Biodynamic Digest #19
Prepared for Sunday, November 30
With your friends Stewart Lundy and Lloyd Nelson
Liturgy of the Seasons with Max Leyf
THIRTY-FOURTH WEEK OF THE YEAR
Geheimnisvoll das Alt-Bewahrte
Mit neu erstandnem Eigensein
Im Innern sich belebend fühlen:
Es soll erweckend Weltenkräfte
In meines Lebens Außenwerk ergießen
Und werdend mich ins Dasein prägen.
∇∆
SCARCE-known yet long-preserved of old
now a flood of newly-fangled presence
rises inwardly as feeling tide:
bestirring forces from the world wide
pour withal into my lifetime’s mould
where I shall set my seal upon existence
“God sleeps in the rock, dreams in the plant, stirs in the animal and awakens in man.” ~ Ibn Arabi
December 6th astronomical highlight:
The last planetary astronomical trine of the year that is highlighted as Specially Good in the Maria Thun almanac occurs on December 6. Mercury will trine Jupiter at exactly a 120-degree aspect on the morning of December 6 in the light/air constellations of Libra and Gemini.
Flower (sp good from 12am to 2pm)
Air and Light constellations in biodynamic astronomy
This planetary alignment is special and will be an excellent time to use biodynamic preparations on gardens, shrubs, and trees to stimulate and activate the Light and Life of the minerals realm in the Earth. We can activate soil and soul transformation with the festival of the Advent Season
Advent: Preparing for the return of the Light
The rhythmic cycle of the year approaches the cold darkness of the winter months. Inwardly the experience of summer’s external warmth fading, as we approach the longest night of the year. Warmth has moved inside now: the fires in our stoves, the bundling in layers of wool, and the intensified metabolism. Below the cold topsoil, there is a mysterious realm that, just like us with cold skin, actually grows warmer during winter. When Steiner says the “summer sun” is active below ground during winter, this isn’t a pure fancy: the ripening power of the sun really is under the ground as we experience sweeter root vegetables. In the human being, attention is withdrawn from the peripheral nervous system of the skin and turned inwards. What lives in our soul as remembrance of gifts of spring, summer and autumn, growth and return, can light our way in the darkness of the months ahead. During this time, we reflect on the past and, if we are attentive, sift through the muck of experience and find flecks of precious gold.
The biodynamic practitioner can look at this turning inwards towards the darkness as one of the most important times of the year, and for a very important reason: we behold the coming light and carry that into the darkness of our time.
We can carry the gifts that the Earth provided during the growing season, and bring that impulse forward towards the future, or as Shabari Bird likes to say, “forward from the future!”
Some may say the farming season has just ended, while others may suggest it has just begun. We shift from external seasonal work towards the inner work, as we are the primary movers and actors on the stage of the universe. We have found that the next four weeks are among the best times to improve soil health on a biodynamic farm. The Earth in the Northern Hemisphere shifts towards a wintery inward aliveness, while the Southern Hemisphere experiences summer’s outward growth. During autumn and winter, the Earth “refills” with humus, water, and soluble nutrients.
The reciprocal cycle of birth, life and death, and the return to source is a common experience we can behold. We can indolently sit back and let these experiences pass by, or we can take pause, and grapple with the inevitable and enter into the mood of creation and existence, life and death, and the continuous cycle that makes life on our Earth possible.
Rudolph Steiner suggested we create new festivals that are adapted to local conditions and are tuned with the rhythmic cyclical breathing of the Earth. As we embark into the darkest time of year, we can look forward to physical and spiritual renewal, when the light returns and overcomes the tenebrosity of the cold nights of winter. Winter on Earth turns into the summer of our soul.
The preparation for the return of the light can inwardly be illumined by a conscious appreciation for the minerals, the plants and animals, and our fellow human beings who share this Earthly existence. Over the course of the next four weeks, what we do inwardly in our soul life can relate to and even vastly improve what we experience outwardly in the coming year. This is the importance of carrying the “spiritual” light forward from all that was experienced as good, true and just.
