When we arrived in Frankfurt, Germany on May 6, we picked up our rental car and made a beeline down to Damanhur, a community in NW Italy so Monique could participate in a World Midwifery Summit that was taking place there. Founded in 1975, Damanhur is a large spiritual ecovillage with over 650 members and many more in the "wider community". They are perhaps best known for their "Temples of Humanity" which they built into a mountain - in secret! - for years before they went public. We couldn't take pictures of the temple itself, but if you're interested, check out their website at: http://www.damanhur.org.
The video below is of one of Damanhur's Nucleo (sub-communities) called the Treehouses where Macaco, one of our hosts and guides showed us some of their work with using biofeedback machines to communicate with plants. Macaco used to be a jazz singer and you can see her singing to a small tree - and the tree singing back!
Where we stayed (in the small bungalow below)
Macaco, one of our main hosts and guides
The main building in Magilla, the nucleo we stayed at. Check out all the solar energy!
In front of the Open Temple, a space created to connect with Divine Energies.
Some of the community artwork near the Open Temple.
More artwork. Notice the baby dragon in the egg!
A Sacred Grove left to nature.
Just one example of artwork on their many buildings.
Some of their cows grazing on grasses (they are free range)
At the end of March, we stayed for 3 days at Bylakuppe, a Tibetan settlement near Mysore. It was an amazing opportunity to learn about and experience Tibetan Buddhism and the plight of Tibetan refugees in India. The community had a similar feel to Dharamsala, where Monique and I spent a wonderful week about 12 years ago. The girls enjoyed watching the monks chant and visiting with students at the community's school. We even celebrated Passover while we were there. It was interesting to note this similarities between the Jews exodus from Egypt and the Tibetans exodus from Tibet.
Our host, Tenzin's family (and our fellow faculty Larkspur and Ethan)
When we visited the Mysore Palace, where the Maharajah used to live, we had the opportunity to ride a camel. It was a fun, but bumpy ride. I don't think I'd want to cross a desert on one of these.
Oy. It's been almost a month since my last blog post. My ambitions for regular entries was thwarted by two major technical difficulties: (1) my external hard drive, on which I was storing video, crapped out; and (2) we lost our video camera (a bizarre occurrence I still can't figure out). We do have a digital camera, which takes (poor) video and I will try to post photos and some video to catch up on our travels. We appreciate your patience and interest.
On our recent travels, we were visiting a temple (Somnathpur) outside of Mysore, when our driver Kallai insisted we continue on to see the Shivanasamudra Waterfalls. We had considered going as a group earlier, but decided not to when we learned we couldn't swim there (and really, in this heat, what is the point of looking at water you can't get into).
We went anyway (mostly to humor Kallai) and were beginning to have doubts after another hour on poor roads. When we got there, we saw the waterfalls, took some photos and were about to head back when Kallai said "No! No. This way!" and led us to the top of a long stairway built into the hill that led down to the water. Again, we were hesitant, but slowly we all trickled down the slope.
You'll see what we saw and did in the video. It was one of the best surprises of the whole trip!
A basketball match isn't exactly something I expected to watch while in Auroville, but they take it pretty seriously here and since one of our students (Ben) and both our "Cohort Coordinators" (Boomi and Segar) were playing -- and actually made it to the finals ... well, I couldn't resist trying my hand at a little sports journalism. Okay, Howard Cosell I'm not...
