Project Nuevo Mundo

Universal Dance 2012

2012-01-19T10:04:00.000-08:00

Hello world!
2012 is coming up, it's going to be an interesting one. Many gatherings are planned around Central America, weaving future and tribal heritage into manifesting our present.

We will be welcoming the new year with a series of Mayan and other ancestral ceremonies, workshops on medicinal plants and natural dyeing and weaving techniques, jungle treks to Mayan ruins, and a new year's bash.

Psy.Family-GuateMAYA & Nuevo Mundo
present
UNIVERSAL DANCE 2012
(the Beginning)

Return to the source of Mayan ancestor wisdom.
Portals open and paradigms shatter.
Past, present, and future meet in Guatemaya at the dawn of 2012, as the stargate opens to unite the threads of time.
So start preparing yourself for the AWAKENING OF THE MAYA CONSCIOUSNESS FOR THE END, AND THE BEGINNING OF THE NEW ERA 2012. Open your third eye and share with us the different activities to start the 2012 full of bliss and magical vibe.

-Tour of Mayan archeological ruins:
- EL MIRADOR (5 day´s trip walking on the Mayan Biosphere to reach the Biggest pyramid in the world LA DANTA).
- TIKAL (3 day´s trip with Spiritual Guide and Mayan Ceremony at Tikal).

-Indigenous Mayan workshops:
- SAN JUAN La Laguna (1 day trip learning about the Natural dyeing and textile production of the Mayan handicrafts, and medicinal plant walk).
-Available workshop in designing and dyeing your own garment using ancestral methods

-Volcano hikes:
- SAN PEDRO (1 day trip hiking on one of the guardians of the Holy Lake Atitlan).

-Closing Party: 31.12.2011 to 01.01.2012 in a Secret Garden around the Holy and Magical Lake Atitlan.
18 hours of different types of beat´s from DubStep to Psytrance in 2 Stages.
With Mother Nature Sounds, Experimental, dubStep, PsyTrance, FullOn, HighTech, PsyHigh, Morning and the special guest !
Entrance 100 - 150Q
EGNOGRA

And …
Mayan Ceremonies.
Mindbending visual sequences channeled from the dream world.
Background on Maya cosmovision and Calendar.
Healing ceremonies with shamans and spiritual guides from diverse traditions.
Introduction to permactulture and tour of gardens.
Contemporary and indigenous art exhibit.
Live performances: belly dance, fire poi, and more.
Mayan Deco.
Chai Kitchen & superfoods-energy drinks & organic salads from garden & chillspace.
Tribal market: medicinal plants and seed nursery, natural dyed traditional Mayan textiles.
Yoga.

And remember, this is just only THE BEGINNING for the different activities schedule for 2012 according to our Tzolkin.

Dates of activities, Line Up an More info coming soon … !

FRIENDS AND FAMILY OF PROJECT NUEVO MUNDO

December 2011 - Universal Dance Guatemala and corresponding events (Project Nuevo Mundo & Psy-Family Guatemala, Guatemala)

January 30 - February 24, 2012 - Ecovillage Design Gathering (Inan-Itah, Isla de Ometepe, Nicaragua).
Responding to current global challenges by designing and modeling opportunities for long-term sustainable and evolutionary living

February 3 - 17 - Permaculture Design Course (Project Bonafide Institute for Regenerative Agriculture, Isla de Ometepe, Nicaragua).
Permaculture intensive covering a wide variety of topics.

March 1 - 4 - Envision (Dominical, Costa Rica). By bringing people together through music, art and sacred movement Envision Presents opportunities to celebrate our spirits, heal our bodies and minds, and revitalize our souls to face the challenges and realize the opportunities of our rapidly changing world.

March 8 -11 - Hypnoza Festival (Costa Rica). You are invited to interact with paradise for a few days, under the biggest full moon in 2012.
This is the 3rd time that we celebrating our tradition, Uniting people from all over the world and enjoying amazing Music, Nature & Cultural experiences.

