Reprinted from the Winter 2024-25 Biodynamics journal (available online soon)
By Anthony Mecca
Looking at the world at large, it is clear there is a great need for healing. The health of the soil, plants, animals, human beings, and the Earth are ailing, crying out for respect, reverence, and care. Underlying the variety of contributing factors to their illness are pervasive doubt, denial, and even a railing against the existence and importance of the world of life and spirit. This world of life and spirit behind the physical world exists all around us, including in all that manifests physically, from the far reaches of space to the center of our hearts. Thankfully, amidst our increasingly materialistic cultural landscape, more and more people are awakening to its existence and seeking to develop their relationship to these unseen realities.
What Rudolf Steiner referred to as a “crushing mountain of materialism bearing down upon us” has grown astronomically over the past 100 years. We stand at a decisive juncture today in our culture and agriculture. While it is important to work on holding back the accelerating merging of the mechanistic-chemical paradigm with the digital data economy, we must also present a new path forward. How can we bring to light the significance of the direct experience of and conscious participation in the realm of life, the etheric, and the higher spiritual worlds as a key to forging a new path for healing agriculture? This is a central task of biodynamics.
Biodynamics has grown and developed thanks to the work of many pioneering individuals and groups through its first 100 years. The challenge of our times is now to increase the breadth and depth of our work within our community while both reaching out and welcoming in the wider world. Together, we will need to take up this challenge to forge a new path for a healing agriculture.
As a contributor to this work, the Biodynamic Association strives to recognize, support, and help empower our entire community. We are working to sense, perceive, and know the widths and depths of the community. We endeavor to include and reflect the community to itself, and serve the community through programs and communications. We create and facilitate bridges between and connections among, fostering living relationships that bring individuals together for a greater purpose. Sometimes we are more successful than others. And we need your help to grow and hone our efforts!
As we strive to enact this work, we stand in a paradoxical position. Many people want the Biodynamic Association to play a central role for the “movement,” bringing this work forward in the community and larger culture. They would like the Biodynamic Association to be a central organizer, community builder, educator, trainer, researcher, communicator, promoter, marketer—and more. And many feel passionately that each person, each farm, each community, and each region should be recognized and valued as autonomous and self-determining contributors and participants in the movement. And for many, both desires are present!
How can we nurture a culture of biodynamics centered around shared core principles and practices while supporting individualization? How can we cultivate a dynamic interplay between center and periphery, weaving together all of our strengths into a living vessel to serve the future?
Our country is very large, and very diverse. Practically, we wonder how our small (and wonderfully strong and capable!) staff of three-and-a-half full-time employees might make significant contributions to this vision. To do this, we envision a process that will unfold and grow over time. We can help bring some initial impulses, cultivate the soil, and plant seeds in various ways to support future growth and the raying out of biodynamics into the wider world.
- Throughout 2025 we will be offering biodynamic workshops, gatherings, and farm visits in different locations across the country. If your regional group, organization, farm, school, or other entity would like to host a workshop, visit, or meeting, please reach out to anthony@biodynamics.com.
- Several advisory groups will begin meeting in the new year around various aspects of our work: education, research, communication, philanthropy, partnerships, and more.
- We will also offer online listening sessions and surveys for the wider community throughout the year.
In addition to these new efforts, we welcome all of your events, workshops, and job posts on our website and e-news to share with our larger community, who sometimes may be a neighbor you have yet to meet. We welcome your stories and insights into our blog and journal. We welcome your questions, thoughts, constructive feedback, and appreciation. We welcome your interest in partnering, whatever that looks or sounds like, whether you're an individual, group, organization, or business. We do our best to welcome what you have to offer toward biodynamics and help share it so that it finds others who may be in need of it.
We look forward to forging new relationships and finding co-workers with whom to carry this important work together: connecting with inspiring individuals and groups, celebrating and supporting amazing farms serving their communities, and developing a working group of the next generation of educators, trainers, mentors, advisors, and researchers that already make up our movement or are soon to join it.
We want to hear from each of you. What are your needs and inspirations for biodynamics? How will you contribute to helping these needs be fulfilled and inspirations find grounding in the world? How can we work together to forge a new path for healing agriculture?
This is an immense task in our current culture. We will need all of our capacities to work in harmony. We will need to participate as individuals that recognize shared goals, and go out of our way to support our colleagues. We can find strength and encouragement for our work in coming together, and a potency in working with life and the spirit through biodynamics. There is ever-present help within us and around us. May we strive to align with this supportive life and spirit, and each other.
We look forward to connecting and working with you to forge a new path for a healing agriculture, together. Please feel welcome to be in touch: anthony@biodynamics.com or 262-649-9212 x705. If you have ideas for our blog or journal, please reach out to rebecca@biodynamics.com. You can add events to our online calendar, and job, internships, or land opportunities on our online forums.
Anthony Mecca is Co-Director of the Biodynamic Association and a farmer dedicated to healing the relationship between human beings and the earth through education, community building, research, and development. As Co-Director, Anthony is responsible for programs and training, as well as working with the social arts towards building a more harmonious and vibrant biodynamic community. Anthony is also a director of EduCareDo, where he offers a distance learning course on Biodynamic Agriculture and Nutrition and contributes to the Foundations in Anthroposophy course. Anthony works and lives on Sun Heart Farm, an educational and therapeutic community farm in the valley between the Berkshire and Taconic mountains in New York.