With your friends Lloyd Nelson and Stewart Lundy
May wisdom shine through me
May love glow in me
May strength penetrate me
That in me may arise
A helper for humanity
A servant of sacred things
Selfless and true.R. Steiner
Opportunity Knocks
September's astronomical forecast presents a unique opportunity with a potent planetary grand trine occurring on the 24th in the Earth constellations. This is a most excellent time to use your Biodynamic preparations, such as barrel compost and horn manure.
Also, you could add other preparations, such as the newly created and powerfully potent Biodynamic Buffalo Soil Activator, and perhaps Equisetum to add a beneficial boost. We will be introducing and highlighting what makes the Buffalo Soil Activator so special next time, but the short version is that this brings all the biodynamic preparations to your fields in a single pass. Not only that, but particularly in North America, we are restoring the native bison influence (though some woodland bison still live in parts of Europe). The differences between cows and bison are too complex to be discussed in detail today. Still, there is something foundational to reminding the land here on Turtle Island of its ancient history with these special animals. Biodynamics is not about replacement, but integrating the old into the new in a harmonious way.
Cosmic Light
Being creative with our use of the biodynamic preparations is a great way to gain new insights. Something I personally like to do this time of year, as autumn approaches, is to add horn silica to my biodynamic horn manure applications in the evenings. Some traditionalists may think it odd to apply horn silica in the evening; however, Maria Thun provided excellent scientific results from using this preparation at unconventional times. Horn silica can be stirred and applied on Earth/Root days because of the crystal's connection with the mineral Earth, crystallizing into form.
Consider what happens when we make the Biodynamic 501 horn silica: we take something that, in its organized state as a crystal, is transparent to light, but by crushing it into a fine powder, we make it look chalky and opaque. If you didn't know better, it seems more like lime than silica! We turn something transparent into something that reflects light. What does this mean? Rudolf Steiner tells us that we can only perceive what we can resist. If we can't resist a thought or a feeling, it simply overwhelms us, and we're just left with a vague aftereffect. Imagine someone who cannot swim flailing in the ocean – unless we can successfully push our way through water, we cannot swim. The same is true for the watery world of feelings. The ability to withstand a feeling lets us perceive its form. And a plant, too, can only perceive what it can resist. This is paradoxical, but the reason you can't see X-rays or gamma rays is that they go right through you without stopping. We can see light because our eyes can resist it. When we give horn silica to plants, we increase their capacity to perceive cosmic frequencies, to “shine” inwardly.
Additionally, I appreciate it when the horn silica can be sprayed in the evening this time of year to help prepare plants for a good year next year. Now, this last statement is a little unconventional, but we should remember that Maria Thun would use horn silica as an evening soil spray to enhance the growth of potatoes and carrots. Also she used horn silica as a spray before planting and on bare soil to awaken cosmic forces and help the soil become more receptive for future Biodynamic sprays. If we take that image and extrapolate from that, then we should be able to use it in the “evening” of the year to enhance the sweetening process in the roots. After all, Steiner says in Man as Symphony of the Creative Word that during summer, the Sun's activity is above ground. But in winter, the [ripening power of the] Summer Sun moves underground. To enhance the sugar process above ground, we spray in the morning or in the spring. To enhance the sugar process below ground, we can spray in the evening or during autumn. Especially if we want good results from soil-building cover crops, we should be using horn silica in the evenings to send more of the liquid carbon pathway down into the soil.
During the September 24th planetary grand trine in the Earth sign, this is an ideal time to spray biodynamic horn manure and/or barrel compound to bring the beneficial energies into your soils. Perhaps an application of horn silica could be added in the morning or evening to your spray.
Make Equisetum tea and add to your stir for a beneficial boost during this spray, if possible.
Service Mission
Many people contribute beneficially to their respective communities in the way of “service projects” as a way of volunteering time or resources towards giving back to what they may consider good and worthy causes. Someone might donate their time or resources to further good and just causes such as giving to the Goodwill or Habitat for Humanity, or a food bank. Of course, everyone has their own moral compass, and so what you would like to give back towards your community can be vastly different from what someone else with a distinct mission and work on planet Earth might give.
What if one were to embark on a mission dedicated to growing healthy food, maintaining healthy lands, and fostering good relations with people and the environment, while upholding integrity in the care of livestock animals and in the disposal or utilization of waste products from such a system?
Imagine working towards the creation of health and vitality of beneficial mushrooms, fungi, and bacteria in healthy, living soils, full of earthworms, all from what most of the world, or at least bigger agricultural industrial areas, needs to dispose of as a waste product.
