Human experience of nature during Easter

During the Easter season, when nature germinates from winter into a blossoming spring, and we turn our eye outward through the impulse of the self, we as humans feel strengthened and carried by the power that comes to us from nature. And just as we need nature to fill us with life force each year, nature needs our attention to thrive and not fall into decay. When we go outside, that natural beauty is there in all its glory, but then we must have an open mind and open eye to it and not be forced to stay inside because of the corona crisis. Watch video on YouTube

This video is recorded on Holy Thursday and so we are now entering the time of suffering, but I pointed out last week that a human being has a very great resilience in him and that this resilience is particularly related to the Easter celebration, that is my perception. And I told you that in my father's house, my father's parental home, lived a reformed family that always listened to the radio on Palm Sunday, to the St. Matthew Passion, but I have been in the fortunate circumstance that in contrast to that - this paternal family lived in Holland - that in contrast to that, my mother, her parental home was in Catholic Limburg and there was no question of strict, it was rather free Catholic, and so I have had the privilege of experiencing both sides intensively. And when you grow up in the Catholic faith - and I was brought up a Catholic - and when you then also come to Limburg with the big feasts, then you experience the wonderfully symbolic nature of the Catholic cult. And I remember it was always said: on Holy Thursday, the bells go away and they only come back at Easter Vigil. That is, of course, a very beautiful symbolic thing, that as a child you are told that during those days when you experience the suffering of Christ, there is no ringing of the bells and that they will only return on the night of the resurrection. That rich Catholic faith - which is also very much lacking - lacked the daily reading of the Bible, which I found so special in the other family, and the experience of the music was limited to the sung Holy Mass. But what I really want to say with this is that in our time now, Holy Thursday, we are working towards a great turning point, also in the course of the year and in nature. I suspect that in the future we will have to deal with a lot of panic-mongering about nature and the earth being in danger. The planet. I would like to ask you to go outside at this time and see what nature is like. What an indescribable loyalty it is that she, nature, bursts forth with such joy every year in the spring. And I believe it is the greatest misunderstanding of all, if we as humans were to learn that we spoil nature. For I firmly believe that also thanks to the human being, nature lives and rises again every year. And that it is thanks to our human eye that we set in opposition to nature, that thanks to that thoughtful, attentive eye of man, nature can also thrive - and when that eye no longer looks, as it does now in our time, when that eye no longer looks, then nature decays. And then, of course, you can say that this is CO2, this is nitrogen and so on, but I dispute that, I say that it is the human eye that nature needs so much. And when, against all advice, you leave home, get into your car and drive on the motorway, you often see large signs saying: Stay home! That makes me very angry, when you see it in the light of nature, which the human eye needs so much. But it is also the other way round, the human eye also needs nature. And what we have to watch out for, of course, is that we are not led into the illusion that seeing a flowering prune on the screen has as much to offer as seeing one in nature. That is an indescribable illusion and a lie too, and so you have to practise that too, that you say: Now, let me see an image on the computer, an image of nature, and then, when I am in nature, let me remember that and feel, experience, what a difference that is. 

And when we think about and experience our perception of nature during the Easter period, it is very fortifying to know the weekly proverbs of the great master of the Occident of the twentieth century, Rudolf Steiner, as an accompaniment.

He has given a proverb for each week that indicates the course of nature in relation to the human being, and when you immerse yourself in the events of Easter, then you experience in those proverbs that before Easter you are in fact still in the mood of winter, where you are with yourself, very strongly, occupied with yourself and your own development, and that when it comes to Easter you begin to turn your eye outwards, and everyone does that. Of course we can educate and cultivate that, but it is a natural gift of the human being that he is drawn outwards because of the beauty. So when you feel the urge from within to let your eye wander in the wideness of your surroundings, you feel that the beauty that meets you is a great life-giving force. You feel how that resilience, which you need so much in our sombre times, how it comes to you from, yes I would almost say the cosmos, but let's stick to nature, and makes new life flow into your physical existence, through which you also feel that you are connected to that which is outside of you. That is what is experienced before Easter, I do not say can be experienced - because everyone experiences it, whether you are aware of it or not. And they are rather awakening statements that you find in those sayings, where something is awakened of which you know: that was already there, that is not strange at all. 

But when Easter comes, then the human relationship to the cosmos is completely reversed, and then it is so that you do not turn to the beauty of nature from within, but that the beauty from outside, carried by that mighty sunlight, which we really should not be afraid of and which we should not want to throw sand in the eyes, so that mighty sun coming from outside, carries the benefits of nature to us. By absorbing that, you feel that you as a human being become connected with the really ruling spirit in nature, the real nature, that what nature really is. And again, every human being has that experience but it is about becoming aware of that experience. And I did not want to miss this opportunity, now that I am recording video's, in corona time, when there is a magnifying glass on an electron microscopic particle in nature, to remind that we as humans are not meant to look at electron microscopic particles under a magnifying glass, but that we are meant to feel that change, how before Easter I still address the beauty in nature all by myself and how after Easter nature gives us her benefit, her sunlight, her spiritual power from outside. That is resurrection in nature, in which our bodies participate wholeheartedly.