Walking on Water

Bom Dia. For those of you who have been following our blog over the last 5 years, you'll know the adventures we've had here at Vale de Moses and the times where we've needed more than a mustard seed of faith. Through all the restoration work to the houses and re-cultivation of the land, we've always known that one day people would come to this valley to find rest here.  But we never imagined they would also be able to walk on water.

We've just finished our 4th Yoga Retreat of the season, and it's a wonderful thing to watch how our guests relax and open their bodies and their spirits through the course of the week. Even their faces change. They soften.

Yesterday we all went for a wee trip down to the River Zêzere, for a mud bake and swim in isolated paradise. It is one of my favourite places on earth. The feeling of swimming out to the middle of the warm river, with not another soul for miles, floating on your back, admiring the Herons and Kites and Eagles as they circle overhead eyeing their next fish meal swimming beneath them. It's an experience I treasure.

And to top it off, thanks to a Portuguese artist, João D Filipe who was born in our village of Amieira, I now know that the River Zêzere is also the purist river in Portugal, as it runs to Lisbon for its drinking water.

The mud bake thing is a ritual too in its own way. We discovered the therapeutic and cleansing effects of mud baking in 2007 while wild camping in the Abruzzo mountins in Italy. And have since taken any given opportunity to smother ourselves in river mud and bake hard in the sun. Just as floating in pure flowing water of a river or the sea connects you to all the waters on our planet, so in some way smothering yourself in mud connects you to all the earth too.

We love it and it's a real joy to be able to share the experience now with others.

We have a week off until our next guests arrive first week of June for our "Rainbows on your Eyelashes" retreat. You'll be pleased to hear that we managed to get that big list of projects done in our last week off. Patio in the courtyard now has a red limecrete and stone, easy to clean floor. The chicken shed (more like palace) is finally ready for layers to move in. The kids have metres of new wooden bookshelves in their rooms. The farmhouse roofs have their boarded trim to protect the wooden structure underneath and the saloon doors are hanging cutely in the library so Moses and Saphira can sleep in the hall. Next week I'll be making and hanging kitchen and bathroom cupboard doors, and an outside fox-proof (here's hoping) fence for the chicken run.

The work never stops. But neither does the water flowing in the river. Nor the thanks for the life we have here in the forests of Portugal.

May you all get to walk on water this week.

Namasté

Memphis

Good Bye Mac Dada, by River

It is the end of spring and the fires have been packed away for the year.   The air is thick with warmth and moisture; the moisture will remain for a few more short weeks before the ravages of summer arrive.  The day is unusually clouded.  The clouds, friendly and plump in character confirm the muted enclosure of the landscape.  On days like these everything is quiet, even the little translucent moths are less hurried than usual.  The dreamy charm of the landscape is enhanced, by the beginning of the roses unfurling.  The old roses have begun to tumble over the mossed stone walls, their thin thorny stems heavy with bloom.  This short and spectacular display I have waited for all year will be over soon but for now we are enclosed in a world of petals shocking pink, or bright garish lipstick red, or purest snow, white.  The new roses of apricot and cream planted to surround the kitchen garden are just swelling in bud and I will see them for the first time this year.   The smell of roses drifts through every window, lifted as it were from the opening petals by the humidity and heat.  I find myself doing any job that allows me to see them and smell them.  It is almost impossible to step away from their frivolous decadent generosity so delicate in this, timeworn part of the world. 

The day is almost tropical in quality and recalls a garden I grew up in.  A garden of mango trees that towered over my head the fruit tantalizingly out of reach, and banana groves, of bougainvillea falling over walls all the colours of the rainbow echoed in their soft tissue like bracts.  In my imagination I can see a man walking and watering and weeding and preening and primping over his plants.  I can almost smell him warm and salted from the tropical heat.  I can see his face creased with concentration determined to grow fine roses in spite of the inappropriate climate.  Sitting here it is amusing to think he tried to grow roses in his bountiful garden when bougainvillea grew like a weed.  Here I am thinking of how to grow a little bougainvillea in this temperate climate when roses grow like weeds.  It is always the same with us gardeners, the desire to grow the impossible because a plant reminds us of someone or a scene or a memory, or is just so beautiful that our desire is ignited and we just have to have it. 

