STIRRING 501
STIRRING 501
It is 4am on a late spring morning in Central Minnesota. The first light to the East will appear soon, but right now the fixed and moving stars still rule the dark sky. I head across the road to the stirring machine, dressed in wool and armed with a clock, a lantern, and a thermos of hot coffee. One cup is for our farmer Angela, who will show up in an hour with the pick-up truck and sprayer. The rest is for me.
I check the calibration of the two 60-gallon drums, to make sure that the dual paddles in each make the deepest possible vortex. I put 12 units of 501 into each drum, filled about a third of the way with water. The preparation was a gift ground by our neighbor and mentor to the north, Dewane Morgan.
The plan this morning is to stir two batches of 501 to spray on 48 acres of pasture, hay, and restored prairie. My role is to hold the human consciousness for the machine while it stirs, and I will be home by 7am, in time to prepare breakfast for my house community. Angela will spray nonstop (except for when the sprayer gets clogged!) from 5 to 9am, when her morning farm crew arrives. The garden is still mostly indoors and will be sprayed in June, but the hay and the pastures are already so tall that Angela winces every time she talks about driving on them with the sprayer.
Needless to say, it is challenging to hold a positive, spiritual consciousness for a motor and four rotating paddles for three hours, particularly until the coffee kicks in. But I love it, and consider it an honor to serve our community and land this way.
Fortunately, I am a morning person. As I sit on the platform next to the tanks, I begin to subconsciously anticipate their churning rhythm. As the sky becomes lighter and the stars fade, I gaze south to our old barn and west to the ponds where marl was once mined and which now serve as recreational habitat for all the sentient beings who pass through. The barn roof doesn’t claim one 90-degree angle, and the ponds are like round mirrors, reflecting the lightening of the morning sky completed by frames of tall green reeds. It’s a priceless view.
As I accompany the machine beings in their work, I comb my memory for everything I know about silica, quartz, and the Biodynamic preparation 501. I recall the only time I participated in its grinding – a large spring meeting of the Northern California BD group. We worked under a large canopy at the Sacramento Waldorf School, as we moved from one “work station” to the next, for most of a day. We started with hammers on large quartz crystals, to mortars and pestles, to the final step of putting the sand-size chunks between two pieces of glass and rubbing them together to produce a fine powder. What I remember most clearly was the sound, as the pitch rose higher until it reached what seemed to be a screech. Harald Hoven, our leader, reassured us that it was the grateful sound of the elemental beings imprisoned in the rock as they were released.
My next memories were glimpses of Dewane Morgan taking quartz from Arkansas through the same process, but by himself in the dark and cozy confines of his basement family room. He was probably working on the batch that I am stirring now.
Rudolf Steiner doesn’t say much about the “horn silica” preparation directly in the Agriculture lectures. In Lecture Four, almost as an afterthought it seems, he describes the grinding, burying, and use of 501. Here he talks about how it should be buried in the summer to be exposed to “the summer life of the Earth” and how this fine spray on the plants complements and supports the work of the “horn manure” preparation by pulling “from above.” Perhaps someone has written it down somewhere, but most of what I know about spraying 501 came through an oral tradition that includes some disagreement but is really surprisingly consistent. I learned to spray it around sunrise, when the forces of the Earth are rising up into the plants and the light is just right to complement the light in the preparation. I learned to spray it on the plants themselves (as opposed to spraying 500 more on bare soil) and at a time that supports their flowering/fruiting process. I learned that it shouldn’t be sprayed where it is too dry or where rain is expected soon, and I learned never to use it in areas where 500 has not first been sprayed.
As the minutes passed, I began to contemplate the formation of quartz crystals – essentially physical receptacles for light – in the darkness of the Earth. The wonder of this picture lives in me still. And I realized that 501 is the only Biodynamic preparation where the plant kingdom is not involved in the process of making it. With 500 and the compost preps, all four kingdoms – mineral, plant, animal, human – make an essential and irreplaceable contribution to the process. The equisetum and valerian preparation processes require only plant and human involvement. For 501, the ground quartz silica is buried in a silica cow horn in the earth; ground, stuffed, buried, and dug up by humans.
Controversies in the BD community regarding horn silica are related to where, when, and how much should be used. I was warned in my training to be very careful in its application, but others say that more should be sprayed more often, particularly on this continent. In addition to obviously different situational factors, these controversies seem to be connected to differing understandings of how the physical substance of silica and the cosmic forces drawn into this material in the process of making 501 relate to each other – understandings of force and substance which probably underlie many differences of opinion regarding other aspects of Biodynamics.
Obviously, we are still very early in truly comprehending and effectively utilizing the “indications” that Rudolf Steiner shared with the farmers at Koberwitz. Steiner’s goal, when he instructed them in how to make and use the Biodynamic preparations, was to show how to capture cosmic forces in a physical substance in a way that would support the plants and soil in developing a kind of “intelligence” needed to counter the degradation of modern agriculture, and to minimize the effects of the exploitation of land inevitable in the production of food for animals and humans, by tapping into the spiritual resources available.
How is this accomplished, when: the fossilized light formed in the dark depths of the earth is brought out to the living light of the sun (simultaneously releasing the elementals trapped inside and maximizing surface area by grinding it to a powder); buried in a silica receptacle that Steiner says has the best capacity to capture the cosmic forces that enter the earth from the heavens, in the summer (I was taught that the earth is totally “out of herself” at this time, so what forces are there?); dug up and exposed for months to the forces of the winter sun; then stirred and sprayed exactly like its complementary substance horn manure? What kind of hocus-pocus is this? What manner of ancient wisdom are we rediscovering? What resources are we tapping that materialistic science ignores? What partnerships are we forming, what relationships are we beginning and deepening, when we ponder these things as we sit with our machines or stir by hand with a stick or our bare arms, in the early morning light? Only time will tell.
I have also been taught that the application of Biodynamic preparations to a piece of land is not to be taken lightly. It implies a relationship and commitment to the spiritual beings who live there, that must be honored with love and diligence. These beings don’t know or care what we think; they only know what we do, how well we do it, and the attitude with which we approach the deed. The haphazard or “half-ass” production and application of preparations is a breaking of faith by human beings with the earth and the beings with whom we ostensibly desire to partner. The rigidity, judgment, and fear that come from believing that “only my way is the right way” is just as dangerous. A constant striving for a balance between precision and compassion is what is called for here, as it is for the rest of life. For no preparation is this more true than for 501.
I am grateful to the machine and mineral beings who have worked with me to create this cosmic substance. And, I am grateful that Angela has arrived and the rhythm of the stirring has given way to silence. My wool jumper is becoming uncomfortably warm and I shed it but keep the hat. I hand her a cup of coffee, we fill the sprayer, and she takes off for a distant hay field. I refill the tanks and start the machine for the second batch of the morning. By the time it is finished, Angela will have returned to begin the second spraying, and I will go back across the road to make oatmeal and toast for my loved ones in Brome House.
Karen Davis-Brown
(from a 2005 issue of the North Central Regional BD Group newsletter)
