By Seth Jordan

A drizzling rain, a cloudy sky, a gray landscape…and the patient, slow promise of spring. But who can be sure about the future? At this moment life is full of hope and promise. It’s on every horizon. Nature’s spring is inevitable, but the spring of our desperate hopes – the possibility of a new American politics, a new economy, new social forms, new life being born within us – is by no means certain. It requires each of us to bring it about.

“A spring that is to be noticed by God cannot be confined only to the trees and fields; its power must also enter into human beings. For then it continues to happen, not in time, but rather in eternity, so to speak, and in the presence of God.”
– Rainer Maria Rilke

Name: Sarah Hearn
Age: 26
Place: Great Barrington, Massachusetts, USA


How did you get here? I went to the Waldorf school in New York City and then off to a small liberal arts college in Connecticut, where I studied Government with a focus on education, community action and public policy. My education provided me with a strong grounding first in social awareness and later in social activism … to a certain extent.  

College dragged on and I was pretty intensely disenchanted with both my social and academic life there. Superficial treatments of social phenomena were plentiful on all fronts, from social dynamics on campus to major global crises. A budding inquiry into the ideas of anthroposophy, as the origin of my more holistic educational roots, steadily bore fruit and deepening interest.

After a few years of real-world work at different issue-based non-profits in the big city, my disillusionment had spread rapidly. I was dissatisfied with both the band-aid solutions of some organizations that never seemed to address the roots of an issue, and the lofty visions of others that never concretized as action. In collaboration with friends I began actively studying Steiner’s social thinking, in which I encountered a living and inclusive understanding of social life alongside deep, practical treatment of social problems.  

For me, Think OutWord is a synergy of my growing understanding of anthroposophy, the profound importance of education, and my commitment to social change.


How do you work with the ideas of social threefolding on a daily basis?
I work at the E. F. Schumacher Society, a non-profit organization named after the economist and author of the book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, which promotes the building of strong local economies that link people, land, and community and develops model programs such as Community Land Trusts, Micro-lending, and Local Currencies.

These programs are all tangible, citizen-based economic tools, which effectively embody threefold ideals. They are solutions to the problematic entanglement of the rights and economics spheres, and living examples of threefold understandings in action – promoting a healthy circulation of loan money, economic associations, and the importance of scale.


What’s on your mind?
It’s certain that these times need our utmost focus and attention to affect real change inwardly and outwardly. So how do we inspire each other? What does an equivalent of a ‘call to arms’ look like for young people in anthroposophy? Mindfully transforming the youthful idealism so many of us carried through childhood and beyond is no small task, nor is shaping a real understanding of what’s needed, what’s possible – and translating it all into getting off our butts and trying new things.

Of late, I’m struggling with where to concentrate the bulk of my energies: in study or practice, intense group work or quiet contemplation – how do we help both methods flourish and truly inform one another?