The Gifts of Gratitude

Sweet delight in finishing up projects and programs, and moving forward into the next cycle of renewal.

Thank you to all our interns for these last couple of months of good learning and growing!

 We put the final plasters on the new kitchen entension...

 We fancied up the sculptures and are getting ready to lay the floor.

The banana mulched double-dug garden beds, soon to be filled with cabbage, kale, parsley, mustard, and more!

Still having fun with forest fungal finds...

The lower gardens getting a boost of compost (and love) for the winter...

 The bath hut for the yoga shala is in use! 

 Mirror mosaics, lime paint, and rock entrance ready!

 Laying the entryway with river stones:

 Detail work cleaning off the bottles and mosaics:

 And viola! The yoga retreat happening with a finished bath hut nearby!

 Sweet child's pose in our Santosha Yoga Retreat-- a great success!

 Thanks yoga friends!

Moving right along into the Temazcal (sweat lodge) and Ceremony to wind up this cycle's learning journey.  Here's our fire to heat the rocks, and the mud turtle altar to point us in the right direction.

All clean?  Great! Now let's have cake!

Bonus Photo: Butterfly and perfectly poised yoga toes!

Fungus Among Us and Bathroom Huts

After the recent rains, the forest is alive with fungi.  Life on the forest floor is particularly fascinating these days... 

 We just found our biggest mushroom yet-- it stands open up to our knees!

 Big enough to be a plate...

 ...or a house for a little Turkish gnome?

 Another fungus, maybe just about to open?

 Looking around, we spot fungi everywhere.  The minis... pink and perfectly stacked on a stick.

 The extraterrestrials...

 The fallic and stinky...

 The popcorn puff balls...

 Pushing through the grasses...

 Hiding around the cabins...

 Even in the pine needles next door...

This one used to be attached to a tree.  This is the underside...

 But we don't just go around looking at fungi all day.  We do actually work sometimes.  Here's us mud-plastering the kitchen extention...

 And the bath hut's back wall, woven around a window space, to be filled with an old car window...

 The cob mix covers the weaving...

 Cute and useful, a bath hut for the yoga shala...

Using bottles in between our adobe bricks, good for letting light in, and recycling our extra glass.

 Structure complete!  Now we need to plaster...

Garden work, planting seed flats and getting some veggies growing for the winter...

 Workshop in lemoncello making...

 Mixing the lime floor plaster for the House on the Hill's back bedroom...

 Air potatoes flying over the garden!

 Bananart.

 Bonus photo: "My fruit!"

Happenings of March

Fall is sweetening the jungle air, the internship has brought in new energies, and Mama Roja is as beautiful as ever.  The month started quite a bit of much needed rain, which brought in friends from all over...

  And the muddy world masked us with her clay.  Mud is medicine!

 A television crew came out to film our project...

 ...and they are putting up an educational multi-part series on channel 12 of Misiones.  The first part can be seen at:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bPIF64l-48&feature=youtu.be

 Plaster-tastic!

Who was around to supervise our mud plastering, besides the tv crew? Taca, of course! 

 More friends in surprising places...

Rainy days means workshops under the dry kitchen roof.  Wild pear jam on it's way:

 ... and peanut butter too!

Once the sun came back out, we put on our boots and headed to the garden.  Here we're putting in a sheet mulch/hugelkultur bed for native tree saplings.

Using the sun to its maximum: our new solar cooker!  Hat and glasses are not just for looking cool anymore...

 What did we cook first?  Fresh eggs, solar boiled in under 10 mintues!

We've started a new building project too.  A little bath hut adjacent to the yoga shala.  For when meditation moves you...

Each wall will be a different earthen building technique.  Here we're weaving the back wall with bamboo, which is the start to "wattle-n-cob".

 River stone and packed earth floor, re-re-recycled roof, and walls in the works.

 The view from the builders andn creepers!

 A final shot of the darn cute kittens. 

 Bonus photo: a rear view.