Sowing Love
Imagine a mission that takes forward qualities like those of Saint Francis of Assisi. At the Kahumana Biodynamic farm I used to live on in Hawaii, we’d start every day with a prayer of Saint Francis, and that was a great way to bring in a beautiful impulse into the farming work.
Lord, make me an instrument of peace
where there’s hatred
Let me sow love….
Sowing love is a fertile ground, upon which many things can proliferate.
With Yarrow, you could use the energetic qualities that it contains, being related to Venus, to “sow” love.
Spraying yarrow would be a great offering if applied directly after the upcoming Venus eclipse happening on the morning of September 19th.
Take it easy, or make it easy
A simple way to use yarrow preparation is to take a teaspoon of it, stir it energetically in the typical biodynamic fashion for 5 to 10 minutes, and then spray it onto your plants.
Boom, it was that easy to apply Yarrow! While a regular biodynamic application may take upwards of four hours, you also have possibilities for a very quick stir and application that may only take 15 minutes.
Biodynamics can even become much more accessible when you start using the individual preparations regularly. You will see more effects and more results the more you use them, so get out there and try!
Even if you decide that you don’t have enough time to stir and spray the biodynamic preparations as you usually would, you could spray the barrel compost (BC) or barrel compound, which is great because it only requires a 20-minute stir.
If you are feeling short on time, you could expedite the process with some of the pre-potentized products, such as the BC and the 500P, because they charge up the soil with the full benefit of all the biodynamic compost preparations.
And if that’s a stretch for you, take some of your biodynamic preparations — whatever you have — and place them in the palm of your hand. Next, add what you hold in your best intentions for your farm for the winter, for the soil, and for the plants, trees, animals, and human inhabitants and relations. Also, add good intentions for the world around us, and then place what you’re holding in your compost pile or at the base of your favorite tree, or even sprinkle it on your favorite house plant. Biodynamic only works if you use it.
A Servant of Sacred Things
Have you ever met someone who inspired you to do better work in this world for Mother Earth herself?
Have you experienced someone with a flame of courageous will to do good in the world, and had tools that were powerful enough to make an impact? What have the elders taught us, and what shall we pass along?
When I met Hugh Courtney in 1996, I was still a young teenager; little did I know that I was about to embark on one of the greatest ventures life can offer–the opportunity to work with biodynamics! To work with an entire cosmology of elements and elemental forces, as well as foraging animals and plants, all in a galactic interplay of dynamic energy transmission.
Hugh Jordan Courtney was such a man who inspired those around him to do great things. Stoic by nature, penetrating eyes, and sly half smile, Hugh was a powerful force! After retiring from the Navy as an admiral, he stumbled upon Rudolf Steiner's agricultural course in a bookstore in College Park, Maryland, incidentally where JPI board member Michael Judge resides, and the annual Chesapeake Biodynamic Network conference convenes. It is always amazing to hear the many unique ways people “find” biodynamics.
Hugh shared that after he retired from the Navy, he became a librarian. One day in a health food and bookstore, he was randomly perusing the bookshelves, when a book literally fell or jumped off the shelves and landed in his hands. He grabbed the falling book titled Agriculture and opened to a random page. He was so struck by the first words he read that he eventually became one of the most productive Biodynamic preparation makers and teachers in the northern hemisphere. His mission statement for his future Biodynamic work was found right then and there in the page he opened to: “so that the Earth may be healed.” He carried that important mission statement with unbridled enthusiasm when he founded the Josephine Porter Institute for Applied Biodynamics. This mission statement remains today as a flaming torch of encouragement for our work.
How could one sentence out of Steiner's work inspire an entire second career after retirement?
Well, the answer may be simple. It is because biodynamics speaks to those who have ears to hear the living laws of Nature.
Real Nourishment?
On the whole, we see widespread degradation in agriculture, which relies more than ever on chemical solutions created in laboratories, most of which have no connection to anything that was ever alive – at least not within living memory. If we feed plants only things that no longer have any vestige of life, they can grow big and tall, but provide us with nothing but superficial nourishment. If we are what we eat, we may want to be cautious of superficial nourishment, what Steiner referred to as “mere stomach fillers.” We can be grateful for the growing emphasis on cover crops, buffer strips, wildlife habitats, compost teas, and more — these are all splendid things, and all are required in the Demeter standard and live at the heart of biodynamics. If we want deep thoughts, we need deep-rooted plants, not crops grown in petri dishes.
