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Alan speaks in a very symbolic and esoteric manner in some parts of his books. Although they can be read anthroposophically, passages speaking of Atlantis, archangels, gods, etc. do not need to be taken literarily to be meaningful. The more you read, the more you will realize he uses many different religions to express ideas in a symbolic manner and not in a religious manner. His writings are not religious. In some places his writings are meant to refer to religious events in a historical way. In some places he is using religious figures (from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Paganism, Ancient Roman and Greek Religions, etc.) in a symbolic manner. However, at no point is he promoting a specific religion or speaking from a religious point of view.
I have kept the writing as close to one-hundred percent original so you will also find that he speaks of Australia often and some spelling or manners of speaking may be cultural. Any words I have changed are presented like this: <word>.
Also keep in mind that these books are written by a Waldorf teacher with decades of experience who also studied with a Steiner student himself, so he speaks to an audience that is dedicating their lives to the Waldorf method without exception.
Because of this, all of his views are not reflected in the Earthschooling curriculum and not all of them may be ones you want to embrace or are able to use. In all of Alan Whitehead’s writings the opinions are his own and may not align with Earthschooling or Waldorf Books. In some cases, we will be updating some of these chapters in the future with additional and/or updated information.
Ultimately, however, as I read through these passages I find I can distill wisdom from even those paragraphs that do not resonate with me.
We invite you to read with an open mind and heart and with eagerness to learn and discuss…
SECOND SUNDAY IN MAY
Mother’s Day
Mother’s Day, in one form or another, at one date or another – in one era or another! – has been celebrated all over the world. For instance, the Ancient Greeks had their festival of Cybele, the Romans of Hilaria, and there was even the old Christian Mothering Sunday. In Hindu society it has been recognized for centuries as Mata Tirtha Aunshi, or Mother Pilgrimage Fortnight. The most recent provenance, however, was in America, where, in 1908, Anna Jarvis, as a memorial to her own mother, eventually had “Mother’s Day” formalized. This included making the word Mother’s singular possessive, to focus on one’s own mother, rather than merely a kind of generic motherhood, as in Mothers’, which is plural possessive.
My contributions for the perpetuation of Mother’s Day are the two tributes below: the first to my own beloved mother, Esther Mary Whitehead, and to my esteemed Mother-in-Law, Mina Mc Vicar. Both stories sadly ‘have a tragic element, but this makes both women even more, heroic in your author’s eyes. The sadness is, however, well balanced by the positives in both women’s lives.
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A tribute to Esther Mary Whitehead:
The signs that all was not right with my mother were always the same – deep depression leading to lack of personal hygiene, neglect of home duties,’ and sitting for long hours masticating nonexistent food – chewing, smoking, chewing …
“Essie’s having another, um, nervous breakdown.” Kindly neighbors would euphemistically inform each other. So, I would be sent off to stay with cousins for the few months my mother was committed to a mental hospital.
My First Lady was an unremarkable, aproned 1950s mum. Well, not totally unremarkable, she was an excellent ballroom dancer in her heyday. In good health she was always there when I got home from school, getting tea, and attending to all those things unliberated mothers did in those days.
She was gentle and loving to a fault; it was these virtues with which I would berate God in my anguish as she was once again taken away to her latter-day sanitized Bedlam. “Why her?! Why not some criminal or – or a person who’s cruel to animals?!!”
This animal element was due to my mother being an original animal-libber, but one of the hearts, rather than the head. Her love of living things was unblemished by new-age concepts. She was simply good.
My mother also gave me, as well as love, total physical and intellectual freedom. Even though she suffered a deep sense of loss, she provided no objections or emotional pressure to me, her only child, leaving my rural school/home at a tender sixteen years of age to work in the city.
My departure may have even triggered her final mental implosion, as within a year, at fifty years of age, she was permanently institutionalized. Curiously, she had unwittingly followed me; her new cold and forbidding 19th Century stone residence being a mere hour away from my city lodgings. Out of a sense of duty’ rather than affection, as a teenager I would hitch-hike each Sunday to sit with mum for an hour as she sat mainly staring into space.
“Why me?!” I raged in my on-going polemic with God as I stood beside the highway in the pouring rain. (Note the pronoun transferal.) On these visits over the years, mum was not totally vegetative, responding with warm recognition; never failing to ask about my work. But she did drift in and out as the afternoon ticked by – chewing, smoking, chewing …
This routine played havoc with my social life; however, I did manage to eventually marry. In a long· list of virtues, my future wife must have acceptance of my mother near the top. To my delight Miss Right insisted we continue the visitation regime. The future mother of my own children treated my mum with a tenderness and respect I dared not even hope for.
Not like my former girlfriend, who expressed reservations about having children with me due to the glaring genetic defects in my family tree! She was wrong – my two offspring, now adults, are mentally as sound as bells.
