Today, I wanted to return once more to the Calendar of the Soul by Rudolf Steiner. Written in 1912, maybe also still in 1913. These are verses for each week, in which you—if you work with them—can experience how the relationship between you as a human being, nature, the cosmos, and the seasons changes throughout the year. That is something very special. Initially, you may not notice it. I could imagine that at first these verses seem somewhat complicated and that, after a year of working with them each week, you still feel like you haven’t fully grasped them. Perhaps here and there you’ve noticed some connection between what you’re meditating on and what is happening in nature and the cosmos.

But that changes over time. And I think it’s so fascinating from the beginning that you won’t get bored, because each week brings a new verse that reveals the relationship in a slightly different way. And then the major polarity in the yearly cycle—of course we see this in the seasons—is summer and winter. And when you look at and practice these weekly verses, you become aware—if you didn’t already know, although knowing is different from becoming aware—you become aware that there is a kind of shift around August. While in summer you’ve been living increasingly outwardly—even if you stayed indoors, because it’s not something external, but something that happens inwardly—you become detached from yourself and your body in the warmth of summer. Then in August, you begin to experience a very subtle return, so to speak, to yourself. Eventually, by Christmas, you can be so intimately one with yourself that you can experience that something is born within you that truly has to do with—let’s say—your true self.

This is something that comes about in winter, even if you don’t meditate. Even if you do nothing else, it still happens. But when you begin with the weekly verses, you begin to become conscious of that which is happening anyway. And that is something very, very special. But of course, there is also a possibility to cultivate and strengthen this physical-cosmic connection in a spiritual sense and to further develop it. And that’s actually what you could especially do during wintertime: to bring thinking into development. People, of course, think in a certain way all the time, but consciously handling thinking—that’s really something quite different. And that is truly the winter work you could do.

Then in February—just as in August there was this very subtle change, where you begin to feel that you are gradually coming back to yourself from the cosmos—in February, the reverse happens: you begin to subtly sense that the outer world is having more influence on you. It actually becomes more difficult to remain centered in yourself while thinking and to unfold thought from the ‘I’. Of course, that remains possible, but more and more, external influences begin to make it harder to maintain clarity.

And what then grows stronger in the time leading up to Easter is that movement where, from within yourself, you increasingly turn toward the world-being, you might say. That you rise out of yourself, no longer remaining solely with your own thoughts, but increasingly directing your thoughts toward what is outside. And this happens almost naturally, because how delightful is it when the first snowdrops appear. You look at them, and you feel that there is an outside world. But that outside world also begins to—one might say, in German “betauben”—numb you a bit, making you a little less clear.

And at Easter, there comes a great turning point: the turning point from initially turning toward the world-being out of yourself, to the moment when at Easter the world-being—however you wish to call it—turns toward you. And that is the first message of spring: that you go on a path toward summer in which you increasingly let go of yourself. First the thinking, then also the feeling and perception. Eventually, you even offer up your will to the ever-warming outer world.

And this means you are preparing a grand, even ecstatic moment that takes place in high summer—one which used to be celebrated as a true festival on midsummer night, where the ecstatic played a central role. That is where you’re gradually heading. And this means, in a way, you’re leaving yourself behind and increasingly uniting with what is outside. And then you learn to move with the outer world, with what is there, without carrying along the usual ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. That is, of course, something extraordinary, something you’d wish to master—something you won’t, unless you actively work on it. But it is something that the nature of the human being, the spirit of the human being, offers us in the life of spring and summer.

The verse for this week—when I read this, and if this video is released around now, it might be a little later, but I don’t think so—is as follows in Dutch:
“In het licht dat uit geestesdiepten, in de ruimte vruchtbaar wevend, het goddelijke scheppen openbaart, daarin, in dat licht, verschijnt het wezen van de ziel, wijd geworden tot het wereldzijn en opgestaan uit de bekrompen binnenmacht van de zelfheid.”

That is something which—you could say—is a path to selflessness, a path that every human being walks throughout the year. Only it’s something very special that there was a person who expressed this development step by step, week by week, in words—allowing you to become conscious of it. And when you become conscious of it, then you know it’s true. You don’t need to believe it—because it is actually so self-evident that it is true—that you feel only a kind of gratitude that it was ever written down.

And when you move on to the next week—and I will read that aloud then, to give a sense of how it develops step by step—so next week, it continues:
“Out of individuality my self has arisen. And it finds itself as world-revelation in time and space forces. The world shows me everywhere as divine archetype the truth of its own image.”

Here we are dealing with a magnificent moment in which the human being could become aware that each person is a microcosm and that each person carries within them the image of the world-revelation. But that, during this time of the year, you have—so to speak—completely poured yourself out into it, only to rise again, out of the self, and then to fully rediscover yourself in the world-revelation. That is what we are heading toward.

And as mentioned, this process continues—each week, it metamorphoses a little bit further, until around August there is—not quite a reversal, that comes later—but a slight turning inward again, and you begin to feel, as always happens toward autumn, that a change is approaching and that you can no longer go as far outward as you did in spring and summer. You feel the question arising within: I need to turn back more toward myself. But I take the fruits of everything I was able to receive in spring and summer—those fruits I carry inward with me.

And then once again begins the time when this inward movement is, in a way, threatened. Because during your “absence,” so to speak, in summer, various things have taken place—and you now need powerful support to return safely to yourself and your body. And that is the festival of Michael. That’s how we journey through the year. And I wanted to draw attention to that once more. When you look out into the human world—into politics, into the wars, into the developments you see in people themselves—you have moments when you simply have no more words. I’m in such a moment now. And those are the moments when you say: Let the higher speak once more. And I hope I’ve done just that here.