The 2026 Goetheanum Agriculture Conference has now closed, and I am sitting with a quiet, full heart. I will share photos and deeper reflections in time, and as Dr Demeter I have been in conversation with many extraordinary people here, farmers, researchers, doctors, philosophers, scientists, herbalists, compost makers, and quiet cultural stewards. There are stories coming. For now, this is a small field note from within the experience.

Dr Demeter / Emily Samuels-Ballantyne at Magical Farm Tasmania, just prior for departing for the 2026 Goetheanum Conference in Dornach Switzerland. Photography by Ness Vandeburgh Photography

People from forty-six countries gathered around a shared devotion: care for land, life, and the invisible relationships that make fertility possible. Across languages and climates, I felt a deep Con Viv truth alive, that food systems are not mechanical supply chains, but living cultural ecosystems shaped by soil, story, community, and cosmos.

Compost was spoken about as relationship, not waste management. Herbal preparations were described with reverence…. Yarrow, chamomile, nettle, oak bark, and valerian were held as mediators between Earth and sky. Many people here have simply followed their hearts into this work, often quietly, often without recognition, because the land asked them to.

Again and again, the conference returned to an ancient remembering: agriculture lives inside a cosmic conversation. Rudolf Steiner spoke of earthly life as inseparable from cosmic rhythms, and here that knowing felt practical, embodied, and quietly radical. I was also reminded of Johannes Kepler’s Music of the Spheres, and of Elisabeth Vreede’s work carrying forward the understanding that the heavens are not distant observers, but participants in earthly becoming.

What moved me most was presence. People were not performing knowledge. They were living it.

If there is one thread I carry forward into Con Viv practice, policy imagination, and the Grow Small, Feed All vision, it is this: the unseen world is asking to become visible again through how we farm, design, govern, and relate.

More soon…including voices from the conference, conversations across continents, and the quiet revolution already growing in soils around the world.

Photography by Ness Vanberburgh at Magical Farm Tasmania

To work with the Foundational Stone Meditation given by Rudolf Steiner is to experience thinking, feeling, and willing as living organs rather than abstract faculties. On the farm this is not philosophy but practice: thought becomes observation of soil and season, feeling becomes reverence for the beings who share the fields, and will becomes the steady hands that plant, mend, harvest, and feed.

The meditation speaks of grounding spirit into the depths of the human heart so that action can rise again in freedom. Each morning in the garden I sense this descent and ascent as breath: compost returning matter to darkness, seedlings lifting green toward light. My family life follows the same rhythm. Care moves downward into listening, patience, and nourishment, then upward into guidance, decision, and protection.

Policy, too, must be laid like a stone in this inner foundation. When laws grow only from calculation, they hover above life and soon drift away from consequence. When they are set into the shared ground of place, work, and relationship, they hold. Writing from the farm teaches me that governance begins with attention: to animals who show when pasture is ready, to neighbours who reveal what community needs, to children who ask what kind of future we are making.

The meditation’s threefold gesture invites me to weave inner clarity, outer responsibility, and communal purpose. In human relationships this means meeting others not as roles but as souls in development. In relation to animals it means partnership rather than use, recognising their presence as part of the farm’s consciousness. In community it means shaping agreements that circulate vitality instead of extracting it.

To carry this stone in the heart is to design from below, from roots and relationships, rather than from distant abstraction. Life, work, and policy then arise from the same source: a quiet centre where thinking is warmed by love and strengthened by courage, and where every decision is asked to serve the wholeness that holds us all in living reciprocity together.

Con Viv and With love,

Dr Demeter

Musings