Finally the rain has arrived to herald in winter and provide relief to our dry landscape – and those volunteer firefighters who have been kept busy of late! In two weeks’ time we will be holding our Winter Festivals.

The Early Childhood Winter Festival will take place on Thursday June 20 from 5pm and the Winter Festival for the whole school will take place on Friday June 21^st. This year, our Festival will be held on the Winter Solstice. At noon on this day, the sun will reach the lowest zenith it reaches all year, the shadows will be the longest noon shadows, the sun will set at its earliest time and it will be the longest night. We will gather to celebrate the miracle of light and to remember how much our lives depend on the light.

The spiral is a universal form written into the script of nature: from the shell of the humble snail in the garden or the sea shell by the beach, all the way to the vast trail left by mighty galaxies moving through immeasurable space, the spiral is an image of a path to the centre. We walk the spiral as an image of this path we are all treading. The spiral is a circle seeking its centre and each of us is on a journey to our own centre. When we find the inner light at our centre, our essence, we also find our future, and the spiral brings us out again to meet the world where we follow our destiny path and join our lives to those with whom we are united. So our Winter Festival will be an evening of reverence and reflection when we gather to mark not just the movement of our planet around the sun, but also the pattern that underlies our lives.

This year we have made some changes to the running of our Golden Hill Steiner School Festival, so I invite you to read through the Festival article further in the newsletter to familiarise yourself with the new format.