Newsletter June 2023

Dear Friends of the Youth Section Worldwide,

At the Goetheanum we are quite preoccupied with the coworkers gathering that will be taking place in about two weeks. Switzerland has put on her finest garments to welcome them, it is a beautiful spring here this year. We will be between 50 –60 people from around 25 youth circles or initiatives. Many will be meeting for the first time and there is certainly a great deal of excitement building up. Two groups are in the midst of establishing themselves this year, namely the circle from Germany and from Oceania. As you might imagine, there are quite a few things to attend to get ready, so I am going to keep this short!

If I was not keeping it short, I would write about the 2024 International Students Conference, and the most recent weekend preparation gathering. I would write how surprising and interesting I have found what is emerging in that circle, and how it appears to be leading toward something I could not have imagined the likes of until recently. I would also write about the weekend seminar that will begin today as an introduction to contemplative practice and inner work, which I will host with Patrick Kennedy. I am sure I would have a difficult time not mentioning the hum and buzz around the International Youth Conference planned in Georgia for August, or the upcoming trips to be present at the founding of a Youth Section working group in Germany and in Oceania. And if I was not keeping it short, and I really got carried away, I very well might tell you many other wonderful or terrible things. But here I will stop noting things that I am saying I will not note, for it turns out it is a slippery slope.

You will find messages and reports in what follows from around the world as well as information about many upcoming events and opportunities. I must admit, I now feel sorry I have not asked for a few poems and sketches to include. I am learning! This is also a good way to introduce the podcast project “Questions of Courage”. It is a new challenge to work in this format for me. I should get the knack of it after a while. In the meantime, I hope it will interest some of you, or perhaps even amuse you in some way.

With greetings from the Youth Section at the Goetheanum,

Nathaniel Williams

This month “Questions of Courage" begins, a video/podcast with Nathaniel Williams, leader of the Youth Section at the Goetheanum. It is an independent and unique look at questions related to technology, education, art, ecology, vocation, community, justice and meaning require a deeper, spiritual take on life. The ability to take up these issues is a question of courage.

Questions of Courage is a project of the Youth Section at the Goetheanum, in collaboration with Goetheanum TV. To support the Youth Section Action Fund, please visit: https://www.goetheanum.org/en/youth-donations.

YOUTH SECTION CO-WORKERS' GATHERING 2023

This year there are groups from around the world seeking a new affiliation with the Youth Section. Core members from these groups will be present at our meeting. We want to find a form for mutual and clear affiliation and connection with the Youth Section for all individuals and groups who want to be active in a similar way. We hope that by the time we leave we will all have made deepened commitments to supporting each other's work.

Moreover, the International Youth Section hopes to find out how best it can better serve as the heart and lungs of all affiliated individuals and groups.

We warmly invite you to join us in celebrating the foundation of the Youth Section in Germany.

We are a group of young people who carry a flame for anthroposophy in our hearts. We want to create heartfelt spaces where young people can come together to share their authentic striving for the spiritual. Bringing initiatives together that share a connection to anthroposophy is another core aspect of our vision. From the 30th of June - 2nd of July we want to officially celebrate the birth of our impulse on the grounds of Schloss Hamborn.

We look forward to welcoming guests of all ages who want to come, witness and support us!

"YOU AND I ARE WE - QUESTIONS OF COMMUNITY"

It’s with pleasure that the Oceanic Youth Circle is able to announce our very first conference. Our youth initiative began about 1 year ago, meeting fortnightly over Zoom, and studying anthroposophy together.

Consider this a call to anyone who is young (18-35), working in anthroposophy, or just interested in anthroposophy to come together for a weekend of learning and connection.

We have three amazing guest speakers, Dr. Richard Drexel, Dr. Helen Proctor, and Nathaniel Williams PhD. Dr. Richard and Dr. Helen are both Anthroposphical doctors coming

over from New Zealand, and Nathaniel Williams is the head of the Youth Section at the Goetheanum in Switzerland.

