Featured Articles

Special WeStrive eNews: Focus on Focus

Submitted by WeStrive on Sun, 02/28/2010 - 21:54

There is a community of individuals who have agreed to re-imagine the world. Some have taken up their tools as craftsmen, sculpting and forming the substance of the earth. Some are grappling with the thought forms that hold us to the present image of the world, and are attempting to free these thoughts from their entrapment. Some are searching on hidden pathways for the heartland’s language. They are all artists and all have different tasks. They recognise each other as essential for the activity of re-constituting existence. All argument has ceased, and the roles played are recognised. This is a new sister-brother-hood. It seeks to bring the imagination of the future beyond the narrowness of the present picture by breathing heart heat into the ice of today to create the water of tomorrow…

Not a conference. Not a report. But a fireplace where we can come and meet and talk. Meeting around the fire. Meeting around our fireplace. What are the frames/context so that I can grow?    Read more »

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Special WeStrive eNews March 1, 2010 Community Letter

Submitted by WeStrive on Sun, 02/28/2010 - 21:49

Dear Friends,
 
This is a special issue to highlight a very unique event, called Focus, that will be taking place in April in Dornach, Switzerland at the Goetheanum. This gathering is sponsored by the the Anthroposophical Society's Youth Section, but is open to all people, of all ages, to bring their passions, their interests, and their questions into a community-held conversation.

The WeStrive Leadership Council thought that this event was so unique, that we've asked to print a special issue all about Focus, and HeartChord (a music festival that will immediately follow Focus). These kinds of gatherings are at the heart of what WeStrive supports, in how they foster community, evoke dialogue and facilitate the growth of questions that seek to further understand the world we live in today, and the ways in which we live in it. Read more »

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RS Archives Recommended Articles: Sexuality and Gender

Submitted by WeStrive on Mon, 02/15/2010 - 16:46

Sexuality has always had a particular complexity to it; this has only further developed in the course of the 20th and 21st centuries as individuals have come to recognize, categorize and express themselves in terms of their gender and their sexual identity. What is, though, the relationship between our sexuality or our gender and the spiritual world? Is the increase in poly-gender identities and polyamory indicating a shift in both our relationship with and to sexuality and gender? Are the genders evolving? In terms of gender, Steiner indicates that we are, over time, evolving into a hermaphroditic gender. But on sexuality, he has much more to say, including the need for balance between lust and morality. In “Reincarnation in the Light of Ethics,” Friedrich Rittelmeyer explores the relationship between morality and sexuality. For Steiner, sexuality is not just a question of identity and pleasure, but of morality, ethics, and freedom, which he further discusses in “The Mission of the Earth: Wonder, Compassion and Conscience the Christ Impulse." Read more »

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Event Report: Sexuality and Consciousness with Lisa Romero

Submitted by WeStrive on Mon, 02/15/2010 - 14:27

The Sexuality and Consciousness Young Adult Conference began in a mood of shy discretion as we all wondered what this weekend would be about. What does Anthroposophy have to say about sexuality, or sex for that matter? Why do we even have masculine and feminine polarities? What are we to understand by the signs of the times?
Lisa Romero, Anthroposophical healthcare practitioner and teacher, guided us on our way; we plucked up our courage and set out with our questions. We realized it is important to distinguish between the terms: “man and women,” that which results from our biology, and the feminine and masculine principles, which are the creative within those bodies. With humor and sincerity, Lisa led us through the phenomena we experience in the intimate interplay between men and women. Read more »

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Inner Eye for the Other Guy: Queer Identity and Spirituality

Submitted by WeStrive on Mon, 02/15/2010 - 14:06


In the July-August 2004 issue of The Gay & Lesbian Review  (Vol. XI, Number 4), Lewis Gannet’s essay, "C.A. Tripp, Sexual Emancipator," provides an insight into the role of the gay identity in the emergence of individualized sexuality, or sexual revolution.  He suggests that Tripp’s book, The Homosexual Matrix, published in 1975, “was the first work to explain in cogent psychological terms why homosexuality is not a developmental failure to achieve heterosexuality,” that is, not a mental illness, as it was categorized at the time. Gannet explains that in Matrix Tripp rejected the division of men into normal or regular (heterosexual) and abnormal or impaired (homosexual). According to Gannet, Tripp argues that “gays and straight people develop their sexual orientation in exactly the same way. In other words, [homosexuals] express a rational and valid sexual development...[that] is an integral and natural component of human sexuality.” Read more »

