9 minute read
Elizabeth Ann Courtney Pratt, by Susan Weber, with Alice Pratt and Mark Birdsall
June 7, 1932 - January 1, 2021
Ann was a member of the “great generation.” Hers was not the first who brought anthroposophy to North America, but the generation who took it up and made it their lives’ work, creating, spiritually striving, as the seeds of change began to germinate farther and farther. Ann was an initiator, one who believed anything was possible. She drew the future toward her as new impulses flowed from the spiritual world into her thinking heart, but also her limbs, her will.
Ann was born in Manhattan into a spiritually-striving family. Her mother was Elise Stolting Courtney who studied biodynamics in Europe as a young woman. Her father was a devout Christian Scientist who died when Ann was quite young. Rudolf Steiner gave what became known as the “American Verse” to her uncle Ralph Courtney. They were part of a quickly growing circle in Manhattan who created what is said to be the first vegetarian restaurant in New York City. The need for healthy vegetables led the group to purchase farmland in Spring Valley, north of the city. Here not only did the gardens grow, but also the arts: music, eurythmy, and theater were part of a burgeoning spiritual life there. Here Ann spent her childhood summers with her parents and sister Charlotte Courtney Dukich. In her teenage years, Ann waited tables at what was then “The Threefold Farm” (now home of Sunbridge Institute) during summer conferences.
It was Ann’s mother who first traveled to Dornach in 1926 to study eurythmy; her traveling partner Gladys Barnett-Hahn had sold her grand piano to pay for the trip! It was Ann however, who became a eurythmist, traveling to England to study with Margaret Lundgren, wife of A.C. Harwood, while her husband Swain cared for their daughters Laura and Alice back in New York. Ann’s mother turned to the study of biodynamics.
Ann’s passion for eurythmy started very young. I recall Ann describing to me her first eurythmy performance: she was only a little girl when she played the part of the mouse in the favorite nursery rhyme Hickory Dickory Dock, while Marjorie Spock was the clock. Imagine tiny Ann at the base of a very tall Marjorie clock! She carried this art form with her wherever she landed throughout life. In every teaching situation, she brought eurythmy, and her Antioch students remember those times vividly. Her own movement moved others. Her daughter Alice, and Alice’s childhood friend Christina Root, recall watching their mothers Ann and Nancy perform eurythmy at the Threefold Auditorium in complete awe of the beauty they created in their colored eurythmy silks.
Over Ann’s shoulder was ever an invisible quiver of beautifully-colored arrows, ready to find their mark wherever she planted herself in the service of anthroposophy. They unerringly landed at the point where the task was to initiate a new impulse—those sparks from the future which spoke so strongly to her threefold self—her heart, her thoughts, her will. She was an initiator, one of those of whom Rudolf Steiner spoke: that over her destiny in golden letters was written, Be a person of initiative.
These arrows first took Ann to Wilton, NH, with her husband Swain, then a teacher at High Mowing School, to create first a Waldorf kindergarten. When Beulah Emmet, the founder of High Mowing rejected Ann’s request to create a kindergarten there, especially for the children of the faculty, Ann forged ahead to create it on her own. In 1972, the Pine Hill Waldorf School opened its doors in a small building in Wilton Center owned by local lawyer (and Pine Hill board member) Charles Sullivan. Two years later the school, growing rapidly and attracting dedicated young teachers, bought an old New England farmhouse at the end of the Bennington Battle Trail and soon extended from K-8th grades.
In 1974 Ann was the faculty chair, third grade class teacher, a board member, and taught eurythmy to the early childhood students. Of course, she was also a full-time mother to her two teenage daughters! In the mid 1970’s Ann left active class teaching and was for a time at the Kimberton Waldorf School in PA. By 1984 Ann and Swain were back in Wilton building a home on Curtis Farm Road. The Pine Hill faculty, meanwhile, assisted by regular visits from Alan and Mary Howard, began to offer a teacher training program in conjunction with nearby Antioch College.
After the site burned in 1983, land was purchased on Abbot Hill and the current building was built. Financing was orchestrated by the Rudolf Steiner Foundation and Siegfried Finser, and this collaboration marked the beginning of a national profile for the foundation.
When Antioch New England’s nascent Waldorf teacher education program needed its second director in the 1985 school year, Ann followed that arrow to continue to build up this young seedling. She remained until 1991, when a call from friend and colleague Betty Staley released a fresh arrow which lead her to Milwaukee to be program implementer for the Urban Waldorf School, the first public Waldorf school in the country. From 1991 to 1993, Ann oversaw the Waldorf training of the founding teachers who came from the local public school district and a few Waldorf schools. She also oversaw program development for the school, a 96% African-American student body in Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhood. In 1993 a change in funding left Ann a difficult choice: leave Milwaukee (she and Swain had recently bought a house) or go back into the classroom. So she became a kindergarten teacher again at age 61. It was a very trying year. One of her students was the most difficult she had ever encountered, and the assistant assigned her offered little cooperation or support. The stress began to affect her health.
