Biodynamics and Returning to the Wild
a reminder to keep some rough edges
“Therefore, behold, I will allure her,
and bring her into the wilderness,
and speak tenderly to her.”1
Once upon a time, we did not feel like strangers in the world. As children, many of us had glimpses through the veil of materiality that have since been repressed. Collectively, humanity used to have a much more common innate capacity to see vividly through appearances into the peopled interstices. Owen Barfield calls this mode of being “original participation” which most of us have long since lost, estranged from ourselves, nature, and the source of all existence.
But once we could see and knew the true names of all the animals. The Popol Vuh speaks of a time when people could “see through mountains and through oceans. They saw and understood everything perfectly and without obstruction.”2 In our quest to pave paradise and put up a parking lot, modernity has succeeded in distancing us from nature as well as conquering it, and now we find ourselves experiencing the sixth mass extinction event in human history.
But we cannot go back to Eden. An angel blocks the past to us with a flaming sword. The only way is forward toward the rising sun. We must rediscover in a new way what Owen Barfield calls “final participation,” which requires an openness to laws beyond our own mortal sense of logic, an openness to living space itself.
Each of the biodynamic preparations involves a spontaneous wild process of fermentation. They rely on the wild, unnamed yeasts and bacteria. Even the Demeter standard for biodynamic wine forbids using cultured yeasts. The liveliness in biodynamic food is the incorporation of wild nature into our cultivated spaces. As in healthy soil, there is not a hard line between horizon A and horizon B, but a gentle gradient, so too in a healthy farm, there is no absolutely clear line where the farm begins and the wild ends. It is clear where the wild space is and it is clear where the farm is, but the intermediary zone should, like a health chroma, appear essentially ambiguous. These are managed wild spaces: hedgerows, buffer strips, transitional spaces: islets of yin within a cleared expanse of yang.
In 1924, Rudolf Steiner suggested that wild spaces should be preserved: “one often gets better results–even if one reduces the extent of tilled land.”3 This may seem self-evident to many of us now but it is still not obvious to much of the agricultural world even to this day. Many farms continue to plow property line to property line, removing vital habitat for wildlife. But the wild is the periphery. If we eliminate the periphery for the sake of the center, then “the center cannot hold.” The Earth cannot live without the streams flowing from the zodiac any more than fish can live without the water in which they swim.
We only have to imagine quail for a picture of how tended transitional spaces between the wilderness and domestication enhance habitat for our fellow creatures. That we cannot always see the direct benefit of sharing with the environment does not lessen its importance. Bobwhite quail thrive in the transition zones that are now so often missing, making them a rare thing. Before European settlers, quail were relatively rare because the native forest had not yet been broken up. With the contiguous forest split for permanent agriculture, new semi-wild edges were opened, and quail thrived. Birds that choose to affiliate themselves with human beings are the closest visible delegates of the elemental world, extending their approval to us.
We should remember that wild plants – even those dandelions – are special because they have never lost their connection to the universe. You could almost say that wild plants never left Eden. In Alan Chadwick’s words, “[A]ll weeds […] are the Origin of our cultured growth, of cabbages, cauliflowers, lettuce, beans, carnations, everything. All the wild ones [...] have intensely more strength of juices, vitalities, and effect than any of the cultured plants.”4
Weeds never became estranged from the cosmos in artificial manmade conditions, so wild plants retain a primordial Edenic vigor. This is part of why we draw on wild animals for the stag’s bladder. This is why Lloyd Nelson, who uses bison much like the late Devon Strong, is extending an authentic and correct direction.
Untamed nature offers an uncompromised relationship with the cosmos. These wild plants grow with tenacity even in poor conditions. By composting wild plants and giving this transformed substance to our gardens, we reawaken an inkling of spiritual fervor in our crops for the wider reaches of the cosmos in our domesticated plants, restoring “dull” plants to a state of wonder.
Biodynamics is not about reducing the seemingly chaotic splendor of nature to totalitarian domestication, but rather recreating the rough edges of the old ways, allowing weeds to grow. After all, “[I]n Nature's judgment a weed has just as much right to grow as a plant which we find useful.”5 Not just this, but “like sympathetic people in human society, who have a favourable influence by their mere presence” so a certain weed may “in a district where it is plentiful, work beneficially by its mere presence.”6
The meticulous disorder of human landscapes often deprives us of the vision of danger, itself a greater risk to our humanity now than the wilderness.
What we perceive as human orderliness is often experienced as a deadening chaos by nature. We often get things upside down and inside out when it comes to the spiritual world. We imagine we ascended from apes, rather than descending from above. We like to imagine that personality and consciousness are illusory excrescences of matter rather than recognizing the exact opposite: the cosmos can only produce what it already possesses.