November - December 2012 - World Rainbow Gathering (Guatemala & Chiapas, Mexico).
Caravans from North and South America will meet in Guatemala to manifest new beginnings.

December 21 - 28 - Tribal Gathering 2012 (Geoparadise, Kuna Yala Islands, Panama).
Gathering of indigenous and psychedelic tribes. Inspired by the art and wisdom of ancient civilizations combined with cutting-edge modern culture from all corners of the planet. In 2012, we´ll be exploring the first chakra and Our Roots in Mother Earth, setting the foundations of this evolutionary movement. workshops, talks, rituals, stories, dances, etc to help the global party community understand their culture and realize how many common elements we share and how we can help one another. Our aim is for this gathering to provide a creative sacred space for peoples and cultures of the world to harmoniously step together into the new cycle of existence that the Mayans anticipated.

More to come!

Love and Light,
Moksha

Summer Rains and Seeds!

2012-01-19T09:13:00.000-08:00

In anticipation of the planting season, it was decided that it would be appropriate to coordinate the first annual seed exchange fair here on Lake Atitlan.

Permaculture groups and womens’ natural production cooperatives were invited, and a series of workshops was offered.

Permaculture groups in attendence included the Instituto Mesoamericano de la Permacultura (IMAP) and the School of Natural Living. Two womens’ cooperatives specializing in medicinal plants and cosmetics also showed up, the Fundacion Tradiciones Mayas giving a workshop on basic preparation of natural medicine, and Q’omanel presenting their natural cosmetic product line. Another womens’ cooperative, the Maya Weaving Women shared a demonstration of natural weaving and dyeing techniques.

Many a seed exchanged hands; interested restaurant owners showed up from nearby towns to augment their culinary cultivation. Original genetic material was obtained from Santiago Atitlan, a lakeside town populated for 800 years continuously. The event was capped with a ceremony led by Tata Juan, in honor of the medicinal plant Goddess Ixchel.

Come Semana Santa, it was decided that it would be appropriate to celebrate along with the rest of Guatemala. We celebrated in style with sixteen hours of electronic music and chai tea (organic coffee from our farm was also served). Downpours threatened to spoil the fun, but the powerful Tata Juan gave supplication to the water spirits and the skies cleared and dusk, revealing fireflies and later the Milky Way. Several Guatemalans congratulated us on our idea to give free water (a novelty in this country, where water is often confiscated at the door and participants are made to pay up to $2 for each small bottle of water).

Most recently, we hosted our first superadobe natural building workshop, coordinated by our resident master builder. Workshop participants hailed from North America, Guatemala, Germany, and France. A sauna was deemed to be an appropriate test model, and if we are satisfied with the technique and its applicability to the subtropical highlands, we may just construct an entire eco-village employing these super-resistant dome structures! Superadobe is a very labor-intensive but cost-effective natural building technique developed in order to create appropriate buildings for disaster-rich zones. The structural integrity of the dome allows it to resist earthquakes of high magnitude, as well as floods. If it would defend us adequately against the nearest volcano erupting is yet to be tested.

With the rainy season already here, we are busy bees planting papaya, banana, taro, macadamia, and other water-loving edibles. It is bound to be a bountiful and colorful growing season! This week, we will also be playing host to a medicine retreat with a Peruvian healer.

Love and Light,
Moksha

La Finca

2011-04-14T13:56:00.001-07:00

la finca: it's a place where the sky is always the bluest of blue and the waterfalls perfectly frigid. it's a place where work is fun and play is rugged. a place where ideas are exciting and creativity thrives, where food is fresh and local and hand-made. where hikes lead you to rock cliffs where you can watch the sun both rise and set. it's a community you can feel in your bones. and it's a home, on a lakeside mountain in one of the most beautiful places in the world. the energy from this place is almost tangible and every day can see the benefits of your labor as the garden produces and the house becomes more beautiful and interesting. it's a place that gets harder and harder to leave the longer you stay. and a place i dream of returning to over and over again. forever.