However, I did carry a sense of guilt from childhood to adulthood, imagining that the legion incidences of my typical youthful selfishness, rudeness and disobedience somehow contributed to my mother’s misery.
Not only her misery, but, perhaps, even her – hopeless despair. However, my mother’s unfaltering love and absence of blame provided no support for this self-loathing hypothesis.
In the brave new world of decentralization of the 1970s, my mother was transferred to a rather modem and comfortable country institution, many hours’ drive away.
Our family visits, though less frequent, were however enjoyable. The children always looked forward to seeing ‘Little Gram ‘ma’. She loved them too; proudly showing her grandchildren off to obligingly smiling patients and staff alike.
So, what medical or therapeutic treatment did my mother receive over the years in this age of modem medicine? To use a descending scale of ineffectiveness, the list is: nothing; craft therapy (basket weaving); psychiatric counselling; group therapy; a plethora of medication across the whole spectrum of uppers and downers – and the dreaded Electro Convulsive Shock Treatment.
My mum would beg them not to do this, crying and struggling as they strapped her down, crucifix-like, onto the table in a scene reminiscent of Dr Mengele’s horror laboratory. ECT was, with the others, useless – nay, counter-productive even, robbing my mother of what little dignity she had. The result was a broken, incontinent, and terrified woman.
ECT is up there with ‘Deep Sleep’ as one of the most inhuman frauds in psychiatric history. (One of the notorious Deep Sleep Chelmsford monsters was actually her doctor at one point!) If recovery does miraculously occur, it’s probably due to fear of yet another dose of high-voltage hell. I guess I should be grateful that they stopped short of frontal lobotomy; thankfully, her passive state didn’t require this humanity-destroying ‘Final Solution’.
Over the years my mother’s condition did not either improve of regress. The last time we saw her she was the same as always, chewing, smoking, chewing … She did look a little thinner though, probably due to now being over 70. So, I was not prepared for the phone call from the hospital a few weeks later – the first ever. “I regret to inform you that your mother has passed away.”
“What?! How?!! When?! !!”
“She died early this morning of cervical cancer.”
Was her life so valueless that no-one even thought it necessary to tell her only child that she was terminally ill? Perhaps they didn’t know? Or dare r’ say it – care?
In spite of being less than masterful coping with this thing called life, Esther Mary Whitehead was a perfect mother – and grandmother; and you don’t get more worthy than that. Having sloughed off the old guilt skin, I have now only one regret, or recrimination perhaps? I was not granted the opportunity to say goodbye – but maybe it was easier this way?
So, treasure your mum, however the world perceives her to because she’s the only one you’ve got. Happy Mother’s Day.
Mina Mc Vicar:
” … oh, and I’ve just been to the doctor dear – no, nothing serious, just a couple of tiny polyps in the bowel.” It was ‘mum’ on the phone; this seemingly innocuous snippet of information, given as an addendum to the regular weekly phone call between mother and daughter, caused mild concern. What are polyps anyway? They sound harmless enough. The individual members of a coral colony are polyps – tiny, rather beautiful creatures, really. The follow-up information in the next phone call came sometime earlier in the conversation, “It looks like I’m going into hospital – no, don’t come down dear, it’s too far. I’ll only be in there for a couple of days. The doctor says it’s just a bit of a snip and the growth will be gone – it’s best to be sure he says. Now, about those cuttings I was saving for you … ”
“Growth!” There was no element of the winsome euphony of ‘polyp’ in that word. Concern turned to anxiety. Yet the prognosis was positive, and indeed, except for some post-operative physical distress, it appeared that all was well; in spite of it being, as was later learned, quite a ‘serious’ operation. Nothing more was heard about “growths” until some months later …
“I’m being put on a course of chemotherapy – it seems the wretched tumors have come back. No, I know it’s not exactly good news, but the treatment is said to be very effective. Now dear, how is everyone?”
The word tumor really set the red lights flashing! What could one do? Life was hard enough as it was.
What, with having to deal with a leaking roof one day and the national debt figures the next!
In face of the ominous implications of this latest phone call, a sense of previously unexperienced helplessness shrouded the light of the soul like a sulfurous fog – and the next call was no better. “The chemo must – be doing some good – nothing that makes you feel so awful could not be working.
But worst of all, it’s making my hair fall out! No dear, no improvement yet. The specialist says it takes time for the sarcoma to respond. The treatment’s helped a lot of people he said – here’s hoping. I’d better go now; I’ve been very tired lately.”
“Sarcoma”! A pox on their Latinisms – ‘sarcoma’, here it is “a malignant growth or tumor of connective tissue”.
Everyone knows what malignant means; it was time to go down. To hell with the national debt, this was really serious.