What we perceive as chaos is simply cosmic order raised in such great intensity that it is beyond our limited understanding. American plant pathologist Frank E. Egler, who assisted Rachel Carson in writing Silent Spring, wrote “Ecosystems are not only more complex than we think, ecosystems are more complex than we can think.” When we step above the domain of man-made laws, the first experience can be a dizzying sense of freedom in which we cannot find our bearings. Biologists have referred to such unpredictability of unfolding life as “a Domain of No Laws.” This is the difference between moving from the realm of logic, where real interconnections are rationally deduced, to the realm of intuition, the space in which new concepts are discovered. Logic does not perceive new concepts itself, but without a robust sense of logic, we cannot make sense of what intuition perceives. As Steiner quotes Plato, “Learn to emancipate thyself from the senses by mathematics, then mayest thou hope to rise to the comprehension of ideas independently of the senses.”7 Those who discover “etheric vision” without a robust training in mathematics or logic will carry their inconsistent and illogical mode of making connections with them, leading to all sorts of confusion. Someone who cannot make logical connections about ordinary facts will not be any better making connections with the slipperier inscape of the world.
Fellow Inkling to J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, Owen Barfield wrote a parable about initiation from a world submerged in caves under dense materiality and an individual crossing the threshold into the vast expanse above ground:
“Almost instantly, it seemed, something rushed in upon him, across the world from the horizon, and down upon and round him from the sky, striding at him with seven-leagued boots from all directions, from all places except the friendly mouth of the cave just left behind. It was Fear.”8
The experience of crossing the threshold from mere physical perception to “etheric” perception is like living under a rock and suddenly experiencing open space for the first time. Upon entering the supersensible world there is often a spiritual feeling of emptiness and an attendant agoraphobia because you suddenly experience being exposed on all sides by a “cloud of witnesses.” Souls raised in confinement tend to experience the etheric world initially as an existential threat in all directions. The etheric world is encountered first as something wild, strange, and even dangerous to our fragile ego constructions (though the etheric world offers nothing but the fullness of life).
“For let us admit it: landscape is something foreign for us, and we are afraid when alone among trees which are flowering, and streams which rush by. Even when alone with a dead human do we not feel so exposed as we do when we are alone among trees. Because, mysterious as death is, still more mysterious is life that is not ours; life which does not participate in ours, and, without noticing us, celebrates its own feasts, while we look on with a certain embarrassment, like guests arriving by accident who speak another language.”9
The first encounter with the open space (Weltinnenraum for Rilke) containing all visible things can easily be one of fear because it is a kind of superhuman reality. As T.S. Eliot says, “Humankind cannot bear much reality.”10
The space behind phenomena is a vast wilderness that boggles the imagination, an openness so large that it is incomparable. Only with this proper sense of smallness and living humility can we see across the veil of the physical world and into the wild expanse of the etheric. In the spiritual world, the only progress is growth in humility — which cannot be faked.
Terrifying and inexorable in its totality, we are certain of one thing: that our little lives are contained by something so much bigger than us. The approach of the spiritual world is not often welcome, and when angels do appear, they seem to always have to tell us not to be afraid.
As Rilke writes in his masterpiece The Duino Elegies,
“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angels’
Orders? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly to his heart: I’d be consumed
in his more potent being. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure,
and while we stand in wonder it coolly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terrifying.”11
But what is such fear? It is not simply of the unknown. Rudolf Steiner declares that by denoting something as “unknown,” we render it knowable. The via negativa circumscribes the unknown by saying what it is not (e.g., neti neti) and thus gives us a sense of its unplumbed essence. For example, I may not know all that is contained inside a locked box but I can nonetheless understand the form of the emptiness of the box itself.
The subtle interiority of things that are not bound by human conceptions is a kind of wild nature, which “does not know the ways / Of porcelain, of fork and mustard and silver.” In psychological terms, there is always an “unconscious” framework on which consciousness operates, much like how the darkness of the soil is the fertile chaos from which each visible plant emerges. I do not directly see the essence of what is happening below the earth, but I can see its dynamics expressing themselves in plant growth above ground. But this is true of all phenomena. I cannot know everything about you, but I can know you, to a degree, through the iconography of your actions, which express your character. A tree is known by its fruits.
But it is an error to imagine we fear the unknown; instead, we imagine what the unknown holds, and we imagine that it is something we dislike. We populate nocturnal shadows with our own concrete fears, but our fears are never general any more than the person we love is anything but a real individual. Anxiety always takes a particular form, through all its shimmering permutations. Our worries are about specific possibilities we imagine. A man does not worry vaguely about his daughter. He imagines very specific scenarios from which he wishes he could protect her.
A farmer fears – and fears because she loves – for her animals, knowing the bad things that might happen. We have no fear of monsters in the shadows if we do not believe in monsters in the first place. Our fears tell us what we value and what we do not want to lose. And no one who loves can be without fear for loving means giving away my own peace for the sake of something else: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.”12 Salam alaikum.
Freedom does not exist for its own sake. Freedom exists in order to be sacrificed for the thing we love. The wilderness sacrifices herself for us and our manicured lawns. She lets us despoil her to the point that our excessive ordering destabilizes the fertile chaos of our climate, generating predictably erratic conditions for marginalized species of life. Despite all this, Wild Nature loves us. That is why these plants change for us. That is why they gladly provide food for us. It is a wild love that willingly bleeds for another. And there is a severe mercy in that.
