Dick van Romunde

Dick van Romunde (Born October 20, 1916, Died April 22, 2010, age 94)

This autobiographical sketch was written by Dick van Romunde in 2002).

When I was a very young boy I received a little corner in our city garden in The Hague that was dominated by a birch tree. I was allowed to play and to sow seeds in this place, which showed me how plants grow and bloom. The birch became a well beloved friend to me; I have never forgotten the warmth of soul that she aroused in me during my rather long life. Now I am living in a small Dutch village. Shortly after we moved into this village a small group of students, with whom I had discussed the Goethean vision about colors, gave us a small young birch. But the ground in which it was planted was too contaminated by the builders of our house and the little tree languished away. A second attempt with another birch at another spot to our sorrow had the same result. We buried our longings and resigned from the task. About a year later my wife drew my attention to a little wooden stem presenting itself. When after some weeks the young leaves unfolded themselves there could be no more doubt: to our great delight nature herself had given us a birch. Now in 2002 it has grown up into a high and graceful tree, dominating the front garden. In the early morning I look at it during a few moments in silent attention to inhale the graceful gestures of her branches and her refined twigs; during this the warmth of soul distinctly renews itself. About fifty-six years elapsed between those two Birch experiences. In those years fate led me - as did the fate of many millions of our fellow humans - through the deep abyss of atheistic materialism. My expression for the basic mood that resulted out of this worldview was that nature gives us no more joyful laughing, but is reduced to matter crafting. Nature no longer can gives us her cheerfully chatter, since her play is reduced to forces and matter. Together with an overwhelming segment of humankind I had to go through a crisis of soul and spirit. This took place in the black years of the Second World War. I was a very subordinate and modest member of a resistance group during this war when, at the point that later on proved to be its turning point, I experienced a deep crisis. To my great amazement the almost tangible presence of death was, after bringing a strong constriction in the first weeks, to undergo an unexpected metamorphosis. Out of the dark stress developed an inner security concerning the existence, the Being, of a spiritual world, fully saturated with spiritual light and deep warmth of soul. This experience arose daily in the awakening. I had the impression that it came out of the sleep.

During my search for relevant literature my attention was directed at a book written by Rudolf Steiner entitled Occult Science. The content of it corresponds fully with my initial experiences. I received far more than a confirmation. After I had obtained my diploma as an electro-technical engineer I took the decision to use it in behalf of the competence it gave to teach mathematics and natural science.

My views concerning the origin of the world of our sensory perceptions had undergone a radical change. There could no more be a place for a purely mechanistic worldview. I experience the whole of nature including human individuals as the result of a creation of the spiritual world, whose reality I had so strongly felt. Therefore I choose for the profession of a teacher in Waldorf Schools and institutions that were founded on Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy.

I think it will be self evident that I owe in behalf of my striving for deepening and extension of the spiritual natural world very much to a lot of people who are striving in the same direction. To these belong on the one side such women and men that have chosen a way of schooling themselves and on the other side people who have by natural talent been schooling themselves and have come to rich spiritual soul warming insights. To both kinds of my fellow men I do feel a great gratitude. Of the last mentioned I will give a few names, because these names are as I presume well known. In the first place comes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the founder of a natural science strictly based on sense perception and free from any intellectual speculations and hypothesis. He pointed the way to the "reading in the book of nature", written in gestures and not in letters. On gestures was founded his Metamorphosis of the Plants. Of the contempories, I chose the following ones because they influenced me strongly: Konrad Lorenz, Adolf Portman, Laurens van der Post, Jean Gebser and Rupert Sheldrake.