Mild shock was the response to the physical change seen in the brave but depleted Lady. Her sturdy Celtic demeanor had changed to one of almost Oriental asceticism. Apart from her own ever-present inner light, the rest of the household was wallowing in a miasma of gloom. The “cancer”, a word everyone had avoided up to now, had spread – it was now in the liver. (The word cancer means hard, like the shell of a crab – the zodiacal Cancer symbol.) The doctor’s face was a mixture of stern professionalism and concern when Mother asked him how long she had.
“A couple of years – perhaps?” He shook his head.
“A year?” she pressed, still with a tremor of hope in her voice; he watched her without expression.
“Months …?”
The Lady was advised to get her affairs in order as soon as possible – while she still could.
Hope, in the form of a glossy pamphlet was dangled in front of the
distressed and bewildered family. A health retreat in the hills told of case histories of terminally ill people, on whom doctors had given up as hopeless, now living happy and healthy lives. Attitude changes were necessary, of course, such as eating habits. Whatever; it was a shining straw of hope in a dark sea. The Lady booked in for three weeks, at what an uncharitable soul might call, ‘breath catching cost’.
Facilities were somewhat minimalist – Spartan, even! – and the food? For the first three days the newly arrived clients (“We don’t use the word ‘patient’.”) were put on a diet of watermelon juice only – “to clean out the system”. From then on the menu consisted only of raw, fibrous (and mostly nameless) foods presented in an unimaginative manner with most ‘normal’ foods (even normal vegetables) conspicuous by their absence.
The number of truants who sneak down to the town for forbidden fruits – well, anything but fruit, really! – will never be known to the health retreat management – but the man in the fish shop knows! By this time the Lady was on a fruit diet, so she didn’t care – and the fruit was good. The most strenuous aspect of the sojourn was attending the near-obligatory ‘lectures’; thinly disguised attempts to sell expensive American health-food hardware, like juicers. However, the change of air and scene (especially the birdsong) did have a salutary effect on Mother, and when she returned home she actually enjoyed the festive season with the family – even managing a small Christmas dinner. It was her last proper meal. From then on, she slipped quickly into a monotonous pattern of sleep and nausea. Her liver, that organ of wisdom with its miraculous powers of transubstantiation, went on indefinite strike; she could only sip lemonade.
Mother’s favorite chair in the lounge room remained empty for longer periods of the day as she became increasingly bedridden. The issue of whether to place her in hospital was met with a unanimous ‘Keep her at home’. So, full time care was organized. More and more she slipped out of the pain and harsh reality of waking life into the gentle embrace of Morpheus, god of sleep. His double-edged gift to the world, opium, the active agent in morphine, allows such departing souls to spend the twilight of their lives in dignity. Without it, those meaningful last weeks would not have been possible.
The Lady went through a funny phase: kith and kin came from near and far to visit, and oddly enough, with each person, she poked a finger into their psychic soft spots. For instance, she informed her sister that she didn’t like her hair color – in another, she referred dismissively to a movie her granddaughter had produced as ‘that film’.
Worst of all, she threw aspersions on a highly sensitive son-in-law’s table manners!
No porcelain-thin ego was spared. Noting the consistency of ruffled feathers, it was gradually realized that she unconsciously (or otherwise!) was aiding, with a carefully aimed jab, each person in ameliorating the pain of parting. In spite of all, Mother was in every other. way delighted with her numerous but increasingly tiring visitations.
Soon the very brave Lady was completely bed-ridden and spent a good deal of time ‘on the other side’. She talked a lot in this soporific state; curiously to people who were long dead, like her brother – and about events from her distant past. “She’s just hallucinating,” said the home-care nurse with undeserved authority.
But was she? Not according to those who hold a deep spiritual conviction. These people seem to handle despair with greater grace, and even optimism, than the broader populace. Materialism is fine until one is forced to face the most profound reality of Life – Death. In one agonizing instance, she turned to me and croaked in desperation, “Help me Alan,” I have never felt more helpless in my life.
In the last days Mother was comatose, lying-in state like Sleeping Beauty. Beauty indeed, her face, gaunt but composed, had a look of sublime peace etched onto its strong features. Soft rain was falling on a moonless night when her breathing began to go through marked rhythmic variations; the so-called ‘death rattles’. Was that a pyrrhic short-short? And that a short-long iamb?
It was as if The Breath of Life was performing a valedictory requiem for the close family members present who were midwifing their beloved’ s birth into another existence – into a luminescent world of Light: a birth equally as difficult as the struggle of the new-born into this world. It was midnight when Mother gave a last, very long sigh …
Large photo: Mina Mcvicar with sons Bruce and Andrew, 1963.
Small photo; Esther Mary Whitehead, 1944.
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