Waldorf News

Before Her First Kiss

By Teddy Macker

Before her first kiss the seventh grader hears from her teacher that it’s up to her generation to save the world.

Before he’s able to find Orion the ninth grader writes an essay on carbon literacy in the Anthropocene. (“We must change or perish,” he concludes. “But if we don’t succeed in reducing emissions, the earth will be fine without us.”)

Before tasting wine, learning how to check oil in a car, before skinny dipping and singing around a fire, she watches a documentary during “study lab” on world-ending storms and drought. At the end of the film the narrator urges: “Don’t wait for graduation to solutioneer! Steer spaceship earth in another direction now!”

If she cannot check oil in a car or make a batch of pancakes or tend a patch of corn, how can she and her friends be expected to “save the world”? Plus, why would she care to save the world in the first place? By the rivers of Babylon we ask the children to remember Zion. But many have never been to Zion, so have no interest in weeping over it or returning.

Underneath the climate change and earth mutilation is, I might venture, an alienation from unknowing.

Rife with information, speed, and answers, we’ve emptied the haunted air.

Thus, the children’s rampant willingness—despite rain-brightened horses, poplars, and blueberries the color of thunder—to spend their light on YouPorn, fentanyl, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Thus, their rampant willingness to withdraw farther into Glow Culture, into Substitute Life, into another angry fix of the digital phantasmagoria.

Perhaps the real work is cultivating a susceptibility to this unrelenting strangeness we were born into. Perhaps the real work is knowing again that mystery is the center.

Our children choke as we force them to drink to the dregs the urn of bitter prophecy. Instead, let us, as much as we are able, introduce them to the beauty.

D.H. Lawrence: “…the vast marvel is to be alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterward. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.”

Teddy Macker’s writing appears in Front Porch Republic, the Los Angeles Times, Orion, Tablet, The Sun, Tin House, and elsewhere. He works in the administration at The Waldorf School of Santa Barbara. He lives on a small farm in Carpinteria, California with his wife and daughters.