Biodynamics: costly endeavor or easy money
Importantly, as Steiner suggests, biodynamics “involves less work than the complicated trouble taken in agricultural-chemical laboratories, and which, moreover, has to be paid for.”1
Lab work is expensive and chemical purity is very costly to pursue, but the biodynamic preparations are virtually free. A single application of biodynamic preparations benefits the soil, yields, and plant production quality more than any negligible cost per acre it might require. When you buy preparations, you aren’t paying for the preparations themselves; you are investing so that preparations will continue to be made in the future. The amount of work that goes into making these preparations is enormous, and no one can be adequately compensated for the level of expertise and time investment required. Alan Chadwick said that a gardener should look at each plant every single day – how much more so for these biodynamic preparations! How can you pay anyone for a remedy that requires a significant investment of time and makes your soil exponentially more productive? When sold for such prices, the biodynamic preparations remain essential to a gift economy. From the bottom up: the animals donate their sheaths, the farmers donate the manure, the workers collect wild herbs, and all these gifts stream in from the cosmos.
Those who produce biodynamic preparations and sell them do so at a highly modest profit because the Rosicrucian maxim is to heal the sick and accept no remuneration (beyond covering necessary expenses). This is all about changing our relationship to money. We teach people how to make these preparations themselves, which undercuts what could be an exploitative business opportunity. As Hugh Courtney liked to say, the Josephine Porter Institute is “in the business of putting itself out of business.” It’s almost like we’re the people who sell fish for a living while teaching every customer who wants to learn how to fish for themselves! The point of our work is to get these tools into as many people’s hands as possible, so that the work can spread across as much of the earth's surface as possible, even if we are no longer here to support it.
Real nourishment comes from food that has been grown with access to the resources in the soil and in our spiritual atmosphere. Biodynamic food has the potential to contain an entire rainbow of forces from the dark vitality of the Moon to the cool warmth of Saturn, from calming chamomile to vivifying valerian, from rich rubies to vibrant indigo. We have the biodynamic horn silica preparation, BD 501, which harnesses solar forces for improved qualities in color, aroma, flavor, and nutritional value. Qualities of the marriage of soul-spirit with etheric-physical can restore many ailments of modern humanity who lack nourishment both physically and spiritually.
Karmic connections
Rudolf Steiner, during the weeks of his Agriculture Course, also talked in the evening in another separate seminar on karmic connections. The Burning Bush suggests that Steiner’s two main karmic tasks that he had to teach about were the law of karma and reincarnation. And by Steiner's own confession, his mission in this life was to write down a “peasant philosophy,” but he took up the task of another man, who was failing to fulfill his own destiny, to edit the scientific works of Goethe. Having sacrificed what he himself had wished to do, Steiner said that it would be “impossible” by 1924 to write the work he'd intended to compose because that wisdom was virtually all gone. But the wish to produce this had stayed in his heart for a lifetime, and one of the last — and most fruitful — things he brought the world was biodynamics. It is as if all the wisdom that had vanished from the world chose this one man as a way to secure a foothold, this man as a messenger of the old ways in a new way.
A Helper of Humanity
This peasant wisdom also included peasant recipes, recipes that an ordinary, everyday person can actually use to improve life around them. One person in particular took this work of Steiner's to heart and decided to make these ideas available to the masses.
Hugh Courtney had a powerful presence, and when he spoke with deep overtones, it was almost as if the biodynamic music of the spheres was in full concerto flow. His words sprouted imaginations like seeds germinating in fertile soil. The biodynamic thoughts and ideas he had learned from his teacher Josephine Porter took on a new form in all of those he taught, who were a lot of people. Hugh introduced thousands of people to biodynamics, and his preparations were made available worldwide and used in nearly every corner of the globe.
Hugh was such an excellent teacher, explaining both how to make the preparations and how to use them, that he inspired others to do the same.
Mycological wanderings
His biodynamic preparations had specific mycelium grown and adapted to his being and his own personal relationship with the preparations, as well as to the soils on his farm. He tended to the dynamic interplay of plants, trees, and waters, and the weather in rural Virginia, just off the Blue Ridge Parkway, where that magic is tangible at times.
These preparations, uniquely made in community and educational settings, as well as in day-to-day life, spread like a fertile fungus of a beneficial nature. You can think of the biodynamic mycelium spreading a regenerative network across the land.
