Another Day!

A Day! Help! Help! Another Day! 
Your prayers, oh Passer by! 
From such a common ball as this 
Might date a Victory!
From marshallings as simple 
The flags of nations swang. 
Steady my soul: What issues 
Upon thine arrow hang!

—Emily Dickinson,
"A Day! Help! Help! Another Day!"

Modern life, with its conveniences and technologies, has had mixed results. With great gains come also losses. For better or for worse, as certain types of knowledge have increased, others, which were not perhaps knowledge in the modern sense, but rather types of wisdom, which were once innate, have grown faint.

Just as the wisdom of traditional diets faded and gave way to a haphazard, increasingly toxic, industrialized, "modern" diet—the
hazardous results of which many are now waking up to—so, too, did older, likely innate wisdom for guiding a growing human being from birth through childhood and adolescence into adulthood all but vanish, with predictable results.

While it’s true that we can’t go back to how things once were, wisdom is also possible going forward. A living, contemporary, and conscious approach to raising children, born of both commonsense and love, is both achievable and necessary. This is the path that Dr. Cowan outlines in this book.

 

John Wulsin approaches the English language not as a conventional linguist, but as a poet interested in the spirit and evolution of our language. To show “how sound works in English and American poetry,” the author traces the many changes, both subtle and radical, in how English has sounded over the past thirteen centuries, while also showing how those changes are related to the evolution of human consciousness in Western, English-speaking peoples.

This practical guide is a valuable resource for anyone interested in English, its development, its effects on consciousness, and how sound works in poetry.

"To our modern way of thinking, this all sounds quite insane. I am well aware of that, but just think how many things were originally rejected as crazy, yet after a few years became accomplished fact. I wish you could have read the Swiss newspapers when somebody first thought of laying train tracks up the mountains—you would not believe how they ridiculed that poor person! But a short time later, the mountain railways were there, and now it no longer occurs to anyone that whoever first thought of building them was crazy. It is just a question of overcoming people's prejudices."

—Rudolf Steiner, from a lecture five.

Translation by Simon Blaxland-de Lange