Cycles, Oaths, and Root Days
“It’s the time you spent on your rose that makes your rose so important.”
~The Little Prince
It was a root day on Monday and yet again, I was unable to finish all my planting before the celestial clock turned and conditions for sowing cover crop seeds changed. For me, this has been the hardest part of biodynamic gardening—carving out time to work on the land when the moon is in alignment with the project. Plant cover crop seeds and harvest root vegetables on root days. Plant fruit bearing trees and shrubs on fruit days. Plant flowering bushes on, you guessed it, flower days. Lastly, plant your leafy greens on water days, but not matter what don’t start sauerkraut or other fermented veggies on a leaf day, it’s too watery. Thanks to the dedication of many biodynamic practitioners over the decades, there are calendars and guidebooks and all I have to do is schedule my life around a published planting schedule.
This isn’t always easy. Sometimes the root days are in the middle of the week when my husband works, like this week, and the job is just too big for me to finish alone. Yet I promised the land I would use this calendar and this method of planting. The burning of our land has created the chance to start anew and since I’ve been administering the biodynamic preps for almost twelve years, I know in my heart I must plant using the calendar. I swore an oath, after all.
Oath. That’s a pretty big word. There’s a special biodynamic prep called the Three Kings Prep, administered once a year on the Epiphany in January. The instructions for this particular prep are quite clear that one should only undertake the Three Kings Preparation if one is willing to commit fully to biodynamic gardening. This means stirring and spraying the 500 (manure) and 501 (quartz) preps each year for the rest of your life with the land. It also means creating and spreading biodynamic compost made from five specific preps and lastly, spraying something called the horsetail prep. This is not an insignificant task, but these preps are like homeopathic remedies for the land and all its beings. When we ask the elementals, the very spirits of nature, to guide us and work with us, we have to give them something in return. We must nourish them. The spraying of the biodynamic preps is one way to honor the pact.
The literature that comes with the Three Kings Prep from the Josephine Porter Institute, where I buy all my biodynamic preparations, is very clear that the time has come for humans to bond with the spirits of nature again. The elementals need us to work with them to bring order to the natural world. We once had a close relationship with the land and its beings, but somewhere along the line we betrayed them. We forgot that the world is alive and left nature on its own to combat our industrialized frenzy. She has tried to keep up, to cleanse our filth, to remain alive while we pollute her. Unfortunately, the time has come where she can no longer do so. The eco-systems are crashing and the only way back is through a loving and committed relationship with the elementals. The final warning is this—do not undertake this path if you can’t keep your oath. The elementals and the natural world cannot handle another betrayal.
It would take me several years before I committed to the Three Kings Prep. The oath was too daunting. Eventually, I would come to see that this is how I want to live with the land and the planet itself. So I stirred the prep on New Year’s Eve of 2011 and sprayed it during the Epiphany a week later, and I’ve been doing it ever since. This oath has even more meaning as I begin to remediate the soil and help the land grow back its skin after being burned, scraped, and trenched. There’s a whole field dedicated to soil renewal and many think it’s the key to turning things around at a global scale. I myself have no power beyond my land, but in my heart I know that’s where all change starts. A commitment. A promise. An oath.
My husband and I just celebrated our twenty-third wedding anniversary. Marriage is an oath that many question these days. When living until eighty becomes the norm, why in the world should one commit to another in this way? What is the purpose of such an oath? Moreover, why bother with a wedding, the communal blessing behind the oath? Why risk standing in front of your friends and family asking for such a blessing if the oath is now meaningless? In my latest novel, Civilization’s End, I explore the bond between twin flames. What exactly do they owe one another? What is the oath when it is severed by law? By distance? By death? In the modern age, oaths may appear to be a dying breed, but what if our promises follow us, even beyond the veil?
As I plant my seeds, I connect with the soil, teeming with life seen and unseen. I imagine roots forming, digging deeper and deeper into the earth, following the dance of the gnomes. I see the earthworms and creepy crawlers joining the festivities to make their homes, the mycelial networks forming, connecting the soil to the trees. I envision the green cover crop sprouting, drawn from the ground by the sylphs and spirits of the sunlight, reaching up for the warmth, opening for the bees. My meditation takes me to the sky, to the cloud people, and to the longed for rains. Where are you Stormfather? Why do you stay away, like a sailor lost at sea? I see a woman wrapped in warm clothes walking in the sand along the shore, her eyes distant to the west, wondering when her lover will return. He’s been gone too long.
