Stella*Natura 2008
Working with Cosmic Rhythms

2008 Kimberton Hills Biodynamic Agricultural Planting Guide and Calendar

Softbound Wall Calendar

$14.95

Based on the work of Maria Thun, the Stella*Natura Planting Calendar adds to each month essays that inspire and guide. The planting guide symbols are very easy to follow and I can say with enthusiasm that it is with this calendar that I got my start as a fledgling gardener. I always found that planting according to it yielded better results than not using it, even when external weather conditions seemed to argue differently. It has become over the years a constant companion to many who love gardening.

Fairy Tale Moons 2008 Calendar

A Fairy Tale and Star Lore Calendar for Parents and Children

Softbound Wall Calendar

$14.95

There's something for everyone in this new calendar. For parents, star lore and fairy tale lore to delight the heart and following the year in the loveliest way. For children, warm, lively watercolors of scenes from fairy tales that contain elements of the current moon. And, a glimpse of the fairy tale, enough to inspire you to find the full story (those books are named) and share it with your child. There are often daily tidbits of story and star lore, too. Pure enjoyment.

Keeping a Nature Journal
Discover a Whole New Way of Seeing the World Around You

Clare Walker Leslie & Charles E Roth

Foreword by Edward O Wilson

Softbound, beautifully illustrated in pen and ink drawings and watercolor

$18.95

Clare Walker Leslie's work is so invaluable in the field of nature study, for all ages everywhere. We use it in our Roots & Shoots program to help young people sharpen their observation skills and deepen their connection with nature.

- Jane Goodall
Founder, The Jane Goodall Institute

For many years now, both Bob and I have felt strongly that there was a need to offer 6th, 7th and 8th grade students (and high school students, for that matter) more direct contact with living nature than the conventional Waldorf curriculum calls for. In our view, our modern world has become so very separated from the Life of the world, that it has become a pedagogical need to balance that reality with something more.

Keeping a Nature Journal offers a beautiful, lively way to do just this - and to do it in the contexts of Steiner's phenomenological approach to science, drawing & painting, and upper grades composition writing. Whether in a classroom or homeschool setting, this book opens doorways to really seeing our world and in the process, also really seeing ourselves and each other. It is simply a gifted work of art, something anyone who teaches will want to discover for themselves. There is even an entire section devoted to ways of teaching this to both children and adults.

Our hope is that the offering of this book will lead many more adults to travel the seasons with their students, and to share the love for nature that grows from such a journey.

The Secret Language of Form
Visual Meaning in Art and Nature

Van James

Softbound

$29.95

The pleasures of discovery that lie within this book are so exhilarating that you may want a cup of soothing herb tea alongside so that you won't interrupt yourself too often by jumping up and singing for happiness.

Van James has explored form as it emerges from nature and finds its way into art and from there into the human soul. His journey into the heart of meaning as we humans find it among the many forms Creation has given us constitutes a tour through an Earthly-Cosmic landscape that is at once always grounded yet never removed from spiritual reality. Hundreds of photos, drawings, and paintings greet you to illustrate each illuminate each of the author's observations; and, to evoke wonder and awe in your own heart. This is a feast of beautiful awakening.

Visit this book again and again, to study closely, to keep at hand for those times when inspiration seems far away, for surely you will find it anew within its pages.

Contents:

Part One: The Formative Nature of Art

• Primal Images
• Archetypal Images
  • Curve and Straight Line: The Alphabet of Form
  • Point and Dot: Origin
  • Circle and Spiral: Wholeness and Eternity
  • Chevron, Zigzag and Lattice: Patterns of Humanity
  • Ladder, Spine and Tree: The Ascent
  • Symmetry: The Lawfulness of Balance
  • Cross and Swastika: Death and Transformation
• Archetypal Themes in Art
  • Mandala: Picture of the Universal Self
  • Labyrinth and Maze: Journey to the Center of the Universe
  • Thread and Knot: The World Weaves

Part Two: The Formative Art of Nature

• The Essential Gesture
• The Open Secret
  

Nature Ways in Story and Verse

Dorothy Harrer

Illustrated by Robin Crofts Lawrence

Softbound

$9.95

Nature Ways is filled with lilting stories that will captivate the children to whom they are read. It is, in fact, intended to be read aloud by parents, grandparents, and, yes, teachers, too. These stories and poems share the magic of nature that occasionally breaks in upon us all -- even when we, like the character Twig, aren't particularly happy with the way things are going.