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Supporting Youth Initiative

Submitted by WeStrive on Mon, 02/15/2010 - 13:29

<div xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" about="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mystandardbreakfromlife/4057165095/"><a rel="cc:attributionURL" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mystandardbreakfromlife/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/mystandardbreakfromlife/</a> _cke_saved_href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mystandardbreakfromlife/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/mystandardbreakfromlife/</a> / <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/">CC BY-NC 2.0</a></div>Last March the Santa Cruz Monterey Bay Branch supported my going to the North American Class Holders’ Conference in Spring Valley, NY. On the way home, after already having spent a night in Salt Lake City because of a cancelled flight, I took the opportunity to be “bumped” and spend an extra couple of hours in the Salt Lake City airport in exchange for a travel voucher on Delta Airlines. I have had this voucher since last March and, when I suddenly realized it will run out this March 23rd, rather like Rudolf Steiner’s value-decreasing money, I decided to check in with Matthew Temple, former student and close friend, founder of NetworkM, now President of the Board of WeStrive. I thought WeStrive might be able to use the voucher—and sure enough, Matthew was very excited when I told him my idea. If you don’t know WeStrive, please take a look at www.westrive.org and discover what this community network is doing to support social renewal. Read more »

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Featured Blogs

adrian's picture

Emerson College: Urgent appeal for help: please distribute widely

Submitted by adrian on Sun, 02/28/2010 - 11:18

We are appealing for your help to ensure that the Emerson College campus can be saved for the future of Anthroposophy – and the world. It comes at a time of great need within the world due to international conflicts, failing institutions and increasing mental health problems.
 
We are encouraged to put forward a vision for the future of the campus as a result of the avalanche of supportive – and sometimes deeply moving – emails, meetings and telephone conversations which we have had with many people over the last few days. There is no doubt that many people all over the world are prepared to give free time, money, love and prayers in an attempt to save this site for the future. Everything counts. Read more »

Sam Saunders's picture

Emerson and the Spirit of Renewal

Submitted by Sam Saunders on Sat, 02/27/2010 - 14:56

“Do not go where the path may lead,
 go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)
 
Near to fifty years ago, inspired by Waldo Emerson and Rudolf Steiner, the initiative was taken by Francis Edmunds to start a college. Since it’s humble beginnings, Emerson College has provided education off the beaten track. Through training in Biodynamic Agriculture, Waldorf Teaching, Sculpture, Storytelling, not to mention it’s original crowd pulling ‘Orientation Year’ for 18-25 year olds, the College has served students by enabling them to stand their ground with meaning in the world. And in a world that is growing evermore hardened in heart, surely there is a great need for such potentially life-transforming courses. Read more »

Mark McAlister's picture

Words That Nourish New Thinking

Submitted by Mark McAlister on Fri, 02/12/2010 - 12:03

What is that art
A pale butterfly knows
When it lies in the heart
Of a flaming red rose?
 
Just ask the young moon
Now drfiting on high
At the roof of the noon
On a gold summer sky.
 
- Wilson MacDonald Read more »

LesQuestes's picture

Feeling the Responsibility of the Process: A Lesson in Letting Go

Submitted by LesQuestes on Tue, 02/09/2010 - 23:32

Today is a practice in letting go. Just a bit ago, I watched my car round the bend into the snowy night and thought to myself, "There goes a small part of my story. May it arrive wherever it needs to be." Two friends are driving my car cross country to my sister in California, and a part of me rejoices in the experience of letting go of a huge material responsibility from my life, and the other yearns for the comfort, the symbolic gesture, that the object--my car--held. It wasn't just that it my car, but that it was a car that had faithfully transported me across a distance of nearly 40,000 miles. It was a gateway, a possibility, towards freedom. That responsibility, and that distance, is a significant amount of relationship-building. So I let go of the material. Read more »

Seth Jordan's picture

Documentary Project

Submitted by Seth Jordan on Wed, 01/13/2010 - 18:35

Hello everyone,
The news has just come in...the election commission has responded to the outpouring of international pressure and is allowing Nicanor Perlas to run for President of the Philippines!   
But the Idea of New Politics that Nicky represents is not confined to the Philippines. His vision of a healthy, integrated, sustainable society is an ideal that we all carry in our own corners of the world. This vision is what's so powerful. It's embodied in an amazing way in his political platform, where a truly remarkable picture begins to emerge of how a whole nation can come together and move towards it's highest future potential. Read more »

