Dead Warmth & Living Warmth (Part 1 of 5)

in the dynamics of plants and gardens

Have you ever been outside when it’s cold and then opened the door to a warm house? A torrent of warm, turbulent air rushes out, and another current of cold air moves inside. Our family perhaps yells at us to close the door as we stomp off the snow on our boots. When the door closes, the exchange of hot and cold becomes restricted.

Without this dynamic interplay of warm and cold — a polarity Alan Chadwick creatively describes as “warmth” and “coldth” — there is no unfolding of life. Alchemically, this is the great interplay between fire and water, the great father and the great mother. Virgil writes in his Georgics, “Then almighty father Æther descends in fertilizing showers into the lap of his happy spouse, and mighty himself, mingling with her mighty body nourishes all her offspring.”¹ When we reach Virgo (in our present epoch), we arrive at the autumn equinox — here, the exhalation of the parched earth pauses, ready to receive new fertility from the heavens.

When you open a door in winter, cold air rushes into the house, and warm air rushes out of the house in a double movement.

There is potentiality for life when there is an energy differential between what is inside and what is outside. Without a higher concentration of force and a lower concentration of force, there would be no possibility of life. It is the interplay between fullness and emptiness that gives rise to expressive life forms. When such life potential “dies,” we can think of entropy: an increase of unusable energy. But living beings are able to maintain their form against the natural tendency back towards lukewarmness. We must always be either warm or cold, but lukewarmness without contrasts is like a tepid cup of tea — better it is iced tea or piping hot. Scientists hypothesize a “heat death” in which the entire universe becomes homogenously “lukewarm” (so to speak) in which everything is of an equal temperature and, therefore, the universe dies out. However, this does not take into consideration the role of life, which is always essentially working against entropy. If the world were merely dead matter and unliving energy, it would have died out long ago — but we wouldn’t even be here to witness that death because it would never have quickened to life in the first place.

Alan Chadwick would refer to the phenomenon of living beings maintaining differentiation from their environments as “disequilibrium” — if an organism cannot maintain a distinctly different inner climate, then it is not a healthy organism. If I can’t maintain my body temperature in winter, I will literally “catch cold.” If I can’t keep myself cool in summer, I may suffer heat stroke. The health and liveliness of any organism — including a farm — is its capacity to sustain “disequilibrium” and not just fizz out. This capacity of life to hold onto things longer than mere erosion and entropy would dictate is called “negentropy” or “negative entropy.” In anthroposophical terms, this would be framed as “etheric formative forces” — the power to build up and sustain new life out of the cosmos.

Consider a helium balloon at a birthday party. The lightness of the helium gas makes the balloon want to rise into the sky. If you let go of a balloon in a room, it will rise to the ceiling and come to rest there. By contrast, if you hold a box and drop it, it will fall to the ground and come to rest there. This is the contrast between the air element and the earth element. The airy balloon wishes to rise and find its level above us, whereas denser materials seek to settle below us. If you light a candle at a birthday party, you will notice that the flames always rise upwards — this is a sign of how warmth always wishes to rise, like the air element. By contrast, if a child stubs her toe at a party, her tears do not fall upwards but always fall downward because the water element always seeks its level below us.

Steiner says something that seems cryptic at first but can be interpreted fairly simply: “So it is both with the warmth and with the air; they take on a slightly living quality when they are received into the Earth. The opposite is true of the water and of the solid earthy element itself. They become still more dead inside the Earth than they are outside it.”² Consider the helium balloon or the candle flames. If you lower a balloon and then let go of it, it rushes upwards. There is more dynamic potential in a helium balloon that is brought below its level because it now wishes to rise up all the more forcefully. Similarly, if warmth is brought down below, it wishes to rise up to the ceiling. This is also true in our soils: when air and warmth are brought into the earth, they both wish to return to the atmosphere. Likewise, if we mound up earth, the water in it wishes to rush back down all the more eagery and air tends to permeated our raised beds more actively. The denser the substrate into which you introduce lighter elements, the stronger their impetus to return to their home — the stronger their astrality — their willful desire to return to their natural elevation.

And yet, this is exactly what we aim to do with biodynamics: we bring the floral “light-bearing” aspect of plants and take that force down into the soil. When we spray Valerian on our fields and incorporate it with our composted manure, we increase the “disequilibrium” between inner and outer and provide more living warmth within the soil.

In summer, the warmth within the soil becomes relatively “dead” because the warm atmosphere radiates down into the soil and heats it. Without the differential between inner and outer warmth, there is stagnation — or “dead” warmth. For something to happen at all, there must be a contrast. For example, knowledge can only pass from someone who knows to someone who doesn’t know. Likewise, energy passes from high concentration to low concentration. Our entire climate and weather patterns are based on low-pressure zones and high-pressure zones striving to return to equilibrium (though they never can entirely).

When moisture is brought up, and out of the soil as water vapor and forms clouds, it is more alive than when it has settled into the earth because there is far more potential energy to be released as kinetic energy. A broken limb hanging overhead is far “more alive” in its dynamic potential than after it crashes to the ground with a thud. You could say that something is alive when it still possesses the will to go somewhere else or become something else. Something is dead when it no longer wishes to be elsewhere — like silica, which has come to rest in itself; it has died into form.

In a plant, this same dynamic is at work. Above ground, we find the cool green leaves as the water in the soil is drawn up by the relatively drier and warmer air. If, as can happen in the humid southeast, the atmosphere is too moist, plants cannot properly transpire; instead, water beads on plants, and they suffocate, unable to be exhaled in a healthy manner. The air must be less moist than the plant or it cannot exhale properly. Ensuring good airflow helps enormously in humid climates because moving air rapidly dries things out — far more than sunlight. Willful movements of the air carry astrality. Steiner even suggests that wherever spiders weave their webs, they are weaving out of the astral steam. And, concretely, spiders always build their webs perpendicular to a draft — an astral current.