Our theme 'You and I are we - questions of community’ arose from an impulse we collectively shared. Spiritually navigating the last three years has been no easy task for anyone, however, the challenges those times brought have given birth to new impulses of change. It is this theme that we would like to explore together.

The price of the conference is $140 for the weekend. That includes lunch and dinner. There is also accommodation available, just reach out and we can organize something. If you are experiencing financial difficulty, please reach out as we can help with the cost. We don’t want finances to be a barrier for anyone.

Please feel free to share this announcement with your friends, colleagues, and anyone who might be interested in joining this unique gathering of young anthroposophists. Together, we can create a vibrant and supportive community, empowering each other to explore anthroposophy's wisdom and apply it in our lives.

For tickets please go to https://events.humanitix.com/you-and-i-are-we-questions-of-community

INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS' CONFERENCE 2024

Through this conference, we wish to inspire courage in young students to work together and face the future with the strength that comes from a diverse and collaborative group. When we learn from each other in an open way, we see where we can combine our attributes to fill in for another, and by doing so can discover new ways to go about the issues our world is facing, ways we wouldn’t be able to find each on our own. As a bundle of arrows is unsnappable whereas a single arrow is weak, so much stronger are we as a team compared to separate individuals. But in order to find our way together, it is required of each member to find independently in themselves the will force to start tackling the immense struggles of our globe.

The International Students' Conference of 2024 will take place at the Goetheanum in Switzerland, transforming each patio, each field, and each hall into a forum of excited and passionate faces and lively voices. Guest speakers will give inspiration and share their wisdom in lectures, and workshops will provide the space for reflection and exploration so that the new inspiration will get the opportunity to take form. In between, games will be played, songs will be sung, and art will be performed and experienced, so that we will become not just a group of students, but a group of friends. Our goal is to provide a space where connections can be made across countries and even continents, so that through all those different lenses through which the world is perceived, a new clarity can be discovered.

WALDORF YOUTH NETWORK

The Waldorf Youth Network is a meeting space for young people from 15 to 35 years old intended to offer a context inspired by anthroposophy. We are in Córdoba, Argentina, in a small town called Villa de las Rosas, in a rural area. The project arose in 2018 from the impulse of a group of young people who wanted to have meetings where they could carry out ideas and projects, both on a social and individual level. In 2020, due to the Covid 19 pandemic, everything was closed and the young people of our region found themselves in great need of creating human meeting spaces among themselves. We started meeting by Zoom and eventually gathered face-to-face, doing things with our bodies that were so necessary, such as walks, games, trips

to the mountains, among other things. At that time we thought of creating workshops, from which a bookbinding workshop and a carpentry workshop arose, so that young people could connect with manual work, and create objects that are completely made by their own hands. As a result of the bookbinding workshop the Casa de los Jóvenes Publishing House was created, and today it financially supports the Network, and some young people who work there daily. Since August 2020 we are a non-profit foundation.

The Network intends to be a space for young people between school and home and then between the end of school and their career in the world, providing contained context and support to youth and the free initiatives that want to be born from them. It is also a place where the primary thing is the meeting of young people without the mediation of any type of substance such as alcohol or drugs, etc. We hold weekly meetings in which we talk and debate about important topics for youth, sharing experiences from our own lives, and creating more questions than answers. We also create camps, in which we invite young people from all over the region to get to know each other and have experiences together; and trips where young people show an interest in connecting with each other. Our last international trip was to the Goetheanum for the ISC Courage 2019 congress.

In this moment that humanity is going through, we believe that it is of vital importance to create spaces in which we can manifest our individuality through social encounter.

You can find us on Instagram as @reddejovenes.cj and our handmade work in the Publishing House at @editorial_casadelosjovenes.

You can also contact us at +54 3544 543230

You have the opportunity to learn more about each other, about life at other schools and in other countries.

Whether you just want to write with other students, visit someone during the holidays or do an exchange abroad - wal-di.com offers the platform.

The website has been extensively relaunched and expanded. The modular structure makes it possible to create additional, closed areas for individual groups or events. For example: areas for students' representatives, conferences, meetings ... also for parents, teachers or alumni.

