Living with the seasons
We’re very excited to introduce Glen Atkinson’s (PhD) latest educational offering. Over three online workshops, Glen will be shedding light on plant growth and the seasons through Rudolf Steiner’s lens and the unique worldview of biodynamics.
Here’s Glen explaining some background for his upcoming course “Living with the Seasons”
Essential Biodynamics
There appears to be a tradition within biodynamics of having booklets of three lectures. The first being Pfiffer’s three introductory lectures, in which he outlined some basic practical principles of Biodynamics. Dr E Kolisko, did a few small books, Manfred Klett did one, and in more recent times, Hugh Courtney did a publication called ‘Agriculture’, in which he has his favorite three lectures, that conveys his ‘essence of biodynamics’. His selection focuses on the elemental beings. So why don’t I do my ‘essence of BD’. Three essential lectures I consider pivotal for comprehending the Biodynamic Worldview.
Over the last few years, I have been looking at the references Dr Steiner gave around plant growth. Three lectures in particular provide three separate, but similar images of the activities involved in plant growth, working its way through the seasons. Two were given around the end of 1923, and then one from the Agriculture course, in the middle of 1924. So these lectures were given towards the end of his life, and together they provide a very intricate image of some the energetic activities active in plant growth.
A central feature of Dr Steiners teaching method is to appreciate he can only tell us a very small part of a very large picture at any one time. It is our task to place all the pieces of these stories together, to reveal his view of the dynamic we see as Life.
So each of these lectures provides a different angle view of plant growth, however each is described in its own language. We are challenged as the students, to find each time the context in which a particular lecture is taking place, and then to define the pieces of the story within that context.
With the next lecture, we will find a different context, and therefore there is different parts within that context, that we then have to identify. Again with the third lecture we need to identify, its context and the parts within that context, that describes that story. Three stories telling of the plants movement through the seasons, described in three different languages.
We can look at the three stories as if they were telling us of three energetic frequencies of the same material reality. If we identify the common parts between the stories, and overlap one story on top of the other, we can see how the stories are really just three different tellings of the same story.
Lecture One
Cosmic Workings in Earth and Man – Lecture 5, 31 October 1923
Lecture Two
Man as Symphony of the Creative Word – Lecture 7, 2nd November, 1923
Lecture Three
Agriculture Course – Lecture 2, 10 June 1924