-Michelle, volunteer :)

Ecological Design

2011-03-01T10:50:00.000-08:00

Every February, Project Bonafide, an ecological farm and community outreach program, hosts a permaculture design course on Isla de Ometepe, Nicaragua. Being one of the few permaculture courses oriented towards tropical agriculture, yours truly decided to seize the opportunity and get up to speed on a number of ecological design themes ranging from erosion prevention to water management to appropriate technologies to integrating animals into cycles of resources and energy. Permaculture is a system of regenerative agriculture and harmonization with the natural elements. The foundational ethics are care of the earth (preservation of functioning ecosystems and rehabilitation of damaged ecosystems), care of people (creating human-centered ecosystems), limits to growth and consumption, and a sharing of surplus.

The project serves the local community in various ways: stimulating the local economy through the creation of on-site jobs and providing business to local hotels and restaurants during the courses offered, diffusing knowledge of permaculture through the provision of permaculture education scholarships to interested community members, hosting a seed and plant exchange event at the beginning of each planting season, and financing and managing a community center that serves nutritional meals to seventy children daily and hosts workshops and language classes open to the public.

The site was designed with the intention of serving as an education grounds, clearly illustrating the concepts of ecological design. A notable point in the workshop model was the redirection of tuition money towards local hotels and restaurants, rather than building on-site accomodations for guests, which would cut the local economy out of the loop.

The class for 2011 consisted of approximately ten North Americans and five Nicaraguans from various parts of the country, including one from the local community of Balgue. The Nicaraguans are given a scholarship to attend the course, which would otherwise be prohibitively expensive. During the course, hands-on workshops were offered in composting, bamboo propagation, animal management, tree grafting, preparing fermented foods, analysis of oppressive societal structures, and soap-making. One morning, we toured local food forest gardens, which can be found in the front yard of almost any family compound on the Isla de Ometepe, generally comprising papaya, banana, mango, among other tropical fruit.

The soap workshop facilitator was a young Costa Rican chemist whose primary job was to simultaneously translate the course from English to Spanish, for the hispano-hablantes. He also offered the workshop to a group of local women, with the idea of forming an economically productive cooperative. At the end of the course, I invited him back to Guatemala, where he is scheduled to come give a workshop on our farm in utilizing avocado (a crop that we are harvesting upwards of 10 000 annually) in the production of oil, shampoo, cosmetics. Indigenous Guatemala is fertile ground for womens’ cooperatives, where there is already a storehouse of ancestral knowledge working with plants in the elaboration of medicines, cosmetics, artesanal products and dyes.

At the end of the course, the students were divided into four presentation groups, and "given" each a piece of land and an objective to implement, incorporating permaculture principles into the design. Projects ranged from a self-sufficient tropical retirement center to an ecological soap production center. Our group consisted entirely of Nicaraguans (excluding myself), and we have high hopes that our proposal will be put into action in the local community, where the very same Costa Rican chemist is planning to start a soap-making cooperative sourcing locally available natural materials as production inputs. The course concluded with a mandatory talent show, every student being obligated to perform as a precondition to receiving the permaculture design certificate. Humiliating and degrading experienced were predictably had by many!

Before returning to Guatemaya, I took the opportunity to visit a neighboring ecological community that we had been swapping volunteers with for almost a year, Inan Itah, only an hour away by foot. The newly formed community is spiritual in focus, and facilitates a number of diverse workshops, most notably tantra. Yoga classes were also offered on a daily basis while I was on the site. They have also created a local economic initiative training local women in massage therapy, and then placing them in hotels around the island catering to foreign tourists. Inan Itah hosts an annual ecovillage design gathering, which was in full swing when I arrived. I was given the opportunity to present the work that we are doing, a summary of existing resources and information on traveler/work-exchange/volunteer internetworks, and the concepts and principles underlying the ecovillage network movement. After the discussion, I was approached by a beekeper and a software developer, who both expressed their desire to contribute their skills to the project.