The platform services are free of charge for users. The participating german-speaking schools finance hosting and further development.

info@wal-di.com https://www.wal-di.com/welcome Info-Flyer (PDF)

THE INTERNATIONAL YOUTH INITIATIVE PROGRAM

Applications open for the 16th edition of the program (2023-2024).

YIP is an Anthroposophically inspired 10-month residential, holistic education program in societal entrepreneurship for 18–28-year-olds from all around the world, based in Ytterjärna, Sweden.

YIP aims to strengthen young people’s capacity to take personal and collective initiative in the face of current global realities and to find their authentic task in the world. Participants live and learn together to explore the current challenges of our time, grow their personal awareness as well as their ability to work together.

My name is Teresa Ramos Serra, and I’m the project coordinator and designer of Planetary Service. My team and I are very happy and proud to present this project to the Goetheanum Youth Section Community.

It all started with a dream: “For hundreds of years, maybe longer, the 18-year-olds were drafted and then forced to serve in the military. Military service. How would that be if we could replace that with Planetary Service – on a voluntary basis” – Rembert Biemond, founder and chief advisor.

Planetary Service is a newly launched international volunteering movement of young adults serving the earth and their fellow human beings by contributing for one year to projects and organisations that are already working in those areas. The volunteers contribute their energy, skills and time to a project in exchange for food, accommodation and learning experiences.

Planetary Service focuses on:
- Promoting volunteering for youth in projects working in the areas of earth and people care.
- Providing an enriching support framework for volunteers throughout their experience and a certificate of completion at the end.
- Creating a network of projects, organisations and people aspiring to make a sustainable, peaceful and humane future possible. This network is a space where to share knowledge, resources, communities, inspiration, etc.
From September 2023 to June 2024 we are launching the first trial of Planetary Service for which we are looking for proactive, courageous and willing young people from the age of 18 years old upwards who are:

- Committed to a one-year experience of volunteering.

- Committed to participating in our mentoring framework.

- Open to having intercultural exchanges.

- Have a good level of English.

We warmly want to invite you to join the Planetary Service movement in whatever capacity you have right now, either by becoming a participant, spreading the word around or sharing it to friends who might resonate with it.

Find more information on our website www.planetaryservice.org and follow us on Instagram and Facebook @PlanetaryService. Do not hesitate to contact us for any further questions or doubts.

The building, which burnt down on New Year's Eve 1922/23, united all the arts into a unique synthesis. People from 17 nations had been working on the building since September 1913. Many cultural workers, writers, and artists came to Dornach to work on the building for a few weeks or months. There are many enthusiastic reports of this unforgettable work. Thus Andrej Belyj the Russian poet, whose wife Assja Turgenieff cut the windows of the second Goetheanum, reports of his first encounter with the building, "that the domes spoke intimate words" to him. His colleague Albert Steffen described how after an all-night stay - he kept vigil at the building - he experienced during a walk in the morning that he saw nature with different eyes: "When I stepped out into nature again for the first time, after I had felt this sacramental enclosure like a universe that had been moved close, I felt that everything my senses perceived was permeated by inner music. The lines of the Jura as melodies. Rock and tree as sounds. The flowers in the meadows as tones. The ground I walked on was a chord that was to become a melody forever. I walked up the meadow and forest and felt how, instead of tiring, I was getting fresher and fresher. Why? - I had felt in the earth realms the deeds of the hierarchies that also build the body of man. The divine origin was in my running over Hill and Dale. I made no misstep. My foot was certain of its destination."
We want to explore, through art contemplations, art workshops, nature observations and lectures on the individual art disciplines, the unique design of the first Goetheanum, in which the phases of the planetary development of the earth became visible in the capitals and architraves; whose paintings in the small and large dome the cultural epochs of the history of humanity and their spiritual inspirers made visible. Is this looking back? A preoccupation with the past? Andrei Belyj recounts: "Often I stopped in front of the Goetheanum, looked at its strangely intersecting surfaces in the moonlight and asked myself: 'Where am I? In the distant past? In a distant future?' Only of the present I was not reminded;"
The attempt that was made with the design of the first Goetheanum was future oriented - it was to be a building in which the new mysteries were founded and cultivated. What was meant by this? At a time when there was virtually no connection between the human and the divine worlds, a building was to be created that was designed in such a way that it could receive and convey the language of the gods: "What the gods of nature have given man with his larynx, we add to the whole of the world if we find the right artistic forms; these are then the means by which the gods speak to us. Only we must understand how we are to fit ourselves into the great context of what is hereby indicated. [...] Art is the creation of the organs through which the gods can speak to human beings.
This may sound enigmatic, but you can only test it yourself with your hands and find out what was meant by this great project. In 2024 there will be a continuation of this work with an intensive art week on the second Goetheanum.
Participation in the intensive week costs 250 Swiss francs for pupils and students, including materials and lunch (breakfast and dinner can be booked in addition).

