CHAPTER TWELVE

MY LIFE’S WORK

As part of my book I want to describe what Biodynamic farming means to me. Every Biodynamic farmer would probably bring out different aspects, but the following is what is important to me. I have tried to describe the farm ecosystem and how I attempted to create this on my last farm built. Especially hard is trying to write about the different levels of the spiritual world and how they manifest in nature without using Anthroposophical terms and assuming the reader is in the least bit familiar with Rudolf Steiner’s writings. As Biodynamic farming can be a lifelong study, and I still enjoy visiting farms and picking up new ideas I have decided to add these chapters at the end, rather than interspersing the ideas throughout the book.

The Great Artist of the Landscape

The spirituality of the earth has always been important to me. As I mentioned before, when I was nine, walking home through the bush, I experienced losing my oneness with nature. By farming my whole life, I could at least be out in nature and enjoy myself. Trying to make a living from nature has been hard but I have always had my spiritual beliefs that kept me going. When most people think of nature they think about a secluded spot or time spent in a national park. For me, nature is all around me when I farm. I like to think of a farmer as the great artist of the landscape. Every decision we make changes the look of the land. Mankind most impinges on nature where we grow our food and on the whole we have done a terrible job. Just think of the corn and bean farms of the Midwest, where people are literally not welcome. Not only are they dangerous places to visit because of known chemical hazards, but there is no place for humans. The farmer could show you his farm but it would be in a pickup truck in a cloud of dust along endless rows of corn or beans. Even worse are the chicken houses, the beef lots and huge dairy farms.
A Biodynamic farm is diversified, it is interesting and it is beautiful. It is a place that people like to visit and where they feel welcome. Not only does it grow food that nourishes, but people feel connected and safe.
I was lucky in that I could farm the land and grow good food. My late wife Joan, with the help of our two children, had the social ability to welcome people into our house and farm. Later Susan and I married and she had this same social ability. In particular, she guides people to find destiny paths….. and what better place to search than on visits to a Biodynamic farm? Thus on our farm in Wisconsin, we invited her friends to visit for the weekend, as part of our “Kindred Spirits” network. I would take them walking through the pastures and in one, I would invite them to sit in a circle as gradually the curious cows would gather around. There I would talk about the spirituality of the earth and Biodynamic farming.
As I wrote earlier, my turning point in life was when I was going through some very hard times in my marriage and the most incredible being of light and love suddenly visited me. I experienced the greatest wonder and appreciation of everything that I had done in my life and felt understood, accepted, honored and loved. Many years later, I had a similar experience of love, only not quite so intense. As background, let me explain that, for me, cows are part of the earth. The cow, in her being of loyalty to the land and the cosmos, belongs to the landscape. One late August afternoon, I was getting the cows ready for milking and they were being stubborn. It was hot and muggy and I was irritated, as I had more hay to make. As I walked past one of the cows, I happened to look into her eyes and we began a deep conversation. For my part, I said “I am sorry, please forgive my irritability, but I’ve got problems. “ In reply, she communicated back to me incredible forgiveness and love. I experienced the earth welling up through this cow. The earth, as a being of light and love, came shining through the eyes of this cow. I was startled yet deeply moved that, in my frustration; I was allowed to experience this union with the earth. Thinking about it later, I realized that it was the same love I had experienced when I was thirty-three and the Being I think of as Christ visited me. I then understood that the being of Gaia is now permeated with light and love, and that this light and love are being extended to all mankind now in an unlimited fashion.
Out of this stems my growing love of nature and the Being of the earth imbued with love. My life’s path has not been scholarly but more a life of doing. My main inspiration has always come from Anthroposophy but often there was no energy left in the evenings to study. One of the nice things about being a dairy farmer is that you are forgiven if you fall asleep at meetings. Now that I am not farming and can be more awake, I want to share how my experiences allowed me to see the spirituality of the earth and how Biodynamic farming led me to my world view.
My experience of the earth being imbued with light and love is further confirmed by meditation. When I look deep into the earth in my imagination, I move through matter, and experience the earth as hollow, surrounded at the periphery by light-filled crystal, dissolving into darkness. The hollow earth itself emanates light and love. The first time this happened I was surprised, as I expected density, weight, matter and gravity.
In my reading from Anthroposophy, mainly Sergei Prokofieff and Jesaiah Ben Aharon, these imaginations are confirmed. To me, they are most attuned to the changing earth. Also, in a course on Geomancy with Marko Pogacnik, I started to actually experience the spiritual landscape that underlies the physical.
The being of light and love that I experience is personal and present but also historical and cosmic. For me, this being is the Christ Spirit, the being of light and love, the beloved one, who has accompanied the earth and humankind from the beginning of time. This is the god that ruled from the sun realms, so all peoples have venerated this being in one form or another. For instance, the Egyptians called him the mighty sun God Ra and the Greeks called him Apollo. Slowly, during our descent onto the earth, he drew closer to the earth too and incarnated into the being of Jesus, and then united his being with mankind and with the earth. By this act, he made his new home on the earth for all time to come. This was a gift from the spiritual world, as we had lost our connection to spirit. In the past, our way of being was spirit-imbued. We still beheld and experienced spirit in matter. Now when we think about nature, we experience an abyss. ….we cannot cross the bridge between matter and spirit in our thinking. When we see a tree, we only see the physical tree. We do not see the spiritual tree, imbued with life force, or the spiritual beings that surround the tree. People with spiritual vision do see them. Now we are starting a new era, when our spiritual organs of perception are reawakening so that more and more people can again see the spirit in matter. We are starting to see the etheric world with new spiritual sense organs. At a later time, we will be able to understand this realm and then to co-create with it. Even now there are forerunners. The Findhorn community in Scotland has been creating an oasis where none could be expected to be. By taking direction from the nature spirits, they have miraculously created a lush garden out of sand dunes.
As time goes on, over the next several thousand years, people will experience and live into this realm Anthroposophist call “the etheric.” Already some people live without food by tapping into spiritual energies. The physical will less and less be able to support us. My favorite grace expresses this so well:
The bread is not our food What feeds us in the bread Is God’s eternal word Is spirit, and is life.
It is the spiritual forces in the food that sustain and nourish us. This is why Biodynamics is so important to me. By looking into the spiritual world, Rudolf Steiner has given us a way to grow food with the spiritual forces that are necessary to enrich humanity.