Pioneer of the early years of the biodynamic movement, Ehrienfried Pfeiffer shares in Biodynamic Farming and Gardening: Renewal and Preservation of Soil Fertility that the biodynamic farmer “would like to express a more general human view. He is convinced that the cleverest methods of technology and chemistry alone do not suffice to make good farmers, even when they have mastered them well. It is a peculiarity of the farming vocation to deal with ‘living matter.’ Our entire inner attitude has to take this fact into consideration. Technology and our attitudes must be brought into harmony before improvement seems possible.
I am aware of the fact that this statement will often be set aside as impractical or impertinent to the problems of Western countries; idealism doesn’t not pay the bills. Although life, health, and lack of health can be expressed numerically, they are far from being something one can buy and sell. We must bear in mind the fact that we have here a creative task to perform. First, however, to create something new requires a building plan; we must have the idea for this if we don’t want to be taught by the damage that arises from uncontrolled empiricism.”1
The “living matter” Phieffer specifies can be consciously worked with, and this is a true task of the biodynamic farmer and gardener. Earth, water, air, and fire are the building blocks of minerals, plants, animals, and humanity. What is “living matter”? Put most simply, it is matter that wishes to become something else. It is no longer hardened into calcified forms, but possess a vital potential energy to unfold eagerly into something else. As a seed desires to become a plant, so too does matter become imbued with will – “astrality” – when treated appropriately, as in the case of manure compost which imparts the soul-qualities of the animals to the earth.
During this twilight time of year, inner work becomes future outward expression, if only we have ears to hear and eyes to see. To contemplate with spiritualized thought, during the darkest time of year, is one of the most powerful ways to break through the hardened crust of materialism, ennobling our actions in the next season. We sow the seeds of the future now.
For this first week of the Advent season, we will consider the gifts of the mineral realm:
The First Light of Advent is the Light of Stone
Stones that live in crystals, seashells, and bones. - R. Steiner
What is Advent?
If we take a step back, we find that wild animals have their reproductive cycles rigidly attached to the seasons, but as we move towards domestication and, at the center of civilization, humanity, the reproductive power is unmoored from cosmic rhythms. Yes, there remains a vestige of lunar cycles in women, but not strictly aligned with the planet in the sky. As humanity has become more “liberated” from the dictates of the cosmos, we have a twofold trial: we attain freedom, but also descend into prodigality. The “kali yuga” in Vedic tradition is a spiritual dark age.
The Dwapara Yuga – the “age of light” – before the depth of the Kali Yuga was an age of spirit moving into matter, which manifested as magic. We have, according to Rudolf Steiner, the Kali Yuga ended in 1899. According to Paramahansa Yogananda’s guru, Sri Sri Yukteswar [Shree Shree YOOK tess var], the Kali Yuga ended in 1699, and with it a new movement of the spiritualization of matter: the discovery of electromagnetic frequencies, radiation, fiber optics, among many other things. Regardless of the precise date, the mere fact that the spiritual dark age has technically ended does not mean its effects are gone. We live in the crumbling of a hardened world out of which new life will be born.
During the cycle of ages, the last era has been one of darkness for the soul, the “cave” into which the Son of God incarnates. We find this pattern in microcosm every winter, when the outer world dies back. In the darkness of winter, the generosity of the Sun is born anew. The Kali Yuga has been the “summer of materialism.” As Steiner says in his Calendar of the Soul:
I can perceive now joyfully
The autumn’s spirit-waking:|
The winter will arouse in me
The summer of the soul.
Externally, we are experiencing the autumn of materialism which is the spring of spiritual life. It is the autumnal qualities, under the banner of the Archangel Michael, that point to the future. The world is better for having a serpent in it, but it must be kept underfoot.
According to Dr. Karl Koenig, founder of the Camphill Community movement, before human reproductive processes were liberated from the annual cycles, he goes so far as to claim that in a previous stage of human development, all human beings gave birth in December. Of course, this is nothing that can be proved empirically, but it is a provocative thought. There is no plagiarism that great beings align with this primal rhythm. Reality rhymes with itself.