A golden Waldorf classic - for children in the early grades.

Sharing Nature with Children

20th Anniversary Edition - Revised and Expanded

Joseph Cornell

Softbound

$9.95

We used this book when our children were young and still love the memories it evokes. The book itself is packed with ideas and inspriation -- enough to see to it that you and your children discover the joy nature holds for us. Now, this same book is even bigger and better - with more of the same infectious enthusiasm that made Cornell's first printing a beloved classic.

If you are a class teacher, homeschool teacher or parent, Sharing Nature with Children is like having a magic wand in your back pocket - just bring out one of the games or activities and watch the fun, I mean, learning begin!

Sharing Nature with Children II

Joseph Cornell

Softbound

$9.95

Joseph Cornell's sequel to his original 1979 volume of nature activities is every bit as inspiring as the original book: Here is another treasury of new games and activities for both adults and children.

Many of Joseph's favorites are in this second volume, and here he introduces us to what he calls "Flow Learning," a 'magical' method of placing the activities in a thematic sequence to ensure a genuinely uplifting experience.

Grab your jacket or sun hat, as many children as you can find, and a take off for the great outdoors and a beautiful day!

Eric Sloane's Weather Book

Eric Sloane

Softbound

$9.95

Eric Sloane is one of my all-time favorite authors, and the reappearance after many years of his fascinating book on weather and weather lore is an event to be celebrated. This is a book that anyone teaching meteorology will want to have available -- absolutely no student could fail to find the subject interesting if you share Eric Sloane with them. And, if you're not teaching meteorology, you'll still want it around.

In simple language, Sloane explains the whys and wherefores of weather and weather forecasting - and does so in a universally appealing way.

With humor and common sense shining through in a book that's also lively and informative, Sloane shows readers how to predict the weather by "reading" such natural phenomena as winds, skies, and animal sounds. This beautifully illustrated and practical treasure trove of climate lore will enlighten outdoorsmen, farmers and sailors as much as it will your students. Anyone who has ever wondered what a large halo around the moon means, why birds "sit it out" before a storm, and whether or note to take an umbrella when leaving home will love this book.

Perceiving Plants: Experiencing Elemental Beings
The Influence of Gnomes, Nymphs, Sylphs and Fire Spirits upon the Life of Plants

Dick van Romunde

Translated by James Lee and Jannebeth Röell

Softbound

$12.95

Perceiving Plants was originally written as an introduction to Rudolf Steiner's Man as Symphony of the Creative Word (newly titled in English as Harmony of the Creative Word). From there, van Romunde expanded it and the result is this amazing little book in which the author teaches us how to become sensitive to the nature beings that sustain and effect plant life.

Whether you begin next to a favorite potted plant or out in a beautiful meadow, you'll find van Romunde teaching you things that will forever change the way you look at the natural world -- and will probably forever change your life. For, once we become truly awake to the helpful nature spirits, it is very difficult to go on as though they didn't exist, as if what we did really didn't matter.

Perceiving Plants offers us a uniquely joyous awakening to both the nature spirits and our own responsibility. A lovesong to both plants and the beings who create within them.

Fairy Worlds and Workers
A Natural History of Fairyland

Marjorie Spock

Softbound, large format

$12.95

Close enough to touch with an outstretched hand or the mere lifting of an eyebrow lie the borders of a fabulous country. It was once familiar ground to all, a place where gods and men lived together in profound communion. But new goldfields of experience beckoned; the old was abandoned in a rush, lost sight of, and soon largely forgotten. Now people are beginning to feel bereft without it and are trying to find their way back again to that lost kingdom.

- Marjorie Spock in Fairy Worlds and Workers

And so Marjorie Spock begins the journey - on which we are invited - into the world of life that is the fairies' realm. I think you'll find as I did, that the journey she leads us on draws us closer to these beings at work and play wherever nature is invited into our lives. This is a book to really enjoy!

Earth-Friendly
Re-Visioning Science and Spirituality through Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and Rudolf Steiner

Adrian M. Hofstetter, O.P.

