INTRODUCTION

The Calendar of the Soul was written in 1912 by Rudolf Steiner. It contains a verse for each week of the year beginning with Easter.

Preface to the Second Edition (1918)

The course of the year has its own life. With this life the human soul can unfold a feeling-unison. If the soul opens itself to the influences that speak so variously to it week by week, it will find the right perception of itself. Thereby the soul will feel forces growing within that will strengthen it. It will observe that such inward forces want to be awakened — awakened by the soul's ability to partake in the meaningful course of the world as it comes to life in the rhythms of time. Thereby the soul becomes fully aware of the delicate, yet vital threads that exist between itself and the world into which it has been born.

In this calendar a verse is inscribed for each week. This will enable the soul to participate actively in the progressing life of the year as it unfolds from week to week. Each verse should resound in the soul as it unites with the life of the year. A healthy feeling of “at one-ness” with the course of Nature, and from this a vigorous “finding of oneself” is here intended, in the belief that, for the soul, a feeling-unison with the world's course as unfolded in these verses is something for which the soul longs when it rightly understands itself.

— Rudolf Steiner

Introduction to the book of artistic exercises:

by Laura Summer

As modern people we live with very little relationship to the cycle of the year. Central heat and cooling, electric lights and modern transportation allow us to be fairly comfortable in any season and therefore unconscious of the great breathing cycle of the earth. The verses of Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul provide a meditative path for experiencing this cycle. The exercises in this book were developed in relation to these verses but this is not a book of illustrations. Rather by drawing or painting them, the artistic exercises are designed to provide the student with an experience of inner movement during the year; the breathing in of the earth in winter, the out breathing into summer and the subtle variations, spirals, reversals and lemniscates of the process.

When I first encountered Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul, I tried to understand it as separate verses, one for each week. Looked at this way it was most often incomprehensible to me. Although occasionally the verse seemed to fit something, either in the seasonal situation around me or in my inner condition, as often as not the verse seemed arbitrary when looked at alone. Three years ago I started to try to penetrate the calendar as a continuous sequence. Each day I read the verse and then held it inwardly for a few moments. At the end of the week I took a pencil and drew a gesture to represent the movement that that verse holds. As the year progressed I noticed that the movement of one verse leads to the movement of the next and all together they form an intricate breathing and weaving. When my first year with the calendar came to a close I decided to continue working with it meditatively for another year to try to experience this breathing/weaving more clearly. At the end of that year I began to create a drawing or painting exercise for each verse. Each exercise is an attempt at giving the participant an inner artistic experience of that week’s perspective in the weaving of the whole. Each week’s exercise has both a relationship to the world outside and to one’s inner world. I hope that by following these exercises in relationship to the calendar verses the participant will gradually become aware of this overall weaving/ breathing and it’s relationship to the exercises. At that point the participant will be able to develop their own exercises, of which I am sure there are unlimited possibilities.

Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul was written in German. During the process of working with the Calendar of the Soul I often felt fortunate that I did not speak German. I had to work with various translations, often referring to more than one, and sometimes doing a literal translation using a German/English dictionary. This gave me the understanding that the Calendar of the Soul lives not in any one language but in the realm of meaning that must be “translated” into human language. Therefore these drawing exercises can be used with any version of the Calendar of the Soul and it may be more effective to work with more than one “translation”. It is perhaps in the space between translations, whether they be from German to English or from word to form, that something beyond the material world can be perceived.  

 You will notice as you work with the exercises that the process of each follows a sequence of observation. We begin by looking out to the world or in to ourselves, we make an observation or have an experience, we look the other direction, out or in, we see how we are affected, what moves in the world, what moves in us. We work with this observation, letting it change and reveal itself to us.

After you have worked with these exercises you may want to develop exercises of you own. Here is the procedure that I followed:

1. Read the verse.

2. Close your eyes and repeat the verse, go line by line if you need to.

3. Do this each day for a week.

4. As you become more familiar with the verse try to notice the movement. Ask yourself questions such as: “Does it      start in the center and move out?” “Does it contain a polarity of above and below?”

5. At the end of the week take a pencil and draw a gesture that, for you, describes the verse.

6. Ask yourself the question, “What drawing would I do?” “Where would I begin, looking inside or outside?” “What colors”?

7. Now draw the answer. Draw it whether you think it is correct or not. Remember that the drawings are footprints left behind you as you tread a path. When walking it is not usual or valuable to expect to create perfect footprints, but it is possible to love your footprints as you gaze back over the path.