The plant is a nexus, a crossing point between worlds. The root is made of earthy substance (as is the brain in this analogy) but is dominated by cosmic forces (e.g, sugars and exudates). The flowers, by contrast, are primarily cosmic substantiality made from this year’s atmosphere, but they embody the earthly grasping forces of reproduction.

A plant is like a doorway through which a “cold” vortex and a “warm” vortex flow — an earthly vortex and a cosmic vortex. Or Yin and Yang, if you prefer. This is the easiest way I’ve found to experience how above ground are the “outer planetary” substances, but below ground are their forces. A plant sends more than half of the sugars it creates out of light into the soil, building its root into a dense earthy materiality. Conversely, the water from within the earth is quickened to new life by the warmth and air above the soil in spring and summer, teasing out leafy growth. Only a small fraction of the sugars produced by a plant are given to bees as nectar. Far more nectar is exuded into the earth itself than is given to the atmosphere. Even here, Goethe’s saying holds true: “Plants live by giving, animals live by taking.” In the case of the honeybee, it is still a form of taking, but only taking what is freely offered surplus — the most benign form of acquisition. Though Steiner often uses unusual terminology, we must always remember he’s describing real plants we can all experience for ourselves. If we lose sight of the forest because of the trees — or find ourselves fixated on the letter rather than the spirit of a text — an enormous amount of unnecessary confusion will arise.

In winter, we get sweeter carrots and beets than during summer, but leafy growth is relatively inhibited. The ripening activity of the “summer sun” moves into the earth during winter. “Throughout the whole winter, we must look for the sun-activity of summer under the earth. In December, for example, at a certain depth within the earth, we have the July-activity of the sun. In July, the sun radiates its light and warmth onto the surface. The warmth and light gradually penetrate deeper.”³ Burying potatoes over winter places them under the cold topsoil where, paradoxically, the ripening force is enhanced. Additionally, Lili Kolisko’s research on growing plants underground found that at a certain depth, she was able to get vine-ripened tomatoes without sunlight (!!). If a biodynamic practitioner were to take this seriously, a sunken greenhouse (e.g., a “walipini”) with good ventilation would provide winter vine-ripened tomatoes, which would bring in a premium.

A practical example may be useful. In summer, you feel hot, but your entire organism focuses on keeping you cool by sweating and changing your blood flow. In winter, by contrast, your metabolism burns hotter to keep you warm even while your outermost skin is colder than in summer. This dynamic is at work in the soil as well: in winter, the topmost layer is colder, but if you get deep enough, it actually becomes warmer than in summer. “[I]n autumn, the soil cools more slowly and to a lesser extent than the air, and by winter it is warmer than the overlying air…”⁴ Imagine watching the activities of a farmer from overhead in fast-forward: the “blood flow” of the farm rapidly increases during the growing season and then retreats during the dormant season. There is an oscillating dynamic between external warmth and internal warmth between the seasons both in the soil, a human being, and in a plant.

“If we pull a plant out of the ground we may see that in the roots there is cosmic force, in the blossom mostly the terrestrial [force].”⁵ The activity (force) at work in the root is cosmic inasmuch as it is the power drawn from the sun and the atmosphere. In the root, we have dense earthly substantiality together with radiating cosmic force (e.g., exudates and sugars feeding the soil in all directions). By contrast, the blossom is a subtle ephemeral cosmic substance dedicated to producing a seed capable of grasping the earth again. In the flower, we have a delicate cosmic substantiality with earthly forces. We should really think of exudates in the roots as nectar radiated generously by these benevolent plants. And if we consider these roots as radiating cosmic nectar, we should come to see earthworms, the counterpart to honeybees, above the ground.

Jacob Boehme speaks of a living body as a sort of divine hierogamy, where the germ of the earthly mother and the cosmic father meet: “The body is a Limbus of earth and also a Limbus of the heavenly essence; for earth has been exhaled or expressed out of the dark and the light world.”⁶ Only when the chaos within the seed meets with the chaos in the cosmos does the germination event take place — a portal opened between worlds. In the plant specifically (but living bodies in general also), we have an intersection of the earth and the cosmos — two worlds interpenetrate in the plant and manifest their presence to us as a unified living phenomenon. Just as a rainbow is a transient yet real phenomenon appearing between light and darkness, so too is a plant a real phenomenon emerging between the dark earth and the luminous cosmos. The fragile contingency of a rainbow does not make it illusory anymore than the fact that you can’t grow a plant on Venus makes plants “unreal.” Even human beings can only survive in a very narrow bandwidth of conditions, but that does not in any way make us less real.

May we not merely habituate bland niceties — lukewarm formalities. Moreover, may we not practice coldblooded affective emotion — warmth that enters and immediately leaves again — but rather, may we each cultivate a rich store of inner warmth — living warmth — that can express itself as sweet fruits in sacrificial deeds for the good of others.

(Part 2 coming soon)

1. Virgil, Georgics, 87.

2. R. Steiner, Agriculture Course

3. R. Steiner, Man as Symphony of the Cosmic Word, Lecture IV (GA230, 26 October 1923, Dornach)

4. https://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/Cooling/EarthTemperatures.htm#google_vignette

5. R. Steiner, Agriculture Course, Lecture II (GA327, 10 June 1924, Koberwitz)

6. Jacob Boehme, Of Regeneration in The Way to Christ, pg 83 ¶2