Buoyant Beings of Light

Originally published 2026-01-05. By Lloyd Nelson, Stewart Kahn Lundy, JPI Biodynamics, Max Leyf.

winter meditations

With your friends Stewart Lundy and Lloyd Nelson

With Max Leyf

THIRTY-NINTH WEEK OF THE YEAR

An Geistesoffenbarung hingegeben
Gewinne ich des Weltenwesens Licht.
Gedankenkraft, sie wächst
Sich klärend mir mich selbst zu geben,
Und weckend löst sich mir
Aus Denkermacht das Selbstgefühl.

∇∆

SURRENDERED to the Spirit’s revelation
I’m vouchsafed the firstborn gift of Light;
the waxing power to think within me strives to waken
preparing me my self to give,
like falling snow that free from clouds of thought is shaken:
the I that knows itself to live.

Astro outlook for early January 2026

January 8th through January 16 is an excellent window of opportunity to spray Biodynamic preparations on your gardens. According to the Thun Biodynamic Almanac, during the 9 days between January 8-16th, the Earth will experience 8 planetary oppositions, and two planetary trines, with only one planetary conjunction.

In general, planetary oppositions are regarded as beneficial for plant and soil development, while conjunctions are more challenging. Even if it is cold and snowy you can still spray preps, although you may have to use warm water!

No fewer than 15 planetary conjunctions occur in the second half of January. Most likely best to avoid those times for using biodynamic preparations.

As the Earth shifts this time of year, the Northern hemisphere begins to experience longer days, while in the Southern hemisphere the nights become progressively longer. Return of the light for half the world! What a wonderful experience, witnessing the progression of daily sunrise and sunset.

The heaviness of long dark nights can be overwhelming. The Sun’s life giving rays brightens us with cosmic warmth and light. The polarity of the dark being overcome by the light can fill our souls with renewed enthusiasm for what is to come. New gardens, new plants, new plans. What seeds will sprout in your garden, what ideas will sprout in your mind? What soul qualities can we improve to be better inhabitants of this beautiful Earth we live on?

Biodynamic practitioners are wise to use this time of year to plan for a better future. Plan your garden, plan your pathways, plan for implementing improvements and developments that came out of winter’s rest and meditations. Plan for using and making Biodynamic preparations this year!

The late great Hugh Courtney would regularly remind his students that “Making Biodynamic preparations is a year round activity!” There is plenty to do this time of year to improve your Biodynamic practices! For instance, I was down in the root cellar where the Biodynamic preparations are stored. Opening up the various lids from the different preparations stored you can notice the moisture content of the different preparations. If some of the preparations seem a little too wet, I leave the lid open a bit more to let them air out, or mix them up a bit to allow a little more oxygen in.

Here’s a Biodynamic pro tip you probably have never tried, takes only five minutes of your time, and has proved to be very useful. This little trick works great for improving the overall quality of the biodynamic preparations in storage, in our experience, especially in Colorado where it can be high and dry. Mile high plus elevations and semi arid desert climate can give numerous opportunities for challenges and improvements. The next time it snows, take a few handfuls of fresh snow and add that to preps in storage. You can simply just place the fresh snow on top of your preps, or mix it in a bit. As Steiner says, in a way the manure needs rainwater. That snow will slowly melt and add small amounts of cosmic crystalline water energizing the Biodynamic preparations. If your preps are a little dry you may add a little more snow, or vice versa. If one were to take that idea further, with the BD astronomical planting calendar, you could look for best times to collect snow for imparting different zodiac influences, such as collecting snow when the moon is in front of Taurus for lightly moistening BD Horn manure or Barrel compost. It’s always the little things you can do that don’t cost much money or much time that can vastly improve your Biodynamic preparations. This is a simple idea of working with the BD astronomical calendar to dial in forces of the zodiac to improve biodynamics.

Suspending judgement, until necessary, allows new found freedom. If you limit possibilities, that may be what you receive. A balanced objective world view will offer new opportunities for further development. One reason Biodynamic has been so successful world wide is because it offers an open gateway of unlimited universal potential. Preconceived notions slow innovative adaptations. Earth bound, one life to live thinking and attitudes limit us to the physical plane.

Reach out and stretch your imagination, the artist might tell you. Rudolf Steiner gave us a profound toolkit to work with the Earth and the Heavens in new practical and artistic ways. This verse was given to Edith Maryon on her birthday in 1923, not long before she died:

Human forces are two kinds:
a stream of forces flows into us,
giving form and inner rootedness;
a stream of forces flow out from us,
giving well-being, lifting, brightening life:
so those plagued by heavy, forming
forces of physical nature should think themselves
uplifted, buoyant beings of light1

The midnight hour

Having passed the longest nights of the year, the effects of those nights feel themselves expressed later. As with thermodynamics and water, the ocean warms slower than the atmosphere and stays warmer longer than the air above the ground. This “delayed” effect is experienced in many ways, but concretely, we experience the consequences of those long nights after the daylight hours have begun expanding again. Epiphany, January 6th, is intimately connected to naturalistic cycles: it marks the day that daytime hours begin to extend once more. Not only this, the “three kings” of Orion’s belt point to the place on the horizon where the spring equinox sun will rise: a promise that the return of the Sun follows winter.