Others, one of whom was Mark Birdsall, came to carry on the next phase of work, and Ann returned to Antioch in 1994. That fledgling program was ready to welcome its second faculty member and Ann joined Torin Finser who had become program director after Ann left for Milwaukee. During these second Antioch years she became a founding board member of what became Sophia’s Hearth Family Center. Together with Rena Osmer, Susan Weber, and others, a new impulse was seeded and germinating, first at Antioch through a new design of its early childhood teacher education program, and later on its own. The recognition, revolutionary at the time, was that Waldorf education had a tremendous contribution to offer to the child in the first three years. It became the first program in the United States to prepare teachers for this new work with parents and very young children.
In 1998, Ann stepped back from her Antioch responsibilities, and she and Swain traveled to Sedona, Arizona, where they pondered the possibility of retiring. But work again called and for two years she was a part of “Pine Hill West” where numerous former Pine Hill teachers came to Sedona to support the fledgling school there. Ann helped facilitate the birth and growth of the Red Rock Waldorf Teacher Education program with Merril Badger and others in connection with the Sedona and Flagstaff schools. Asked to come to the Moraine Farm Waldorf School (then Cape Ann) in 2001, Ann moved to Gloucester on the Massachusetts north shore to help build up the early childhood programs there.
At age 72, Ann returned with Swain to her roots in Spring Valley to become members at the Fellowship Community. But it was too soon for Ann to retire; her need to stay active out in the world brought her to Maine with her daughter Alice who was finishing her Artistic Speech training there. Though Swain had stayed at the Fellowship, the separation was too difficult and in 2004 he joined Ann and Alice in Brunswick for the next year.
Ann and Swain’s next move took them to Keene, NH, to help develop an initiative inspired by the Fellowship Community. Ann joined groups both in Wilton and in the Ghent, NY, area. The latter culminated in the Camphill Ghent Community, a setting for older adults inspired especially by the presence of the arts.
In 2007 the Housatonic Valley Waldorf School in Connecticut asked her to come develop its college of teachers. While serving this community that lovingly surrounded her efforts, Ann suffered from Bell’s Palsy, perhaps a sign at age 75 to slow down? But that was never Ann’s way. There were not only these golden arrows of initiative living in Ann’s soul, but also some inborn restlessness, a challenge to find comfort in her earthly dwellings. When I (Susan Weber) first met Ann in 1986, she and Swain were living in the house they had just completed in Wilton NH, planning to spend the rest of their days there. How surprised I was to hear that no, after the shortest of years, they were on the move. During that first year in Milwaukee, Anne first, then later with Swain, moved seven times! Moving boxes were always permanently labeled, ready for a change.
Over the last years of her life, Ann wrote poems and recorded her thoughts in notebooks or on slips of paper. One poem was “A Loose Leaf.” I ponder this title so descriptive of her life especially in the later years when all the initiatives were completed. Perhaps it was now a time of waiting or feeling herself a “loose leaf” carried by a changeable wind, rather than the clear path of the arrow.
Did she ever really find peace in an earthly abode? In her notes and musings after the death of her beloved, best friend, confidant, comforter, lover, and husband Swain, the answer is probably not. Still mourning his death, Ann continued to seek kindred souls with whom she could confide and share insights. In her 82nd year, she returned to the Fellowship Community; even then, her thoughts were of service, how to be “useful” in that community. At 85, when her short-term memory began to fade, it became difficult for her to express her thoughts clearly. But her senses were taking in everything around her in minute detail. Always perceptive and acutely aware of the inner life of others, she suffered or was lifted up by the thoughts of those around her. Her strong moral backbone seemed always to guide her to seek the very essence or kernel of truth in everything that she did in life.
Ann not only inspired the creation of many outer shells for Waldorf initiatives, her inner life was ever actively seeking in the house of her spirit. She was a lover of the sun, basking in its warmth and light until her death. In the early years, wherever she lived, she created beautiful gardens full of color and scent and her family and friends remember her excellent cooking and her love and enjoyment in being with friends and family.
In the last days of her life, Ann was surrounded by pictures of her family, and the ever-present copy of Rudolf Steiner’s How to Know Higher Worlds, offering solace, courage, and guidance for Ann’s striving. I am reminded of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, with wings flowing behind the upright torso, carrying Ann upward to the world of the spirit.
