Harvesting Earth and Sky
Honoring the Feminine in Agriculture
“You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment. In that insight of inter-being, it is possible to have real communication with the Earth, which is the highest form of prayer.”
Thich Nhat Hanh1
The air is crisp, the light changing fast. Mornings are darker now and a bit slower. Yes, cows still need to be fed and crops tended, but we each of us are animals between Earth and sky, shifting ever so subtly with her evolving rhythms. For me, the seasonal change is welcome. Inhaling deeply, I pause to look around. Trees bare, starlings thick, I catch a flash of white—a vulture who has circled our place year after year, but something looks slightly different, the same, yet not. Perhaps the bird is an heir, an offspring to that very first albino buzzard I encountered here years ago. The trees shiver in the cold wind, and I echo them.
Over the centuries we see countless attempts to exploit the land. Conservation tillage only finally crystallized on an industrial scale retrospectively—after we had created a cataclysmic Dust Bowl and destroyed the rich, fertile soils of the prairies. With industrialization came many advances and attendant losses too. Of knowing, yes, but something more insidious as well: of learning how to listen to beings other than oneself. A rift opened between ourselves and Mother Earth. Instead of digging our hands deep into the soil, we dig with implements, simultaneously ripping ourselves apart from centuries of ancestors that came before. Instead of looking at the good earth, we run numbers and tests. Instead of asking ourselves how to balance old with new, we blindly forge ahead without regard for our ancestors or future generations. We have forgotten that “intellect and reason will never bring you to truth. They are, on their own, deceivers, separators, destructors.”2 Most importantly, we have forgotten that each decision we make now is an imagining, a determination of how the future will look. Feeling without thought is blind, and thought without feeling is dead.
Let us consider farming as a whole organism into which we incorporate contrary dynamics like yin and yang, masculine and feminine, light and dark. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning…”3 These echoing circles form a reverberating whole, moving outward becoming impossible to separate. When allowed to blossom into its fullest expression, agriculture requires a robust feminine quality. In biodynamics, we see the pistils of this feminine impulse. We must seek to heighten the receptivity of Mother Earth to the cosmos. Sophia reflects the universe back to itself.
Waiting for the moon
Plum blossoms lean toward
A child mountain ascetic
Matsuo Basho4
Biodynamics is a preparation of the Earth to receive the sky, offering an alternative to a world dominated by one-sided, masculine technocracy. “No art can possibly be empty. It is not. It is the reverse, the opposite course to separation. It’s a total marriage.”5The alchemists called the union of contraries the conjunctio. The marriage of opposites is intimated when you use horn manure and follow it with horn silica. Try using horn silica on soil lacking the biodynamic preparations and see what happens. This embodies biodynamics. Of course, it is possible to have “excessive Moon-influences” where the feminine Earth is left alone and a dark wrath proliferates.6 But in most soils, we are dealing with a dearth of the feminine resulting in a growing inability to receive cosmic nutrition from the atmosphere.
To understand something truly, your soul must become it; or, as Goethe puts it, “If we want to attain a living understanding of nature, we must become as living and flexible as nature herself.”7 Our task is to develop a passive imagination that reflects the images of the outer world sans expectations or distortions. The concept of the farm as an organism can seem deceptively simple. But if we go into the garden with preconceived notions, it is easy to filter out the reality of what is happening before our very eyes. "Never anticipate. Never expect. Never know that the next season is going to be the season because it won’t be a season, it isn’t. It’s something you’ve never known. Something none of us have ever known."8
Pasture is dependent on soil fertility which is connected to the microbial life below that thrives from the manure of the animals which walk and poop across the Earth which in turn help feed us and grow our vegetables, herbs, flowers, and more. Tiny miracles, day by day. Harmonious chaos is in full view on our animal and vegetable farm. Each personality is a potent vortex of energy constantly spiraling into a symbiotic working whole. Trite as it may sound, everything is already connected, thus impossible, dangerous, even, to endeavor to separate out.
What we speak always returns
With a spike of barbs
Or the sweet taste of berries in summer.
Joy Harjo9
In 1924, Rudolf Steiner delivered a set of agriculture lectures in Koberwitz, Silesia (what is now Poland), and biodynamics was born. Steiner saw clearly the dangers of chemical inputs separated from integration with the whole, of mechanized farming without a beating heart, of subjugation of land without a vital imagination or care. But the soul of biodynamics had been gestated for years in the insights of Madame Blavatsky, the visionary art of Hilma af Klint, and would be carried on through decades of practical work and field research performed by Lili Kolisko, Maria Thun, and Josephine Porter, among many others. During this time, an alchemical process was ripening across the world, or perhaps it had always been there in the hands of so many women quietly growing food for their families across generations. By people so rooted to their own time and place that to separate one from the other was a violence that dared not be uttered.
You embody a particular power when putting hands to soil, conjuring not only sprouts to spiral out toward the light, but evoking an ancestral wellspring flowing centuries backward and forward, carried aloft by the souls of these women and so many other revered pioneers who came before.
