Ode to the Women Who Work With Life

You arrive without fanfare, with sleeves rolled and eyes awake,
carrying the science of attention into soil and society,
so the farm becomes more than production,
it becomes a place where human hearts can learn their rhythm.

Maye Emily Bruce, you remind me the flower needs no advertisement,
only the courage to be seen as itself,
the intelligence of nature held in plain language,
a kindness that does not dilute innate genius.

Lady Eve Balfour, you press your ear to the ground and say: listen,
the earth is not a resource, it is a relation,
and every economy begins where humus is made.

Elisabeth Vreede, mathematician and astronomer, who was star-wise and exact,
you keep the heavens honest,
so our thinking can be clear without becoming cold,
and our wonder can be lawful without becoming abstract.

Ita Wegman, healer of thresholds,
you show that medicine is also social courage,
a practice of meeting another human being without fear,
and letting the future enter through care.

Julia Yelton, mentor of my hands and seasons,
you taught me to trust the rhythm, the soil, atmosphere and everything in between; to do the next right task,
and to let the land educate me without rushing its answers.

And Sophia Montefiore, with colour and form,
you make the planets speak in the language of plants,
so biodynamics can be embodied,
so the cosmic becomes real,
so the farmer can remember the sky without leaving the compost heap.

In the Goetheanum, Dornach, the home of holism,
I sat beside Sophia and felt the lineage breathing,
not as hierarchy, but as companionship, reflection, brilliance and joy:
women who keep the impulse warm, workable, and free.

Here is my vow, Dr Demeter’s devotional practice:
to steep yarrow, to wait, to speak with care,
to weave boundaries that do not harden,
to cultivate warmth as a field, not a demand.

May our islands, valleys, schools, clinics, gardens, committees,
become cultural farms of the future,
where healing, education, agriculture, and social art
meet each other in truthfulness,
and the world remembers: we are ‘with life’.

With Life ‘Con Viv’ and Love,

Dr Demeter

Dr Demeter / Emily Samuels-Ballantyne and Sophia Montefiore in the Goetheanum at the 2026 Agriculture Conference

You Never Farm Alone: Collaboration from Free Will, and the cultural farms of the future

Feature on the Agriculture Conference in Dornach, Switzerland at the Goetheanum, 4–7 February 2026.

We gathered at the Goetheanum for the agriculture conference titled You Never Farm Alone, and I left feeling that what was being cultivated was not only agriculture, but relationship and a praxis of courage. Approximately 750 people came from every continent, yet the gathering felt intimate. Each morning began with Michael Letters readings, conversation, and a strengthening eurythmy practice with Stefan Hasler and Eduardo Rincon. In anthroposophic terms it felt like the “I” learning to stand inside community, without losing warmth. On one of the last evenings we all joyfully danced together in the large hall, which was such a delight.

Sophia Montefiore, Ueli Hurter and Emily Samuels-Ballantyne at the Goetheanum, Switzerland, in front of Rudolf Steiner’s chalkboard drawings, an atmosphere of imagination, study, and practice. Agriculture Conference ‘You Never Farm Alone’ 2026.

I attended the Cultural Farms of the Future workshop three days in a row throughout the conference. Its question was simple, courageous, and ambitious: how can farmland become a place where living communities are formed, where healing, education, agriculture and the social arts are integrated as one cultural organism. We spoke of farms as places that can hold learning, care, research, celebration, and good work, and we returned repeatedly to economics: how might we organise farm activity so value circulates rather than extracts, so farms can host people without burning out farmers, and so the social life around the farm becomes an organ of the farm itself.

The same group who ran the Cultural Farms workshop also led a panel titled Our Work with Life: Working with Life in Agriculture, Medicine, and Pedagogy, weaving integrative medicine, education, and biodynamic agriculture into one conversation. Berni Courts (Ruskin Mill Trust) spoke of education through meaningful work. Dr Martin-Günther Sterner brought the human organism into view, linking digestion, rhythm and immunity with social environment. Tobias Hartkemeyer (CSA farm Pente) spoke of co-responsibility and associative forms that make community agriculture real. Ruben Segers and Antoinette Simonart (De Kollebloem, Belgium) offered a living example of a farm as a cultural place where production and pedagogy belong together. The thread running through the conversation was practical reverence: life can be enriched through the farm organism.

Emily Samuels-Ballantyne in a eurythmy circle as part of the Cultural Farms of the Future workshop at the Goetheanum, during the Agriculture Section conference We Don’t Farm Alone, Switzerland. Photography by Emily Samuels-Ballantyne/Dr Demeter

Ueli Hurter, in his lecture on “Free Will,” named Collaboration from Free Will as a practical social principle: not compliance, not consensus-by-fatigue, but creating the conditions for people to choose the work. Then, when the weather turns (or a moment or situation tightens), cooperation comes as a willing and shared response rather than something forced. He drew on Kepler’s music of the spheres as an imagination for lawful relationship, and the evening concluded with the Turning of Time stanza from Steiner’s Foundation Stone Meditation: a Michaelic request to meet the present with clearer thinking and warmer hearts. In essence, technique alone won’t meet the future of agriculture; what is required is a new warmth and truthfulness between people, and this takes Michaelic courage to discover.

