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.
by Ness Vandeburgh Photography
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.
by Ness Vandeburgh Photography
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