I get this sense that I it will be another dry year. That the woman of the mists will continue to pace the shoreline, for her captain can’t find his way home. Is this a punishment? The climate change narrative would make it seem so, but I don’t sense that’s the word the storms would chose. It isn’t punishment. It’s more like destiny. A rhythm. A cycle. Drought has as much to teach us as does the rain. How do we learn to live in a drought? How do we follow the cycles of nature? Is that even possible when we’ve forgotten her song? I imagine allowing Nestle to continue to pump the aquifers dry in central California during a drought to sell bottled water to people in the UK is not a gesture of surrender to the cycles of the planet. It’s the exact opposite. It’s a willful rejection of our place in the web of life.
Nature’s cycles are what guide the biodynamic calendar. This is why I must remediate the soil on a root day. I’ve made a commitment to the beings that live here and to the roots yet to grow. I invite them, as I invite the fog to rise along the mountain and cover the newly sown seeds in a blanket of moisture at night—we must work with whatever we have. I listen to the sound of the sprinkler, much quieter now that the system is hooked up to electricity rather than a generator. The thought of electricity makes me glance at the huge, shining power station I can see now that the trees are gone. What is electricity? Is it not trapped fire? Elementals in service to us, confined to humming machines, transformers, and wires. Did we ask the fire elementals permission to put them in our machines? Should we have? In the 150 years since we turned on the lights, we’ve created quite the civilization. At what cost?
The substation sits at the top of the canyon and the path of dead trees leading up to it shows how the wildfire raced up to the equipment, raging from below. I can almost see the wall of flames, reaching out to the fire trapped in the substation, engulfing the structure, and setting its brothers free. Wildfire meets trapped fire in a furious embrace and becomes more as it continues up toward higher ground, burning everything in its path. Not destruction, not to the fire. More like a dance of liberation, of freedom for the fire that humanity needs to live, but gives no thought to its being, nor its life. Taken for granted as a force we control, not a being we should know. How could it be different if we viewed electricity as a co-creator, rather than a tool?
My sons are sad, their whole generation is. They worry about the state of the planet, they worry it’s too late to turn things around. This might be so. I can’t argue with them. I can feel the moment was missed. We went over the crest of redemption sometime in last year. Fearing change, we allowed politicians to sit in their ivory halls and grow old, blind to the needs of the people and the planet, focused on something that no longer matters. We allowed our minds to be consumed by narratives of anger, blame, and separation. We failed to protect our children and the animals who share this land with us. We’ve failed to make the changes needed and while something will survive, it might not be what it is now. I recall standing on my land for the first time after the fire and my heart breaks as I consider the whole planet in such a state. Could we go that far toward destruction? Could this be my last Earthwalk, for in my next lifetime there’s no Earth to return to? How can I give my sons hope? Should I even bother? We gave up our oaths to the land long ago, thus it makes sense we would also give up our oaths to each other.
Hopelessness is a dark path toward an endless abyss of nothing. You can’t affirmation yourself out of such a state and no amount of TED Talks or self-help books approved by Oprah can remove the heavy cloak of such grief. You can however pray on your knees and surrender to the chaos of life. Let go of your need to control others and allow your own life to change as it must. Listen to the land and the people around you and see what you can do to help. It always starts with love. The love between two people creates a force. That force is felt by the land you live on. It grows and connects to others, thus weaving your land to the land and other people around you, creating a tapestry of life. This is the point of marriage—to form the smallest of communities and let it grow into a village from there. So throw parties. Host people in your home. Cook for your family. Plant cover crop and flowers. Keep bees. Most of all, make an oath to the beings of nature. Yes, driving an electric vehicle may help, but try loving just one tree, one river, one stream, one beehive, or even, in the spirit of the Little Prince, one rose. Love them to the point that you will make an oath to nourish them without conditions. Then sit back and listen. You will know what to do next because they will tell you.
I glance at the biodynamic calendar and sigh with relief. There are three root days next week. I will continue my work then. For now, I will lay in the hammock under the redwoods and drink in their glory, their spirits, and their love.