreboding may also flit quickly by, overpowered by the daily rush of thoughts and impressions, and reappear in the soul only when that which was foreseen has happened. What is this 'boding' in the realm of the soul? Is it feeling, willing, mental image? Is it an emotion like anger or fear?"

"'Boding' is also 'an awareness of conditions and circumstances that are not clearly apprehended. As well as misleading, mood-dependent self-deceptions, there are bodings which bring intuitively-senses objective realities into consciousness.' One may also have a boding of the solution of a task or a problem, and yet still not reach the answer."

"Thus the awareness of boding belongs in a region of our experience which may be characterized as a kind of pre-consciousness. Boding is not an unconscious experience, yet it is not conscious either, nor is it similar to dreaming. It is a condition which indicates to us something which is already present, but which we cannot yet apprehend with clear consciousness. It is an activity which indicates to the soul something that nevertheless remains hidden from it."

Here we come closer to the inspiration and impulse to adopt The Bode Well as our blog name. We are interested in that which lies just on the edge of consciousness, that which is listening in to the stream of meaning that approaches from out of the future, and specifically in the context of the human encounter. I'm interested in the inner activity of trying to bring that which we call boding into clearer consciousness, and in doing so, in a kind of reversal of the will, seek access to the well or wellspring from which boding arises in service of the human encounter.

There we've taken a further step...into that which is seeking to be spoken, toward that which wants to be made visible, into the approaching stream.

Why The Bode Well?

Why The Bode Well? Is it because that's what we long to do, bring something that bodes well for the world? Is it about the well from which boding surfaces?

Very curious fact! It was more than ten years ago, much earlier in my life with computers and the internet. I'd taken and tired of my first moniker--gorjohn--the name I customarily entered as my user ID when asked to register online. That one came from a nickname my older brother had for me when we were kids--Gorgeous George. I needed a new one. But what?

I must have been reading Karl Konig's Commentary on Rudolf Steiner's Calendar of the Soul. There's nothing else that can account for such a strange choice. I chose bodewell and have used it ever since. It's my moniker for Skype, my Yahoo groups ID, the login ID for my website and so on. Over the years, I would sometimes cringe, thinking it a little silly, and came to forget, in fact, from whence it had come. That is, until just recently.

My newlywed wife and collaborator, Cat, took up working with verses earlier in the spring. Seeing her interest, I dug up other translations for her. Then, one day, I remembered Konig's book and dug it out of a box. Once it was out and visible, I picked it up to remind of what I had read now these many years ago. It was then that I discovered a whole chapter on "The word 'Ahnung' (boding) in Rudolf Steiner's 'Calendar of the Soul.'" That's the actual title of the second chapter of his Commentary!

In that second chapter, Konig explores nine times the word 'ahnung' appears in the Calendar and follows the A.C. Harwood's translation where he renders 'ahnung' as 'boding' and even writes the following in the notes in the beginning:

"The rendering of two words calls for special comment: Ahnung with its verb ahnen, and dumpf. The former has no very good equivalent in English. In the Calendar it is almost a technical term for that profound surmising, divining, presaging power, or inkling, which everyone knows in some degree, but which is not much recognized in modern psychology. I have felt it important that one word should be used throughout for this power, a word capable of taking a verbal form, and I finally decided to employ the word boding, or sometimes foreboding, in its original neutral sense, which it has not entirely lost and which it may perhaps still recover. I believe that in its sound it suggests better than other words something deep, inward, powerful and mysterious."

Konig takes these indications along with Harwood's translation and develops them further, following the nine verses and their movement through the year. Because of their close accompanying of our relationship's history, we were drawn further into the mystery of this word, boding.

That's a scratch on the surface. To go more deeply, I'll want to build up some supporting thoughts in further posts.

John