There’s an astonishing painting by Hilma af Klint entitled Primordial Chaos. Against a vibrant blue backdrop, vortices swirl up, outward, away; constant motion, ever in flux, life itself. The more you gaze at it, the more you lose yourself in its motion, pulled up, swept away in the vortices, conjuring another image—this observation Rudolf Steiner makes concerning Goethe’s idea of the archetypal plant:
Someone who is really observant will never see the root other than striving downward into the Earth and at the same time rounding itself. The root rounding itself into the Earth—that is the picture of the root that one must have, the rounding form pushing into the ground. We must see the stem differently as it unfolds in an upward direction. Someone who combines sensitivity with observation will have the definite feeling that the stem strives to stream out as a line. The root wants to unfold in a rounding, circular direction; the stem wants to unfold in a linear direction. That is the archetypal form of the plant.10
Primordial Chaos by Hilma af Klint
The world is framed by oscillating polarities: light and dark, straight lines and circles, masculine and feminine, harmony and chaos—each unable to exist without the other. Contraries thrive together but maintain their discrete distinctness. The entire phenomenal world is a nuanced dance of these polarities. Spiraling onward and upward toward the light: to thrive a plant demands both the dark warm fertile soil of earth and the rich warming sunlight up above. This intricate dance is typified in the ancient Greek myth of Demeter’s daughter, Persephone, who is kidnapped by Hades and spirited to the underworld. Persephone must remain in darkness for half of the year, entombed through fall and winter. She is only allowed to return to frolic with her beloved mother when the sun melts the winter snow in spring and summer. Each season, while Persephone is in the underworld, Demeter mourns, seemingly quitting her duties as goddess of agriculture. During this time, the fields are allowed to rest and lay low with their goddess taking a much needed respite through the darkest hours of the year. In this hibernation, the fruits of summer are dreamed into being. Once Persephone emerges from the bowels of the Earth, her mother rejoices and spring begins again. New life awakens, and the soil warms with the sunlight of longer days. These primordial rhythms are older than ancient. The cycles of life, death, and rebirth carry mythical forces, overwhelming the intellect and weaving its way through our psyche. A cry of revolution, a radical reckoning in a world that constantly demands we individuate from one another.
Let me show you the tangible, our birthright, our song. See the way the light is captured on my suntanned arms? Did you know you can taste the sunshine even in February from a spoonful of blackberry jam?
The winter months teach me how to listen. When the leaves abandon the trees, I find myself quiet (and quite alone) with my thoughts. Too much time to spare. Too little time to savor. Each day an endless parade of mud, damp, and cold—sunless days punctuated with a muted palette of grays. Despite her monotonous reputation, gray comprises an astonishing array of colors. By February, I grow tired and restless. Weary of sunless skies, dark nights, and forecasts of interminable rain, I begin to look around and see. My eyes are opened. Amidst the enforced gloom I take notice. At first it is little things. My attention is commandeered by small details: daily occurrences transform into tiny miracles. Perhaps they were miracles all along?
A flash of red arrests my periphery. Cow dung writhing with sacred scarabs, dead matter reborn through the work of a tiny beetle. Robins gather by the dozens in my yard every day at dusk. Sunset wonders dancing more brilliant than any firework, alighting the sky in purples, pinks, golds, and orange. The way the trees whisper on an especially bitter cold day. A white blanket of snow so clean and crisp, transporting me somewhere else entirely.
They say there is nothing new under the sun yet how many tiny wonders have I missed, do I continue to miss daily? The reverberations continue, the stones we skipped upon the lake echo. My hands in soil, conjuring someone’s ancestors. Mystery of mysteries I may never know. But onwards towards today I go, carrying these small miracles with me, determined to not forget. But more importantly, determined to not let any more slip through my fingertips.
“You once told me that the human eye is god's loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn't even know there's another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty.”
Ocean Vuong11
For all that modernity has to offer, and its gifts are many, we tend to forget a simple principle: we are all inextricably connected, each and every one. To sever or harm a part is to damage us all. Nature is our birthright and yet, we cut ourselves off from it for what? Superficial knowledge, technical knowhow, exploitative profits, unlimited growth: sterile fruits so transient and costly that they are impossible to grasp hold of.
I’ve learned to plant my vegetable rows in straight lines because they are easiest to harvest. Seasons come and go, circling round again and again. The horizon barrels straight and true in front of me, dwarfed by the rise and set of the sun and moon, each coexisting peacefully with the other. Is it odd that I never think to question how they get along, where the lines end and the circle begins? But I, we, each of us, have sunlight, moon, and earth coursing through our veins, a lineage older than time, rooted in eternity, the past and present, circling back before once again arriving at center.
Much of the power of biodynamics lies in rituals, at once new, yet as old as time. Planting us firmly in the here and now, yet only able to root because the genesis started long ago, connecting the past with the present age. And so we arrive full circle, back to the beating heart of it all: the farm, nature, this good Earth we inhabit and call home. At the heart of biodynamics thrums the preparations, the good work, the intent to heal the Earth through specific practices designed to give back, to increase soil fertility, to listen and observe. To help us see again.
