STREAMS OF INFLUENCE

I have never looked for teachers. I have been invited or taken to them, not foreseeing the huge shifts about to take place in my life.

Some of these teachers were public figures, others more reclusive. Each one has given me immense gifts and opportunities. As their intern and apprentice, they shared streams of meaning that shaped me and are inscribed in my soul.

Why talk about encounters with teachers?
Teachers who are guides and mentors are a special kind of kin, of family, of ancestors, who often link to places and cultures of being and enquiry from way back. If I tell you about these teachers and their passions, I not only honour them and thank them, but share these streams of meaning and enquiry with you, and the way they have come together in me.

Who these teachers were.
Sadly, it is a picture of the time that my teachers from my teens onward - Joseph Beuys, Swami Nisreyasananda, Bill Ainslie, Dumile Feni, Richard Wake and many others - were men, as their teachers and inspirers were too… like Goethe and Rudolf Steiner for Joseph Beuys!

Before them though there were many women ‘teachers’ in my life, without public profiles: the teachers-artists-healers-carers of my early childhood: my mother, Naomi Sand, who encouraged me to see and create and to never look away; my grandmother Gladys Chenik, who took me on imaginal journeys into past and future; my second mother, Grace Rabolela, who taught me about patience, facing difficulties and care; Pamela Smuts and Dorothy Hall, dedicated art teachers in my early years; Mama Pedi and a group of traditional healers who helped me work with certain torments and despair; and Scarnel Lean, an esoteric philosopher - something I didn’t realise about her then - who spent months helping me write my first public talk when I six, about my angel painting, and the role of angels.

Other teachers who were and are not persons. These teachers are places, movements, cultures, poems, worldviews, crises and questions. They are creatures, trees, life-forms, forces and stars of the more-than-human world. All have in different ways held me, nourished me, challenged me, deeply affecting how I work and what I share in the world.

They are South Africa, Apartheid and the visible horrors of racial capitalism. They are Marx’s early writings and visits in dreams from C.G. Jung. They are the Essene Gospels, Advaita Vedanta, Engaged Buddhism, Theosophy-Anthroposophy. Rilke. Schiller. Goethe. Rudolf Steiner. James Hillman and the Archetypal Psychologists. Ngugi wa Thiongo. Paulo Freire. Joanna Macy, Val Plumwood, Black Elk, indigenous ways and and knowledge and the “Basic Call to Consciousness’ of the Haudenosaunee. They are Erich Fromm. Hannah Arendt. Ivan Illich. And in my daily life: my children, partners and many inspired friends. Hundreds of challenging and imaginative students. And dialogue partners in projects, connective practices and labs. The teaching and learning never ends.

Shelley Sacks with Joseph Beuys 1977