Peter Selgin was cursed/blessed with an unusual childhood. The son of Italian immigrants—his father an electronics inventor and a mother so good looking UPS drivers swerved off their routes to see her—Selgin spent his formative years scrambling among the hat factory ruins of a small Connecticut town, visiting doting—and dotty—relatives in the “old world,” watching mental giants clash at Mensa gatherings, enduring Pavlovian training sessions with a grandmother bent on “curing” his left-handedness, and competing savagely with his right-handed twin.

 

Ogni giorno un uomo passeggia in città, siede al caffè, sfama le anatre al parco, guarda le vetrine dei negozi, fa la spesa e a sera torna a casa per prepararsi la cena. Tu che cosa pensi? 'Che uomo triste e solo...'. Ma l'uomo solo e triste è felice. Felice perché sa apprezzare le piccole grandi cose della realtà di ogni giorno: il fuoco acceso nel caminetto, la luna e le stelle che brillano nel cielo, i bambini che giocano nel parco. Stare soli non vuol dire essere soli. E quando la sera spegniamo la luce prima di dormire, siamo tutti uguali. Tutti insieme dentro il magico flusso della vita. Età di lettura: da 7 anni.

Rudolf Steiner spoke frequently about the soul's continued existence beyond death, and about the importance of establishing a new kind of community that unites spiritually active souls and endures beyond death.

Peter Selg shows how Steiner commemorated the dead, the words he chose to use and his descriptions-sometimes in great detail-of the inner processes involved. He makes clear both how Steiner's own connections to the deceased shaped what he said and how his words were intimately related to their new stage of existence. Thus he not only recapitulated a particular soul's biography, but also assisted that soul on its path after death.

Realizing that the true depth and meaning of Steiner's words about those who have died cannot be understood except against the background of what happens to the soul after death, Dr. Selg dedicates the second part of his book to a stunningly clear and detailed account of anthroposophical research into the process of dying and the soul's path after death. 'The moment of having died,' for Rudolf Steiner, as for the poet Rilke, is the 'consummate event' of a human life. It is held constantly in view by the soul after death and filled with beauty, grandeur, and a sunny-bright warmth related to Christ.

In this passionate, inspiring, and moving book, Peter Selg, speaking out of a deep knowledge of Anthroposophy and extensive experience as a child psychiatrist, goes back to the original impulses underlying the first Waldorf School to show their continuing validity and how they still respond to what we need today.

From this point of view, Waldorf education is future-oriented, based on a holistic worldview that is simultaneously humanistic, scientific, and spiritual, and unfolds through a developmental curriculum and a teacher-student relationship based in love.

Through this story of the first Waldorf School we learn to see Waldorf Education in a new way: in its essence, as a healing model of what education might become if the primary relationship, the inner core of a school, is the free relationship between teacher and student.