From Switzerland to Detroit: A Summer of Inspiration & Service - Part One

by Gareth Dicker, Emerson Waldorf High School Physics & Math Teacher

This past July, I had the privilege and opportunity to travel both to the Goetheanum in Switzerland and the Brightmoor Makerspace in Detroit, USA. In this Part 1, I’ll write about the Goetheanum experience, and in Part 2, I’ll share more about my time in Detroit. Both experiences continue to inform my hopes as a high school teacher and mentor for young people. 

The Goetheanum in Switzerland is the center of the Global Anthroposophical Society. I’d wanted to visit it ever since I was 18 years old and first started reading Rudolf Steiner. 

The Waldorf school movement originated from the broader impulse called anthroposophy at the turn of 1900. Rudolf Steiner, at age 40, began to respond to people's spiritual and life questions out of clairvoyance for what is vital for humanity to become wiser, more creative, and more loving. All that he shared until his death at age 64 became called anthroposophy (loosely meaning human-wisdom) which now has many branches of application in fields such as biodynamic agriculture, eurythmy, anthroposophical medicine, architecture, art, and Camphill community living.

I arranged to stay at the Goetheanum’s Youth House for about ten days. The Youth House is a permanently open house, meaning that you could simply walk in at any time, hang out, use the kitchen, and meet other people who live there or are passing through. It works under gift economy, so I simply emailed the folks running the house before I arrived, and they made sure a bed was available. I didn’t have to pay anything to get a bed. 

At the end of my stay, I paid them what I felt it was worth to me and in balance with how much money I felt I could offer, and I was filled with a feeling of gratitude. More and more groups I’ve come across globally are shifting where they can in this direction. I’ve seen studies that show, in many cases, you can generate more income for some businesses through working in the spirit of the gift than by requiring a fixed price or even sliding-scale prices. Gift economy is central for me in contemplating how Waldorf education can begin to operate in the spirit of the gift under US private education laws, which are highly driven by capital inequalities. 

It just so happened that while I was there, the international eurythmy schools were putting on their end-of-year performances. I got to see the best eurythmists in the world perform on the Goetheanum stage! If you’ve never seen a full eurythmy performance with its dynamic stage lighting, flowing silk-veil attire, and professional musicians and speakers, I highly recommend finding some way to have this experience. I have taken up a daily practice of meditative eurythmy for its energetic benefits (similar in a few ways to more well-known qi-gong exercises), and I wish more young people had a deeper appreciation for eurythmy as both a healing art and incredible performance art. Our school has striven to cultivate a rich eurythmy culture over the past few decades. While some parents may have a hard time appreciating its educational benefits, I would like to say that it really is not something that a Waldorf school should do without.

By some great fortune, the Goetheanum was also putting on a production of the play Faust during my stay. Faust is a book that 12th grade generally reads, as it asks profound questions about the edge of what the intellect can understand and what diving off the deep end into unknown territories can lead to. Faust was written over a number of decades by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, after whom the Goetheanum was named by Rudolf Steiner.

I attended a three-day conference on social threefolding by Joan Mele. Social threefolding is a way to understand humanity's social life consisting of its economic aspects, its governmental aspects, and its individual cultural aspects. Rudolf Steiner described it first in the 1910s in response to the social crises leading to WWI. 

These three realms of social life are strikingly analogous to the three well-known systems of the human body: our nervous system, our rhythmic/circulatory system, and our limbic/metabolic system. More simply, they correspond to the head, the heart, and the hands of the human social ‘organism.’ Joan Mele gave persuasive examples, especially in relation to considering modern-day banks as the ‘hearts’ of the social organism: you want the blood to flow through them, having received oxygen (inspiration) rather than getting blood clots/heart attacks, for instance. I find these analogies extremely helpful in diagnosing social ills. We can use social threefolding ideas to ask poignant questions such as: “Is health more a governmental issue, or more an individual/cultural question?”. Or “to what extent should education (a free, cultural initiative, in the hands of a local) be influenced by economics or government?” 

The Goetheanum is a bit like an independent university: at the center is the daunting, futuristic Goetheanum building, surrounded by other smaller buildings where eurythmy is practiced, a small farm, and a few other places for research and local initiatives. The houses in the neighborhood have a kind of rounded, convex-angular architecture that made each one look like it was living and breathing. 

Steiner’s architectural innovations strive to make buildings feel like beings: a square, clunky building will also feel square and clunky to the people using it and to the people seeing it every day from the outside. Buildings around the Goetheanum try to mold to their surroundings in terms of materials used. They employ intricate angular geometries that balance curve and straight line forms and consider how forms will be perceived by the human beings walking by and through the buildings. The buildings also strive to match the local geography and landscape and help the people living on the land to feel the intimacy of their connection to it, as well as to the sky above them (see the dome-shaped science building on the left of the image below). 

Lastly, I had the great chance to meet with some leaders of the global anthroposophical youth section. The Global Youth Section serves to connect young people with anthroposophy around the planet. There are really strong youth sections in Western Europe, such as in Sweden and the Netherlands. You may not know or expect that vibrant youth sections are also active in India, Georgia (the European country), Chile, Egypt, Australia, and Argentina. Next year, there will be a large international gathering for all the sections from around the world to celebrate their 100th anniversary. I'm active in the North American Youth Section, which met last summer in Detroit. 

The whole trip was very inspiring and rejuvenating, making me feel connected to the Goetheanum’s social and artistic endeavors in particular. The young people I met there gave me a fresh feeling of the deep value that anthroposophy has had for people around the planet in widely varying cultural contexts. I hope to continue to connect young people in our area - students, alums, and those outside of the Waldorf community who have big spiritual and social questions - with all of these fruits I’ve witnessed and keep threads alive for a meaningful future. 

In Part 2, I’ll describe my very different, other experience this past summer in Detroit, Michigan, around the youth gathering I co-organized to attend an activist conference hosted by the Elderberries Threefold Cafe and the World Social Initiative forum in collaboration with the Brightmoor Makers.