10/05/2026
The harvest moon put on quite a show this past week and it aligned perfectly with our annual Michaelmas festival. My understanding of Michaelmas changes from year to year.
When I first brought this festival to my young children and my Forest Kindergarten students, I understood it mainly as a festival of courage. We dressed up, carried swords and shields, told dragon stories, and gave children opportunities to meet something a little frightening and discover that they could move through it. I wanted to cultivate courage, strength, confidence, perseverance, and a willingness to face challenges.
There was something beautiful and appropriate about that work. But as my own children have grown, my spirituality has deepened, and my understanding of Waldorf education has continued to unfold, I have started to question the way I once understood the festival.
Was Michaelmas really about my courage? A child's courage? Individual strength? The ability to defeat a dragon?
This year, instead of looking mainly at what other schools were doing, I found myself going back to Rudolf Steiner's lectures and asking what he was actually pointing toward. The more I read and listened, the more I began to see that calling Michaelmas a "Festival of Courage" isn't wrong—but perhaps it doesn't tell the whole story.
The way Michaelmas is celebrated looks different from school to school and country to country. Some focus on courage, others on harvest, stories, swords, dragons, music, art, or community.
But underneath all of this is the season itself.
The days are getting shorter. Summer is fading. The leaves are falling, plants are dying back, and the natural world is beginning to turn inward.
Perhaps that is why Michaelmas belongs here.
Steiner connected this season with a movement away from simply being carried along by the life of nature and toward becoming more awake and aware within ourselves. He spoke of inner strength, courage, strong will, and the ability to act with purpose.
This gives me a different picture of courage.
It isn't simply the courage to stand before a dragon.
It is the courage to wake up.
To choose.
To act.
From Easter to Michaelmas
Easter comes just beyond the Spring Equinox while Michaelmas comes just after the Autumn Equinox. Steiner saw Michaelmas as a kind of counterbalance to Easter. In spring, renewal is happening around us. In autumn, as the outer world is moving toward darkness and rest, we have the conscious ability to take part in our own renewal.
As the outer light begins to fade, what light are we cultivating within ourselves?
The Dragon Becomes Something Larger
It is easy to tell a Michaelmas story in which the dragon represents fear, anger, greed, laziness, or some other personal struggle. There is certainly value in helping children work with those images.
But Steiner's dragon seems to be something larger.
In his 1923 lectures, he connected the dragon with forces that can become active in human beings and with the deadening effects of rigid, overly intellectual thinking. He warned teachers against simply falling into old habits and encouraged them to keep their thinking alive and awake.
That makes Michaelmas less about putting on an impressive festival for children and more about asking something of ourselves.
How am I thinking?
Where have I become stuck?
Where have I let habit replace curiosity?
Where have I become comfortable when I should be awake?
What am I doing in my daily life that actually helps the people around me?
This has caused me to rethink the festival entirely.
From Me to We
Perhaps the biggest shift in my understanding this year has been moving away from the idea that Michaelmas is mainly about individual heroism.
Of course, a child needs to discover courage within himself. He needs to learn that he can face something difficult, persevere, and develop strength he didn't know he had.
But what is that strength for?
Steiner's vision for a Michaelmas festival was deeply connected to community. He spoke about bringing people together and restoring a sense of fellowship.
That feels very different from: Look what I can do.
Instead: What can I develop within myself that can become useful to something larger than myself?
Michaelmas is not simply: I am brave.
It becomes: I can become strong enough to serve.
Not: I will conquer.
But: I will learn how to use my strength wisely.
Not: How can I become the strongest person in the room?
But: What strength, patience, courage, wisdom, or skill can I develop that will benefit my family, my community, the earth, and those who come after me?
The Michaelic Deed
We can have wonderful intentions. We can read the books, talk about courage, make beautiful festivals, and decide that this will be the year we become more patient, generous, disciplined, or courageous.
And then life happens.
We fail.
We get tired.
We lose our temper.
We abandon the project.
We forget what we intended.
