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The humble human hand.
This wonderful video and the text below was posted on one of my favorite blogs, “
On Being
“. Renate was my Handwork teacher during my teacher training at Sunbridge College. I am so happy to share this with all of you!
“Our destiny is written in the hand.”
—Renate Hiller, co-director of the Fiber Craft Studio at the Threefold Educational Center in Chestnut Ridge, New York
Practicing mindfulness. Paying attention. Listening generously.
For Renate Hiller, the fiber artist whom you see in the film above, these majestic phrases apply in all their richness. Her German lilt of the tongue reaffirms this exquisite eloquence as she connects the importance of using our hands with the way in which we understand and find value in ourselves and in others. There’s something so honest and pure about her thought — that we gain a deeper, more meaningful relationship with our own humanity and our greater world by using our hands.
Using our hands grounds us — in work and in relationship. As we create something, hopefully beautiful, with our hands, we are transforming our moral and social senses. We evolve; we change. We notice things that we passed over the day before: the curve in a sidewalk to make way for a tree in the boulevard, the purl of a scarf, the transition of a capital that greets the ceiling. We observe the mundane and see it anew. The process of creating through the hands becomes a spiritual practice.
Ms. Hiller strings together so many “threads” that help me think about raising children; about living a fuller, more physically experiential work life (yes, even about writing marginalia in a script rather than using the track changes option in Word); about hearing differently the many stories from folks who write in to the program, especially the passionate accounts of people and their gardens.
She also reminds me of something Joanna Macy told Krista in a recent interview (show to be released on September 16th):
“I’m looking at my hand right now as we talk. It’s got a lot of wrinkles ‘cause I’m 81 years old. But it’s linked to hands like this back through the ages. This hand was shaped by when it was a fin in the mother seas, where life was born. This hand is directly linked to hands that learned to reach and grasp and climb and push up on dry land and weave reeds into baskets. It has a fantastic history. Every particle and every atom in this hand goes back to the first — what Thomas Berry calls ‘the primal flaring forth,’ the beginning of space-time. We’re part of that story.”
We are excited to share a new documentary about the work the Neighboring Tree Project did with a neighboring Head Start and the creation of an outdoor forest program for the children in their care. 🌿 Over the past months, Elia Gilbert , one of Acorn's kindergarten teachers, has been working with the Agri-Business Child Development Center team of educators to produce a 30 minute video which documents their collaborative process in creating an outdoor forest program for the children in their care. We hope this will inspire future Neighboring Tree Project collaborations, as well as other Waldorf educators to reach out to their neighbors in similar ways. We are now looking for more "branches" to our NT P work, as well as more Waldorf teacher people-power to work on the ground with our neighbors. After seeing the video and getting a sense of our work, please get back to us with any inspirations or feedback. We'd like to hear from our community! We hope you enjoy this film!
Let's Celebrate Together! Acorn Waldorf School is celebrating its 10 Year Anniversary! We began this wondrous journey with 8 intrepid families who took a chance on a tiny new program and, with their support and the support of so many families in the decade since, have grown into a vibrant center for Waldorf Early Childhood Education in the Hudson Valley. I can’t think of a better way to mark this auspicious moment in our school’s biography than making a meaningful contribution to the Sunbridge Institute Diversity Fund . During the entire month of June, for each donation to the Sunbridge Institute Diversity Fund, Acorn will give another $25. In the line where it asks, " My connection to Sunbridge is? " Please write " AWS 10 Year Anniversary ". Our hope is to inspire at least 50 individual donations but we will happily go above and beyond! If you or your family has benefitted from, enjoyed or simply appreciate what’s happening at Acorn, please consider joining me in support of this all important endeavor. This wonderful fund supports BIPOC individuals in the Sunbridge Institute Waldorf teacher education programs, creating a more diverse pool of Waldorf teacher education graduates who will be fully prepared to take on educational and leadership roles in Waldorf classrooms and schools. We are grateful and awed by Acorn’s continually star-strewn journey. May the next ten years continue to be blessed. Together we can make a difference! 🧡
The Neighboring Tree Project (NTP) is an AWS initiative that aims to create community partnerships with our "neighboring trees," i.e. local early childhood educators, schools and centers who are doing the important work of caring for children from underserved, migrant farming or inner-city backgrounds. In building these relationships, we are working collaboratively to bolster the programming offered, taking individual needs and current staff into consideration. The goal is to empower our neighbors with tools and pedagogical enrichment. We also hope to learn: we want to get to know our neighbors, the children and families in our region, and learn from whatever is brought to the group together. The forest offers nutrients to all its trees, and one tree shares with another for mutual health of the whole. Read on to learn about our first two endeavors, Agri-Business Child Development in New Paltz, NY and Meagher Pre-K in Kingston, NY.
