Letters from Karl

Day #12, Dnipro Waldorf School, Michaelmas,

Dear Friends,

Saturday an 8 ½-hour bus ride through southern Ukraine to the bustling city of Dnipro on the mighty Dneiper River, Ukraine’s life blood, its ‘Mississippi.’ You can feel the cultural centrality of the river in these lines from My Testament by the great Ukrainian bard Shevchenko:

When I am dead, bury me
In my beloved Ukraine,
My tomb upon a grave mound high
Amid the spreading plain,
So that the fields, the boundless steppes,
The Dnieper's plunging shore
My eyes could see, my ears could hear
The mighty river roar.

When from Ukraine the Dnieper bears
Into the deep blue sea
The blood of foes ... then will I leave
These hills and fertile fields --
I'll leave them all and fly away
To the abode of God,
And then I'll pray .... But till that day
I nothing know of God.

read more...

This is the most eastern part of my journey, about 63 miles from the front, although distance matters little in these days of modern drone warfare that has rendered tanks and trenches as antiquated as cavalry charges and catapults. Ukrainians are tough. As a teacher told me today, “Russians, Poles, Germans, Turks, Mongols have been trying to wipe us out for 800 years and we are still here. We know how to endure.” But it doesn’t mean humor fails them. Contemplating what will surely be the very difficult winter ahead, one Ukrainian posted in early September: “I’m wishing Happy New Year to you all now because I won’t have electricity or internet until next April.”

Dnipro Waldorf school has warmly received me. It’s one of the two largest Waldorf schools in Ukraine (along with Sophia in Kyiv), its size made possible by the fact that it’s a public school (as is Sophia). So its struggles are less about enrollment (as with Stupeni in Odessa, last week’s school) but more about their nearly existential struggle with government regulations. The stories of interference and lack of understanding from the authorities are jaw-dropping (for one, they have been forced to shutter their beautiful kindergartens this year for bureaucratic thinking so absurd that I can’t bear to go into it). Never was there more need for a threefold social order.

What distinguishes Dnipro Waldorf are its excellent and highly developed handwork and crafts programs (see attached student sculpture of organic forms). From its early days, these programs received a lot of support and teacher education from Germany. They are strongly connected to a sister school in Germany, which continues to support them in all sorts of ways, sending gifts and messages and moral support, not just funds—all hugely appreciated by the beleaguered faculty here. But many teachers also used to visit. Not one has come since the war began. Upon my arrival this year, a teacher said to me, “It’s not just that you are here, it’s that you came back.”

The war twists school life in many ways. Today, instead of a snow delay, we have an air raid delay, which has now grown into a cancelled day. If there’s an active alert at the time children should leave for school, they all stay home until the alert ends. Beyond a certain point, school is cancelled, as it is today (thus, why I have time to write). This kind of unpredictability and uncertainty creates havoc in people’s lives. And has worn everyone out. Teachers do their best to conduct online lessons but that has to be “under-the-table” so to speak. They cannot demand that students participate since everyone should be in a shelter probably without internet access. The reality is that rarely people go to shelters and most students show up. Today I taught my 3rd day of 8th grade North and South American geography. It was imperfect, but at least it was something.

Another twist is to the school schedule. This school has a shelter, which is a tremendous asset. Schools that don’t either have to close or have the children run to nearby shelters in neighboring buildings that do. But the shelter here is not large enough for the entire student body. So the school has had to create two school days one after the other in the same day. Grades 1-5 (and kindergarten until this fall) have school from 8-12. 6th-11th have school from 12-5. Some of the faculty and staff have to work very long days. It all works fine unless the air raid alert happens just before noon, as it did yesterday. The younger grades were in the shelter and couldn’t leave while the older students arrived and immediately had to go into the shelter. It was a traffic jam.

It certainly was a most unusual Michaelmas. In the morning lesson, students made their way to the eurythmy room gathering in a circle (see photos). Each class teacher spoke simply and beautifully about Michaelmas and the sword of light piercing the darkness, their voices flowing from each corner of the room towards the center.

Back in class I observed the extremely accomplished 5th grade teacher in her geography block (see picture). She faces many, many war-accelerated emotional challenges in her class, challenges that would bring a lesser human down. Maintaining her equanimity in a stormy sea. But she really knows her class and loves her class and was truly inspired. Teaching as healing therapy. Particularly when she spoke of geological events, asking if any of them ever felt volcanoes or earthquakes inside of them. Much lively discussion followed. All seemed somewhat lighter after—the flowing magma of the first part of the lesson cooled a bit.

I’m teaching not only 8th grade geography all week but their entire main lesson, one half in social games for which their teacher asked, again as therapy. Last fall doing the same, I was often on the phone with David Sloan who generously supported me from out of his deep experience with these sorts of activities. This year I feel his presence and support still, though the connection is much finer than the one WhatsApp provided last fall.

Michaelmas at school came to an end with the assembled high school. The 11th grade wanted me to address the following questions they had: “How can we plan for the future when we don’t know if we’ll even live to be 18.” I shared some thoughts and gave them some ideas to think about: Gandhi “Live each day as if it were your last; learn as if you would live forever.” And “The future depends on what you do today.”  Buddha: “Do not dwell on the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” Mary Oliver “What do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” They then conversed in small groups, finally we gathered for each group to share its thoughts with the whole. They had processed a lot and, I feel, as a group, found a way to breathe out, even relax a little, and perhaps more calmly accept just a bit more. They asked to please meet again before I go.

A day began with silver voices of the young singing of St. Michael and ended with questions of how can we find a way to live if death awaits just around the corner? Which, of course, it does for all of us, just on varying timelines.

The HS talk began with these lines from Wendell Berry:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.

For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

with love,

Karl

[To one and all, clearly, the need here is great. Moral support is the most important, but money matters, too-ugely. You would not believe how little these schools have, even the public Waldorf schools—and how little the teachers are paid. If so inclined, please visit our website: Supporting Waldorf in Ukraine. There you can read letters from all the schools and also donate. 100% of donations go through der Freunde, The Friends of Waldorf Education in Germany for distribution to Ukraine and are fully tax-deductible.: https://www.re-generationfoundation.org/

Pictures: Dnipro school exterior, HS sculpture, 5th grade geography, LS Michaelmas gathering