Posted on Tue, Nov 03, 2009
I attended Emerson from 1988-1990, in the foundation year course and the speech and drama course, with a brief stint at a Camphill Community in Switzerland in the interim. After my time at Emerson, I returned to the US, in the Hudson Valley of New York State, to work in the Visiting Students Program at Hawthorne Valley Farm in Harlemville. I remained there until 1993, during which time I met my wife, Jeri Burns.
Jeri and I immediately set to work developing ourselves as tandem storytellers, and in 1993, we set out on a full-time career as The Storycrafters. We have since managed to establish a national reputation for ourselves as performers, teachers, and recording artists in the artform of storytelling. Our work has taken us to fabulous places and helped us to meet glorious people all over the US and beyond...the photo you see of us was taken at a storytelling festival in the Cayman Islands! In addition, we are adjunct faculty at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, CT, in a graduate program in the Oral Tradition. There we teach graduate students, mainly teachers and librarians, many aspects of the oral tradition and storytelling, helping them to find ways to integrate the artform into their lives and workplaces.
I credit my time at Emerson College for so many things in my life and career. From a deeper understanding of the imagery in the stories, to ways of connecting with audience and listeners of the tales, to the very creative imagination wellspring from which the tales emanate, Emerson helped me to reach a fuller understanding of so many principles of the artform and its uses in the world.
I would love to be in touch with anyone who might remember me during those two magical years at Emerson. The website through which I can be contacted is www.storycrafters.com. Greetings to all, and blessings and thanks to the many wonderful people who make up Emerson College.
Posted on Tue, Jun 23, 2009
Those of you who remember me from 1970 and the Biodynamic Agriculture Course would never imagine me as I am today. Remember Jenny Carr? In 1973 she took a chance and flew with Gareth our son to join me farming in Connecticut. We married and 36 years later are happier than ever as empty nesters with four sons and a daughter and four granddaughters!
We were self sufficient farmers for two years trying to build an "island of culture" as Mr. Edmunds used to call it, then joined Camphill to learn more about the logistics of community building. We loved the festivals and fullness of life and after three years joined a burgeoning effort to begin a new community which survives today as Triform Camphill Community. It was here for seven years that I learned to raise money and put my inheritance alongside so that when we decided to move on at the end of 1984, we left with nothing in our pockets and five young ones in tow.
To keep our children in Waldorf Schools I did some teaching and design-built the manual arts building at Pine Hill in New Hampshire, and later taught the first 7th and 8th Grades in North Carolina. Jenny always kept up her social work skills, working with Lukas and taking on boarders, with special needs and emotional problems, not to mention counseling me. For a few years I sold insurance, delivered newspapers and tutored children while Jenny catered and waitressed to get by. We were steeped in what is now called "poverty mentality."
This all changed when in 1993 my brother Tony, who died last year, sent me a list of wealthy investors with social intention and asked if I would help him raise money for his socially responsible venture fund. I helped launch two technology companies in the next seven years. In my 50th year I took some time to think how I should spend the last active part of my life. I went to Peru and experienced the magic of ritual, I went to Stuttgart and studied at the Priest Seminary, but in the end realized my work was all about the meaning of money and I needed to remain engaged. So in 2000, I launched my real vocation which is working with the transformation of money through investments.
Later, Jenny picked up the connection with the seminary and went for a year to Chicago, and upon returning got her Masters in Social Work (I still have no degree!). Her focus is hospice work and the support for home funerals and green burial. I have established my own investment firm (www.benchmarkam.com) and have become a thought leader of sorts in this space, advocating for investment only in positive initiatives, from micro-finance to great companies with real solutions. We are now managing close to $200M and growing with a wonderful team in Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York and my daughter, Candor, doing social and environmental research in North Carolina. We still live simply and only just bought a home next to our daughter to fix up and plant gardens for the future.
Posted on Tue, Jun 23, 2009
I came to Emerson College with my wife Alison in the summer of 1975 and stayed until the winter of 1978, when we returned to New Zealand expecting our first child. After our return we have raised four fine sons and helped foster an equally fine daughter.
The time at Emerson College was a postgraduate experience for us, one that exemplified how such studies should really be, or so it seems to me. I immersed myself in everything that I could find - all the arts, epistemological philosophy, Goethean Science and hydrology, curative teaching and above all, wide-ranging learning from reading Rudolf Steiner and soaking up the marvelous teachings of very alive teachers who visited and who lived on the campus.
Francis Edmunds, Jesse Darrell, Adam Bittleston, Lionel Elin, John Wilkes, and many others as inspiring influences, all added to my life story. Without them I would not have understood what it was to make commitments to a life worth living. It was also during this time, with their support, that my inner life opened up into new vistas, forming the basis for decades of enriching and at times, demanding transformative work.
