CHAPTER FOUR
The Flight of a Hawk….and Biodynamics

My life seems to go in cycles and every seventh year, things change for me. When I was seven, I choose to go to boarding school and then again at fourteen, I made a major change. I was very close to Liesbet and at this time she married a sheep farmer. Her husband to be, Rod had a beautiful hill farm with seven thousand sheep and four hundred beef cattle, all on sixteen hundred acres. The farm looked like a park and was located at the end of a seven-mile gravel road. The land was divided into many paddocks and the greenness stretched from one hill to the next. In the hollows there were lakes and ponds and patches of native bush. Here and there would be flocks of sheep and cattle and there was a quietness pervading the whole. During my vacations, I would stay on the farm and help with the work. All the stock work was done on horseback and at lambing time we would spend six to eight hours riding around helping any ewes that were having problems and saving lost lambs. It would be springtime and on a beautiful day with a blue sky, the hawks wheeling overhead, the lambs playing and the gentle calling of the mothers, I felt that life was good. There were other days when the rain would be driving across the saddle and by lunch my hands would be so stiff and cold that I could barely undo the girth straps and take off the bridle. This too brings back memories of animals saved and good work done.
In contrast to this, school was not so fulfilling. Looking back, I realize that high school could not give me what I needed. I wanted to be part of the world and to succeed. I worked hard to be successful in school academics and sports. I had friends but by sixteen I felt disappointed in humanity and was pinning for the solitude of the farm. While I didn’t realize it at the time, school had no room for my search for spirit and I learned to hide my true being. I liked farming where I could get away from people and I really enjoyed the work and being in nature. Nature can seem hard and indifferent but it accepted the way I was. I decided that my vocation would be farming.
I graduated from High School in 1966 when the hippie movement was in full swing and we thought we could change the world. Rachael Carson’s book Silent Spring confirmed my suspicion that we were fighting nature, traveling down a destructive road. The photographs of our planet from outer space were particularly moving to me, letting me experience how beautiful but fragile our earth is.
After high school, I worked on farms for two years and then went to agricultural school for two six-month periods, with a six-month farm stint between them. During those first two years on farms, I was doing correspondence courses and after all this I got my agriculture diploma. This sequence gave me a good grounding in conventional farming while searching for a way that would acknowledge the spirituality of the earth and allow me to work with these forces.
I was lucky in that my parents were sympathetic to my interests and introduced me to Biodynamic farming. Here I found a belief that the physical world is a reflection of the spiritual world, and that we could work directly with these spiritual forces. At this time I was working on a beautiful farm that was on a plateau wedged between the ocean and mountains. I spent many hours sitting on a tractor doing field work. By modern standards, these were smaller tractors with no cabs, air-conditioning or radios. You are not so cut off from nature as you are now on the modern tractors. Ploughing was especially fun. There is a real skill in keeping the rows straight and even, and as the front wheel of the tractor moves slowly down the furrow, you can look behind and watch the earth roll over in long ridges. The gulls would follow all day long, looking for grubs and worms, and it was very peaceful. I would be by myself all day and had no access to the media such as newspapers or television. I had become interested in Anthroposophy and would study in the evenings. One night I was lying in bed, meditating when I experienced myself floating in the corner of the room looking down at my body. This really freaked me out as I didn’t know how to get back in. The shock drew me back into my body but as I had nobody to talk to about this experience, I decided to stop that particular meditation. Now of course I would love to repeat the experience but my mind is too full of distraction.
While working on this farm, I had an accident and cut my wrist with a chainsaw. I cut two tendons and the hospital had to put my arm in a cast. I could not work for two months and took this opportunity to visit some Biodynamic farms. I was especially taken by one of the farmers and how he stopped our talking to look up into the sky to follow the beautiful flight of a hawk. He was getting close to retirement and I sensed that he had a deep wisdom and gratitude towards nature. If this was what Biodynamic farming did for a person, then I would follow in his footsteps. Soon after, I left New Zealand to learn about Biodynamic farming in England.