We would like to invite you all to participate in our - we are a group of artists, philosophers, musicians, and eurythmists - artistic exploration of the first Goetheanum. In doing so, we will shape the present and the future.

We look forward to discovering the first Goetheanum with you!

For the preparatory group

Christiane Haid

Head of the Section for Fine Arts and Sciences

- Was ist der Nachfolge des Kampfs Michaels, dass er die Mächten der Dunkelheit auf die Erde gestoßen hat?

und wir leben auf dieser Erde.

- Wir kennen aus dem Rudolf Steiners Geisteswissenschaft, dass die Dunkelheit die Zukunft enthält, und immerhin gehört das Licht zur Vergangenheit.

Wie können wir aus der Dunkelheit heraus die Zukunft entfalten lassen?

Wie können wir nach diesen scheinbar gegensätzlichen Gesichtspunkten eine zeitgemäße und moderne Malerei treiben?

Was bedeuten diese Fragen für die Malerei?

Wir möchten Euch ermutigen, dass Ihr mit eigenen Gesichtspunkten in diesem Thema vorbereitet - jede individuell, dass wir dann dadurch in dem Thema reicher zusammenarbeiten können.

Wir werden verschiedenen malerische Technik lernen:

- Wie können wir sogar mit der Hilfe des Rudolf Steiners Farbenlehre in unserem Thema vorankommen?

- Entdeckung die schwarze Farbe.

- Mit dem Chaos umgehen zu können.

- Dunkel verwenden.

- Wie kann man das Chaos in den schöpferischen Prozess hineinbringen?

Wir bauen gleichzeitig auf die Freiheit und auf die individuelle schöpferische Kraft.

Wir warten auf die jugendliche Kraft, womit die Dunkelheit umwandeln kann und wovon die Zukunft sich gestalten kann.

Eine wahre internationale Künstlerkolonie erwartet Euch in Ungarn, wo bereits Teilnehmer aus Argentinien, Deutschland, Österreich, der Schweiz und den Niederlanden sind.

Die Mysteriendramen bieten eine eigene und ursprüngliche Offenbarung der Anthroposophie. Auf den Wegen der inneren Schulung eröffnen Krisen den Einblick in die tieferen Wirklichkeiten. Es zeigt sich ein langvergangenes Erdenleben eines karmischen Kreises, der sich heute im Sonnentempel sucht.

Drei Tage leben wir mit dem Drama. Wer will, kann dabei oder auch schon jetzt die weiteren Pläne mitschmieden: denn Ende Juli beginnt die letzte Zusammenarbeit an einer vollständigen Aufführung.

Vom zweiten Tag an berührt sich das Treffen mit einer Zusammenkunft der Jugendsektion, die freundlicherweise Unterkunft und Verpflegung organisiert. Das bietet reiche Begegnungen währen der gemeinsamen Tage. Außerdem bittet sie um eine Szenenaufführung!

INTERNATIONAL YOUTH CONFERENCE IN CAMPHILL

From the 11th till the 14th of May 2023, the International Youth Conference in Camphill took place in Newton Dee, Scotland!

