I looked around in the unknown year, aware that few are
        those who come from so far, I was saturated with
        sunlight as a plant with water.
That was a high year, fox-colored, like a crosscut redwood
        stump or vine leaves on the hills in November.
In its groves and chambers the pulse of music was beating
        strongly, running down from dark mountains, tributaries
        entangled.
A generation clad in patterned robes trimmed with little bells
        greeted me with the banging of conga drums.
I repeated their guttural songs of ecstatic despair walking by
        the sea when it bore in boys on surfboards and washed
        my footprints away.
At the very border of inhabited time the same lessons were
        being learned, how to walk on two legs and to pronounce
        the signs traced in the always childish book of our
        species.
I would have related, had I known how, everything which a
        single memory can gather for the praise of men.
O sun, o stars, I was saying, holy, holy, holy, is our being
        beneath heaven and the day and our endless communion.

—Czeslaw Milosz, “The Year”
        (translated by the author and Richard Lourie)

***

Greetings on this eve of the New Year!
May it be a blessed one for us all.

Today we’re announcing a new and unique title in The Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner in English series, which is now available. You can read more about it below, and I hope you do!

And here’s another reminder that our 2023 holiday sale ends tonight.
There is, though, no deadline for gifts, and responses to our end-of-year appeal are still being gratefully received—always in awe and appreciation of your thoughtful kindnesses.

With warmest wishes of light and strength for the New Year
—and beyond!
—John-Scott

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”