All the biodynamic preparations are wild plants. In the biodynamic preparations, we ripen into “fruit” various flowers and nectar; we contain and sweeten them into something impossible by accident. A plum tree may produce a plum full of the forces of Saturn, but what a strange thing it is to ripen yarrow like a fruit in the summer sunlight. The biodynamic preparations are magical fruits from the wild.
Biodynamic Preparations as Esoteric Fruits
Everything on Earth is made possible by the constant influx of energy from the cosmos. When we fertilize our fields with compost, we bring living potential energy to the soil so that it can be discharged as kinetic energy in the growth forms of plants. But not all energy is the same. The heat of a gas stove is not the same as the warmth of a mother hen incubating her egg. Likewise, not all compost is created equal. The resulting organic matter from the process of decomposition still bears many inner similarities to the parent materials from which it formed.
As the alchemist Paracelsus reminds us, “Nature is so careful and exact in her creations that they cannot be used without great skill; for she does not produce anything that is perfect in herself. Man must bring everything to perfection. The work of bringing things to their perfection is called ‘alchemy.’ He is an alchemist who carries what nature grows for use of man to its destined end.”13
When wild nature makes itself at home on your farm, it can be considered a healthy farm. By contrast, if a field is only wild nature, it is not a farm. If wild nature does not voluntarily choose your farm, it is an unhealthy farm. In permaculture circles, the aim is effectively to transform everything into these managed wild “edges,” which has considerable overlap with the Demeter standard requiring dedicated wildlife habitat spaces on any certified biodynamic farm. After all, all life emerges on thresholds — edges — between earth and sky, water and land. If we maximize the liminal space by increasing edges, we maximize the space available to host more life. In soil, increasing edges means incorporating organic matter and biochar, one tablespoon of which has dozens of acres of surface area.
Some animals are more readily attracted to our buildings, like cats attracted by our granaries and barns because of the mice. And then there are more delicate animals who choose us as well, like barn swallows and purple martins. If a farm does not attract such gentle wild creatures, one will have to wonder whether the farm is even alive. If the most obvious representatives of the wild do not make their home on our farm, how can we expect the more timid elemental world to draw near to us? Depictions of Catholic saints like Francis or the Orthodox saints who befriend wild animals should tell us how far removed we are from true freedom.
What we call freedom — the ability to do what we want — is not freedom at all, because we do not choose our desires. As Schopenhauer astutely observed, “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.” We are born unfree, marked by inheritance, family prejudices, indoctrination — or karma, if you will. Familiar habits are pleasing to us — even if the habit is bad for us. We are often so misguided that we imagine our thoughts, feelings, and wishes are our own. It is only someone who dies to oneself who attains freedom from such prejudices. Only someone who has quieted their own prejudices can befriend the wild. Only someone who has died to self can stand in the presence of angels without fear.
As Perennial Roots Farm has settled into itself, there is less bare earth. More trees whisper in the breeze and diverse forms of life draw ever nearer. The night is populated with glittering eyes.
I recall visiting John Jeavons with Lloyd Nelson where the wild deer are so comfortable there that you can almost reach out and touch them even without having to bribe them with food. Something very right is happening at John Jeavons’ operation.
This year I'm watching the shy Canadian geese nest down near our own geese. Geese are never fully domesticated, as anyone who keeps them will know. They retain a feistiness that many other domesticated breeds do not. Geese also retain their connection to the cosmos and lay eggs once a year with the seasons. When a wild goose chooses to nest near our own geese, it is wild nature giving its stamp of approval on the farm. White cattle egrets that frequent our farm return in May and walk around with our animals, eating the flies in our own semi-wild echo of the Serengeti. May we welcome the wild into our homes, because the wild is our home.
P.S. after composing and recording this piece, we saw (and positively identified with a birdsong app)… those elusive Bobwhite quail I'd been writing about!
Hosea 2:14
Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks, pg. 249
R. Steiner, Agriculture (GA327, Lecture VII, 15 June 1924, Koberwitz)
Lecture by Alan Chadwick in Saratoga, May 16, 1972 http://www.alan-chadwick.org/html%20pages/lectures/chadwick-lecture-saratoga-3-2.html
R. Steiner, Agriculture, Lecture II (GA327, 10 June 1924, Koberwitz)
R. Steiner, Agriculture (GA327, 13 June, 1924 Koberwitz)
R. Steiner, Mathematics and Occultism (GA35)
Owen Barfield, Night Operation, pg. 41
Rainer Maria Rilke, "Worpswede," in Werke (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1978), 3:393-394. quoted in Käte Hamburger, Rilke: Eine Einführung (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag. 1976), 18.
T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton
John 14:27
Paracelsus, Ed. Jolande Jacboi, Bollingen Series XXVIII, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1958 1/9, 78 pp. 92-93
Thank you! You built a beautiful bridge for us to cross over from the wildness of nature to the exquisiteness on the other side!
Great article. Thank you.
The connection between our structured farming and gardening for our food sources and the rewilding of a property can merge synchronistically, order in chaos.
Nature always has its way and getting out of its way is something we have forgotten.
I’ve been reading about Knepp Estate in West Sussex, UK.
Now there’s proof Wilding works.