by Heather Bellow, Parent
Twinkle twinkle little star,
how I wonder what you are…
This was a favorite song of my children’s when they were very small. They still love it, the way they love all reminders of their babyhood. But now, my eight-year-old is seeing stars in a different light. She informed me one night, as she was settling in to bed, “the sky is so black and big and all those little stars… I know it is called the universe, mama, and it’s keeping me awake.”
The universe does have that effect. I see she is growing up and that concepts which may not have stuck a year ago, are provocative now.
I suppose this has to happen. For all our efforts to preserve the wonder of small children, it fades rapidly in our material world, that material paradigm that Rudolf Steiner—at the turn of the twentieth century—said could be the undoing of a spiritually healthy humanity. The notion that everything must be measured and analyzed to be understood has taken its toll on the West. And now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it seems we are in real trouble.
As I climbed the stairs with yet another cup of warmed milk for my restless daughter, I recoiled at the idea that a feeling of unease about the universe may be a signpost of the arduous journey into the mainstream of modern Western consciousness.
Yes, the universe is dark and mysterious. We all are confined to this spinning globe, in miraculous suspension, as though in the cupped palms of divine hands. Native peoples see the earth as a living, breathing being. It birthed us all. And the universe really is our mother home. The ancients knew this and they charted the paths of the stars. The universe is vast but we belong to her. The stars are her children as well.
Now, instead of a wondrous garden of celestial magic, the universe and her inhabitants are seen as a scientific cosmos to be navigated with machines. The modern world, with its need for abstraction and measure, is wonderful and necessary. Steiner, too, recognized this. But children live in a different consciousness; the world has not yet shaped them or assigned constructs. To a child, the star—whether in the heavens or in the apple’s core—are products of divine construction.
When my daughter was a baby, her crib lay directly under a skylight. Deep in the northern Vermont woods the stars above her were a source of comfort, easing her into sleep. Why should it be that they now inspire unease? In this world we live in, wonder and awe can slide into dread. I think this is what we are trying to avoid by preserving wonder in our children. Perhaps this preservation is an antidote to the existential fear that can lead humans down the material chute, in danger of becoming stuck there. Or is it the other way around? Perhaps the Waldorf way is so good for children precisely because it delays abstraction long enough to prevent becoming mired in a sense of dread that we parents, raised towards the end of the twentieth century, are prone to feel.
Of a renowned astronomer in our extended family, my daughter asks, “How does she study the stars?” I explain to her about the observatory and the powerful telescopes. But I also tell her that the stars have secrets which they will not tell. From earth they are magical lights which urge us to remember who we are and where we are.
Wonder precedes great scientific discovery—reason enough to keep it intact. The wonder of the astronomer must be as infinitesimal as the universe itself. Surely that wonder can only increase while the stars are examined. After all, knowledge acts as a rich fertilizer in the garden of wonder. But wonder, it seems, must come first. Watercolor by Senta Reis