Now we come to the third guiding principle as laid out by Rudolf Steiner. In the developmental journey of the child, in the time from puberty to adulthood, the quest for truth is the guiding principle.

The child has hopefully had an early childhood, filled with gentle loving caregivers who themselves have a moral integrity. By osmosis and imitation, the child comes to experience that goodness prevails, goodness is what we want to step into. The child hopefully develops faith in the world.

In the second phase, the middle years, the aspect of the child that yearns for nourishment is the sense for beauty, harmony and rhythmic activity. The child is responsive to creating something beautiful. What is needed is learning about the world and humankind in a rich, warm and beautiful way. Needless to say, there is very little food for this aspect to develop within our school system or the technological (entertainment) media. This part of the child may have become very shrunken.

Next, at puberty, with a sense for the ethical rightness of things, and with a sense for the beautiful, (although these are of course immature in development), the child’s mind desires to come awake. Truly, this is the time to develop thought, to look into things, to experiment, to find out for oneself about the truth of things. We might think of the need for the child to go their own way, to rebel, all because of the quest for truth. Often though, we may look with some horror at the way things are going with the teenager. We can remember the idea of “the quest for truth”, and that such things as the family’s “good name” or “what our family does” are actually not of developmental relevance to the teenager. We can suggest a wider search for consideration – to consider the other side of things, consider other ways to view something, consider the end result or consequences of actions.

Writing this (above), I have deeper sense of how Little Star and Eliore ended (an ending which I questioned in an earlier blog.) It was kind of a subconscious segue into the direction of my next book, a book for early adolescents. The attitude of Eliore is portrayed as one of humility and surrender to a larger principle. As we start to use our independent mind questing on our own, what can be more important than to balance our impulses and drives with some humility and surrender? If our minds can balance our single minded pursuit with other and larger considerations, it can often save us from disastrous pain later.

“I am here, Mother-of-Us-All” (Somehow turned into a very ethereal image, but still…)