This was not always the case. Rudolf Steiner talks about early pagan times when people did not know that the Sun would necessarily return. The shrinking hours felt every year like the end of the world. Those who could perceive the pattern instituted rituals of Adonis in autumn, during which he would be drowned for three days, and then raised again after his descent. The necessity of this Easter ritual in autumn was because humanity as a whole could not grasp what they could not see with their own two eyes: the myth of Adonis promised the resurrection of spring to unbelieving eyes. As consciousness developed, particularly with the arts of mathematics and astronomy, these celestial patterns of autumn and spring became mathematical certainties – but mathematical certainties are only realities to people who understand mathematics. To an uneducated mindset, there was always the possibility that the Sun might not rise again!

Steiner speaks the same way about the esoteric world. “This may sound like mere words and phrases, but through genuine observation of the human being, based on spiritual science, we can see these things with the same precision that a mathematician uses in approaching mathematical problems. We cannot arrive at this through any kind of mystical nonsense: it must be investigated with precision.” 2

But just as only a mathematician can correct someone else’s mathematics, so too with the kind of thinking necessary to fathom the esoteric world. Only those who really know know what they know – everyone else is pretending to know. And those of us who know we don’t know cannot easily discriminate between the sage and the fraud. This is why Steiner says mathematics is a healthy prerequisite for objective thinking in the hidden (or “occult”) worlds. It is not entirely necessary, but it is extraordinarily helpful for an occultist to be first a mathematician.

Because mathematics is “true in itself” – you can check it, it remains the same later, and someone else can repeat it – this trains the right kind of thinking for the spiritual world. There is a reason that the trivium in education used to be grammar then logic and only then rhetoric. Then one would graduate to arithmetic and then to geometry and then to music and only finally to the “music of the spheres”: astronomy. Then and only then would one be suitably equipped to travel the spiritual world with safety and without delusion. But this requires an egoless self-denial that most of us are not willing to undertake in our day and age. Everything is about self-expression and indulgence, widely to the detriment of higher cognitive functions. That, and we are missing the solitude of winter:

“No one is exhorted to become an occultist; one must come to occultism of one’s own volition. Whoever says that we do not need occultism will not need to occupy himself with it. At this time, occultism does not appeal to mankind in general. In fact, it is extremely difficult in the present culture to submit to those rules of conduct which will open the spiritual world.

Two prerequisites are totally lacking in our culture. One is isolation, what spiritual science calls “higher human solitude.” The other is overcoming the egotism which, though largely unconscious, has become a dominant characteristic of our time.

The absence of these two prerequisites renders the path of inner development simply unattainable. Isolation, or spiritual solitude, is very difficult to achieve because life conditions tend to distract and disperse, in brief to demand sense-involvement in the external. There has been no previous culture in which people have lived with such an involvement in the external.”3

Can we hear how serious this is? “The absence of these two prerequisites [isolation and overcoming subjective egotism] renders the path of inner development simply unattainable.” There was a science experiment performed in which individuals were left alone in a room with nothing to entertain them and no one to talk to. Almost everyone, out of sheer boredom, would opt for the one thing offered: clicking a button to administer a mild electrical shock to themselves repeatedly. How can there be contemplation if we cannot first be alone with ourselves? How can the light of Christ be conceived within when there is no room in the inn?

Between January and February, the forces that arrived at the Nativity crystallize. This is not merely a metaphor – or rather, the entire universe is a metaphor for divine love and is, therefore, best understood through metaphors. What is true on one level expands and is true on many others, mutatis mutandis. Without the solitude of winter, this cannot happen. Imagine a winter on a farm where no rain or snow arrives – this spells a very difficult subsequent year. Externally, we find the soil most likely to freeze during January-February in places that experience winter, even though daylight hours are already increasing. One could say that what arrives in November-December as an inflowing force, is rereleased during January-February. Externally, frost is water from which enough warmth forces have radiated out. Where have these gone? The surrounding soil. But more concretely, the frost-thaw action on the Earth liberates soluble nutrients from parent material – elements that were long entombed within the physical-mineral realm.

Steiner himself said that freezing will cause “no harm” to preparations buried overwinter. This is in part because what is happening is not primarily a microbiological process, though microbes are undoubtedly a symptom of the process. Alex Podolinsky’s work in Australia indicates that winter burial, where the contents of the horns are generally below 42F, prevents most microbial life from developing and instead has a different kind of activity. In Minnesota Dewayne Morgan’s horns are contained within the frozen earth for extended periods every year, yet he regularly produces some of the best horn manure in the country. One thing that occurs in alchemy by freezing is that excess water is removed by becoming ice. This is a trick alchemists would use to get (nearly) pure alcohol from distillates: by freezing the distillate, the frozen water could be separated out easily.

