When picturing the school community in my mind, it is very difficult to keep it alive; it requires extra effort. When going for a walk, one can experience that we are more ready to greet and communicate across the street.

In order to meet students, parents, colleagues in my mind, I have to work much harder inwardly. I realize that it takes much stronger inner work to reach out to the spiritual world. As humans we have now created an all-embracing electrical sheath around the world that makes it yet more difficult to reach higher beings. How strong do we have to work from our side for the spiritual beings to break through to us?

Another community concern comes with the financial aspect. Many individuals are seriously struggling, and we know that many of our schools are going through extreme challenges. This calls also for an awareness of the smaller and larger community. Are we inwardly strong enough to meet the new challenges creatively?

Working on the inner strengthening of our school community, it can help to work with the Teachers’ Imagination. If one wants and needs to strengthen one’s own well being, one can work with prayer or meditation, or both. One meditation that encourages particularly the qualities that we need so much––light in our thinking, warmth of the heart towards the world, so that we can meet the tasks in life we choose to do––goes as follows:

Evening
Blue of the sky with many stars,
Devout and reverent, my soul,
Send, intuiting, into the breadths of space
Your feeling gaze.
Receive this gaze
And send into my heart’s depths
Light, love and life
From spirit worlds

(inner tranquility)

Morning
(the sign of the Rose Cross)

What speaks to me
In this symbol
May the lofty spirits of worlds
Fill my soul
All the time
In all life’s situations
With light, love, light.

(inner tranquility)

(a verse by Rudolf Steiner for Elisabeth Vreede)