Softbound

$20.00

Earth-Friendly collects the fruits of a lifetime of study and teaching in search of a holistic, organismic, living science, respectful of the sacredness of nature and the ubiquity of the spirit. As a biology philosopher, Sister Adrian’s first teachers were Aquinas and Aristotle; later she came to know the work of Goethe and Rudolf Steiner.

Earth-Friendly traces the development of Sister Adrian’s conviction that "the spiritual science flowing from the thought of St. Albert and St.Thomas, as developed seven hundred years later by Rudolf Steiner, could recapture the true greatness of the West as it reaches out to the East to create an ‘earthfriendly re-visioning of science and spirituality.’"

Earth-Friendly invites us to follow Adrian Hofstetter's explorations of a new kind of science, one rooted in a clear and profound epistemology that allows the wholeness of nature to become visible. These essays let us participate in a personal spiritual journey to overcome the rifts between philosophy, religion, and science that characterized the 20th Century. We can learn much from them.—Craig Holdrege, author of Genetics and the Manipulation of Life

Embryology and World Evolution

Karl König

Softbound

$28.95

In these remarkable seminars, König traces the preparatory steps that every human being has to tread in forging an earthly 'house' fitting for the spiritual to incarnate into the physical. Wonder builds on wonder as we begin to recognise the wisdom with which we human beings are fashioned; it turns into awe we we see how intimately we are interwoven with the evolution of our earth. Indeed, we recapitulate its earlier stages in our own unfolding from the moment of conception onwards.

König succeeds in bringing vividly alive a subject normally confined to the academic laboratory. What might be thought dry or difficult here becomes exciting and challenging, and we are left with a new and deeper understanding of our significance for the future of this beautiful, fragile planet.

Flowforms
The Rhythmic Power of Water

John Wilkes

Brimming with full-color and black-and-white photos and drawings

Softbound

$35.00

What is the true nature of water and does it have memory?

By working with the rhythm and flow of water, can we increase its life-giving power?

Water is not only fundamental to life but is essential for the cycles and changes in nature. John Wilkes asserts that water is the universal bearer of whatever character we put into it. Consequently, the way we treat water is crucial to our own health and to the well being of the planet as a whole.

Working with his remarkable invention, the Flowform, Wilkes uncovered many mysteries of water and, in the process, created an art of great beauty. His lifetime of applied research into rhythms and water, fully revealed here for the first time, has startling implications for such topical issues as farming and irrigation; food production and processing; water treatment and recycling; and health and cosmetic products.

The author includes a history of Flowform research as well as the most important, up-to-date developments in this research around the world. He also includes informative appendices on metamorphosis, Flowform designs and applications, and the scientific and technical aspects of Flowform research.

Flowforms is a groundbreaking, lavishly illustrated book, revealing both the beauty of Flowforms and their broad range of applications.

Contents:

• Water and Rhythm
• Rhythm and Flow: The Water Cycle
• Metamorphosis
• Experimenting with Water
• Discovery of the Flowform Method
• In Flowform and the Living World
• Järna: the First Major Flowform Project
• The Next Generation of Flowforms
• The Metamorphic Sequence
• Research with Cascades
• Flowform-related Developments
• The Flowform throughout the World: An Illustrated Survey
• Present and Future
• Appendix 1: Metamorphosis
• Appendix 2: Flowform Types, Designs, and Applications
• Appendix 3: Scientific and Technical Aspects
• Appendix 4: Virbela Rhythm Research Institute

Sensitive Chaos
The Creation of Flowing Forms in Water and Air

Theodor Schwenk

Preface by Jacques Cousteau

$32.00

Sensitive Chaos presents one of the most enthralling, marvelous, even sensuous journeys into life on Earth. The destination? Nothing less than eye-to-eye contact with the conjunction of living creation with the matter of our Earth and beyond. Theodor Schwenk's groundbreaking work stands as vivid testimony to the interconnectedness of all life and to the living heartbeat of the Earth itself. This is a wonderful book - one I have turned to many times over the 20 years since I first found it. Please do give yourself the same opportunity. Beyond outstanding!

Drawing from the Book of Nature

Dennis Klocek

Softbound

$23.95

Draning from the Book of Nature does double-duty as a book that is about both drawing and the natural world of plant and animal. Here is a wonderful resource for teachers, students or anyone wishing to develop their capacity for the artistic observation of natural phenomena.

