52 Portraits 16: Mary Stewart Adams
Mary has the magical title of star lore historian, “safeguarding the human imagination by protecting our access to the night sky and it’s stories.” She is perhaps best known for founding the 9th International Dark Sky Park in the world in Emmet County Michigan in 2011. In this podcast Mary offers us a wealth of poetic knowledge of the night sky, what it stirs in us, and what it can tell us about ourselves as human beings. She shares about her spiritual path as an anthroposophist and about her personal contact with the spiritual world. What has stayed with me most is her insistence that we as human beings need to “ennoble the sense of self as opposed to diminishing the sense of self.” She suggests that we ask ourselves, “Is the thing that I’m hearing - is the language that’s being used affirming or diminishing me as a human being? Is my language affirming or diminishing the ‘other’?”. And when discussing the problem of being uncomfortable with where we are in life, she says "we need to love and trust and respect the fact that we need to be right where we are.”
This one is so full of wisdom and imagination and invokes a trust in, as Rudolf Steiner says and Mary references, the “ever present help of the spiritual world.” Enjoy!
Click below to view Mary's website and learn more about her amazing work!
Mary next to the birch tree that she often sat near during her near death experience with meningitis.
"The imagination suffers when we as human beings can’t get to environments that are naturally dark. Regular exposure to natural darkness is fundamentally important to being human, and nearly two thirds of US residents live where they can’t see most of the stars at night."
