Update: Fall Biodynamic Workshop 2024
friends, community building, photos and more
There are many reasons to participate in a biodynamic workshop. Perhaps you’re a farmer, and you want to revitalize your land. Or maybe you’re a gardener who wants to participate in making remedies that help heal the earth. Or perhaps your motive force is the wellsprings of anthroposophy. Or maybe you don’t garden at all, but you intuit that biodynamics is a meaningful way to work with other people to make the world a bit better. After all, regardless of where we live and work, none of us are “separate” from Nature by the very fact that we live and move and eat from the same Earth. As a fish cannot live out of water, we cannot live outside the Earth — but like fish belong to the ocean and are a part of it, we too are part of the Earth.
No matter your walk in life, I always like to remind people that the most significant transformation is the change made within one’s own imagination. After all, the imagination is a function of the will. The deliberate practice of making the preparations year after year — none of which would ever happen by accident — disciplines how you imagine things to include new creative pathways. By doing the work with regularity, the imagination is transformed, and, as an aftereffect, concepts are developed.
Biodynamics does not begin with the ideas, it begins with doing the work. As we begin with the sense-perceptible world, then experience feelings evoked from outside, and eventually — if we are attentive — discover spiritual concepts from these experiences. While we arrive last at the spiritual ideas, they were there first. We arrive at living ideas from the wisdom of repeated experience, out of the gentle empiricism of practical life.
As Hugh Courtney liked to say, “Biodynamics is not an intellectual path, it is a path of the will.” But what does this mean? It means that those who go out of their way to do the work, even when it’s inconvenient, are the ones sharing our path. A librarian like JPI’s founder, Hugh Courtney, was obviously a big reader, so he understood the ideas undergirding biodynamics. Nonetheless, he knew it’s not enough to know “about” biodynamics; we must participate with our own two hands. It does not matter how many cookbooks I read if I don’t practice cooking consistently. If we mistake biodynamics for a formulaic recipe, we have already fallen out of the “realm of the living” into fossilized thinking.
Every year for most of my time farming, I have been making biodynamic preparations even when I don’t need them. It is the practice that makes perfect. Even if I make preparations for another thirty years, that’s only another thirty times I get to practice since most can only be made once a year. It’s been a blessing to be involved with JPI, where I regularly help make preparations in Floyd, Virginia, and again in the same season on my own farm — this “doubles” the number of times I get to practice, but it’s still so little in one lifetime. How can anyone become an “expert” in something they can only ever do a few dozen times before dying? But it’s the doing that is key. Barring acts of God, the future is my habits today multiplied by time. What I am not actively working on today will not be any better in the future. As Goethe says, “Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.”
By Thursday, October 17th, folks started gathering at our farm on the eastern shore in Accomac, Virginia. They helped us empty out the transformed horn manure buried last fall. Most of our guests camped on-site, some stayed nearby, and a few in the farmhouse.
It’s been a busy season, so our horn manure at Perennial Roots Farm had remained in the ground for an entire year. But we got those horns up, emptied, and 2000 horns filled and buried again before Sunday was over. Great work, folks!
We emptied the horns with helpers on Thursday and then immediately started refilling them with manure gathered from the farm. As Steiner says in the Agriculture Course, “On the whole, it is best to leave them in the ground until one uses them. If they are to be used in early Autumn, they should be left in the ground till the moment when they are wanted. The manure will not suffer through this.”1 Given that horn manure often takes longer to transform in Virginia — Hugh Courtney indicates that we must wait until Ascension before unearthing it — it’s not unreasonable to give them a full year of treatment. Even the manure that was thoroughly wet had no offensive odor. We threw out about three horns’ worth out of over six hundred buried, about a 99.5% success rate, though chromas haven’t been made yet to demonstrate quality as pictures. If you can afford to do so and can manage to keep roots from consuming the contents of the horns, a full-year burial tends to give pretty consistent results.
Friday evening, for the opening ceremonies, we invited Fr Mike Imperial to give a blessing to the pit, consecrating this plot of earth in service of humanity and the spiritual world. Fr Mike told me that he could see this group of people thought outside the box. They’d been in the box, didn’t like it, and he knew he couldn’t read a formulaic prayer from a book. He spoke, instead, extemporaneously and from the heart about healing the earth and bringing justice back into social relations, particularly for those actively displaced by violence. By the end of the event, he’d shared time speaking one-on-one with almost everyone there and had received multiple invitations to return or visit with us at our other events at the Christian Community in College Park, Maryland.
We were fortunate to welcome Michael Judge of the Chesapeake Biodynamic Network, who presented a talk of enormous scope exploring the comparative morphology of the skulls of humanoids over time, the evolution of consciousness, the fall, and the possibility of redemption — and how all this relates to biodynamics, believe it or not! He brought museum-grade replicas and connected biodynamics not just to geology but to ancient mystery centers and the future unfolding of the human spirit. In short, we are to a point in the development of the Earth that, left to itself, she will die out. This is a hard pill to swallow, but conscientious and repeated efforts must be made out of free human initiative to keep the Earth alive. Out of this conscious participation, a new renaissance of biodiversity will emerge, but this is precisely not by withdrawing from Nature into technocratic bastions and leaving Nature to her own demise.
On the contrary, we do not participate with Nature enough. We are alienated from Nature, yes, but that doesn’t mean further alienation is the answer. We forget that within the household of Nature, there is no waste, and we are part of Nature. The task now falls to us to keep the Earth alive. It is almost as if the archangels governing the seasons have “let go” so that we might step up to the task of renewing fertility consciously each season. This isn’t a task that stops at the edges of our own little garden plots but one that extends across the entire globe.
Patrick Dodson, who has presented various biochar and biodynamic workshops in Virginia and Maryland, graciously helped lead a session making Barrel Compound (BC) for the farm. We ran out of bricks, so we cut pecan logs to line a new pit. Everyone got a chance to participate in the good work together. This is a way to create new soil and feed your plants throughout the growing season. In the garden, I use Barrel Compound between crop rotations and whenever I disturb the soil.
Fresh salads, directly from our gardens, piled high with beautiful radicchio, sweet cabbage, heirloom tomatoes, succulent cucumbers, radishes, and turnips, were served with each meal, with vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free options available. The vegan winter squash poblano soup was a particular hit with folks. No one went hungry, to say the least!
We offer a sliding scale for tickets, allowing attendees to pay what they can afford. This helps people who can’t afford as much to attend for less, and everyone was able to enjoy the workshop as equals, fostering community in the process.
Our next autumn biodynamic workshop will be in Accomac, Virginia, October 17-20th, 2025. Save the date!
What do you most enjoy about biodynamic workshops? Is it the food? The community? The spiritual work? Being outdoors? Working with the land? Something else?
R. Steiner, Lecture IV, Agriculture Course (G327, 12 June 1924, Koberwitz)
Such a resounding success.. Wish I could have come . Thanks for Sharing :)Sharon
Saving the date! My favorite part of Biodynamics was then I stirred the first time, in community, with Mark Voss leading—he changed the course of my life forever. Now every time I stir at my own home I remember that time and am so thankful he opened my senses to the power. Now I feel spiritually nourished and am thankful for the devotional practice.