A Camphill Youth Conference Overview

Deepening Our Questions, Quickening Our Souls, Forging Our Friendships: Sources of Strength for Future Tasks

by Haleh Wilson

On September 18th, 2014, Heartbeet Lifesharing Community welcomed to Vermont members of Camphill communities all over the United States, along with representatives from communities in Ireland, Scotland, England, Canada, and Russia. They came to celebrate and learn about anthroposophy and to discuss the present state of the Camphill movement worldwide. Nearly eighty attendees came together to frame important questions about prevailing dynamics between the generations of Camphill. After four days, such questions had been identified, parsed, and refined, and participants had struck new friendships of the kind that serve increasingly to knit Camphill together as an international community.

Lecturers David Schwartz and Sherry Wildfeuer explored the mutual history of the Anthroposophical Society and Camphill, commenting on the need for Camphill’s younger generations to take up the “intellectual thread” of anthroposophy. Guy Alma provided an overview via slideshow of the construction of the First Goetheanum. Artistic workshops, including biography work, clowning, and singing, served to punctuate the lectures—along with delicious, wholesome meals prepared and offered up by the regular residents of Heartbeet.

On September 20th, 101 years since the laying of the Foundation Stone of the First Goetheanum, a Heartbeet ceremony incorporated conference participants in a poignant visual reminder of Camphill’s basis in anthroposophy and the legacy of Rosicrucianism. A vast cross was laid on the site where Heartbeet will soon commence construction on its Community Center.* Participants joined Heartbeet community members to form a circle around the site while seven bunches of red roses were laid in the circuit that appears on the Rose Cross, a symbol that urges us toward renewal.

* Editor’s note: the cross described was formed from the ashes of Sophia House, an almost completed new Heartbeet building that burned in 2013.

On Friday morning, following a lecture introducing his form, conference participants broke into rough dozens to embark on “Circle Work.” Then and on each of the two following mornings, the circles met to share and hear each other’s “burning questions,” hopes, and intentions. My own group discovered within that intentional form a safe space that spoke to the vulnerabilities each of us carried into the room and invited purposeful contact. In this exercise, in forming circles of not many, we saw the essence of what we do in community itself, in choosing to live with others where we share a common intention.

The Circle Work reminded us of what we experience on a daily basis in Camphill—that in choosing to live in community, in this deliberate form, we are building a space together every day, a space that invites meaningful interaction. In recent years, the Camphill movement has seen the disruption of community, of our chosen form. In Europe and the United Kingdom, Camphill communities are beset by policies that seek to end lifesharing between disabled and non-disabled residents. Following his lecture on Friday morning, David Adams, who has himself been forced out of Botton Village by such measures, took a moment to comment on these destructive trends.

“A word about England,” he said, addressing the living generations of Camphill, a room of people between the ages of twenty and seventy. “Do not be proud. It can happen here, too.”

Although many people shared stories of pain and loss that reflected the current experience of communities like Botton, the conference atmosphere was overwhelmingly one of security, warmth, affirmation, and hope. In Heartbeet, I saw many people enjoying the benefits of lifesharing in several thriving Camphill homes. The abundant goodwill and warmth in that community is tangible, and speaks to the brightest of possible futures for Camphills around the world.

Certainly in the moment of that September 20th ceremony, the Rose Cross image seemed to speak to the events of today’s Camphill movement, a call for renewal in the face of forces seeking to change us: the cross on the Earth, the wide circle around it, people joining hands, voices lifted in song.

Haleh Wilson (haleh.wilson@gmail.com) grew up in Mississippi. She first encountered anthroposophy as a child by way of her mother’s interest in Waldorf education. Now living in England, she is a coworker at Grange Village.

Heartbeet Lifesharing (heartbeet.org) is a Camphill Community and a Licensed Therapeutic Community Residence in Hardwick, VT; host to youth gatherings for many years, it is now raising funds for a community and cultural center.