However, they can only continue to spread if we use the preparations, which was another one of Courtney’s main tasks: to get people to use the preparations more often.
In fact, you might say that, besides making great preparations and having them available for the public, Hugh Courtney’s second main karmic task was to reach, inspire, and empower others to use these preparations to improve the Earth.
Proliferation of the Positive
These digests we’re sharing here are unique thoughts that have sprouted over many years of working with Hugh’s suggestions. Sometimes what seemed like an insignificant aside has erupted into flower years — or even decades — later.
Similarly, Alan Chadwick said that, “Steiner planted seeds within his young pupil that would mature of their own accord.”2 You often do not know when you are receiving a seed — or sometimes you know, but you never know when it will germinate.
A Balancing Act
Hugh was also a huge proponent of using biodynamic preparations to help create balance, which extended to balancing the internal and external weather within us on our farms and in the atmosphere. Yes, Hugh made contributions that even involved influencing the weather. If we remember that all weather is the result of the interplay between high-pressure and low-pressure zones, influencing this becomes much simpler. As Stephen Harrod Buhner notes in Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm, some microbes live in our stratosphere, without which clouds would not condense so readily. Yes, clouds precipitate around cosmic dust, but ice forms faster around these microbes and at warmer temperatures. This means that even rain is biologically influenced! There are fungi in the Amazon rainforests that wait for a strong updraft to release their spores and reseed not just the forest, but the entire planet. We can fertilize not just the soil but the atmosphere with these preparations!
Here, we can insert a practical example. We experienced some very beneficial astrological influences from the water trines with the planets last month in August. A suggestion was made that if the weather in your area was too dry, you should spray equisetum tea on your garden to encourage moisture when the moon was in optimal alignment.
Try it!
Hugh would encourage us to spray some Biodynamic preps during such dry periods as a way to counterbalance a drought. Have you tried it? I’m sure some of you did! What did you see? What were the results?
Well, during those exceptionally great planetary water trines last month, we had a few wonderful group stirs and sprays here in Colorado as a community where people came together, stirred Biodynamic preparations, and then took them out to their unique places and sprayed them.
Well, I’m also happy to say we are no longer experiencing severe drought out here in Western Colorado, as the rain gods answered our prayers and delighted us with multiple days of moisture.
Was that just good luck, good timing, or just doing it right when everything aligns? That all remains to be seen.
How do you judge the results of the biodynamic spray? You may feel that something changed in your garden or even in your heart; you may see the sunshine or the clouds in a different way. Who knows. All results are unique. The main thing is to try it!
Use it or Lose it
This leads me back to Hugh Courtney’s main task to make preparations, have them available, and help people to use them! And by using biodynamics, we can contribute towards a better future for the Earth and all her inhabitants.
With the approaching autumn season, we can look towards applying Biodynamic preparations for building soil health. We have a beautiful opportunity coming up to participate biodynamically, even amongst these challenging eclipses this month.
On September 23rd and 24th, we are set to experience a double grand trine in the Root/Earth constellations of Virgo, Capricorn, and the mighty Taurus, all coming into perfect alignment with the planet. With the Sun and Moon in front of Virgo, Uranus in Taurus, and Pluto in Capricorn, the planets will align in the sky, creating a rare “grand trine”. It is almost as if the Heavens will be especially aligned to help Earth at this time. If you were only to do one thing to benefit your land with biodynamics this month, this would be the ideal time! Biodynamics is much easier and works way better when the heavens are aligned in your favor.
Second Century Biodynamics:
Who has got the Time?
In the Agriculture lectures, Steiner suggests we use an entire hour to stir preparations before they are applied. What does this require? This is a relatively significant amount of time that we have to dedicate, but how much work does this really take from us? The average American loses 43 hours sitting in traffic per year, but that doesn’t stop most people from driving. And we spend 122 days per year sleeping – but that doesn’t stop us from going to bed at night! In biodynamics, we are literally only asking for a few extra hours a year. Anyone who says biodynamics is “too much work” is mistaking farming and biodynamics. Farming and gardening are the hard work! Biodynamics is the fun part.
Gettin’ Spicy
If you’re cooking a meal, the time-consuming part is cooking, not “seasoning” the dish! Biodynamics is like adding delicious herbs to a well-prepared meal: it won’t fix a bad meal, but it will make a good recipe even better.
