Spirit of the Time

These are photos taken by an angel, Ryan Daly (ryandaly1@yahoo.com) who came, lived and worked with us for two weeks. More photos from his trips and other adventures live at http://www.geocities.com/ryandaly1 .

Sculpture on side of the one little shed that we inherited from the previous owners of our community land. This is an earthen plaster on a bamboo weave over the old boards. Long live wheat, the noble seed that accompanies us and sustains us daily.

This is the cabaña that Alex, Denali, and I lived in during the summer. The horses are our neighbors’ and are as much a source of awe and inspiration as they are a source of frustration. The mix of big animals and old traditions with aspirations of orchards and green growth can sometimes be difficult. The cabaña now has a chimney spewing smoke out of it and Alex has set it up really nicely to be able to spend the winter there. What vision and dedication the young lad has!

Our solar oven…. quiet conspiracy with the heavens. We were cooking brown rice and beans almost daily during the summer in this little box of alchemy and always had water ready for maté in case someone came to visit.

Ines’s unfinished house up on the hill. We just found out she’s pregnant…. another member of the tribe on the way! Let’s hope the house is done by this coming summer to shelter the new family.

A view from Ines’s house down on our gardens, the shed, the river and the forest. We thank god for such beauty and dedicate our lives to manifesting this grace in return for all that we have been given.

The first post of Alex’s house in place. Wow, what a long time things of true and lasting value take time to come to be… and that is not even to speak for the millenia that have formed these mountains, rivers, valleys… and the song of the stars? How long has that harmony been composing its self? (This is a good shot of the layout we used to figure out where to put the posts)

Eva, the fiddler on the fence. One of our many blessed visitors this summer who brought their song to the choir.

Om shanti, shanti, om. Till the next fire circle.

Whew!…. life times pass by in so little time. But I guess that isn’t out of the question if one, looking into the reflection of a pearl of dew on a squash plant, finds that it also contains the whole world. And then there’s the fact that not only one cabbage can come from that small black speck which is a cabbage seed, but also the truth that saving seed from the cabbages that have the most vitality by simply letting them go past the point of harvest so that they may flower and be genetically woven by bees amongst each other to then mature and give forth into this material reality thousands more small black specks like the first one. Everything tightly folds into the compact nothingness from which everything is born again- and so the end of some things slips into the beginning of others like one patch on a quilt is sewn to the other.

My brother and I have realized that basket weaving is one of the great metaphors in life. We start with a simple, but solid framework. We add cross-pieces to fill in that structure, and then continually add smaller pieces as we give it more and more structure and beauty. The process is infinite, like jumping into a fractal… until we say we are finished and what we have made can hold ingredients for the next baskets we want to weave.

Well, what to say?… building a house is like giving birth, it is quite a consuming process. That’s mainly what we’ve been up to as of late. The building enters into your dreams and I have been discovering that dreams can be a really interesting place to learn – to receive teachings. Sometimes they are very specific – a dream describing how to resolve the next step in the carpentry that we are doing – and at other times they belong to that incredibly nebulous mix of memory and things yet to come that intersect in a puzzling place of fantasy.

Having plotted with my mom behind the translucent veils of internet cafe computer screens, we were able to pull off the grand event for my brother (Alex) of her arriving wrapped in her orange tent tarp as a surprise for his birthday. It was amazing to see how large a gaping mouth can get when the realities of time and space are bent to bring our mother from Singapore to a Patagonian homestead in the amount of time it takes to unwrap a present…. and very lucky that the present was out of earshot when Alex asked with a befuddled excitement if we had brought a stripper all the way out to the land!!!!! (Thanks to Sal for all the logistic manoeauvering to get her there).

Anyways, it was amazing to be an even bigger family on the land than we already are, and especially to come back from working on the building to find incredible food with spices brought from the “exotic Orient”.

Ma reminded me of that section of the feminist activist, Betty Freidan (who passed away last month) writings where she says something like with a paraphrase of a paraphrase: The more attention you put into waxing your floor, the more beautiful that floor will become to you. My interpretation: Whatever we put out heart and attention into will be filled with our essence of life and in turn reflect vitality, in other words beauty. It is for this reason that I find so much beauty in the joints we are making in the wood to weave Alex’s house together. I’ll be damned if I don’t find beauty in them after spending all day working on one connection after the other.

There’s so much to say about the building process – it obviously taps veins of archetypic experience probably not expected by even those who have been through the process even many times before – but I will not bore he or she who is equally immersed in a completely different task and is similarly polishing away at his or her floor. We will find beauty yet in everything that we do.

The weather is just too good to be able to justify writing for too long and my mom´s going away dinner is soon upon us. I will try to pick up next time with thoughts about the “corn people” that arrived from the travel tales of a friend in the cold, candle-lit darkness.

(I´ll have to upload images another time)