The Healing Plant Garden from the top of the hill, Camphill Village Copake
By Anthony Mecca
Co-Director, Biodynamic Demeter Alliance
The Heights:
Behold our weaving,
the kindling radiance,
the warming life.
The Depths:
Live in the earth's sustaining,
and in the form-giving breathing,
with the power of true being.
The Inner Human Being:
Feel the limbs of man,
from the heavens illuminated,
in the strength of worlds united.
Through this whole:
Substances are densified,
errors are judged and rectified,
hearts are sifted.
— St. Johnstide (Summer) Imagination, Inspired by Uriel, Rudolf Steiner *
The above verse, which is displayed outside the workshed in the Healing Plant garden at Camphill Village Copake, beautifully encapsulates the striving for growth and the potential fruits encountered during the recent Biodynamic Intensive. A group of eager and inspired individuals gathered together last week in New York’s Hudson Valley to explore healing the relationship between human beings and nature through the lens of agriculture, particularly during this time of sharply increasing digital and mechanical technology. Our varied, yet interweaving, questions about our role in creating a healing agriculture inspired by biodynamics created a tapestry into which we breathed life throughout the week.
Morning sessions of eurythmy set the tone for each day, bringing us into relationship with the heights and the depths meeting in the human being, the inner life and the outer world, and dimensions in space and time through sensing qualities of life flowing through us and around us. Finding a center between being pulled out into the heights of summer and stuck in ourselves, overwhelmed by our intellect, we were guided to be relieved of our everyday self to receive into our hearts what was present around us with vulnerability. From here we ventured out knowing the richness of both our own potential and the living world around us in nature.
Our morning sessions at Sun Heart Farm led us into conversations with plants, who over the week became new friends. The plant world as a doorway into the realm of life beyond the physical framed practical and philosophical immersions into being a landworker in our current milieu, from balancing material demands with health and life to working creatively with social and economic questions in community. We shared our individual paths and questions, and from this vantage point were led into exploring the biographies and individualities of farms and gardens. Inspired by our pre-reading from the Biodynamic Agriculture and Nutrition course from EduCareDo, we practiced different ways of conversing with each other and the natural world. We found our way to a place where we can be free from shoulds and shouldn’ts, rights and wrongs, that come from our outer intellectually dominant culture. We found our way to a place of peace where we can move into an inner space of knowing what needs to be done towards healing and finding inspiration to enact and administer it.
Our afternoons brought us to three wonderful, large, and diverse Biodynamic® farms: Hawthorne Valley Farm, Churchtown Dairy, and Camphill Village Copake. Each had similar aspects, yet each was also very clearly an individual unfolding. Varied expressions of biodynamics flowed through each of the places and each of the farmers we met.
Hawthorne Valley Farm carried an enterprising and productive feeling alongside a gathering place for the surrounding community to experience agriculture and nature. Summer camps were in full swing, with many children and young adults moving through the barns, gardens, and wild spaces. The active farm store, which is a fully stocked natural grocer, highlighted the farm's products from their vegetable fields, raw and pasteurized milk dairy and creamery, and meats, in conjunction with a strong connection to communities in New York City (2.5 hours south) through farmers’ markets and CSA groups. The two impulses worked upon each other towards a full and rich community experience.
Exploring the greenhouses and vegetable fields at Hawthorne Valley Farm
Talking about the details of the dairy with Summer Campers in the background, Hawthorne Valley Farm
Half of the dairy barn, Hawthorne Valley Farm
Churchtown Dairy expressed an outer beauty striving to nourish and heal centered around the dairy cow and medicinal plants.The medicinal plant gardens felt vibrant and alive, with many layers of plants in all directions, water features, and spots for contemplation, as well as strong abilities to produce abundant and very potent plants! The dairy made an impression through the calm and quiet contentment of the cows, the cleanliness and organization of the barn, and the quality of the raw milk and cheese that highlighted the care for the cow’s nature to come to fuller expression. Our two elder farmer guides engaged us in lively conversation, offering insights and questions from their experiences that were similar to many of those carried by our youthful group of participants.
Jean-David Derreumaux showing us his yarrow filled stag bladder attached to a stirring tripod with the Churchtown Dairy medicinal gardens in the background.
Greeting the cows as they wander in for milking to the barn on the left, with their round barn winter quarters on the right. Calves nurse their dams and are separated after a while in the evenings, happily walking through the ‘creep’ openings in the gates. Churchtown Dairy
Camphill Village Copake surprised many in that it really is like a village! With roadways lined with residential houses and craft workshops interspersed with gardens, pastures, and fields, it felt like a carrying of the village life of the past into a modern context that is centered on the dignity, equality, and purpose of people with differing abilities. Each space is set up on a human scale that welcomes engagement and participation, and also produces a variety of beautiful, tasty, and useful goods. We were led through the Turtle Tree Biodynamic seed garden and processing facilities; the Healing Plant workshop and gardens; where plants are grown and then harvested and made into culinary and medicinal wonders; and the farm where 15-20 cows are hand milked year round to supply the village. While each work area was clearly its own, the idea of a farm organism shown through, as each work area leader shared how they were supported by the other aspects of the farm and village, that they could not be what they are with the support of the other, and that they felt nourished by being able to offer what they had to the other.
Part of the processing facility at Turtle Tree Seed looking at fermenting cucumber and tomato seeds, Camphill Village Copake
The dairy at Camphill Village Copake
Throughout the week we walked a path towards fostering healing relationships: between human beings and the natural world, between human beings, and between the realms of nature. We walked a path between our inner life and the outer world we have a significant part in creating, exploring the deep interplay between them. We made new friends and were inspired by people, plants, places, and animals; were very well nourished through shared meals and experiences; and each had glimpses of what healing feels like to receive and to offer, often one in the same. We finished full, and ready to continue on our quest towards healing agriculture as we ventured off across the country and even overseas!
* The Four Seasons and the Archangels, October 12, 1923 - https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA229/English/RSP1968/19231012p01.html
Anthony Mecca is a farmer dedicated to healing the relationship between human beings and the earth through education, community building, research, and development. Over the past decade, he has developed and led training programs for the Biodynamic Association. 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.