No Shore Too Far

by Jonathan Stedall

One challenge for all pupils in relation to their teachers is how gradually to make the essence of what they’ve learned their own; nor to be disheartened by how far those efforts fall short of the original work that inspired them. Rudolf Steiner’s extraordinary legacy represents a monumental example of this challenge.

Having spent a lifetime studying Steiner’s work, and along the way trying to communicate through documentary films and an autobiography what has interested and inspired me, I have recently turned to poetry through which to express what are my own humble efforts at an understanding of his essential message.

One of my recent poems attempts to address that most profound question of all, the meaning and significance of Christ’s incarnation—though the word Christ is deliberately not mentioned. I’ve called the poem “Vision.”

Without my eyes

I wouldn’t see the world;

but what I never see

are those two eyes themselves.

And as I search

for what it all might mean,

these wonders I behold,

I see not god as once we did –a

god we call the sun.

Perhaps that god has come to us

and lives in eyes

of quite a different kind, t

hrough which we’ll see much more.

And maybe such a power as that,

which needs our trust to grow,

is heaven’s newest gift to us,

and like the eyes we’ve had awhile,

cannot itself be seen.

I began writing poetry just over a year ago, following the death of my wife Jackie, in the autumn of 2014. The early ones were almost entirely addressed to her, in the hope that this might be one way to express my gratitude and love, and in a more mysterious way to stay in touch. My mood at that time is expressed in a poem called “That Robin.”

That Robin who became so tame

when you were ill

is back again,

but not so close.

Perhaps he knew –

not in his tiny brain,

but in his feathered being –

that you would welcome such a friend

when times were hard.

For what keeps animals at bay

comes tumbling down when people drop their guard

and boundaries start to shrink.

The garden was your world.

You saw each flower and tree anew. P

erhaps you saw them as the robin does.

No wonder you became such friends.

Another example of how I tried to cope with my grief, but also to express the trust I felt that Jackie had not totally disappeared, is illustrated in the first verse of a poem called “Alive.”

‘It’s strange’, you said,

‘how well I feel;’ and then you spoke

another word

that helped me cope, t

hat helped me see

a deeper truth at work.

‘Alive’, you said,

‘so much alive.’

And as your body slowly died,

that life in you

it grew and grew

and so outshone what met our eyes

as words, too, fell away.

Gradually this experience of Jackie’s continuing presence found expression in a poem called “A Helping Hand,” which begins:

My need to share,

to share with you,

through poems that I write

on life and death

and love and hope,

grows stronger by the day.

I go on to imagine in what way we might be continuing to help one another, ending with these lines:

Perhaps we’re even holding hands,

this hand with which I write;

and what I try to share with you,

it is perhaps your gift to me –

the poems are by us.

Rudolf Steiner’s work has not been the only influence on my writing. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, the philosopher Thomas Nagel, economist E.F. Schumacher, psychiatrist Carl Jung, Mahatma Gandhi, and one particular paragraph in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows have all, in their different ways, inspired these poems—poems about time and space, angels and devils, memory, the night, Sleeping Beauty, Herod, and a war in heaven.

The title of my collection is "No Shore Too Far", conveying, I hope, my sense that in our efforts to extend boundaries of every sort—and not just in connection with those who have died—there are no limits. It is a trust that I have tried to express in a poem called “Exploration.”

We feel so small,

just tiny specks,

the more we’re told,

the more we learn about another billion stars

that someone’s found

while peering into space.

And yet in other ways we’re huge,

as huge as each new thought

that takes us to those billion stars,

and to a truth beneath our feet

and in our hearts –a truth that knows no size.

Jonathan Stedall is a noted documentary filmmaker whose “The Challenge of Rudolf Steiner” is now in Chinese. "No Shore Too Far" was just published by Hawthorn Press www.hawthornpress.com.