Passing through Managua, I revisited an organization that I had been acquainted with previously, CEPREV (Centro de Prevencion de la Violencia). A group of psychologists doing beautiful work with at-risk youth and gang members, these ladies patrol Managua daily from one end to the other, quickly responding to crisis situations as they come up. Youth come to receive workshops at the CEPREV headquarters, where an integrated approach of personal counseling, group self-esteem exercises, and sharing sessions have proven so effective that the World Bank has supported the spread of this model to other Central American states.

Returning home on a chicken bus curving through the Guatemalan highlands, a back tire suddenly exploded and we careened forward with two tires up in the air, the conductor fighting to keep the bus from flipping over completely and descending down the mountain. By a miracle, the conductor managed to keep the bus grounded as the frame’s metallic screeching against the road eventually brought the bus to a halt. The bus was full of citizens of San Pedro la Laguna, and this was apparently the third or fourth hairy incident with a bus full of Pedranos, of whom it is said that angels are watching and protecting. Safe at home, we are now launching our first super adobe housing prototype, with the volunteer assistance of four professional architects.

Love and Light,
David

Ecovillage

2011-01-22T13:30:00.001-08:00

Since the 1960’s, an alternative lifestyle movement has been gaining momentum around the world, manifesting in many different cultural and economic forms. The movement springs from a lack of faith in the survival of the current system, which seeks to continuously centralize, mechanize, and homogenize economies, cultures, landscapes, and a search for another way. As renegade World Bank economist Herman Daly put it, “We must recognize the necessity of change and blow the whistle on Growthmania on the grounds that GDP ‘growth’ simply means the satisfaction of ever more trivial wants while simultaneously creating ever more powerful externalities which destroy ever more important environmental amenities”.
From the hippy communes of California to the kibbutzes of Israel, citizens around the world have been experimenting with more viable forms of collective socioeconomic organization for decades now. These experiments have come to be generally known as ecovillages, or intentional communities. These communities have a wide variety of mission statements, activities, and member composition, but they share a tendency towards a lifestyle that is ecologically sound for body, mind, and planet. Some focus more on artistic creative expression, some on super-healthy lifestyles (raw vegan cuisine, juice fasting), and some on spiritual realization through yoga, meditation, and service. In general, space is opened for the evolution of more complete, balanced, and happy human beings. There are a few global databases online, including Intentional Communities and Global Ecovillage Network.
Before trying something as audacious as engineering one of these communities from my own utopian conception of what the ideal lifestyle is, I decided it was prudent to visit a few ecovillages that have already been functioning for a period of years. My first visit was to Nierika in Mexico State, a retreat center and evolving ecovillage. Here I met Armando and Anya, the beautiful couple that gave birth to this project. Nierika is nestled among verdant rising mountains, a truly spectacular setting to commune with nature and other like-minded humans. Water flows fresh from these mountains, and a small diversion is then diffused and dispersed to irrigate avocado, banana, coffee, and many other crops that grow here in abundance. During the growing season, Nierika is essentially self-sufficient in food supply, maintaining a population of about 20, about half of which are children. The children are educated on-site at a Montessori school, which also serves children from the surrounding community.

Nierika also plays host to ceremonial gatherings of Native American tribes. Intricately designed meditation and ceremonial spaces are to be found across the property.
A discussion with Armando yielded many fruitful ideas. He dryly commented that you cannot be sustainable if you are driving your kids to school every morning in your gas guzzler and picking them up again at the end of the day. Moreover, taking control of education back from a broken system is paramount to creating long-term change. He also advised me to examine the ways in which a project can directly benefit the community it is located in (education, healthcare, economy, etc.). For example, a native medicinal plant garden involving community elders has the potential to serve as a bridge to the community, and create economic opportunities and healthcare services at the same time. The Ix Chel Foundation in Belize is a successful model of this kind of project.