I remember him waking and stretching in the morning, before donning his filthy old work clothes, sharpening his knife on an old belt head bowed and face in deep concentration not even his breadth could be heard.  He never went out before greeting his pack of dogs, gathering his tools and stepping out into his landscape to fulfill his ever growing desire for heaven on earth.  He demanded that I read my dictionary and anytime he came into a room I found myself sitting bolt upright, immediately wanting to look, well, occupied.  Laziness was not to be tolerated, and yet, he never moved quickly, he never spoke quickly, he didn’t even blink quickly.  He was powerful and a little scary, but I can find no memory of him raising his voice to me.  When or rather if the day’s work was completed successfully and his light shone on you, you wanted to stay in it forever.  To me he was a typical gardener where his every mood was so linked to the successful growth of his plants.  This man was my Grandfather, who I liked to call Mac Dada.  He was one of my first gardening teachers and yet he never said a word to me of plants, other than, “Go eat the cherries or go pick some mangos” always words to encourage a taste filled relationship so to speak.  I watched him, working tirelessly on his land, sweating profusely with the effort to assist nature and to see emerging from the soil some seed that had first formed in his imagination.  To my eyes, it seemed that some great symphony occurred between him and the soil, his subtle refined breathing, music to the plant matter that eagerly rose from the ground just to please him.  What he did with that landscape over his lifetime could only be said to be miraculous, and yet not many people will ever see his garden or what his human hands made of that place.  Perhaps this is the way that the greatest gardeners are, hidden and secret.

My grandfather died today.  I am very far away from that garden and sad that I never got to see him for one last time or talk with him about my growing obsession with plants.  As I sit here at the computer with my dogs curled at my feet and the fine old roses falling over the walls I know that I owe a great deal of my life to the time that I lived with him in the West Indies.  Goodbye Dada, you were a wonderful gardener, I watched you turn a barren hard piece of land into a virtual paradise through tireless effort.  I hope to be as dedicated a gardener as you were.  Today each petal of the roses that hits the ground will be a prayer for you, I hope that wherever you are now there is a garden without weeds or little things that bite, where all is crystal clear and growing on a wish and a breadth.

Today also another garden is being left behind.  Andy’s Mum and Dad will be leaving their beautiful London garden, a paradise of dedication of nearly half a century.  It was in this Dulwich garden that I first bowed down and gazed up into the cheeky face of my very first daffodil.  It is so very hard to leave one’s garden behind, but then all life moves on to new gardens and new planting opportunities.

“And all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.  When the tongues of flame are in-folded.  Into the crowned knot of fire. And the fire and the rose are one.”   T.S. Eliot

Boa Viagem

River

Integrated Memoirs

Thanks Eliss for your blog interview last week. I really enjoyed the questions you sent. In the run up to your wedding, remember to breathe in and out as often as you can. :)

Vonetta. 

Em Abril Águas Mil!

That's the old Portuguese proverb. In April, a thousand waters. What normally should occur round these parts is a thoroughly wet cold winter (see earlier postings), early Spring with days of sunshine in March to plant out all the potatoes and veggies and then April arrives to water them all in.

This year the weather forgot the script.

We've just had one of the driest winters on record here in Portugal. Almost 5 months from November to March with hardly a drop. It has now, graça de Deus, begun to rain a bit more. Not yet a thousand waters, but showers every few days.

With the new Spring rains, the flowers finally make their entrance. With a huge sigh of relief. Not because the cold dark winter has ended and sunshine is on tap, but they let their breath out for all the world to see because they've been dry as a bone for their hibernation this winter.

Water is life. We, like the plants all around us in the gardens and forest, are grateful it's raining.

