Maybe in the stillness....

I love winter. The wind, the rain, the cold that drives us inside. Still stacks to do outside to get ready for spring, but when the weather howls, the fires get lit to roaring and we retreat inwards to the warmth of the hearth and stove; metaphorically and physically. Probably meta-physically too in some way. That's why I love it so. Every winter we've spent here since 2008, I've relished the time to read, to reflect, to plan, to ponder, to dream. To retreat.

Vonnie favours the sunshine of the summer, for she, after all, is a tropical island girl and genetically designed for a daily shower of free vitamin supplements that never cease to rain from the ever shining Barbados sun.  I suspect our future winters might be spent in other warmer climes, bless, but for this one, we're here, in Portugal, in the mountains, on our own, and it’s raining. Inside we remain. ;)

In this reflective season, something dawned on me. Over the course of 2013 an unexpected pattern had begun to emerge, on Facebook no less. Every week it seemed I was seeing another new profile or cover photo emerge on our guests FB pages (as they commented and shared each others holiday snaps), shots taken here on their stay at Vale de Moses. 

It was flattering to think people would choose our place as a beautiful setting to display their virtual identity on the cloud. Face after face of happy, bright souls with dreamy sunsets and misty valley vistas. All looking like they were feeling pretty lovely about life, bordering on content.

I realised it's on places like retreats and healthy holidays we often feel quite lovely. About everything. Relaxed, nourished, minds clear, bodies given an MOT and service, all far from the maddening crowds. The least worried. The most meditative. The most still. Even though every day our bodies are paradoxically more active than normal, practicing yoga, walking in forests, swimming in rivers, surfing, whatever. We feel the most active and yet the most still.

Maybe in that stillness of retreat, we get to know ourselves a bit better. 

And perhaps we actually like ourselves a little better than the stressed out version of ourselves we left back at home.

One thing is certain to me, everyone definitely shines after a week on retreat. “You’re positively glowing, darling”. So maybe it's only natural that photos taken at those moments are the ones we choose to share with the FB universe. Because we feel more like ourselves. And to make our friends jealous too no doubt!

Thanks to our guests who have let me share their selfies and Vale de Moses photos with you today. Each one of these photos today on the blog are from their FB covers or profiles and aren't they all beautiful! 

That's it really. To say it’s winter. Which you knew. And that Facebook is revealing patterns in our own human social behaviour and projection of virtual self image. Again, you knew. And that going on a retreat is really really good for you. If you've not gone on one before, and you are able to do so this year, then

"Retreat, retreat, retreat!"

Choose any one of hundreds of wonderful retreat spaces all over the world. Any one of them. Just go. Especially if you're not feeling particularly like the best you have ever felt. Book a retreat as soon as you can. If it's with us, we very much look forward to meeting you and showing you around this stunning part of Portugal.

Also in this last week we've had an enormous response to our Karma Volunteer recruitment, so successful in fact that looks like we're fully staffed already! If you'd like to be contacted in case anyone of our volunteers have to cancel, and at the same time be considered first for our 2015 teams, please still do apply for our Reserve team this year. 

Finally, finally, you might like to read the interview Vonnie had last week with the delightful Tameera Kemp who runs Light Stays Retreats in Australia. Great site.

Wishing you lots of warmth and cosyness wherever you maybe be wintering.

Memphis

Autumn at Vale de Moses

Hey peeps. Finally the rains have come, and the forest has drunk deeply from the soaking. As have we. The water table is rising. The bore hole is refilling and the old Moorish water mine is once again overflowing. The mornings are crisp and misty and the evenings cold enough for us to light up the wood burning stoves in the houses. That long hot Portuguese Summer has passed and Autumn has arrived. Graças a Deus.

At the start of October we were most honoured to host a lovely group from Holland who came with their yoga teacher Mijke Linders. It was the first time we have had a Yoga teacher bring their students on retreat here and it is something we hope to do much more of in 2013. Mijke led the morning classes and a few afternoon workshops, I cooked and Vonetta massaged. Twas a truly wonderful week and we are particularly thankful to one of the group, Mirande Phernambucq, who took some stunning photos during her stay.

We have one more small retreat to run this year and then we will be hibernating as a family for winter (including Christmas with Von's family in Barbados - not been back for 7 years, way too long!). But before that, we are taking advantage of the still hot sunny afternoons to look after the land. Putting the kitchen gardens to bed for the winter, clearing more of the forest scrub around the houses, and attacking the jungle of brambles and shrubs on the terraces along the 2 rivers that run at the bottom of the valley.