Once, a fantastic orchardist told a group of workshop participants that spraying biodynamic preparations is a four-hour task. It takes an hour to get everything ready: retrieve the biodynamic preparations, find the stirring vessel, get the best water (and perhaps heat it), and get the sprayer or whisk and bucket ready. Then you have a full hour that the Biodynamic preparation needs to be stirred. Next, we will need to strain the preps to remove the leftover debris if we intend to put them through a spray rig. Then we have the actual spray application.
And finally, we have the clean up, rinsing out the bucket, filters, and sprayer, and putting everything back where it belongs. The entire process of stirring and spraying can take about four hours, or half of a single waking day. But how much is this really? We have some 6,132 waking hours a year, and even a four-hour spraying process is, what, only 0.065% of the waking year! Biodynamics isn’t asking much of you at all, even though it may seem like it at the time!
(Spiritual) Passive Income
If you think about it, it’s easy to mess things up in the garden: planting at the wrong time, forgetting to irrigate, watering too much, or plowing when the soil is too wet. There are some enormously expensive “innovations” that gardeners and farmers try, only to end up costing them time, energy, and money. But what does biodynamics risk? A few hours at most, and not just that: biodynamics keeps working while you’re asleep. Most human interventions in the soil deplete fertility, but not biodynamic sprays, not compost teas. If it is done right, biodynamics saves you time by continuing to support fertility even while you’re doing other things.
Going between the rows and through the gardens, this is the beautiful part of biodynamics: the hands-on doing of biodynamics. The Josephine Porter Institute is for Applied Biodynamics, but if you think about it, biodynamics is already a kind of applied anthroposophy. The wisdom carried by the biodynamic preparations restores to the earth everything needed for beneficial growth – things regularly ignored by conventional (and even organic) agriculture.
What we are dealing with here is the physical manifestation of some of Steiner's most potent spiritual ideas. Think for a moment about all the works of Rudolf Steiner – he rarely assigns specific practical tasks to do, especially those that are not some sort of meditative activity or spiritual inward exercise.
With biodynamics, Steiner provides specific practical indications for creating a new type of Agriculture, new kinds of soil remedies, and completely new ways of understanding working with plants.
A Good Cookbook?
The recipes for the creation of the biodynamic preparations were one of the scarce times that Steiner actually prepared a “recipe” that everyday people can use. While Steiner did provide specific, recipe-like indications in his medical lectures, his agricultural lectures are a creature of their own. One can note that this is a rare exception in otherwise abstract spiritual-scientific ideological pontifications, where Steiner’s ideas can be discussed endlessly, but with little consideration for practical application.
You can study Steiner's life and find some surprisingly practical offerings to the world. Some of the most useful were towards the end of his life on Earth. Anthroposophical medicine was created to work with herbs, metals, plants, and even planets. Waldorf education was designed as free education for laborers in a cigarette factory, in part to mitigate the revolutionary conflagration of the day. But biodynamics takes the cake when it comes to practical development and spiritualizing the earth element itself.
Who would be qualified to practice Anthroposophical medicine? Significant study and training are required to develop these remedies. So while you may be able to receive anthroposophical medicine, it may be hard to make it your own, as the remedies are made in laboratories under controlled conditions by advanced, trained medical and homeopathic practitioners.
Waldorf education is the most successful private educational movement in the world. Educating the head, heart, and hands has proven its merit the world over. Waldorf teachers are highly trained in many practical arts, as well as in the unfolding idea of the spiritual and soul development that emerges from their students. Exceptional creativity develops when individuals are freed from the usual constraints instilled by the modern public educational system. However, such an education system is not strictly necessary, as Steiner himself indicates when he praises people like Rabindranath Tagore, who was quite critical of his own childhood education and yet was able to overcome it and become a truly remarkable individual. Many of the most extraordinary people in biodynamics did not grow up as anthroposophists or grow up in any biodynamic context whatsoever. Quite the contrary, some of the brightest stars in biodynamics overcame an enormous world of inherited preconceptions to find their way to this way of thinking – and that initiative burns in them still.
Biodynamics the Beautiful
The beauty of biodynamics is that it is a gift to the ordinary day-to-day person. It was never intended to be an elite product but a kind of reincarnation of decentralized peasant wisdom in a post-industrial society. Biodynamics is a practice that continues to give after the deed has been done. It keeps working without further intervention. Anyone can use biodynamics; you don't have to be a trained professional! It is the peasants' philosophy and practical guide to working with the physical and spiritual world to create a new Earth.
With biodynamics, may we see a new Earth!
Go Biodynamic–for Life!
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So many rich nuggets, quotes, phrases. Thank you thank you! 🙏