Drinking sunshine

I make juice with kale, carrot, apple, celery and parsley. I will drink it and a mysterious process will take place inside of me that neither science nor mystics can explain. I taking something foreign, break it down and assimilate it into my own body, with a wish for health for my own thoughts, creativity and activity. Sun, soil, water, millions of microorganisms, gnomes and fairies, acting together, to create an amazing natural something: vegetables. I can’t leave out our beautiful horses who contribute their manure to our compost piles. A domestication of a process long known to to this planet—animals graze, stride past, dropping their dung or manure, leaving the ground more fertile than when they arrived—sustainability. Someday maybe we will no longer need to eat them.

Rudolf Steiner described two “streams” of nutrition that flow into us. One is the earthly nutritional stream, it comes into us from our food, and builds our thoughts, while the cosmic nutritional stream is what we take in through our senses and builds the substance of our physical body. It seems impossible at first that we might be able to absorb actual substance through our eyes nose and mouth, and that food is primarily building thoughts, but I like to imagine this to be true.

What kinds of thoughts will be supported by this colorful vegetable juice?

Five ways to add living protein to your salads

An up-and-coming patch of fall greens

Lettuces and salad greens grow ever so happily in cool fall weather, so take full advantage of their generosity! Instead of having a salad before your meal, add a few of the high-protein ingredients below, double the size of your salad and make it your meal! When I eat only salad for dinner, I notice that I need less sleep, dream more vividly, and wake up feeling alert. Protein from raw food is easy to absorb since the food still has all of the enzymes intact needed to break down the protein into amino acids. (These enzymes are destroyed when food is heated over approx. 105 degrees.)

• Kale Many people don’t realize that nutrient dense, dark, leafy greens have high quality, easily to assimilate protein (22% of the calories in kale are from protein). Chop them small and bruise them up a bit (rub with fingers).

• Sprouted Lentils We prefer the small French lentils, soak overnight, drain and let them sprout for a day or two, just until a small ‘tail’ forms.

• Avocado Provides protein, enzymes and healthy unsaturated fats.

• Nuts Walnuts, almonds, pecans (soak overnight to neutralize enzyme inhibitors).

• Raw Milk Goat Cheese

• Hemp Seed Delicious nutty taste, contains valuable essential fatty acids.

Chris checking on the cabbage and broccoli

There is an important book called The China Study that presents research that causes us to question whether we do indeed need the high levels of protein commonly prescribed by “government experts,” and that in fact, high levels of protein may correlate with cancer and other diseases. The research in this book also points to the benefits of plant-based proteins.

Have a great day! —Christy Korrow

Gardens and Prayer

Biodynamic horn manure (BD #500) to bring earthly 

and cosmic life forces to the plants via the soil.

The French philosopher, mystic and activist, Simone Weil 

(1909–1943) once wrote, “Absolute unmixed attention is 

prayer.” Her statement holds meaning for those who en- 

gage in biodynamic work. While practical and scientific in- 

formation about biodynamics is widely available through 

hundreds of books, websites, classes and conferences, the 

spiritual aspects of our movement cannot be so neatly 

packaged and sold. 

Though it is important to share “how-to” information, 

and encourage friends and fellow farmers to use the prep- 

arations, it is equally essential for practitioners to adopt 

a devotional mood while working with the land. Rudolf 

Steiner describes an attitude of reverence as a fundamental 

prerequisite for the human soul to gain access to supersen- 

sible worlds. After all, emphasis on how the spiritual world 

is active in nature and agriculture is what sets biodynamics 

apart from organic agriculture. 

Mindfully stirring the preparations, or really being on 

our farms and in our gardens can become opportunities for 

the development of spiritual capacities. This is the juncture 

where we go beyond a biodynamic practice that is more 

or less, one of following instructions or guidelines, to one 

where the gardener or farmer participates with the whole 

of nature; through this higher sense of awareness, spiritual 

scientific research takes place. We become capable of phe- 

nomenological research, “reading the book of nature,” and 

can come to our own understanding of what, for example, 

a healthy plant, field, or landscape truly looks like. From 

the basis of this understanding, we can problem-solve and 

discern what can be done to restore balance. 

—Christy Korrow 

Letter to readers of the fall 2009 issue of Applied Biodynamics, the newsletter of the Josephine Porter Institute, Christy is managing editor. 

Rosie and Wind

Gabe asked me to spend some time with Rosie while she was away in Cookeville, cleaning for my parents and taking a Saturday workshop in contemporary dance. Rosie is her two-and-a-half year old filly, and is now in a separate pasture from our two other horses, her mom, Lucy and our gelding, Ollie. Gabe said it was time to wean Rosie (short for Rosie Cotton, named after Samwise Gamgee’s wife). So, now, separated from her horse family only by a fence line and our driveway, Rosie is anxious and lonesome. I walked down to give her a carrot.

From the far end of the field she whinnied and came walking over to take it from my hand. The wind was blowing her mane and banging the loose piece of tin on our stable. She took the carrot, gladly, and stayed with me at the fence while I brushed flies from her face, scratched the side of her neck, and told her that this separation was only temporary. I think she understood.

Rosie understands a lot more than most of us. She was born in the field just down from our well. We call it the Well Pasture. She was born on Gabe’s 13th birthday, March 21st, just a hair before midnight.

Gabe has a special touch with horses, communicates with them using few gestures, and even fewer words. She calls their names and they come running, like in a Walt Disney movie. There is an empty chair in the bamboo where she goes to meditate. Large Chinese poll bamboo, not native, an almost twenty-year-old patch, now a small forest. Inside of it you feel clean, still and orderly. I walked through on my way to give Rosie her carrot.

Near the pasture gate there is a puddle, shallow, filled with last night’s rain. I walk around it, and wonder if it is clean enough to drink from. Probably two-hundred years ago my body would have had the correct bacterial balance to tolerate such fresh water as this. Now I only avoid it, and wonder how long it will take to soak into the ground.

The same wind that blows Rosie’s mane is drying the clothes on the line. The best kind of weather for laundry day. Each tee-shirt, panty and pair of jeans becomes a Kentucky prayer flag, carrying our gratitude and wishes across the treetops, and northeast to the Appalachians. I hope they make it over those mountains, all the way to the ocean.