After Ueli’s lecture I found myself in conversation with Eduardo Rincon and turning to a small, almost disarmingly simple gesture inspired by Ueli’s lecture: to make a cup of yarrow tea! I was seeking to give his talk a Keplerian imagination through this simple idea. This Keplerian imagination is a way of perceiving that seeks the lawful relationships at work within both the cosmos and the commonplace, and trusts that these relationships can be consciously participated in, somewhere tangible to rest.

If harmony is experienced as right relationship, then we require simple, repeatable gestures that tune the human being toward listening. Yarrow offers such a gesture. As a plant long associated with boundaries, mediation, and weaving, it works quietly with the organs of the body. Likewise as we know it is quite an integrator in bio-dynamics practices for the soil and the overall farm organism. In the human experience, by steeping, waiting, and drinking, one practises a different tempo, less reaction, more receptivity; less assertion, more attunement.

In the old language of correspondences, yarrow carries a Venus quality: the principle of relationship, balance, and heart-centred communication. Through such a plant, the planetary is not abstract but intimate. The cosmos is not elsewhere; it is participating. And so a simple cup of tea becomes a way of inviting lawful order, warmth, coherence, reciprocity, into the shared field of human conversation and experiences. In this way, plants are not passive background to human development, but living partners in our co-evolution, quietly shaping the conditions through which we refine perception, relationship, and consciousness.

Emily Samuels-Ballantyne at the Agriculture Section front door ‘double dome’. Photography by Evelyn

Insight and reflection questions for readers in Tasmania and beyond:
Where in your region could a cultural farm take root, not as a venue, but as a living place for learning and healing?
What would it mean to design a farm gate as a civic doorway?
Which institutions could become allies, and which habits of control would need to soften into trust?
What would you change if your measure of success included soil, children, elders, microbes, and local stories?
Who are your collaborators from free will, and how will you care for those relationships when pressure rises?

Sevenfold Learning Course Participants at the Agriculture Section building, Photography by Emily Samuels-Ballantyne

Next year’s conference will focus on the biome and nutrition, and I return to our island with renewed impulse: to weave festive agriculture and convivial farming into life, so more people can access biodynamics and culture can be reinvigorated through land connection, one honest relationship at a time. May this impulse become practice in homes, councils, and markets.

With life ‘Con Viv’ and Love,

Dr Demeter

The BD Farm in the foreground, the new preparations storage building and the Goetheanum in the background. Photo: Emily Samuels-Ballantyne

From Clash to Pattern: A Living Systems Guide

The human world hums with tension. Meetings flare into argument, social feeds crowd into outrage, and kitchens, workplaces, and councils echo with competing voices that rarely feel heard. Con Viv, which simply means “with life,” treats this heat as living energy rather than waste. In living systems disturbance is not an error but information, so the real question becomes whether we can build vessels strong enough to hold that energy and transform it into insight, relationship, policy and practice.

Jung’s insight is helpful here. When two poles lock against each other, a “third” thing is missing. The “Third” is not a bland compromise but a new form that appears only when opposites are consciously held long enough to reveal a creative synthesis. Our public life often fails at this, since we either suppress conflict in the name of peace without truth, or inflame it in the name of truth without peace. If we want to move beyond that binary, we need containers that invite the Third to appear, which is a cultural and institutional task rather than a purely emotional one.

Anthroposophy offers a clear shape for healthy community life. It says culture thrives with freedom, our shared rules should treat people as equals, and our economy should be based on mutual support. When we mix these up, trust breaks down. When we keep them distinct and in balance, love becomes something you can build with. Roles are placed where they fit, relationships are cared for, and decisions follow a steady rhythm so care can move through a community reliably. Con Viv turns this into practice through head, heart, and hand: seeing clearly, meeting each other warmly, and making things together. We move through a simple cycle of notice, hold, transform, and act. The aim is not to remove conflict but to guide its heat into learning and useful patterns.

On the ground this looks ordinary and practical. Listening spaces give people a way to speak without fear so that heat turns into information that everyone can use. Rights containers make decision paths visible with transparent timelines, rotating facilitation, small trials that run for a set period, and a public review that invites revision rather than punishment. Mutual-aid prototyping redirects arguments into safe-to-try projects such as verge care, herb plots, walking routes, tool libraries, and shared maintenance days, so trust grows sideways through work done together. Creative activation turns disputes into raw material for theatre, music, murals, and story-gathering, since new forms often appear first in image or gesture before they can be legislated. Individual containment gives each person a way to hold strong feeling through journaling, contemplative movement, boundary practice, or a quiet walk, which is less about private self-help and more about civic hygiene that prevents projection from flooding the commons.

