Newsletter 20: Sunday 17 May 2026

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What the Plant teaches us

For everything we find in man, we can find something analogous in the rest of the world.  Schiller has a verse which indicates how, in the realms of Nature, something symbolic of an outstanding human quality can be found:  

Seek you the highest, the greatest?
The plant can teach it to you.
What the plant does without willing it,
Go, you and do by willing it.

Schiller here brings before us the being of the plant and urges man to develop in his own character something as noble as the plant is on its own level. And the great German mystic, Angelus Silesius, says much the same:

Not asking why or wherefore blooms the rose
Cares not for herself or whether men behold her.

Here again, we are called to look at the plant world. The plant draws in whatever it needs for growth; it asks no why or wherefore; it flowers because it flowers and cares not whom it may concern. And yet, it is by drawing its life-forces and everything it needs for itself from its environment that the plant acquires whatever worth it can have for its environment and finally for men. Indeed, it attains the highest degree of usefulness that can be imagined for a created being, if it belongs to those realms of the plant world which can be of service to higher beings. And it will now be an idle triviality to repeat here a familiar saying, although it has been quoted so often:

When herself the rose adorns,
She adorns the garden.

When the rose is as beautiful as it can be, the garden is adorned. We can connect this with the word 'egoism', and say: When the rose strives quite egoistically to be as beautiful as she can, and to grace herself with the finest possible form, then through her the garden becomes as beautiful as possible.

Source: Rudolf Steiner – GA 58 – Metamorphoses of the Soul I  – VII. Human Egoism – 25 November 1909, Berlin

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA058/English/RSP1983/19091125p01.html

Charming Little Rose Garden by Tina LeCour

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Arts Tutor will be Sophie Lankovsky:

"Sophie fell in love with clay for sculpting as a teenager while attending a Steiner School in Southern Germany.

Its rawness, malleability, and endless possibility of form have inspired a long career in pottery and sculpture. 

Clay is both tactile and visual. We will attempt the challenge of metamorphosis of form, from simple to more complex geometric forms. All materials provided."

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Musings on Arithmetic 7