I was asked to speak about my relationship with Rudolf Steiner on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his death. I wrote a letter to Brother Dr. Steiner which is abbreviated below.

Dear Brother Dr. Steiner,

When I was asked if I would say a few words on this 100th anniversary of your physical departure from this Earth, I was honored and grateful for a chance to reflect on the impact you have had on my life and so many others, especially in the North American context from which I come.

How does an African American woman-child from the American industrialized Midwest, come into relationship with an Austrian-German spiritual teacher whose earthly presence departed 33 years before she was even born? I marvel as I think about the life journeys that have brought us into each other’s sphere.

Great-grandparents were contemporaries of Rudolf Steiner

Brother Steiner, when you landed this last time in 1861 in Kraljevic, a tiny village during the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, I look to my hereditary stream for karmic clues. My maternal great-grandfather Henry was seven years old when you were born, having recently traveled from southern slavery to northern freedom in Detroit. Later he married Josephine, a woman from a mixed free-born Black and indigenous Nehantic Nation whose family had migrated to Detroit. Contemporaries of you, Brother Steiner, Henry and Josephine fostered a family dedicated to freedom, community building, and recognition of the Spirit in a world of conflict and sorrow.

Other ancestral and karmic connections led to a yearning in me that I recognized as a child and carried into young adulthood: a desire to understand more beyond the world as presented to me in sense perception and thought. Brother Steiner, I found out later that you named this feeling for me within the first Leading Thought: «Hence only they can be anthroposophists who feel certain questions on the nature of man and the universe as an elemental need of life, just as one feels hunger and thirst.»

And it was a hunger and thirst that I sought to satisfy through the various spiritual and cultural portals of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States and the world, trying to penetrate what it meant to be a spiritual human being in the world.

Experiencing Rudolf Steiner in communities

When I was a young woman in college, one of my younger cousins enrolled in the fourth grade at the Detroit Waldorf School. I bore witness to his growth while I worked in an agency that served people with disabilities. To me, it seemed that the education I glimpsed at Detroit Waldorf was a way to help both children and the clients I was serving.