We take manure from our cows, mix and stir it, kneading it like dough, until slowly, its texture begins to transform. I add cornmeal that I grew on the farm, bright orange as the sun, an offering of sorts, from our garden to the ancient ones. Our animals give their manure, we give our time and intention, but sometimes it is good to add just a bit more. Something grown, something sacred. All of our farm, body, and soul. After an hour, we gather around, and begin to stuff the manure into the cow horns. A safe vessel, a spiraling temple for the manure to evolve and transform over winter into black gold, a fertile ground where new life can grow. Each year, the process is the same, yet each season is different. Fertility, seeds, sprouting, growth, renewal. The miracle of growth is that it grows out of imperfection, corruption, and rot. How do you make the soil fertile? By adding excrement, compost, cover crops, fertility, rebirth, intention. The prima materia of alchemy is someone else’s garbage.
Of course, biodynamic horn manure can be explained scientifically. That is easy enough: you take manure, rich with nutrients and compost it. It is a similar process that can be experienced through the use of kitchen scraps, garden leftovers, egg shells. Waste transformed into fertility. Everything living craves a skin, from our human bodies, to the soil, to a compost pile. And so, we give a skin, a safe house to the cow manure in the form of cow horns. For many, this answer is easiest, the most comfortable.
“A craving to get through the curtains of things as they appear, to things as they are, and then into the larger, wilder space of things as they are becoming…”
May Swenson12
Where does the smell disappear to? What happened to the cow manure? Where did it go? For some, these questions are too much. They must have answers filled with finality and certainty. Indeed, they used to trouble me as well. What we seem to forget is that life itself is full of these improbable wonders. It is impossible to make compost without a steaming pile of rot. There are days I don’t recognize that face staring back at me or my hands molded season upon season by layer upon layer of good Mother Earth. And yet, the root at the root of everything lies waiting, just below, unseen. Each act, intentional or not carries the unknown unbearable weight of tomorrow. What a particular joy is contained in that tiny sliver of doubt. Seeds germinating in darkness, somehow enlightened to push through toward the light. Here there is an intention too, an unknowable element to each as well. What exactly happens during those months below in utter darkness? But the eyes that gaze back at me tell a different story: concentric circles spiraling ever outward of who I am, who I’ve become, and who I’m on my journey toward becoming. Daughter and apprentice of this Mother Earth I reside on.
No one can teach anyone anything else, not really. You must arrive at this conception, or you are just repeating someone else’s opinion. Growth and discovery must be an effort, a journey, a sacred act, an arrival. What virtue lies in mindlessly repeating the biodynamic preparations like recipes? We must internalize the preparations as lived experiences. We’re not after intellectual complexity, we’re after Sophia. “Spiritual Science is not clever: it strives rather for Wisdom. Nor can we rest content with the abstract repetition of words: ‘Man consists of physical body, etheric body,’ etc., etc., which one can learn off by heart like any cookery-book.”13 Mere mortals, most of us can only communicate in words until the realization crystallizes: feeling and thought cross the boundaries of space and time. It is in that moment that the preparations exist obliterating the divorce between Earth and sky.
Yin cannot be fully realized without yang. Circles are formed by lines. To flourish, Agriculture must embrace the feminine impulse. Existence unmoored from ritual estranges us from the land, our home. Without wonder, we come crashing back to Earth, devoid of awe, meaning, and blind to the miracles that overwhelm our senses every single day. An act of intention may not by itself change the world, but it will change your world, day by day, once you begin to see, reverberating outward, season upon season, cycle upon cycle, circles ever expanding. To be swept up in this song, to be stirred by stars larger and grander than yourself, to let those pistils unfurl, what a joy indeed.
Do we grow the seeds or do the seeds grow us?
As we grow the seeds, so the seeds grow us.
Thich Nhat Hahn, A Love Letter to the Earth (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 2013), 69.
Alan Chadwick, Reverence, Obedience and the Invisible in the Garden: Talks on the Biodynamic French Intensive System (Asheville: Logosophia, 2013), 71.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature and Other Essays (London: Penguin Publishing Group, 2003), 225.
Matsuo Basho, “707,” in Basho: The Complete Haiku, trans. Jane Reichhold (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2013), 173.
Alan Chadwick, Reverence, Obedience and the Invisible in the Garden: Talks on the Biodynamic French Intensive System (Asheville: Logosophia, 2013), 207.
Rudolf Steiner, Agriculture Course: The Birth of the Biodynamic Method, trans. George Adams (Hudson: SteinerBooks, 2004), 118.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Scientific Studies, ed. and trans. Douglas Miller (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1995), 64.
Alan Chadwick. Reverence, Obedience and the Invisible in the Garden: Talks on the Biodynamic French Intensive System (Asheville: Logosophia, 2013), 108.
Joy Harjo, “Song 6,” in An American Sunrise (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019), 42.
Rudolf Steiner, Broken Vessels: The Spiritual Structure of Human Frailty. (Great Barrington: Anthroposophic Press, 2003), 107.
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (New York: Penguin Press, 2019), 12.
May Swenson, Made with Words (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 91.
Rudolf Steiner, Agriculture Course: The Birth of the Biodynamic Method, trans. George Adams (Hudson: SteinerBooks, 2004), 131.
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