The Fox and the Bear

It may be beyond my skill to describe being a Waldorf child for seven years in a way that will resonate with you if you weren't one yourself. CoLo laughed when I first mentioned it, "That explains so much; I've never met one of you who came out normal."

Lets start with something simple: beeswax. Beeswax is an art material provided to children frequently during Waldorf education. It is made (rather unsurprisingly) from the wax of bees and is dyed a variety of vivid colors. In the warmth of your hands it will become soft and mailable, but when left alone it will cool to hold its form. Its given to children in class and used in a similar manner to clay.

The older kids got to use beeswax, so we all were terribly eager for our first chance. I remember our teacher holding a wooden bowl at the front of the class and tipping the brim forward to show us its contents. Inside were about thirty-five pieces of wax. About half of them were vivid orange and half were a dark, warm, and vaguely royal purple color. The bowl was passed, down one row and up another, as I hungrily watched each student select a piece and pass the rest along.

"What is the difference?" I asked.

"They different colors," my teacher said, and couldn't be persuaded to say any more.

The interest was overwhelmingly in favor of the purple wax, so much in fact that by the time the bowl came to the last row there was nothing but orange left despite the fact that there were easily one and a half times as many pieces of wax as there were students. I remember holding the bowl in my hands and looking at both of hues, thinking that they were both very pretty, but eventually deciding that while the orange was slightly prettier, all of the cool kids were taking the purple and that I wanted to be a cool kid too.

"There once was a fox and a bear," the teacher said, and we all hushed to listen to story time.

"And one day the bear found the fox eating many delicious fish. The bear asked the fox how he caught them, and the fox said that it was very easy. He promised to teach the bear how to fish if the bear promised to listen very carefully to his instructions. The bear agreed and they went to the lake where the fox taught the bear how to make a hole in the ice.

'That was easy,' said the bear.

'Oh yes,' the fox smiled, trying to flatter the bear, 'I am sure for somebody as clever and strong as you it was easy. You can probably do anything, but here is the hard part: you must now sit with your tail in the hole and wait a very long time for the fish to come and bite your tail. Then you can pull up all of the delicious fish and eat them.'

So the bear sat with his tail in the hole all day and all night, and when the sun rose the next morning he thought he felt a nibble so he stood up. However, when he stood he found that his long and beautiful tail broke off in the ice, and now he only had a short stubby one. The bear went home very angry because he had been tricked, and whenever the fox thought of him he laughed. This is why bears have short stubby tails. but foxes have beautiful long ones."

I looked down in my hands at the purple wax and thought for a moment but was interrupted by the teacher.

"Now I want all of you with brown wax to make the bears, and all of you with orange wax to make the fox from our story."

Brown? I looked at the wax again. To a seven year old a teacher might as well be the voice of God himself, and so I immediately and wholeheartedly believed that my beautiful purple ball of wax was brown and ugly. What was worse was I was making the loser for the story. I turned to see the back row of the class grinning because they were all going to make the winner.

One student asked to trade her brown wax for orange wax but the teacher did not permit it. Dejected, I formed the very best bear I could from the wax and placed it on the counter along with all of the other student's work.

The figures sat there for almost a week before we were permitted to take them home, and when my mother asked me about my bear I didn't want to talk about it.

I remember daydreaming in class though and looking at the little figurines. If I do whatever everybody else does, I thought, I will only ever be as happy as everybody else is.

If I want to do better, I need to do something different.