Kirjahaku

Life today poses many questions, both in our personal lives and in our participation in nature and the broader culture. We often focus on the outer needs for social, political, technological, or environmental change. However, can we really meet the challenges around us without also attending to our inner life and to our own evolving biography as it re ects and informs the outer world? This book starts from the premise that each of our lives expresses uniqueness of spiritual intention within the unfolding of universal rhythms and possibilities. Can we wake up to the developmental opportunities offered to us through different life phases? Are we able to step out of the narrowness of the dualistic nature-nurture argument and experience that we are both more than our genetic composition and more than a product of the social and educational influences that have shaped us? Can we come to appreciate the learning that our "I" has received through heredity, ethnicity, schooling, and gender without losing a sense of our true individuality? Waking up to our unique self as it grows through interaction with the world and other human beings helps us recognize the significance we all play in one another's biographies and in the unfolding of our larger human story. Why on Earth? invites us to explore our own meaning-filled life journey, to bring conscious attention to how we go our path, so that we may more freely perceive our possibilities and our responsibilities along the way of our personal and shared becoming. C O N T E N T S Preface 1. Lifetimes of Intention2. Feminine and Masculine and the Question of Gender3. Understanding Temperament: Appreciating our Differences4. Seasons of Life: Phases of Development5. The Long Spring: Birth to Twenty-One6. Summer Fullness: Twenty-One to Forty-Two 7. Autumn Light and Shadow: Forty-Two to Sixty-Three 8. Winter Winds: Sixty-Three and Beyond 9. Taking One's Self Seriously: Going an Inner Path 10. Lifting the Veil Appendix: Biography Work with Others

We should face that world not with our opinions but with our questions, indeed in a questioning mood and attitude. -- Rudolf Steiner, The Fifth Gospel"Who, or perhaps what, is she?" Signe Eklund Schaefer poses this question as she leads us into a heartfelt exploration of the great mystery that is Sophia. Her book does not take an academic or theological path but one that is personal and full of warmth and genuine interest in discovery that goes toward living reality, well beyond mere names and fixed ideas. As Schaefer says, she decided to "forego the idea of a straightforward narrative and instead interweave musings, poems, saved quotations, and other assorted notes from my many years of living with questions about and to her." The author tells us, Questions of inner growth, of spiritual striving, of how to bear the suffering in the world without going under, and perhaps most of all, of how to love, often present themselves surrounded by veils. In acknowledging a question, the veil may begin to shift. Our questions matter; bringing them to consciousness, exploring them with others, waiting with an open heart for the spirit to speak--this is the ongoing work of unveiling.Sophia is rightly seen as the living, moving being of universal wisdom and the archetypal feminine, but Schaefer helps us to see her as more--as an expression of what humanity must rightfully become.Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing. -- Arundhati Roy

-- A forgotten box of letters in a dark attic corner, messages from women friends written decades ago ---- An intimate record of a time of great transition in how women experienced their daily lives and imagined their future --During the 1970's and 80's, Signe Eklund Schaefer and her young family moved often, within the United States and abroad. Handwritten letters, now relics of a pre-Internet world, were vital to her ongoing connection with friends and to her evolving sense of self. From the surprising discovery of these old letters she has woven a moving account of the reflections, mutual support and multi-dimensional exchanges between women friends, which offer a record of women's lives five decades ago, and speak powerfully to contemporary social concerns.Exploring relationships, motherhood, children, personal development, career and friendship itself, the letters touch on the emerging women's movement, efforts for world peace, and individual spiritual striving. The Epilogue offers new letters from these articulate and impassioned women, now in their 70's and 80's.Signe Eklund Schaefer is the author of Why on Earth? -- Biography and the Practice of Human Becoming. She served on the faculty of Emerson College in England and directed Foundation Studies at Sunbridge College in New York for more than twenty years.