Perhaps the Michaelic deed is not found in never failing.
Perhaps it is found in beginning again.
Picking it back up.
Trying again.
Repairing what we damaged.
Returning to the work.
Choosing once more.
We live in a culture that often teaches us to throw things away when they become difficult. Replace it. Move on. Start something new. Michaelmas seems to ask something different.
What if courage isn't only the moment when we bravely face the dragon?
What if courage is the quiet decision to return to the work after we have failed?
What if the sword of Michael helps us cut through our own distraction, fear, complacency, and resignation?
What if the deed is the thing that actually changes us?
The Teacher's Festival
As an educator, I have had many reflections this year about my own path forward, especially as I return to the meaning of Michaelmas.
I do not share all of Steiner's spiritual beliefs about Michael or angelic beings. Yet I continue to find value in his words and in the images, stories, and rhythms he brought to Waldorf education. I can take what speaks to me while allowing other parts to remain outside my own understanding.
For me, Michaelmas has been an invitation to think about courage—not simply as being brave, but as meeting what is difficult with steadiness, awareness, and strength.
Steiner spoke about the teacher's relationship to Michael as an inner task. What matters to me is not asking children to believe in a particular spiritual being, but asking myself what qualities I am bringing into the classroom.
I can tell a story.
I can create an image.
I can walk with children into the forest.
I can give them a dragon to encounter.
But what I carry within myself matters, too.
If I am working to become more courageous, patient, awake, thoughtful, and devoted to my community, the children may experience those qualities without my ever needing to name them.
This is where Michaelmas feels meaningful to me. It asks questions that reach beyond any particular belief system:
What does courage look like?
How do we meet what frightens us?
How do we keep our thinking awake?
How do we use our strength in service of something beyond ourselves?
Making living in spirituality less about what I profess to believe and more about how I choose to live.
The teacher's inner work becomes part of the environment.
The light does not have to be explained or announced in order to
be seen.
Michaelmas as a Festival for the Future
Steiner spoke of Michaelmas as something that could bring spiritual awareness into earthly life and strengthen our sense of fellowship. That makes Michaelmas feel less like a festival about the past and more like a festival about the future.
What are we sowing now?
What kind of people are we becoming?
What kind of community are we creating?
What will our children inherit—not simply from what we teach them, but from what we practice?
Perhaps the question is not simply:
How can I become more courageous?
But:
What will the future ask me to be brave enough to do?
What strength do I need to develop that isn't just for myself?
What have I begun and abandoned that needs to be taken up again?
Where have I become rigid instead of curious?
What relationship needs repair?
What part of my community needs my participation?
What is one thing I can do—not because it benefits me alone, but because it makes the world around me a little more whole?
So What Will We Do With Michaelmas?
This year especially, as I am not leading forest kindergarten or a formal gathering in my nature immersion school, perhaps this is where the festival becomes a practice rather than a performance.
I still tell the dragon stories to my son. We welcome friends for a potluck and the children still carry shields and swords as they run through the forest on a dragon quest. We still bake dragon bread.
Children need imagination. They need beauty. They need stories large enough to hold the mysteries of growing up. They need festivals that connect them to the rhythm of the year.
But perhaps beneath all of those things, we can hold something deeper.
The dragon does not have to be slain.
The sword does not have to be raised against another.
Courage does not have to become another expression of the ego.
Instead, I can ask:
What am I willing to begin again?
What am I willing to strengthen—not for myself, but for others?
What am I willing to protect?
What deed can I make today that contributes to the world I hope my children will inherit?
Michaelmas, then, becomes more than a festival of courage.
It becomes a festival of responsibility. Awakening. Strong will placed in service of something greater than ourselves.
A festival that asks us to meet the darkness of the season by cultivating light within ourselves—and then carrying that light outward through our deeds.
The strongest knight is not necessarily the one who can fight the hardest.
Perhaps the strongest knight is the one who can take hold of his own strength, tame it, and offer it to the world.
And perhaps that is the work of Michaelmas, where the festival truly begins.
