By Anthony Mecca
With the coming of spring, new life and new forms arise in creative majesty. What beauty and grace! Beholding this wonder, we often pass over what has come before. Recognizing death feels hard to approach. It is unfamiliar and mysterious to our common outlook. But death itself is a wonder and an “open secret”—it is everywhere if we know how to look and can turn ourselves to it.
The life of nature has a deep relationship to death. And it is always creating anew. In nature what has passed away gives itself to the life of the earth, in devotion. It is seeking transformation. With each blade of grass, each clover leaf, each growing stalk of wheat, nature transforms and renews life.
While nature carries this great task out of its innate being, human beings are free to choose renewal. As human beings, we may usher the old, dead stalks of our inner and outer lives towards death. We can direct thoughts, feelings, habits, and other activities toward transformation. Through choosing death, we can make way for and welcome new seeds for the future. This renewal of ourselves and our relationships helps us work more consciously and creatively with nature.
It sounds wonderful, but is quite a challenge to realize. This challenge of renewal is one way to view the work of biodynamics. It is also part of the greater task of humanity that Rudolf Steiner helped initiate. How will we as modern human beings meet the challenges of our times as opportunities for renewal? How will we see them as helpers in cultivating our unique human capacities such as courage, compassion, and magnanimity? How will we change, transform, and develop ourselves to bring healing impulses to our ailing world?
This coming week, March 30, marks 100 years since Rudolf Steiner’s death. His spirit lives on through the many seeds of renewal he planted. These seeds are central to the work of biodynamics. Over the past 100 years these seeds have grown, developed, and borne fruit, as well as new seeds. How can we continue this work for the future of biodynamic agriculture? How will we use the potential within both those original seeds and the new seeds towards future health and renewal?
The film The Challenge of Rudolf Steiner offers pictures of how this work of renewal has taken root, borne fruit, and offered new seeds throughout the world. Interviews focused on biodynamic agriculture, and others such as Dennis Klocek and Craig Holdredge are shared, as well the entire film.
Anthony Mecca is Co-Director of the Biodynamic Association, where he is responsible for programs and training, as well as working with the social arts towards building a more harmonious and vibrant biodynamic community.