Patti Smith: 6/22/1951 - 6/24/2020

by Signe Eklund Schaefer

Patti Smith crossed the threshold on St John’s Day, June 24th, 2020. Given her fiery nature, it was not difficult to imagine her rising like the sparks from a St John’s bonfire. Her funeral, with limited attendance due to Covid-19, was held on June 27th, which would have been her 69th birthday.

Patricia Ellen Smith was born in 1951, in Boston, MA. Her father was a Navy pilot, her mother a devoted homemaker for the growing family that moved every three years throughout Patti’s childhood. Four younger siblings joined the family along the way. Patti went to seven different schools, which she found challenging and increasingly painful. She described a gradual silencing of her voice by teachers who could not recognize her struggles, something which led her later in life to work tirelessly to help young people trust and practice using their own voices. Patti loved singing and acting; in high school drama she came to feel the beginnings of self-confidence.

In 1970, after a few years of college, her longing to find herself out in the world was fired by an article she read in Look magazine about a commune in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. Full of idealism, she hitchhiked to the Brotherhood of the Spirit, and immediately connected with its aim of working for the common good out of a living sense for the spirit. In the early years at the commune she appreciated the shared commitment to meditation, service, and thoughtful moral action. She helped to start a pizza business serving the local area and was active in organizing large community events. As the years went by, she increasingly struggled to connect her own acute sense of responsibility with what she experienced as a devolving and destructive leadership. After seven years she left the commune with her partner at the time, Andy Baer, and their newborn daughter Shannon.

Here is how she described her personal search in the years after leaving the commune: “I sought spiritual practices that would enable me to muster inner courage, foster clarity in my decision making, and enhance my intuitive capacity to accept the circumstances life provided.” Within a few years she had found her way to the work of Rudolf Steiner and to Waldorf education, and she began a long connection with the Meadowbrook Waldorf School in Rhode Island. In the mid-1980’s the family, now including son Ezra, moved to Michigan, where Andy was a student at the Waldorf Institute in Detroit, and Patti ran a small home day-care. She and I met at the Institute in a workshop on The Philosophy of Freedom led my Robert McDermott. Robert and his wife Ellen were to become especially dear friends of Patti’s; and she and I knew immediately that we had much shared work ahead of us.

Since the early 1980’s, Patti participated as both student and course leader at the Rudolf Steiner Institute (in Pennsylvania and Maine), forming deep friendships with many people through these summer adventures in learning. In this past year before she died, she was collaborating with several colleagues on an idea for a new summer study community for individuals and families.

The late 80’s found Patti teaching kindergarten at Green Meadow Waldorf School. She described this work with young children as the favorite of her many jobs through the years. She felt real joy at leaving all other concerns behind when she entered the classroom and readied herself to be fully present to the needs of the children. But private schools were hard for her. She had a deep longing for greater social equity in the world; she wanted to help improve public education, and so she decided to return to university, eventually completing her EdD.

For the rest of her professional life Patti worked in a variety of educational settings including Outward Bound Expeditionary Learning, Brown University and the National Academy Foundation, largely focused on bettering public high school education. While working on her doctorate, she was a research assistant to retired Professor Emeritus Edmund W. Gordon, a much-respected leader in urban education. He recently offered this characteristic picture of her vision about education: Patti practiced student development long before that conceptualization in education came to exist. Early in her work with me, it was she who insisted that we be concerned with the development of the person, first, and what else the person was learning came next. She felt that well developed learners will choose what they want to learn and learn it with our help. She saw her role as enabler of wholesome and holistic development.

Patti was also always engaged in side activities that allowed her to work more directly from her commitment to human development as elaborated by Rudolf Steiner. She was involved with several Waldorf public initiatives, including the Urban Waldorf School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the Mariposa Initiative in Rhode Island. She also served as an executive producer for a documentary film series about Waldorf initiatives in public schools. She was always awake to questions of equity, diversity, and inclusion and was a fierce advocate for attention to gender or racial disparity in many varied settings.

