From Hand to Heart to Head

Biodynamic Transformation of the Imagination

“Certain thoughts are practically unthinkable except in terms of an appropriate language and within the framework of an appropriate system of classification. Where these necessary instruments do not exist, the thoughts in question are not expressed and not even conceived.”¹ - Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy 

The most significant transforming influence you can bring to the farm or garden (or life in general) is in the changes you make to yourself. No amount of book knowledge will spark enthusiasm or, by itself, enliven imagination in such a way that text can be transformed creatively into action in your own particular place. This is why so many books stay on their shelves, and, even when read, do not result in change. It is because something is missing in modern materialistic thinking. 

Image: “Dandelion and Bee” by Sophia Montefiore. Used with permission and with great appreciation. All rights reserved.

“It is the force of Jupiter that reinforces the solar force and brings forth the white and yellow colours in the flowers.” (Rudolf Steiner, The Agriculture Course, Lecture 2, GA 327)

Consider the great changes in intellectual ideas and yet, the same injustices perpetuate themselves. The world sees a flash of hope, but then the protests stop and everyone goes back to work. As society ages, imagination has a tendency to become sclerotic. It is harder to imagine new pathways and, without an enlivened imagination, even harder to make those colorful pictures into reality. These days there is a lot of thinking, but thinking is dissociated from action. The hands do one thing, the head another, and we live as “men without chests.”² Humans without heart – what an image! Without a heartfelt enthusiasm, abstract principles have no life, and, by contrast, hard work to change external conditions becomes stultified. 

Pfeiffer remarks that when people leave their isolation and move out to visit the liveliness of the country, being unversed in the poetry of nature, all they tend to take back is a vague mood: “The great horde of city dwellers [visiting nature] do not usually go further than the reporting of a mood, and will add here and there they ate well of the fruits of the countryside.”³

While outstanding flavor is one of the best virtues of Biodynamic produce, we want to give something else too. It is our task to offer more than a taste, we want to impart an articulate feeling born from practical participation in biodynamics. How do we do this?

Together with your support, the Josephine Porter Institute for Applied Biodynamics (JPI) approaches the dilemma of the human heart with practical hands-on educational experiences. As our founder, Hugh Courtney, repeatedly reminded people: “Biodynamics is not an intellectual path. Biodynamics is a path of the will.” But what does this mean? Practically speaking, it means we don’t begin with the head nor with abstract speculative conceptions, but rather we start with our hands. One can imagine as an armchair theorist any number of completely false notions if there is never any feedback from the real world. Farmers have a privileged perspective because if they get something wrong, it costs them immediately, whereas the speculative theorization of academia is often insulated from real-world feedback. In Biodynamics we begin with our hands. 

Our work at JPI strives to make ourselves obsolete by educating as many people as possible so that their inner world is transfigured by what they do with their hands. Imagine if so many people were making quality preparations that no one had to buy them in from abroad. While this may never be entirely actualized, this remains a guiding light. But where will people learn to make good preparations so that this distributed decentralized movement can flourish? There are several places where practical biodynamic education happens, and JPI is one humble participant in the broader biodynamic world.

The process of making preparations, while rejuvenating and significant for the healing of the Earth, has another significance: the transformation of your own inner life. One may read about biodynamics or anthroposophy, but unless its exercises are regularly practiced, one's familiarity remains limited to abstraction. 

When you make preparations, repeatedly, as an esoteric exercise, what is developing underneath the surface is a new way of seeing, provided you pay attention and give it the enthusiasm it deserves. A brilliant man without enthusiasm will quickly be surpassed by an uneducated person who possesses great fire. The tortoise and the hare.

By using your own bodily form and your “will forces” to make biodynamic preparations in community, you are changing. Outwardly you will look the same, but something within your consciousness has altered. You will not be able to say what it is immediately because at first, all that might arise is discomfort: it’s all new and different and you might not understand it. But as with learning anything new, persistence and repetition is what matters most. If you only take one lesson in Spanish, it doesn’t matter how well you performed in that one lesson if you don’t repeat the lessons and retain what was gleaned. The first step is to start. The second step is to repeat what you started.

At first, when making biodynamic preparations, all that arises is a vague feeling – vague because it is new. And because this novel experience is unfamiliar, it will likely feel like a compulsion to speak, but initially your words may not be able to express clearly the inner form of that feeling. Almost like a foot waking up after being asleep for a long time, the feeling evoked by crafting the biodynamic preparations with your own hands may feel like pins and needles at first. There is the unusual nature of the work, the visceral quality of working with these animal components, but in this work we practice overcoming subjective antipathies and learn to find value in what is perhaps initially repulsive. What else can Steiner mean when he says we must develop a "personal relationship with manure"? To discover the flecks of gold hidden in excrement, to find what is true even in what is false.