And with the rains and the flowers came our first guests of the year to stay on retreat with us. The Kilpatricks, an amazing family from Porto. You gotta check out pappa Sandy's new album. It's melancholic and resonant. http://www.sandykilpatrick.com/ and those beautiful videos shot in the Portuguese countryside. Outstanding.

At the end of the week all the kids had a delicious family session of yoga with us too. We've uploaded some of the photos from the class to our Facebook page. It really was as lovely as it looked. Thanks Von. You're the best.

The second retreat just finished at the weekend, with Amalia from Sweden and Isabel & her gorgeous 6 yr old Madalena from Lisbon. What a privilege to host such fine people. Really, it was an honour and a wonderful start for our 2012 yoga retreat season.

Earlier in March we finally put up our new Vale de Moses website, which was fun to make thanks to a great design company in Braga called Seegno. Highly recommended if you're looking for web design. At the same time we went up on Facebook too, and have been overwhelmed by the response. Such lovely words people have expressed especially from the Portuguese.

The best thing about the speed of this social networking thing, is that in just 1 month we've been able to make contact with some great people in Portugal in the world of yoga, meditation, massage, gardening and rural self sufficient living. With invitations to visit each others homes and projects being swapped around cyberspace like cards flying from a croupier. We hope to meet some of them this year, either at Moses or in a road trip we're planning at the end of the season to see more of this Portugal we love so much.

Meanwhile, in the realm of the real, I've been cooking. I'm often fascinated by the course our lives take. My first job was as a Mexican chef in Dulwich Village, London. It's a real joy to be back in the kitchens again serving lunches and dinners, yet even more so as now I can work from home in a restaurant we built ourselves! And learning how to apply macrobiotic principles within the context of what herbs, veggies and fruits we can actually grow well in the gardens here, will keep me experimenting all summer long.

When Ellie and Josh can, they're always there ready and willing to lend a hand and help. Plus a cake or two thrown in for good measure. And not just in the kitchens. Over Easter they helped us spring clean the guest cottage with another lick of lime paint. This time with some soft yellow iron oxide pigment added to warm it up a touch. Terrific painters the pair of you.

You make us proud cubs.

We've have a wee break now until our next guests arrive in May. And the list of things to do around the place is vast and extensive! Vonetta is, as you can imagine, gardening passionately as always. Preparing the terraces for the usual spectacular summer show. While reminding me daily that the greenhouse I am yet to build would literally save the lives of so many of the hand reared, lovingly tended into being vegetable seedlings that are dying because it's not yet built.

I hear you dear. It's coming.  First, I'll just see to the courtyard stone flooring, then the saloon doors in the lounge for the dogs' bedroom, then the chicken shed and run fencing. Hopefully with a bit of luck, I'll get the improved composting structures built over our next break. Barn for the tractor and shredder, river damns and levada irrigation restoration, new roof and floors in the Adega and clearing the overgrown riverside and valley terraces will all have to wait. The greenhouse is coming babe. Promise.

"Palavras, palavras". Eu sei.

Peace and all good things to you

Memphis

"The Joy of Yoga"

A big thanks to Emma who writes the Joy of Yoga blog, for posting up her interview with Vonnie yesterday.

Vale de Moses: Yoga, Massage, and Acupuncture in the Portuguese Mountains

One of the best things about the racket I run here are the folks I "meet" from all over the world. This week I received emails from Germany (Hallo, Bettina!), Guatemala, (Hola, Annie!), and-- as you may guess from the title of this post-- Portugal.

Ola, gorgeous Vonetta. Vonetta is the Senhoria of Vale de Moses, a retreat center in the Portuguese mountains. She read some of my posts from the past years about yoga and gardening (the season of which is upon us! Hurrah!) and emailed me about some upcoming yoga and gardening in Paradise (I mean, Portugal) retreats she has coming up. After some email correspondence, I decided I didn't want to keep her all to myself, so (without further ado, or further parenthesis), I introduce something very exciting....

Potatoes planted the Portuguese way

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