Biodynamics’ Mojo–Is It Real?
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Organic gardening and farming concerns itself with the aspects of growing plants and animals in ways you can see, touch, hear, taste, and smell. In other words, the five senses. Biodynamic horticulture and agriculture also is concerned with these things, but adds the sixth sense. In other words, the things you can’t hold in your hands, but which have an effect on growing creatures nevertheless.
Some are obvious, like sunlight. On the physical level, the sun is the engine of life on earth, supplying the fuel that drives life onward through its generations. Akhenaton’s monotheistic sun worship wasn’t far off the mark, for if anything sustains life on this planet, it’s the sun. You can’t hold the sun, but you can feel its effects. Many plants even follow its path across the sky each day. Sunlight showers the earth with tremendous energy at every moment. And not just physical energy, but on the higher level that biodynamic founder Rudolf Steiner spoke about, with spiritual energy, too.
Musician Bobby Hebb wrote a song called “Sunny,” which seems to be about his girlfriend but can easily be read as a prayer of praise to the light– physical, metaphysical, and spiritual–that illumines the world and saves our souls:
Sunny, yesterday my life was filled with rain.
Sunny, you smiled at me and really eased the pain.
Oh, the dark days are gone and the bright days are here,
My sunny one shines so sincere.
Oh, Sunny, one so true, I love you.
Sunny, thank you for the sunshine bouquet.
Sunny, thank you for the love you brought my way.
You gave to me your all and all,
Now I feel ten feet tall.
Oh, Sunny, one so true, I love you.
Sunny, thank you for the truth you’ve let me see.
Sunny, thank you for the facts from A to Z.
My life was torn like windblown sand,
Then a rock was formed when we held hands.
Sunny, one so true, I love you.
Sunny, thank you for the smile upon your face.
Sunny, thank you for that gleam that flows with grace.
You’re my spark of nature’s fire,
You’re my sweet complete desire.
Sunny, one so true, I love you.
What are some of the other invisible forces that engage with gardening and farming practiced in accordance with nature’s laws?
How about the moon? It waxes and it wanes in the light that it gives. It pulls daily upon the earth’s oceans as they rise and fall as tides. The moon completes its cycles in 28 days, the same as a woman’s cycle of capability to conceive and incapability to conceive. Coincidence? Hardly. The moon is at work on the vast oceans as well as the human body and its functions. Biodynamics believes that root crops are best planted during the waning moon and fruit and seed crops in the waxing periods.
Is it wrong to think that other celestial influences might affect plants and animals on our farms and in our gardens? We can’t see or feel the earth tilting as the seasons pass, but all life on earth is strongly attuned to it.
We can’t see the earth’s magnetic field, but it’s strong and affects our crops and animals. Birds have tiny magnets in their heads that use the magnetic field to navigate long distances. The field affects incoming solar radiation to create the auroras’ shimmering curtains. The field turns the needle on your compass. Why wouldn’t it affect the crops that grow in your fields?
You can’t see gravity, but it turns the emerging plant roots toward the center of the earth and the flowers and seedheads toward the sky. It holds the farmer to his field. It lets the apple fall from the tree. And it’s invisible.
“The Secret Life of Plants” is a book about how plants respond to human feelings, growing better when they receive love and less well when they are hated. One suspects that this is only the tip of the iceberg of human-plant communication. Inter-plant communication is also well-documented and happens through pheromones and plant hormones, among other channels.
There are energies and laws in nature that we can’t see, except for their effects on physical matter, including plants and animals. One is the tendency for flowing matter to form vortices when its flow is disturbed. It happens in water as whirlpools occur behind a stick plunged into a flowing stream, in living tissue such as the chambers of the heart, and in the air behind the beating of birds’ wings. If you look closely at wood, you see the same flowing forms created in the slow motion of yearly growth. It happens on a microscopic scale and up through the whorl of hair on the back of your head, the whirlpool of water that swirls down your drain, all the way to the great spiral galaxies in the far universe. Why vortices and not some other flowing form? Because physical laws are at work guiding the process, and nature’s laws apply, no matter what the level.
Biodynamics takes these phenomena and others into account and is a kind of “organic-plus.” Truth be told, the tenets of biodynamics were laid down in the 1920s by the metaphysician Rudolf Steiner, predating the development of the organic method of gardening and farming by a decade.
Besides all those invisible influences on the garden, what about those that are not only invisible to our conscious minds, but the ones that spring unbidden from our subconscious minds? I’m talking about the times when you think you should call someone, and when you do, you find they were simultaneously calling you? Or when you’re planting beans in a row and a small, still voice says, “Save a few beans and plant them over there,” and they turn out to be the best bean plants in the garden? Or when you see a bee pollinating a flower on an apple tree and are struck by the beauty and simplicity of nature’s plan, so you mark that blossom and plant the seeds of the apple that grows from the marked flower, and one of those seeds produces what many consider to be the best apple in the world—which is just what happened to Mrs. Richard Cox in England in 1838 and the apple she grew was Cox’s Orange Pippin, to this day considered one of the finest-tasting apples in the world?
If you like organic and biodynamic food, be aware that all this kind of stuff goes on for the gardeners and farmers who grow it.
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