Dennis Klocek, with his refreshing combination of depth and clarity, offers a wealth of insight into the lives of plants and animals. His text is enhanced with step-by-step lessons to help the reader bring the kingdoms of nature to life on paper.

In Partnership with Nature

Jochen Bockemühl

Softbound with unbound full-color plates

$17.80

This is a fascinating book, one that is as much an artistic presentation of the natural world as it is a considered ecological treatise on the interrelationships and unique attributes of individual species and environments of nature.

Bockemühl's goal is to allow us to experience the unity of beauty with scientific fact, of science and art -- in the process, it is his conviction that we will develop our own sense of how to respond with care to the needs of nature in those instances when our own needs impact the environment. In short, he has composed In Partnership with Nature in the hopes of reuniting beauty, truth and goodness -- for the love of the world.

This is a book that is a treat to have on one's bookshelf -- and to go back to time and time again to discover and rediscover it's gems. Very highly recommended.

The Holy Order of Water
Healing Earth's Waters and Ourselves

William E. Marks

Softbound

$18.00

This fascinating tour of water lore and science takes us from ancient Greece to our present-day challenges of pollution and ecological destruction.

A kaleidoscopic variety of subjects are covered, including water and the human body, vortex energy, cosmic rain, the use of water in spiritual practices, deforestation and dams, healing with water, and much more.

At a time when Earth's waters are under siege, we need Marks' message more than ever before. If there is a Bible of water, this is it.

- Larry Dossey, M.D.
author, Healing Words

Sky Phenomena
A Guide to Naked-eye Observation of the Stars

Norman Davidson

Softbound

Profusely illustrated

$25.00

This is the astronomy course I always wanted to take, but could find! Davidson takes us outside, has us look up at the starry wonder overhead, and then tells us what we are seeing. In the process, he also treats us to myths, legends and history, and even includes a whole chapter of poetry about the stars! Wonderful!

Contents:

• The Stars - I
• The Stars - II
• The Sun
• The Moon
• Eclipses
• The Planets
• The Copernican Revolution
• Comets and Meteors
• The Southern Hemisphere Sky
• The Stars in Poetry

Appendices:

• Astronomical Events
• Technical Data
• Astronimcal Symbols
• Star Maps for Observers at the Equator
• Useful Materials and Publications
• Some Famous Individuals in the History of Astronomy
• Glossary of Astronomical Terms

Earth and Man
Collected transcripts of lectures by Dr. Karl König

Karl König

Softbound

$18.25

Dr. König and friend at a Camphill Village

It is hard to know where to begin to talk about the contents of this book - it is a truly vast collection of thoughts and correspondences. Dr. König was a man of many talents with a heart big enough to take a warm interest in all that has to do with life - plant life, animal life, human life, earth life, spiritual life; he delved into it all, observing much, realizing more, then weaving the relationships of all he saw into a beautiful tapestry. And, as with anything that is genuinely beautiful, his insights are also deeply useful - sparking in his audience (now readers) that "Ah ha!" that goes almost immediately from the head thru the heart then into the hands as a fresh approach to things that need doing.

If your interests and work focus on life - whether you are a healer or a gardener or farmer or just love the earth - then you will find a lifetime's inspiration in these lectures.

Note: the editors rightly point out that these lectures are uncorrected by Dr. König and, therefore, contain errors. As they say in the Preface,

Students of these texts will have to bear in mind that they are confronted with incomplete and sometiems misinterpreted recordings which, nevertheless, offer to the discerning reader such a wealth of insight, stimulation and moral strength as to justify the withholding of these manuscripts even less than making them available in an imperfect and sometimes distorted form.

Responsibility for this descision rests entirely with those who have been asked by Dr. König to administer his manuscripts and writings. But this preface should be taken as an indication that the reader of these reprints also has to accept a certain responsibility in the deployment of judgment and care for these texts by Dr. König.

Bees

Rudolf Steiner

With an Afterword on the Art of Joseph Benys

Softbound

$25.00

In 1923 Steiner predicted the dire state of the honeybee today. He said then that in fifty to eighty years we would see the consequences of mechanizing the forces that had previously operated organically in the beehive, such as the practice of artificially breeding queen bees. The fact that over sixty percent of the American honeybee population has died during the past ten years and that this same phenomena is occurring around the world should urge our attention to the importance of the issues discussed in these lectures.