Patti was deeply inspired by the idea of life phases and other factors such as temperament and gender that enrich a human biography. In the late ‘80’s she and I began meeting weekly with two other friends at 6:30 in the morning, the only time that worked for our busy schedules, to study together and eventually offer workshops, courses, and conferences for parents through The Center for Life Studies of Sunbridge College. One of the largest conferences, “Who is Raising our Daughters? – Women Coming of Age for the 21st Century,” in 1995, led Patti and me to put together a parenting book, More Lifeways – Finding support and inspiration in family life (Hawthorn Press, 1997). It was such fun to work with Patti on a project like this; she had endless ideas and enthusiasm, and had no trouble badgering our many writers/friends to finish their chapters.

A person of tremendous initiative, Patti was involved in so many projects. In the mid-1990’s, she began Sideby-Side at Sunbridge, a summer program where young people from all parts of the country worked together to offer a camp experience for children from Harlem and Spring Valley. She was on the faculty of The Barfield School, a degree-granting initiative connected to Sunbridge. She joined the board of the Center for Biography and Social Art, offered biography workshops and retreats, and worked with colleagues to develop the Awakening Connection-Creating Community program, which brings biography work to Waldorf schools throughout North America. Patti had so many good ideas, she was impatient to make the world better, and she sometimes found it frustrating that others did not always rise to the task of bringing what she could envision into reality.

Patti was very inspired by Parker Palmer’s book Courage to Teach and the community that grew up around him, dedicated to helping teachers align their own inner lives with authentic ways of working with students. She trained as a facilitator in this work and some years later was offered a Courage and Renewal Fellowship where she sought to introduce biography activities to a wide audience through developing a program she called, “Covering Ground: Journeying across the Seasons of Your Life.” In these retreats people would do a lot of walking in nature and also practice deep listening to themselves and each other. The fellowship work took place at the Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center in the Poconos in Pennsylvania, where Patti was soon asked to join the board.

She was a great networker, always trying to bring together friends and colleagues who she felt should collaborate. For example, she saw common aims between biography work, the Courage and Renewal activities, and the Kirkridge Center. She worked hard to bring biography events to this beautiful retreat center, most recently by organizing a conference through the Center for Biography and Social Art on questions of karma, in the fall of 2019.

Patti felt that her ‘avocational communities’, as she called them, were an important source for her spiritual development. She found her day jobs satisfying, but described how she also needed the enrichment of working with “my people.” She was devoted to anthroposophy as her path of development. This did not waver. She was a daily meditant, and returned often to the lessons of the School for Spiritual Science, even during the final days of her life.

In addition to More Lifeways, Patti was involved in two other book collaborations. What could arise between people, in real conversation or even through reading, was a lifelong interest and motivation. She felt the power of hearing different voices on a common theme. In Thin Places, a book of stories by the Kirkridge Fellows, she wrote a chapter called, “Letting My Life Speak: The Power of Autobiographical Practices.” More recently she drew together stories from her women friends at the commune, looking at the history they had shared and what has become of them in the intervening decades. The book is in preparation for publication, now dedicated to Patti, and called, More Than Friends – Shaped by Flower Power: Women’s Stories from Brotherhood of the Spirit, THEN and NOW.

Patti’s relationship with Andy ended in 1997. At the time she was living in Nyack, NY, but her work took her to many parts of the country. She could be on the road for weeks at a time. In 2001 she met Rob Swanson and together they created a beautiful home in Hope Valley, Rhode Island, to which she would happily return after her many professional trips. She and Rob loved to be out in nature together, hiking, biking, kayaking. She needed this regular immersion in outdoor physical activity; it helped to balance the demands of her many commitments and the intensity of her own strong personality.

Patti was diagnosed with a rare and fast growing cancer in February. In the few months she had to live, she prepared seriously for her death. She attended to areas still needing resolution, and said many conscious good-byes. She was lovingly cared for at home by Rob, her daughter Shannon, and her grandson Jeremiah. Her son Ezra and his partner Melissa were nearby, and Rob’s sons Robert (Jaclyn) and Everette (Deirdre) were in regular contact. Patti could be very self-critical, but in these months she practiced being compassionate with herself. She was deeply moved by the many words of gratitude that she received from so many whose lives she had touched.

Always devoted to helping the young, Patti had hoped to be available to coming generations as a thoughtful and nurturing elder. I have no doubt her legacy will grow on and her being will continue to inspire, within the circle of those who knew her personally, and beyond.