Forces of crystallization present in snowflakes and ice shape intricate patterns. This crystallizing force also happens inside the Earth. A return to the light is experienced in the mineral world in winter months. During the cold winter months cosmic light shines on and into the Earth.

Steiner gives an image of the light penetrating the earth’s layers, and the crystals reflecting the light up

“For the mineral substances, midwinter is the time with the strongest formative forces, the strongest crystallizing forces can develop within the Earth. That is when the inner nature of the Earth has the characteristic of being least reliant on itself, on its mineral masses, and most under the influence of the crystal forming forces from the widths of the universe….

The situation is this: The mineral substances of the Earth have the greatest desire to be crystallized at the end of January, and the deeper down you go, the stronger is their desire to become pure and crystalline….

This is the time when what’s going on in the mineral kingdom is most neutral as far as plant growth is concerned, when plants are most self absorbed in the Earth and least exposed to the mineral substances. On the other hand for a period of time before and after— especially before, when the minerals are just getting ready to become formed and crystalline— that is when the minerals radiate forces that are of particular importance for plant growth….

Let me remark here that if we are dealing with this weather that does not carry these influence upwards during the winter as it should, it is good to furnish the soil with some clay, the dosage of which I will indicate later.”

This has left many questioning what and where he mentions this clay dosage. Here we would do well to remember Steiner did not mince his words, and he did indeed provide the necessary dosage, even if the bulk of Biodynamic practitioners never unraveled the mystery.

In lecture five of the Agriculture course, Steiner tells us: “I am perfectly aware that people who are caught up in current ways of thinking will object that I have not said anything about how to improve the nitrogen content of the manure. But in fact, I’ve been talking about this all of the time, mainly when I spoke about Yarrow, chamomile, and nettle, because in organic processes, there is a hidden alchemy at work.”

Though Steiner didn’t explicitly say “Nitrogen” about each preparation, by his own admission, he was speaking indirectly about nitrogen dynamics and retaining nitrogen for plant use the entire time. Similarly, Steiner discusses clay in a circuitous way, and the more one works with his recommended remedies, the more quickly these mysteries are unraveled.

Perhaps the nine biodynamic preparations are a part of this mysterious claylike dosage. Some propose that the various horn silica preparations Steiner details could be considered a part of this clay remedy.

“With clay, we prepare the soil to conduct the crystalline forces upward, for the plant growth above the Earth’s surface. This force of crystallization, which is already apparent in the crystallizing snow, reaches its peak intensity in January and February and gets stronger and more intense the further down into the Earth one goes.

You must realize that in given an area of farmland— together with what’s beneath the soil— forms an individual individuality that also exist in time, and that the life of the soil is especially strong in the winter, while in a certain sense it tends to die down in summer.”4

Several interesting points here for the Biodynamic practitioner: Using the Biodynamic preparations in the autumn opens up the potential of the soil, especially with trace mineral availability. Autumn use of the preparations works to improve microbial life and boost beneficial fungi.

The late great Biodynamic preparation maker, Hugh Courtney, emphasized the importance of spraying Horn silica, with special importance of use in the winter seasons. Spraying horn silica during the winter, even if it is cold or frozen outside, would allow a spiritual crystallization process to more easily penetrate the Earth and work on the mineral realm. This homeopathic treatment in the winter is one of the reasons Biodynamic has charged soils up so rapidly.

We could encourage the Biodynamic practitioner to make biodynamics a year-round sport, where we would still be active in the winter months.

Maria Thun’s research showed excellent results from using the silica preparation on bare soil, and in winter. Have Biodynamic practitioners tried this approach or have we limited Silica to a checkbox, where silica is only used on actively growing plants, in the early morning?

Even if it is winter you can still use Biodynamic preparations to improve soil quality. Try spraying Horn Silica on a patch of land and see what happens! Remember Steiner says it doesn’t take much Horn Silica, as little as the size of a pea – or even a pinhead! This is because silica is not an essential nutrient for any known plant (with the exception of Equisetum), nonetheless, even in trace doses, most plants benefit enormously from plant-available silica which we can deliver with 501. This can be a great therapy for uplifting our spirits, giving well-being, lifting, and brightening life with comic impulses.

In these long, dark, and cold hours of winter, we can be plagued by heavy, forming forces of physical nature and challenged to remember the return to the light. By spraying Horn Silica, midwinter, one can think and experience its buoyancy as force sacrifices itself by dying into solidified form. Lest we find this an odd time to use such a preparation, just remember that Maria Thun sprayed horn silica in the evening to enhance the sweetness of root crops like potatoes and carrots. So too, we should spray horn silica in the “night” of the year to enhance the activity of the summer sun, where it is found: below ground, waiting to rise again in spring.

Go Biodynamic!

For Life!