Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul, Verse 10
Introduced by Joyce Reilly
Zu sommerlichen Höhen
Erhebt der Sonne leuchtend Wesen sich;
Es nimmt mein menschlich Fühlen
In seine Raumesweiten mit.
Erahnend regt im Innern sich
Empfindung, dumpf mir kündend,
Erkennen wirst du einst:
Dich fühlte jetzt ein Gotteswesen.
The sun’s shining essence
lifts itself to summer’s heights
and takes my human feeling with it
into its wide expanses.
Inwardly, sensation stirs with anticipation,
subtly announcing;
“One day you will know
a divine being felt you now”.
(trans. Christopher Bamford)
Sharon McFeely, Felted Painting
We are now in the last verses of the Calendar before the summer solstice, although
with our calendar adjustments , we are right on the cusp of it and soon to celebrate Midsummer’s Day.
We can feel the air thick with life, our eyes are filled with a riot of color in the garden, and all the earth hums with manifestations of the spirit world. We can easily be lost in this profusion of life outside ourselves and be lost in the sense world, off -kilter, dreaming. What does it mean that we will know- one day, in the future- that “a divine being felt you now”?
In the United Sates, on this Sunday, in the midst of the great summer release and the height of the sun, we are recognizing an event called Juneteenth, June 19th, the day in 1865 in which, months after the Civil war ended and Lincoln was dead, more than two years since the Emancipation Proclamation, all slaves were finally made aware of their freedom
New life as human beings, not property- this is the joyous shout-free! A divine being has felt you now! A divine being has always felt, held, and recognized you- now you are recognized, “felt”, and freed by your fellow human beings. May we strive to recognize and free our fellow human beings as we are recognized, and felt, and freed by the divine world.