Fourteen Day Cycles

52 Weeks of Steiner – Week 49

You will be well aware that people who are given to creative thoughts and the free play of imagination are not equally productive at all times. Poets, for example, if they are honest with themselves, have to admit now and then that they are out of tune, unable to write anything. People who observe this in themselves know that the productive periods, for which a certain imaginative frame of mind and a warmth of feeling are necessary, alternate in a remarkable way with periods when nothing can be accomplished. They know, too, that the soul has a fourteen day period of productivity, after which anyone who has to do with creative thinking goes through an empty period, when the soul is like a squeezed out lemon. During this empty period, however, he can apply himself to working over what he has done. If artists and authors would take note of this, they would soon see how true it is.

This alternation of periods is influenced not by daytime conditions, but by the times when the soul and the ego are outside the physical and etheric bodies. And so, for a fourteen-day period, productive forces are, as it were, poured into the human being while he is independent of his physical and etheric bodies, and then, during the next fourteen days, no such forces are poured in. That is the rhythm. It applies to all human beings, but is more clearly evident in the sort of people we have just mentioned.”

Rudolf Steiner, 9 December 1909, Berlin
Metamorphoses of the Soul I, Lecture 9
GA 58

Since having children, the cycles of the moon have played a large part in the rhythm of our home. When they were smaller, I paid close attention to the actual cycles of the moon and planned our time together. learning and otherwise, accordingly. As they have grown, I have found we ebb and flow within our own fourteen days of rest and productivity which, while closely reflective of the moon cycles, might not be as spot on as we once were.

We live in a world where productivity (and as a result, consumption, but that’s a topic for another day!) are expected around the clock. I find this especially with social media. In order to stay “relevant” business owners, content creators and influencers are tied to a platform that lowers their presence if they don’t show up consistently, pitting everyone in constant competition with everyone to place in your followers’ feeds. Even within the more traditional work force, as more and more people work remotely, there is less separation between home and work, rest and “productivity”. Additionally, if you have a great idea or a wonderful skill, it is often suggested that it be monetized. But what is this doing to our creativity and our health?

Historically, humans were incredibly tightly tied to the rhythms of earth and sky, living within its bounds not in freedom and full consciousness, but out of necessity and in a sleeping conscious state. Steiner goes on in this lecture to discuss how we humans have evolved from depending on this external rhythm to individualizing it:

An essential point we must emphasise is that man grows out of these external influences. He becomes more independent all the time—e.g. he can sleep by day and stay awake at night. But he still has to order his waking and sleeping in accordance with the rhythm of the sun; he has to maintain the rhythm within himself. In earlier times, inner day and night corresponded closely to the sun’s day and night; man was then more closely bound to his native soil. He becomes free and independent precisely by inwardly liberating the rhythm under which he lives; by retaining it as a rhythm, but no longer dependent on the outer world. It is as if we had a clock marked for 24 hours but set in such a way that it does not correspond with external time; e.g., when the clock says it is 12 o’clock, it is not 12 o’clock by the sun. Thus although the clock follows a 24-hour rhythm, the time it shows is its own, not that of the sun.

Thus man frees himself inwardly by making the external rhythm into an inner one. He has long since freed himself from the rhythm which connected his inner being with the moon. Hence we have emphasised that man lives through the phases of the moon inwardly, but these experiences are not caused by the moon in the sky. The course of the moon shows a similar rhythm because man has retained the rhythm inwardly, though outwardly he has made himself free and independent of it.”

What I ponder is if it is possible to evolve even more so that we see, in freedom and full consciousness, that working against or outside of these natural, external rhythms, is detrimental to our continued evolution and overall health? Is part of our evolution in consciousness to CHOOSE to live within these rhythms because within them our true impulses and needs as natural beings are being met in a healthful way?

There is much science around night shift workers and how living in the topsy-turvy rhythm can create serious health issues. I have nursing friends who struggle to find a balance in their health all the time because of the constant adjusting to external time.

While Steiner hails the development of free will to choose a rhythm of our liking, would it have been possible for him to see how far and deeply we have swung in this direction?

Is it time in our evolution to choose natures rhythms once again, knot because we don’t know any better, but because we do?

(This post is part of a weekly serial started on Michaelmas 2023. To see the other entries, please see the post linked HERE and scroll down to the bottom for individual links)

Until next time,
Marina