The virtue that names the tone of this work is Michaelic courage, a clear and warm quality of attention that meets the dragon without becoming one. In practice this looks like precision instead of blame, imagination instead of cynicism, and rhythm instead of rush. It is a kind of heart-thinking where understanding is shaped by interest in the other, which keeps the social field from hardening into camps and slogans. Conflict will not vanish, nor should it, since friction keeps systems alive. What changes is the destination of that energy. Within a living container the spark falls into a wider field and can ripen into a third thing, perhaps a pattern other places can reuse, a pilot that becomes policy, or a poem that restores language where it had collapsed.

This is the seed-vision here… Love becomes infrastructure that shapes decision making, convivial governance, and everyday interaction, while Con Viv offers a choreography for the passage from heat to practice. Jung gives us the organ of perception for the Third, and Anthroposophy gives us a social anatomy that keeps freedom, equality, and mutuality in honest relationship. Together they sketch a future life system that is robust enough to hold our heat and gentle enough to help us grow. Here, friction is fuel and the vessel that turns it into life is made, maintained, and renewed in common.

Imagining Healing: The Third Path for Tasmania

Tasmania is at a crossroads and there is a great opportunity to make this beautiful island a place of renewal. The debates that dominate our island aquaculture expansion, forestry, tourism, renewable energy, are often framed in binaries: jobs versus environment, growth versus preservation, progress versus collapse. These debates are real, but when they harden into opposites, something deeper is lost.

Rudolf Steiner called this the hardening of the soul. In modern life, thinking becomes mechanic and abstract, feeling grows dulled, and willingness is outsourced to bureaucracies and machines. Carl Jung described the same danger in psychological terms: when opposites split apart, we risk paralysis or rage unless we awaken the Third, a symbolic organ of integration, a space that can hold tension long enough for something new, whole, and healing to emerge. The challenge before us is not just political or economic but tis spiritual and psychological. Tasmania needs the Third. Not neutrality, not compromise, but the courage to imagine beyond the binary. 

The Third as Social Practice

The Third is not a theory, it is in fact a lived practice. It shows up in a community food hub, a biodynamic farm, a seed library, a convivial festival and even a thought process that holds complexity without jumping to a conclusion. ‘Third’ places and mindset are where imagination, justice, and reciprocity can breathe together. Third ways of thinking, being and doing act like acupuncture points in the social body: small but intentional mind and/or physical spaces that release vitality into the whole. Steiner’s vision of the threefold social organism gives us a map. A healthy society balances:

• Cultural freedom: imagination, education, and spirit free to unfold.

• Political equity: governance grounded in fairness and rights.

• Economic mutuality: livelihoods based on reciprocity, not extraction.

Applied locally, these principles are deeply practical. They remind us that social healing begins not with abstract strategies but with lived experiments, participatory action, and transparent processes that keep head, heart, and hands together. I love the deep green design Prof Seaton Baxter (from Scotland) theory called “way of the prototype” - much of my work is based around this methodology. 

Local Government: From Strategy to Practice

Nowhere is this more urgent than in local government. Councils produce endless strategies, reports, and consultation papers, yet communities often see little translation into practice. Strategy is not an outcome and true outcomes happen when policies take form in gardens, services, cultural initiatives, housing solutions:  the fabric of everyday life. Fair local government means shifting from paperwork to practice. This doesn’t mean abandoning strategies, but holding them accountable to lived results. People in communities (rate payers) deserve transparency: to trace how decisions are made, where funds are spent, and how outcomes are measured. Without this, government risks serving mechanical and abstracted systems instead of people they are there to serve.

Imagine a local government that functions as an enabler, not just an administrator? Councils can support neighbourhood initiatives, co-design projects with residents, and facilitate cooperation across sectors. In this way, governance itself becomes a Third space: not caught between bureaucracy, process and populism, but a living practice that restores vitality to communities. Tasmania, small enough to be nimble and rich enough in imagination, has the potential to pioneer this. If we can re-root governance in action, ensure transparency, and honour community-led practice, we can show how local government can become not just functional, but regenerative.

Magical Farm Tasmania Festive Agriculture event 2025

Feminised Intelligence and Plant Allies

Ecofeminist thinkers remind us that what the world needs is not more domination but feminised intelligence: cyclical, regenerative, relational, rooted in care for land and community. This intelligence is already alive in Tasmania in community gardens, co-ops, and creative economies but it needs recognition, resourcing, and policy support. Even plants point the way. Yarrow teaches us to heal what is torn and to hold paradox. Rosemary sharpens memory and discernment. Nettle brings courage and vitality. Together they embody what the Third requires: integration, clarity, and action.

The task before us is not neutrality but imagination, beyond binaries. This heart shaped island Tasmania must reawaken the Third, and inspire other places to do the same. The Third is a space where grief can be honoured, paradox can be held, and new forms of life can be designed. The future of this island will not be built by choosing sides in collapse. It will be built in the Third space where we move from abstraction to life systems and community practice becomes the foundation of renewal.