To help us do this we have a beautiful young couple wwoofing until November, Fanny from Sweden and Felipe from Brasil,  who are with us for a few weeks on the start of a year long adventure. They are both avid photographers and we're enjoying their view of our home in the forest through the lenses of their cameras, through their eyes. Thanks guys.

We also said goodbye to Chris and Anette who after 3 months with us to deepen their practice of Suikido, have moved on to another forest wilderness retreat space, Inner Peace, further south in the Algarve. It was a privilege to have them here with us this summer and we wish them all the best in their journey here in Portugal. Força Suikido!

In between all the people coming and going, it's Vindima time in Amieira. Grape picking wine making fun with our neighbours Laurinda and José & Eugenia. It's a harvest festival season. Families and friends returning from all over the world to gather in the sweet abundance of the vines and ensure the rivers of juice that flow are preserved in the ancient art of making wine in Portuguese Adegas.

So glorious to be able to share this experience once again (was our fifth year of vindimas), especially as we won't be making wine from our own grapes this year (half the vines unfortunately were burnt in the August fires). But we will again one day.

One day I'll make another Adega here. One day I'll get round to grafting all the old vines with new ones. One day Vale de Moses will produce wine, not the 8000 litres a year they used to make here, but enough to share with friends, guests and visitors in the winters, springs and summers that will follow.

I'll leave you with a video below on our YouTube channel, a wee Autumn update showing the charred forest landscape and introducing just one of our jobs for this season - putting the kitchen garden to bed. Instead of veggies next year, we're going to lay a lawn! After 4 years of crop planting we're gonna have grass to lie on. Under the shade of fruit and olive trees. Plus some new big beds for flowers and keeping the smaller kitchen garden beds for salads, tomatoes and herbs. Exciting to move things around again. Constantly creating. Never stops.

The veggies are moving down to the river terraces where we'll be able to irrigate them better using the water collected by the açudes (little stone dams) that we'll be restoring over the next few weeks. The açudes also mean that in the soaring heat of next summer, we'll have some long cascading shady natural river pools for us, our guests and, of course, Moses to swim and cool down in. Delicious.

Thanks for tuning in.

Memphis. 

Liminality

One of the precious aspects of living a Portuguese rural life, is the opportunity, away from the noise and energy of city life, to allow for more contemplation. I’m not sure it is simply just having more time to think. It’s more to do with being in this stone terraced valley, in the midst of wilderness. The place itself somehow invites contemplation. “A Simplified Life” by Verena Schiller first introduced me to the notion of a place being liminal.

The view from our windows is always forest.  Green, dancing in the wind, pine tree forest. Remote or desert places, as many hermits like Verena and others will attest, often provide a fascinating mirror to the human condition. The power of planet earth to create, constantly, and provide habitats for creatures to thrive and die, is a continual reminder that we as humans, are part and parcel of the whole. Part of the natural universe that we see with our eyes, and in some way, part of the other dimensional realities we don't so readily see.

Many concepts exist in the plethora of human cultures that attempt to describe or illustrate this otherness. Spirit world. Heaven. The stream we enter through meditation. Consciousness.  The list is long.  It fascinates me to consider the possibility that an actual physical place and the space it holds, can be a threshold ‘between’  these worlds.

Liminality was first introduced to the vernacular in 1909 by the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep as a way of explaining the threshold moment that occurs in the middle of a cultural rite of passage. And neurological psychologists use the word to depict the metaphysical subjective state, conscious or otherwise, of being on the threshold of, or between, two different existential planes.

As we begin our new yoga retreat season for 2012, it will be interesting to observe how our guests from all over the globe will once again interact with this liminal valley at Moses. As we invite our bodies in yoga to relax a little more, the quieting of our minds may just allow a glimpse of an altogether different perception of the place we are in. 


I am so looking forward to it.   

liminal adj. 
1. of or pertaining to a limen, especially a sensory threshold. 
2. marginally perceptible


limen n.
a threshold, especially the point where a psychological or physiological effect begins to occur

Peace and all good things

Memphis

Arcs of Light in the Forest. By River.

Nature’s fluffy softness begs us to forget that we are tender and fragile.  Inch by inch, step by step we seek to learn a new way to live.  Every every stone laid, every wall plastered, every nail hammered, every seed sown we hope leads us closer to home and the illusive, corner of the eye vision we seek.  We breathe in and out and appear brave, while caution pricks on like a thorn for Eve’s rib. But ashes to ashes and dust to dust it’s just us the Winters playing and singing and shredding and feeling the firm dark earth. 