I saw, and see now, Emerson College as a modern grail castle that, through a fortunate destiny, attracts its many students and then encourages them to fan out around the world to help culture where they feel most able.
In my case, back in NZ by 1980, I helped pioneer ‘Raphael House' Steiner School in Wellington, New Zealand's capital city, by taking its first full Class 1 through for four years and being involved with its building program and adult education program. Moving to Taikura Steiner School in Hawkes Bay in 1990, I spent another 10 years taking a class through the middle school and working in the upper school and in adult professional development in Taruna College. In intervening years I also taught in State schools using Waldorf methods while focusing on creative and scientific work around water in the many hours not spent in schools.
Throughout these teaching years, I led a small group involved with Flowform® design, research and installation, enabling over 400 Flowform® projects in many different applications around the South Pacific.
Since 2001, I have been focused entirely on developing the Healing WaterTM global initiative with John Wilkes, gathering Flowform® eco-technology arts and therapies into a coordinated international business that can help water support life in nature and communities worldwide.
As part of this endeavour we have relaunched the Healing Water Institute within the Emerson College campus in Sussex, but also in New Zealand and America. Our Healing Water Institute projects include our book Flowform Water Research 1970 - 2007 being published and the film Divine Water being made, as well as ongoing educational, research and design activities.
Please visit www.healingwaterinstitute.org.nz and also www.divinewaterfilm.net as well as www.flowforms.net All are websites in development, so do come back regularly to see new and old developments being better shared, step by step.
With best wishes for courage and insight in your own lives and adventures,
Iain Trousdell
Posted on Thu, Jun 04, 2009
I was at Emerson College during the period of 1975-80 doing the Foundation Year and then helping to run the kitchen. At the time, the kitchen hosted a catering course. The kitchen was a lively place - full of abundance. In the intervening years, inspired by Francis Edmunds and John Davy, and the Biodynamic work, a group of us started an initiative on a 60 acre mountain farm in Mallorca, teaching life skills. This demonstrated to me the importance of people doing land-based activities, baking bread in a wood oven, gardening, cooking and eating together. Many good things came from this and despite difficulties; seeds were planted for the future.
Subsequently, I returned to Devon, studying at Schumacher College, obtaining a degree in Waldorf Education and writing three books, two of which deal with nutrition, cooking and the importance of Biodynamics to heal the earth. This has brought me many invitations to travel and speak about this unsung topic.
I have returned to Emerson for a brief period to see whether it will be possible to develop a cooking and nutrition course here. It feels like new initiatives like this are needed in the world and could possibly flourish in the new vision of Emerson College.
Posted on Thu, Jun 04, 2009
On leaving Emerson College in 1967, Jonathan returned to the BBC where he then worked, first in London and then in Bristol, until 1990. Since then he has been a freelance producer/director. He married in 1981 and has a son and daughter in their mid-twenties. He is also an Emerson Trustee.
His first films, after completing the Foundation Year at Emerson, were about the Camphill School in Aberdeen and Botton Village in Yorkshire ('In Need of Special Care' won the 1968 British Film Academy Documentary Award). Over the years he continued to make other films about Camphill's work, including 'In Defence of the Stork' with Dr Thomas Weihs, and a three-part series in 1989 - 'Candle on the Hill' - to celebrate Camphill's 50th anniversary.
During his forty-year career Jonathan has also made a number of biographical documentaries - on Carl Jung with Laurens van der Post, Mahatma Gandhi with Fritz Schumacher, and Leo Tolstoy with Theodore Roszak. In 1974 he made another film with Laurens van der Post - on the mythology of the Bushmen of southern Africa - followed by three films for the series 'The Long Search' which looked at the contemporary situation in religion, philosophy and science worldwide.
In over 150 films Jonathan has explored many other subjects, including Waldorf Education, the seven phases of life, the erosion of childhood, and people's quest for meaning and purpose in their lives. And on this journey he has worked alongside poet John Betjeman, writer and broadcaster Mark Tully in India and Pakistan, poet and novelist Ben Okri, playwright Alan Bennett, astronomer Bernard Lovell, journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn and artist Cecil Collins.
Drawing on all these experiences he has, for the past three years, been at work on a book called "Where on Earth is Heaven?' to be published in 2009. Beyond that he is planning to raise funds for a documentary on the life and legacy of Rudolf Steiner..
"Needless to say," writes Jonathan - "the meetings and journeys described above, and the work that resulted from them, were enormously enriched by my time at Emerson College. To have been able to pause and take stock at such a key moment in my life - I was twenty-eight - and in the company of so many interesting and thoughtful people was a tremendous blessing for which I shall be eternally grateful. Not only did it deepen my understanding of Steiner's work, but it also helped me to put in context the experiences and ideas I had already accumulated as a young film director and as someone open to all the exciting and inspiring initiatives that were emerging in the 60s - a renaissance that I sense is trying to happen once more."