Waldorf News

The Girl Inside the Raindrop

The Girl Inside the Raindrop

By Teddy Macker

One of the gifts of working at a Waldorf school is sifting through the leavings of the children. Perhaps once a week I stumble upon a drawing of some sort—under a bench in the auditorium, wet in the grass on the field—that makes me pause.

Waldorf drawings tend to be of the same kidney: lots of dragons; lots of fairies under mushrooms; lots of knights upon steeds. Here at The Waldorf School of Santa Barbara I keep a collection of favorite discards in a drawer in my desk: a portrait of “Jefe Grande,” the “trick pony” who is “77,711 years old”; a note that reads: “This orange juice is from the orange tree. It was made at 7:53. I made it.”; a hand-drawn campus advertisement done in crayons for the play “Shepherds, Giants, and Kings: Stories from the Old Testament”: blue Nile, basket made of reeds, thick bulrushes.

But my favorite discard is right here framed atop my desk, a delicate colored-pencil drawing I found half-crumpled in the trash enclosure. So beautiful is the image that it sometimes puts prickles on the back of my neck.

It is a drawing of rain. But inside the closest raindrop, a longhaired girl stands in grass and flowers, holding up her right hand—a right hand which is also a torch, blazing like the sun. The image is dream-strange. Archetypal. And with its reconciliation of opposites—dark and light, rain and sun, sadness and joy, weakness and strength—the image (like the yin-yang symbol, the cross, and the Celtic tree of life) has profound medicine in it. As for which brilliant-souled student did the drawing, I’ll never know.

A Rain of Statistics

The rain of statistics these days about our youth’s “mental health”—unsettling phrase—is pummeling. Do you know some of these statistics? Do they have to be recounted? I myself don’t know what to do with them.

What does one make of the CDC’s reporting that 57% of high school females in 2021 felt so sad and hopeless they stopped doing their usual activities? And what does one make of how different this number was in 2011 (36%)?

What does one make of the recorded 22% of high school students who seriously considered suicide in 2021; the 18% who made a plan; and the 10% (ten percent!) who actually tried to kill themselves? How does one respond to this? (And our mental health crisis is not merely a response to COVID. As you likely know, youth anguish has been surging in recent years.)

And what does one make of the commentary on such statistics? Listen to writer and NYU professor Jonathan Haidt in his bluntly titled piece “Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s the Evidence.”:

“…two threads are both essential for understanding why teen mental health collapsed in the 2010s. In brief, it’s the transition from a play-based childhood involving a lot of risky unsupervised play, which is essential for overcoming fear and fragility, to a phone-based childhood which blocks normal human development by taking time away from sleep, play, and in-person socializing, as well as causing addiction, and drowning kids in social comparisons they can’t win.”

Phone-based childhood. Horrifying phrase.  

(Mr. Haidt, by the way, is the author of the forthcoming book The Anxious Generation. The publisher’s description of his book contains the following revelatory sentence: “The Anxious Generation is a penetrating and alarming accounting of how we adults began to overprotect children in the real world while giving essentially no protection in the brutal online world.”)

Our homegrown prophet Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I obeyed so well?”

Thank God, Waldorf schools around the world have not always obeyed so well. Blessedly, we still serve as a menace to modernity’s collective susceptibility to the Gadget. Blessedly, we still advocate for a play-based childhood. Blessedly, we are not beholden to every fashion and trend. Blessedly, we still remain, to invoke Martin Luther King Jr., creatively maladjusted.

Almost 40 years ago now a group of local parents started The Waldorf School of Santa Barbara. Looking through our binder labelled “Early History WSSB,” I see the articles of incorporation; the first bylaws; old newsletters; fundraising brochures; phone directories; yellowed newspaper clippings; flyers for visiting lecturers; and old budgets (in 1986 $350 was apparently enough for all campus maintenance).

But what moves me most in our green binder is a copy of a typewritten letter written in 1983, a year shy of the school’s founding, by the director of the steering committee. He was ostensibly trying to find teachers, raise money, and recruit visiting lecturers all at once. And in the fourth paragraph of this letter, I bump into these words:

“We are aware that this school is coming about not only out of our love and concern for our own children, but for all children and in the broadest sense, the future of mankind. This implies a moral responsibility that goes far beyond our personal considerations. If we are to establish a firm, lasting foundation here for future generations we must proceed with great care.”

These straightforward bare-hearted words ambushed me. Immediately, I was in tears.

A few weeks ago, I discovered the work of Czech activist and politician Vaclav Benda. Benda was a close friend and collaborator of the more famous Vaclav: Vaclav Havel.

Benda wrote of what he termed the “parallel polis”: small-scale networks outside a pernicious mainstream (in his case a totalitarian communism)—networks which “value once more the inalienability of human dignity and the necessity for a sense of human community in mutual love and responsibility.”

But these parallel structures, Benda emphasizes, are not starkly cut off from the status quo. They are porous to it. And these structures seek to ultimately heal the status quo, humanize it. Benda writes: “The strategic aim of the parallel polis should be the growth, or the renewal, of civic and political culture—and along with it, an identical structuring of society, creating bonds of responsibility and fellow-feeling.”

One could say this is what our founding parents sought in 1983: the building of a healing and renewing parallel polis—an alternate network in service of future generations.

And that is what we—humbly and fallibly—still aim to do now in 2023. As our mission statement has it, “The Waldorf School of Santa Barbara seeks to not merely reflect society but help guide and shape it.”

In the summer of 1962, Bob Dylan wrote “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” You know the song. But for many children today the song might feel out of touch, out of date. They might say the future tense—a-gonna—should be excised from the prophecy. They might say the hard rain is falling—falling now.

And we adults need to do something about it. This is not the time for us to abdicate our role and power in their lives. This is not the time for us to be quietist. This is not the time to shirk our agency. This is not the time for us to give up on having noble inconvenient values. This is not the time for us to vanish into the shrill speed and mountainous miscellany of our modern lives.

Rather, this is the time, to borrow from writer Harold Robbins, for us to reject the denial of free will which is involved in the dogma of inevitable progress. This is the time for us to build homes and schools and communities for our children—home and schools and communities that don’t passively reflect the standing order of things but rather stand somewhat outside it—healingly so.

And let us be guided in this work by our patron saint, The Girl Inside the Raindrop, the longhaired girl inside the hard falling rain—the girl who stands in grass and flowers, holding up her right hand: a right hand which is also a torch, blazing like the sun.

Teddy Macker is the Director of Development at The Waldorf School of Santa Barbara. He is the author of the collection of poetry This World (foreword by Brother David Steindl-Rast), and his other writings appears widely: the Los Angeles Times, Orion, The Sun, Tin House, and elsewhere. For many years he taught literature at UC Santa Barbara. He lives with his wife and daughters on a small farm in Carpinteria, California. Teddy can be contacted at teddy@waldorfsantabarbara.org