But finding and recognizing the valuable qualities of things requires practice. Few people know immediately without experience what healthy manure or unhealthy manure looks like, not to mention the subtler signs of animal health exhibited in their dung. Only with repetition does initial discomfort give way to familiarity, and only with enough repetition can familiarity give way to objectivity. From the work of the hands sprouts the feelings of the heart which, with persistence, blossom as new concepts.

Towards this end, we offer to all of you our Fall Workshop, which is hosted from October 6-8th, 2023. We encourage all to attend, even if you do not have a garden, because each one of us has an “inner garden” – the work of community and the making of these preparations is a subtle path of initiation but, as with any path, one only makes progress by walking it. As Pfeiffer writes, “It should not consist merely of theoretical work, but be supplemented by field visits in order that all questions should be carried over into ‘flesh and blood’, into the sphere of living observation.”⁴ Gathering together has become harder since the global pause. We want community, we want to meet face to face, and not just dimly through a screen. But the inertia of society no longer lets us go with the flow and find ourselves carried effortlessly into community. Now, if we want to meet together, it must thrum within us out of our own willful initiative. 

We meet because there is always more to learn, and ever more to unlearn. If we feel like we have grasped, intellectually, what biodynamics is, we are in danger of hardness of heart. As soon as we grab the flame of a candle, we snuff it out. Not only that, such arrogance turns us against one another, where we see movements exhibiting what Sigmund Freud called the “narcissism of petty differences.” In movements that agree on almost everything, the focus must not be on hair-splitting details, but on what we share in common. In the spirit of Simone Weil, “what we are unable to grasp is more real than what we are able to grasp.”⁵ If we believe what we can grasp with finality is the greater part of reality, our light is turning into darkness. Our alliance is with all who share the values of responsibility towards our good earth, human freedom from oppression, the right to health, and our connection to one another and the cosmos. 

As it makes a significant subtle difference to make the preparations with your own hands, likewise there is a marked difference between a farm where the farmer lives in residence versus a farm where the farmer comes and goes. Practically speaking, this is not always possible, but when farmers make their home on the same plot of land where they work, there is a new kind of spiritual embodiment. The directing principle of the human “I” travels no further than the dream world at night and remains a beacon to the farm individuality.

Towards this end, JPI is undergoing initial fundraising efforts to create sustainable housing on-site as part of an unfolding community project. We would like to invite you to participate not only in our fall workshop but to join us in our constructive meaningful work. Donations from individuals who wish to support the incarnation of the JPI farm organism and the renewal of the Earth are welcome and encouraged. Here we are sowing seeds of a new economy.

Image: architect’s preliminary imagination of possible housing on the JPI farm.

Out of this spiritual initiative, our educational demonstration farm continues to unfold. Thanks to your ongoing support, we have already obtained a new herd of cattle, built fencing, significantly increased our preparation-making, expanded our Substack presence to include voices from around the world (with much more in the works!), and spread biodynamic preparations and education across the globe. 

In a hyperconnected society, what we are able to offer the world quickly finds its audience. We have to ask ourselves: What are we putting out for the world to find? Your support advances new biodynamic research, on-farm experiments, and quality assurance testing.

Those who are unable to participate directly in our workshop nonetheless belong to our intimate grassroots movement. Some of you are sponsoring attendees by purchasing a ticket and marking in the notes “sponsorship.” Others are supporting our work by upgrading on Substack. Still others are contributing direct donations for specific purposes. As we approach the centennial of biodynamics, it is time for the North American stream of biodynamics to graduate to the next level. For as little as $8/mo. (that’s barely 25 cents per day) your subscription to our Substack presence goes directly to nourishing the soil of the blossoming JPI farm organism. Your subscription says: I support this work. The revenue from this platform goes straight to infrastructure projects and the unfolding vision of our biodynamic farm organism. Your money now moos in our fields. 

Sometimes things seem to burst into new activity which can only be understood in retrospect. As Rudolf Steiner says, “It is wrong to say nature makes no leaps. Nature is perpetually making leaps, from leaf to blossom, from blossom to fruit. When the chick develops out of the egg, that is a leap. To say that nature makes no leaps could not be further from the truth. There are leaps everywhere, sudden transitions. And we are living in such a time of transition.”⁶ It is time to make such a leap and burst from foliage into flower.

Join us in becoming the future together.