America!
Land created in common,
Dream nourished in common,
Keep your hand on the plow! Hold on!
If the house is not yet finished,
Don’t be discouraged, builder!
If the fight is not yet won,
Don’t be weary, soldier!
The plan and the pattern is here,
Woven from the beginning
Into the warp and woof of America:
      ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL.
      NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH
      TO GOVERN ANOTHER MAN
      WITHOUT HIS CONSENT.
      BETTER DIE FREE,
      THAN TO LIVE SLAVES.
Who said those things? Americans!
Who owns those words? America!
Who is America? You, me!
We are America!
To the enemy who would conquer us from without,
We say, NO!
To the enemy who would divide
And conquer us from within,
We say, NO!
  FREEDOM!
    BROTHERHOOD!
        DEMOCRACY!
To all the enemies of these great words:
We say, NO!
A long time ago,
An enslaved people heading toward freedom
Made up a song:
    Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On!
The plow plowed a new furrow
Across the field of history.
Into that furrow the freedom seed was dropped.
From that seed a tree grew, is growing, will ever grow.
That tree is for everybody,
For all America, for all the world.
May its branches spread and shelter grow
Until all races and all peoples know its shade.
    KEEP YOUR HAND ON THE PLOW! HOLD ON!

—Langston Hughes, from “Freedom’s Plow” (1943)

***

Holidays and Holy Days . . . It’s interesting living into the spiritual year, again and again, especially doing so with children. Celebrating festivals over the years, more or less idiosyncratic familial or community traditions develop that can’t help but nourish, being as they are rhythmic, certain, shared, the same, in a way, but new each time. Such practices, over time, can become individualized windows into soul and spirit worlds, simply because that is the nature of these experiences, and our memories of them.
Then there are the “national holidays,” the “bank holidays,” the three-day-weekend holidays (and, of course, for some, and for all in some ways, officially, there is no or little difference between these and more overtly spiritual holi-days). More secular, perhaps, or more nationalistic, these national holidays, kept and honored over time, are no less capable of being infused with idiosyncratic tradition, love, soul-substance.
Here in the U.S.A., this is Memorial Day weekend, derived from Decoration Day, begun after the end of the American Civil War, in the spring of 1865—a day to honor those who died in that conflict (~620,000 men, or 2% of the entire population), to visit their graves and “strew them with flowers.”
My grandfather, whose grandparents’ generation fought and died in that war, kept this holiday faithfully, by visiting and decorating, on Memorial Day, the graves of those he’d known and loved, not necessarily soldiers of war. I went with him and saw him do this every year, and I asked him once, aged five or so, what it was all about. “Remembering the dead,” he said.

As a truly thinking person, with a fully healthy understanding, one can hardly look at what exists today in the form of general culture in the so-called cultivated world without being clear that much is missing from this culture; that, above all, this culture lacks sufficient impulses for life. Instead, in our time there are many widely dissipated ideals, as people call them, for which all sorts of societies and associations are founded that put on programs through which this or that ideal is supposed to be expressed! It is all very well-intentioned, such that one can say that those people who form associations, large or small, from all the circles and strata of life, under the impression of this or that ideal, want what is good from their viewpoint. And the convictions of these people should be respected fully. But for the most part, these people live under the restrictive influence of a certain constraint that comes from unconscious timidity, unconscious spiritual cowardice in regard precisely to the most important thing that humanity needs today. We say: the most important! What humanity needs today is spiritual knowledge, and the introduction of certain spiritual insights into our lives.

—Rudolf Steiner, lecture of October 26, 1916 (“The Great Delusion of Contemporary Culture”), in The Connection between the Living and the Dead