Each new detail brought into focus clarifies a little more of the picture.  Each picture we see shows beauty and perhaps the need for a little more effort, more work, and more projection of will or is it subjugation, surrender?  Inside we are moving and slowly tuning into a smooth groove.  We now see clearly where effort honours will, in this grounding, wisdom like a Forest grows, but on the other hand let’s call it what it is a thrill, a  joy to be here right here right now.

Nature weaves her seasonal tapestry around us, we become more attached, interwoven.  In a swiftly fleeing arc of revolutionary light we glimpse ourselves connected to an ill formed but nonetheless growing body of people seeking a new way of life built on old foundations and places forgotten by the many but held by a few.  We seek not an escape from work, for here there is work a plenty.   Instead, we seek another kind of release, a break free from the title of slave, wage, slave, a new tune of living, jungle book style for a little while at least. The boundaries of our golden vision are linked, chained and fenced in by joy.  In this context of links growing, connections forming, relationships blooming we feel a little more secure, rich in green fields, blue skies and roses out of stones. 

Within this glorious light of courage there remains a sense of disconnection of not yet rootedness.  “What can I contribute?  How can I earn and stay out of the business scheme?  Will my children receive all that they need?  Am I enough or do they really need all that stuff the advertisers say they need?”  Ripples of consternating sensation prostrated in the face of a beautiful dawn or sunset but heard, in the dark when we lay awake and wonder, “Are we crazy?  Should we return to the city?  Are we more secure here or there?”  Here.  For sure. 

If you should ever come this way may we suggest a little game, better than counting sheep or hiding the head in sand.  Stretch your eyes over the land and set a square vision.  Try with all your might to replace every tree with a sky obliterating tower block.  It has never been the case that we have managed to replace even one tree.  So, though fragile we may be we dance and play on to a life of creativity, learning and await the call of revolution beyond what we here can offer.   We shred Olive leaves and get ready to cover the earth for this year’s garden.   An old skin, of an old self is dropped, a wet, heavy, suffocating coat to be stripped off and thrown.

A new celebration, where pictures are on walls and the firewood in the new shed.   Where time has been spent in family and in friendship; where at the end we will still feel warm, not coldly enslaved but free to learn over a slower pace, thank God.   I hope we minions take our festivals back.  I hope, we return to tribal unity, brotherly affection and sisterly love and the bosom of light bringers wherever they are to be found even if it all seems upside down.

Strike up the band and play a new blues.  Let the Light shine through the impenetrable undergrowth of debt.  Let the snakes run to their holes of commerce and we earthlings, return to our Forest homes or to the nearest still alive tree.  We are cashing in our coupons, checking out of the swelling need to buy something, taking our toys home and refusing to play.  We are fragile, tender and bravely trying to save our souls and honour the complex rich family life of us, just us and yes indeed yes it helps when you fall and there are so many lovely friends and family to help you get back on track.  Spread a bigger net, enlarge your tent and coppee down to the daffodils, tinkle on the piano, read nice notes from Aunties,   O + Live, O + Love, honour the oneness all around.

Green Tomato Chutney and more wine making

I have a sneaky suspicion based on the arrival of a new wind today (and on hard evidence from online weather sites) that tomorrow the autumn rains will commence. We've felt and known that for a week or so now and like little mice scurrying around before a storm, we have been gathering firewood and pine cones, staining the last bits of wood around the house which are exposed to the elements, and daily harvesting and preparing more of the delicious fruits of River's labour of love, her 'horta bonita'.

Tarpaulins are on, covering a number of stacks of wood dotted around the houses on all sides, under which now reside a variety of tree trunks, branches, old floorboards and beams too rotten to salvage for building into other things and mounds of off cuts from all the new wood we used to build 2 roofs, a veranda, a green roof  and 4 floors this year, all of which we will burn in the stove to keep ourselves warm and heat our water this winter. We've not gathered it all in, but enough for us not to have to worry about dry fire wood probably at least til Christmas.

Now the rains can come and wash this land anew with its autumnal promise of a new season away from the harsh scorching heat of the summer sun. Warm, wet and windy. Boy, will the forest love it.

A few videos below from the last week or so. Guest starring Carline's brother Steven and his beautiful and expecting wife Sophie who flew in for an action packed weekend mostly involving the harvesting, making and consumption of quite a fair quantity of wine. Come back for olive harvest soon guys. You were great.

Hope all your encounters are full of lovely vibrations this week. It's much easier to feel less afraid if you turn off the TV and don't open a newspaper. Seriously.

Yours tomatoly,

Memphis.