‘Thousands of useless words have been spoken about, “When poverty is complete, he is God” But if there is no blasphemy in the words, then it means that “when poverty is completed, God appears; you find Him and see Him.” If the meaning isn’t that, then what difference can there be between you and a Christian?’ - Rumi’s master, Shams of Tabriz
Into the darkness shines the Light, and the darkness does not understand it. According to some Kabbalists, in order to test us, our higher faculties are all taken away from us when a test arrives – we enter into a deep forgetfulness, and that’s the real test: not what the head grasps, but what the heart learned. The Kali Yuga has been just such a test for humanity, with the necessarily mixed results of any trial. In Rudolf Steiner’s view, humanity had to forget its connection to the past and to memories of past lives to become fully individuated. This is where we have been tested. How will we act with no memories of the primal past? Or severed from living traditions? Adrift in a world of atomized individuals, how will we choose to behave? Our external successes do not judge us, but by what we have improved. As Egyptian tombs display the heart weighed against a feather, will we be found to have hearts lighter than air? To those who much is given, much is expected; but to those who little is given, little is expected. There are more bodhisattvas in disguise than you might ever realize in the blanket of this all-encompassing darkness that is only now moving towards dawn.
In winter, all the planetary powers move together within the Earth, a recapituation of the fertile “seed chaos” from which all fertility emerges. And yet, new seeds are not produced in winter, but in summer: during the Kali Yuga the seeds of the next cycle are being matured.
As the alchemist Michael Sendivogius [Send i VOHG ee us] writes, “it is a wonderful thing to see Nature thus obey the Seed, and that, withoutconſtraint, but of her own free will. In like manner God grants to Man whatever he will, not that he is forced thereto, but out of his own good, and free Pleasure.”2
As Ehrenfried Pfeiffer warns us, what we see as problems on the farm are usually consequences not from what we did during the same season, but from the previous year – or even years earlier. This is the process of karmic influences: we are living in the effects of earlier lives, and do not receive our recompense within a single life but in the “world to come.” This is why it is all the more urgent that we sow the right seeds as we move into the autumn of materialism. Its soil has not yet warmed – all we can see is its foliage changing color and its vitality retracting. The spiritual life must be interiorized and ascetic relative to the bacchanalia of late capitalism, as we rapidly deplete what fossil fuel reserves remain faster than ever – as if the party will never end. Biodynamics exists for a world where organic matter is depleted as much as crude oil. In the meantime, the powers that be cannot see biodynamics as a “threat” because it isn’t: it is the nativity of a world that dwells within the realm of the living not the tricks of sinister sorceries or the machinations of seething and contradictory technologies.
In winter, new minerals are born, liberated into solubility out of parent material in the soil. Even where soils appear to have nothing “plant available,” the vast majority of nutrients remain locked up in the soil. During the frost-thaw action in winter, new soluble nutrients are freed. The deeper you can get a plant’s roots into the soil, the more they are able to access what is referred to as an “ocean of nutrients” below the ground. It is always the topsoil that is weathered most, and soluble nutrients move downwards year by year. It is essential to encourage deep rooting in our plants, and winter is the time of interior growth within the soil.
This is an excellent time of year to add rock minerals to your compost piles. We say add to compost piles, not directly on the soil, for a specific reason: In biodynamics, we do our best to keep all of our fertility measures within our best realm of the living.
Steiner shares that “any mineral fertilizer gradually reduces the nutritive value of whatever is grown on the field where is used; that is a completely general law.”3
“[E]verything is being mechanized and mineralized nowadays, but the fact is that what is mineral should work only in the way it does in nature. Unless you incorporate it and do something else you shouldn’t introduce anything that is mineral or totally lifeless into the living soil. This will not be feasible by tomorrow, but by the day after tomorrow, it will certainly become a matter of course.”4
One easy to use product for remineralizing the soil is Azomite. This is an ancient volcanic ash containing a full spectrum of mineral elements mined in eastern Utah. An addition of this Azomite can greatly help to remineralize the soil and improve crop yields. Adding Azomite to your compost pile is one of the simplest ways to add minerals through a living process, and this compost can later be spread on your gardens and fields.