Vitalis's picture

Australian Green Senator supports Nicanor Perlas Presidential Bid

Submitted by Vitalis on Sat, 01/09/2010 - 01:11

Citizens from around the world, especially concerned with environmental and social justice see in Nicanor Perlas the profound insight and practical capacities to make a meaningful, positive and far reaching impact both in the Philippines and, (as his track record shows over the past 40 years), also the globe, were he to be elected as President in 2010.
  Read more »

WeStrive Chronicle

The Impacts of Moving Your Money

Submitted by WeStrive on Tue, 03/02/2010 - 09:17
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Moving your cash out of big banks and into local banks and credit unions is one way to move your money, but even this choice doesn’t address one of the major issues I have with banks, regardless of size: how are they lending the money I’ve deposited? Can you even find out if their lending practices align with your own values?
Two years ago, I embarked upon an effort to move my money away from Bank of America (where I had my checking account) and ING Direct (where I had the bulk of my cash savings, both in a savings account and in several laddered CDs), and into banks whose activities I felt were more aligned with my own values. Read more »

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Balance for Zimbabwe - The Rimbi Farm Project

Submitted by WeStrive on Mon, 03/01/2010 - 11:35
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The Rimbi Farm Project is a concept to create a community based, supported and benefitting Biodynamic farm in Eastern, rural Zimbabwe. Through community engagement, the wish is to introduce a new type of agriculture that not only has the potential to boost harvest quantity through crop rotation and Permaculture, but also create job opportunities, a space for cultural exchange and, ultimately, a new source of hope. The intent of this project has many different levels and aspects but one main goal is to harvest awareness to the potential that lies within this community, in and of itself. The aim is to create a space to start conversations that can lead to healthy community development; through Biodynamics, create a new way for people to work together, closer to the earth, and from that work, build deeper relationships with one another that will perhaps fulfill a wish for a more integrated, supportive community where no one is left to fend for themselves. Read more »

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Co-creating Intimate Partnerships

Submitted by WeStrive on Tue, 02/23/2010 - 21:25
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Nicanor Perlas was interviewed by David Schubert on the components of relationships and intimacy. Nicanor is the winner of the Right Livelinhood Award (the alternative Nobel Peace Prize) in 2003 and is now running for president of the Philippines. His words here on how we can find the right relationships, shape them, and understand the beauty of love--and its authenticity, naturally, will inspire anyone. Read more »

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UK Farming is on the threshold of crisis - Soil Association

Submitted by WeStrive on Wed, 02/10/2010 - 09:36
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SIXTY years of farm intensification has put the UK food system on the threshold of crisis, the UK’s leading organic lobby has warned at its annual conference ... - Wednesday, February 3.
 
Patrick Holden, Soil Association policy director, painted a bleak picture of UK agriculture which he said had been farming unsustainably for too many years. 
 
He called for a seismic change towards low input farm practices ‘before it’s too late’.  “Business as usual is not an option. Our vision is for a radical transformation of agriculture within the next 15 years,” he said, adding organic farming was the only truely sustainable option. Read more »

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The New Economy Challenge: Implications for Higher Education

Submitted by WeStrive on Wed, 02/10/2010 - 09:26
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Institutional change is perhaps the most important and yet most neglected of the crucial changes we must navigate. If we humans are to adapt to 21st century reality, we must restructure or replace the economic institutions of the 20th century, which lock us into a dynamic of perpetual economic growth, with institutions designed to support ecological balance, shared prosperity, and living democracy...
This presents an unprecedented challenge for institutions of higher learning organized to prepare young graduates to succeed in a world that we must now put behind us. They are ill-equipped to prepare people of all ages for their necessary roles in creating and staffing the institutions of a new civilization. They must rethink, retool, and reorganize. Read more »

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This Emerging Food Source May Get Banned from Organic (and it's not GMOs)

Submitted by WeStrive on Sun, 01/24/2010 - 11:21
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Debate heats up about sustainable agriculture.
 
The USDA's National Organic Standards Board (NOSB), which determines which products can be certified organic and carry the valuable organic sticker, is leaning against allowing innovative growing systems, such as aquaponics, from the program.
 
Why? Because, according to their logic, food not grown in soil cannot be organic, even if no pesticides, herbicides or hormones are used. Yet vegetables grown in recirculating systems are proven to have exactly the same nutritional value as any other and are perfectly healthy. Decades of research have shown this. Many vegetables on our store shelves now are grown hydroponically, but this question of plant health or nutritional value has not come up.
  Read more »

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