Rudolf Steiner began this series of lectures on bees in response to a question from an audience of construction workers. From physical depictions of the daily activities of bees to the loftiest esoteric insights, the lectures describe the unconscious wisdom contained in the beehive and its connection to our experience of health, culture, and the cosmos. They are essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the true nature of the honeybee, as well as those who wish to heal the contemporary crisis of the beehive.

The Cycle of the Year as a Breathing Process of the Earth

Lectures by
Rudolf Stiener

Softbound

$15.95

Human beings must attain an esoteric maturity in order to think not merely abstractly, but to be able to think so concretely that they can again become festival-creating. Then it will be possible again to unite something spiritual with the cycle of sense phenomena.

- Rudolf Steiner (in The Cycle of the Year as a Breathing Process of the Earth)

In these five lectures given at Easter in 1923, Rudolf Steiner lays a foundation for celebrating the Christian festivals - Christmas, Easter, St. John's, and Michaelmas - in a fully conscious way. He begins by describing how the festival year evolved over long ages from the cycle of inbreathing and outbreathing that the forces which are the Earth's soul element carry out in relation to the cosmos. He reveals the deep relationship of humankind to the Earth's seasons, to the time of the solstices and the equinoxes, and through the festivals of the seasons to the Christ Being. The esoteric realities behind the festivals are also discussed in relation to subearthly and superearthly forces, the ancient Mysteries, St. Michael's activity, morality, and the arts.

Nature Spirits

Selected Lectures by Rudolf Stiener

Softbound

$18.95

Long ago human beings had an natural spiritual vision that allowed them to easily commune with the spiritual beings of the natural world. Over time, people became less able to see and know these beings, and fairies, gnomes, dwarfs and other "little folk" became the stuff of legends, myths, and children's stories. Rudolf Steiner was among the first of our modern age to insist that these folk tales and fairy stories were in fact based on reality - spiritual reality. He further asserted that we must now transform the old, instinctive knowledge of these beings into a clear scientific knowledge - and that by doing so we can restore and rebuild the shaky bridge that lies between humankind and the spiritual world.

These lectures are filled with fascinating descriptions about the the many spiritual helpers of the natural world. They also serve beautifully to characterize the relationship of human beings to this world and offer ways in which we as individuals can once again befriend the "wee folk" who carry with them the health of the Earth.

Secrets of the Talking Jaguar
Memoirs from the Living Heart of a Mayan Village

Martín Prechtel

Foreword by Robert Bly

$13.95

I love this book; so much so that after making three attempts at writing my own review of it, I've decided to let Robert Bly speak from his Foreword instead:

"[Prechtel's] father Swiss, his mother a Native American from Canada, Martín is a half-European, half-Huron baby cooked in some darkness he couldn't have imagined. He settled into the famous Mayan village of Santiago Atitlán from the time he was twenty until he was thirty-three. There he received two initiations, one into the village religious tradition and the other into shamanism.
. . . Before meeting Martín, I'd never known a representative of such a culture. But I can testify to the integrity, the massive learning, the faithfulness, the lighthearted joy, and the hard-working nature of this representative.
From these metaphors of honey, of Gods crazy about smoke and dancing, we get a scent of the "original flowering earth," that is, the fantastic fragrance that can come into human life when, despite madness and greediness, old women and old men help the young ones to embody beauty and eloquence, and when eight-hundred-year-old rituals of gratitude get a chance to play themselves out.
. . . It's a precious thing, this book. I've never known another like it. It's a great encyclopedia of beauty that could so easily have been lost if a tree had fallen differently, if a foot had slipped on a rock, if a canoe had sunk in the storm, if the gunman had aimed a little to the left. . . . it is a treasure house of language, in service to life."
- Robert Bly

And it is even more than that. I hope you have the good fortune of being able to read Secrets of the Talking Jaguar - every minute of it will love you.

Goethe on Science
An Anthology of Goethe's Scientific Writings

Jeremy Naydler, editor

$25.00

Goethe on Science is a delicious walk through Goethe's scientific premises, methodology, and conclusions. I found an enormous amount to contemplate, much that opened my eyes to the unfolding of nature around me. I also found that this is a difficult book to put down for very long. I have often set it on the shelf, only to return in a few moments for yet another taste of a way of looking at the world that combines the beauty of poetry with the rigor of science to arrive at conclusions that behold the Spirit.