Basalt rock powder is also an excellent addition for compost piles and an easy way to add new minerals to your soil. Both Azomite and Basalt rock powder are commercially available and are a cost-effective solution to improving soil health. The use of Barrel Compound (BC) delivers a dilute dose of this “volcano power” and is particularly useful in areas that have not historically been centers of volcanic activity. Stewart uses basalt dust for his Barrel Compound that is hand-crushed by folks in Tepetlixpa, Mexico, from the active volcano Popocatépetl, gratefully sent by Ricardo. There is something special about plants: they always seem to prefer what is new. So what is newer, geologically speaking, than basalt from an active volcano? Moreover, the more human participation goes into any preparation, the more it is imbued with soul qualities. Machines, at least as we have them now, merely break things apart or physically mix them, adding very little – and often destroying valuable subtleties. Rudolf Steiner tells us that when rocks are crushed, the rock “group” identify feels pleasure, much as the plant world feels pleasure when you pluck its ripe fruits. Liberating what has died into excessively hardened form brings joy to the world.
If we were to add these rock minerals directly to the soil we can often see improvements. When we run these same rock minerals through the compost process, we would make the nutrients more available to plants and easier to assimilate.
Similar to eating salt for us, salt added to a meal is delicious, salt on its own is salty! For the soil, minerals that have been incorporated through the compost process are delicious for soil life, wher as minerals added directly to the soil are hard to digest and maybe even give the soil a tummy ache so to speak. It is difficult to grasp at first, but Steiner tells us that all nutrition is ultimately “homeopathic” – we only ever assimilate a tiny fraction of the nutritive value of the food we eat, and the same goes for agricultural applications of things such as limestone. Plants only assimilate a tiny amount of what we spread in bulk quantities over the field. In fact, they assimilate such small amounts that there must be a better way to apply that small quantity in bioavailable forms. This is what the biodynamic preparations do: they deliver to plants forces and nutrients needed in a way they can use them directly. What is attained with bulk quantities of material can be attained, nutritively, with biodynamics. It’s not that we won’t apply fertilizers, but as Dr. Elaine Ingham has suggested, composted fertilizers become so much more bioavailable that you need only perhaps 2% of what you’d need if you applied bulk materials raw to your fields.
One reason, biodynamic Barrel Compound (BC), is so effective is because we add rock minerals to the beginning of the composting process, and they are fully digested by the time this product gets used in the Field and Gardens.
Another biodynamic process of using the minerals in unique ways derives from using biodynamic horn silica preparation. The only known plant that absolutely requires silica is Equisetum arvense, but virtually all plants benefit from even tiny amounts of soluble silica. But they need so little, it can seem like nothing is being sprayed out at all! But the benefits are very real. Consider if a plant would benefit from even one part per trillion of soluble silica, you need a miniscule amount to benefit an entire acre – perhaps as little as the size of a pea!
Here we are crunching silica rich quartz minerals into a fine powder. This fine silica powder made into a biodynamic remedy can vastly impoverish the quality of the whatever agricultural products you are producing. Some Biodynamic prep makers even go as far as to add Gold to the powdered quartz to boost the effectiveness.
Gold is often associated with wealth, power and status. It is accumulated and hoarded, and is a luxury and is linked to corruption, and even cultural dominance. In polar contrast, biodynamic folks use Gold for its association with the Sun and the heart, and we use it as a spray to gift the gold back to the land, in a celebration of the Sun’s life-giving essence.
“Seek the heart, not instincts! Where is the place of the heart? The heart is hidden…. The moment the bright light of the Truth reflects upon the heart, the heart becomes joyful. Then in a moment, that light disappears, but many times it happens like this so that the heart might become a heart. It burns, and many times the heart gets broken, until it melts and only God remains.” - Rumi’s mentor, Shams of Tabriz
Gold is one of the primary ingredients in the Three Kings Preparation used on many Biodynamic farms worldwide to ring in the new year. These are royal gifts fitting for a spiritual king. By tradition, the three “kings” (or magi) were named: Melchior hailed from Persia, Gaspar from India, and Balthazar from Arabia.
It’s not too late to order your three kings preparation – but now’s the time!
The minerals are the building blocks of existence, and the turning of the season is an excellent time to give gratitude for the creation of Life on Earth.
Advent is four weeks of build-up to the annual spiritualization of the Earth and the beginning of a new cycle.
Go Biodynamic
For Life!
pg. XI
Novum lumen chymicum, 1604
C/G ag pg 136.
C/G Ag pg 137
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These posts are bodhisattvas in words! Many thanks again for the 'alchemy'💝