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