The Delicate Balance of GAIA

6-10th August, 2015 Oakdene Centre, Bear River, Nova Scotia

With Duncan and Maggie Keppie, Jennifer Greene and Jonathan Swan

This unique conference brought water and rocks together as subjects of Goethean observation of the processes common to water and the earth as a step towards a deepening understanding of the “Living Water and Earth or Gaia”. The stage was set by presentation of a beautiful puppet production of Goethe’s The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily by a group of South Shore Waldorf parents under the direction of Monika Wildemann. Goethe regarded the Fairy Tale as his way of presenting his most profound observations of nature in the transformation of the soul. The Fairy Tale is set in a landscape divided by a river that depicts the boundary between two lands: the land of our normal ‘daytime’ consciousness and the land of the super-sensible, which is not accessible to our normal sense perception. By the end of the Fairy Tale, there is a permanent bridge spanning this river, joining these two Lands together. In this context, we “read the water and rocks” using experiments, and excursions around Bear River. Workshop themes centred around the ring vortex and archetypes.