We continue to delve deeper into the living processes of nature, working towards an understanding of how earthly and cosmic forces work through the substances of the Earth.
Nitrogen is significant to agriculture but can be better understood in relation to its so called four sisters: Sulfur, Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen.
Turning first to Sulfur, we find it is the element through which the Spiritual comes into the physical realm. Both sulfur and phosphorus have been called “light bringers” since they have to do with the working of light into matter.
We meet Carbon, the physical basis for all life forms on Earth, as the great sculptor - able to receive the sublime cosmic imaginations from the cosmos - and then transform them into the forms of a tomato leaf, a maple leaf, a mint leaf, etc. Carbon builds up the forms of plants, and it also builds up our human forms, but is stopped from making us too stiff and plant like by being breathed out as carbonic acid.
All life forms have a Carbon framework, and this must be permeated by life, what some call the ethereal. This ethereal life is none other than Oxygen; but it is fleeting and if left to its own devices would float away like a cloud. Oxygen needs the consciousness and the sensitivity of Nitrogen to play its part in living things. Nitrogen is a mediator between Oxygen and Carbon.
Nitrogen has a spirituality which we are wont to describe as astral. Nitrogen surrounds us on all hands. And it too becomes alive and more sentient when it enters into the Earth. Nitrogen is the bearer of sensation. You can penetrate into the intimate life of Nature if you can see the Nitrogen everywhere, moving about like flowing, fluctuating feelings.
At a certain point a plant has to vanish again. It is not the plant that vanishes, but that form which the spirit has built into the Carbon. Not only in the sense that it vanishes on Earth; it must be able to vanish into the cosmos; into the universal All. This is achieved by the lightest and least spiritual of the four sisters, Hydrogen. In Hydrogen the physical flows outward, utterly broken and scattered, and is carried once more by the Sulfur out into the indistinguishable chaos of the Universal All.
On the other hand, Hydrogen drives these fundamental substances of protein into the tiny seed during its formation and makes them independent there, so that they become receptive to the forces of the Cosmos. In the tiny seed-formation there is chaos, and away in the far circumference there is chaos once more. Chaos in the seed must interact with chaos in the farthest circles of the Universe. Then the new being arises.
We end up returning to Calcium/Limestone and Silica. Carbon seeks the support of the formative activities of Limestone and Silica. We speak of the legumes or Nitrogen fixing plants and how they represent a breathing process on the farm, even the lung organs of the farm organism, and how there seems to be something craving Nitrogen in the soil. This is the limestone mood – craving, claiming everything for itself. Whereas Silica makes no claims – it desires nothing for itself. Silica has come to rest content in itself.
“Once more we ought to feel the chalk or limestone as the kernel-of-desire. Limestone is the fellow who would like to snatch at everything for himself. Silica, on the other hand, we should feel as the very superior gentleman who wrests away all that can be wrested from the clutches of the limestone, carries it into the atmosphere, and so unfolds the forms of plants. This aristocratic gentleman, silica, lives either in the ramparts of his castle — as in the equisetum plant — or else distributed in very fine degree, sometimes indeed in highly homeopathic doses in the atmosphere. And he contrives to tear away what must be torn away from the limestone.”