Guided by the theme “Creating Community: how can we (re-)imagine our future?”, three lectures were given around the Camphill Research, sustainability in intentional communities and personal development, leadership and social threefolding. Reflective artistic activities as well as the workshops in Newton Dee gave space to process the content. Evenings were filled with bonfires and music, and even fire breathing and juggling with fire balls!

It was a wonderful experience of the unique warmth of life within a Camphill Community, accompanied by the coming together of over 70 young people from all over the world! With excitement and many young people interested in joining, the organising team is already looking into the future of the youth conferences in Camphill.

- Gabriele Nys

“… I will carry on with the power that I got from these 4 days, and do amazing things, as all the youths I met do!

Empowered, is the whole theme of my conference experience in Newton Dee. As soon as I entered the community on the first day, I immediately felt strong energy flowing in me and I couldn’t help starting to run towards the Phoenix centre. I have always heard a lot of stories of Camphill but have never experienced it myself. For the first time, I could be invited to have dinner in a house and see how everyone cared for each other. I can really feel that there is no hierarchy, and everyone is relaxed and comfortable. Everyone I met had wonderful glowing energy. Stranger or friend, we smiled at each other, and villagers always couldn’t wait to introduce themselves. This place is just so nourishing for everyone, and the whole picture of how beautiful this corner of the world is has given me huge hope and power. The sustainability talk especially moved me, that so much is taken into consideration and taken care of, which really turned my distrust of mankind (after learning about environmental economics in uni) around. It is truly a special place, and I have learnt so much, especially gained so much power in my body to take action. I also appreciate so much seeing young people from all around the world, so devoted to this wonderful mission. It was so meaningful and empowering to me, every talk we had, and every minute I spent in Newton Dee. The experience really made me reflect a lot and elevated my pessimistic emotions in the past few months. I couldn’t wait to start my journey in a Camphill (after I finish my study), and I hope to see a lot of you in the future!”

Natalie Gu, participant of the International Youth Conference in Camphill 2023

Young In Time

The young heart is humbled by the wonder of things.

It is astounded by the boredom and lethargy of age.

The young heart knows that those who have grown old
find young awe in life misplaced.

They know that these “elders” have unlearned the celebration of seeing a slug in a wakeful moment of forgetfulness, when the world articulates itself, as for the first time.

For the young, it is speaking, again, for the first time.

To be young is to have life speak for the first time into the heart.

It is the crush that is focused on another person, a person who is somehow also the whole world. It is a crush on life.

Youth does not believe in age.

It does not believe in the dead weight of times heavy chains,

that the heart will give way to dullness and routine,

that the song of time, even in its terror, will play itself out.

Youth does not believe in death.

It does not believe the vitality of the world has put it together, a flower of life, and that it will also take it apart, petal by petal.

The young heart calls out a pledge:

I will never sell out!

I will never lose hope!

I will never abandon justice!

This pledge echoes in the halls of universities. From the lecture halls the veil of silence responds.

It threatens to suffocate the friends by turning them into specimens of dead thoughts.

It threatens to erect a shadow wall, with bricks of death, before their faces, and taking the ones that are loved, to take the world.

What does the truth feel like?

A living person.

III

Youth is an image of the spirit.

The young heart will turn into a stooped, sorrowful figure of dusk, if the spirit is not found.

The young heart knows the spirit is invincible.

It must strive to participate in the living spirit, becoming invincible through trial, hypocrisy, crisis, even death.

The glory of youth can find itself in time.

The sun of youth only sets if the spirit fails to set the heart aflame.

In 1924 Rudolf Steiner called to the youth of his time with the words, "stick together with an iron will". This was to overcome the great differences in perspectives and because, in Steiner’s words, “Sticking together is what is most necessary if we hope to accomplish anything today with regards to life’s great issues. […] Eventually, you may realise that the greatest of your youth was knowing how to stay together." (Steiner, R. in "Youth & the Etheric Heart" CW 217a)

In this spirit, we would like to appeal to our members and friends to support young people to come together. We would be very grateful for your support and will to help young people find their way to the Goetheanum!