My next stop was the Bosque Village, a gringo-initiated project in the woods of Michoacan, near Patzcuaro. There is a cluster of other foreign-initiated ecological living projects in the vicinity, a phenomenon I have noticed in a number of places with magical natural surroundings (another one is Tepoztlan, in nearby Morelos). There were about eight volunteers on site when I arrived at the Bosque, split evenly between Europeans and North Americans. As you may have guessed, the site is located deep in the forest, with very little contact to the outside. However, I encountered wireless internet access powered by a small solar electric system! During my short stay there, I worked on building a chicken coop from cob. I also had a chat with the director, Brian, who gave me some advice on running a project such as this. We discussed possibilities for future collaboration on things like a volunteer database, the use of social networks like Facebook to connect the dots, and having gatherings and summits which would serve as educational workshops and networking opportunities.

Tepoztlan, as previously mentioned, is a nexus for consciousness- and ecology- oriented projects. Huehuecoyotl is one of the pioneer ecovillages from the early days of the movement, founded by an itinerant performance arts collective of Rainbow Tribe members who decided that this was the spot to settle. Down the mountain a couple of kilometers lies Tashirat, an orphanage, primary and secondary school (soon to be preparatory school as well!), and yoga center open to the public each morning for classes. Wandering through the stunning mountains that surround Tepoztlan on all sides, we were invited into a friend’s house for Kirtan meditation and a vegetarian meal. After talking with the monks present (two bearded orange-robed fellows, one from Japan and one from Italy), I discovered that they were from Ananda Marga, a spiritual and social service organization who is helping Project Nuevo Mundo to organize our inauguration festival, Universal Dance. I had been in contact with a friend of theirs for some time, who I would meet a matter of days later in Guatemala! Another lady at the dinner table was the organizer of the local chapter of Progressive Utilization Theory, whose other members I had met just a few days before during a meeting in Mexico City.

I had considered Tepoztlan as a possible location for our first Project Nuevo Mundo site, but ultimately decided against it for two main reasons: 1) Tepoztlan is not self-sufficient in water, which is piped in from outside, and 2) it is located less than one hour from the largest and most polluted city in the Western Hemisphere, and suburban encroachment by Mexico City’s upper classes is already beginning to leave its mark.
In addition to attending the PROUT meeting at the Universidad Nacional Autonomo de Mexico, I found myself at this bastion of independent thought a second time for a workshop with the Centro de Medios Libres. The Centro promotes free media access from the grassroots as an alternative to the corporate-controlled channels that feed the majority of humanity their (dis)information. The workshop was a lesson on how to broadcast your own radio station, using only a computer, an internet connection, and free software that was provided during the workshop to all participants.
Universal access to reliable information is quite possibly the most fundamental threat to the survival of the current systems of domination. On our website, you will find a number of independent news sources covering a diverse spectrum of viewpoints.
As I hopped on the bus down to Guatemala, my head was full of ideas on how to create a space for education in natural living and a free flow of information between individuals and between communities. Trial and error will shape the direction of the project over the next few months as we launch our dreams.

Love and Light,
David

Holidays in Guatemala

2011-01-21T14:10:00.000-08:00

We have been busy at work on our new project site, all the while enjoying a temescal ceremony, a Christmas afternoon with the local village, showers in the waterfall, and even a trance set courtesy a DJ from the capital. At this point, large helpings of lettuce are being harvested on a daily basis from the garden, and production is increasing. The new lettuce crop is grown from seed harvested on site in Tzununa. We are working on engineering new recipes to keep up with the thousands of avocados that demand continuous consumption. Said Guatemalan DJ came up with a brilliant avocado ice cream formula that was savored with shredded coconuts and raw cane sugar. Meanwhile, hundreds of pounds of coffee are being harvested, taken off the farm to be shipped to many destinations unknown to us.

A rotating cast of international chefs continue to grace our kitchen with their presence, as a software programmer develops our new interface for our ecovillage/volunteer social network, modeled loosely after Couchsurfing and WWOOF. New garden beds have been opened and a small fruit orchard has been initiated, planted with papaya, fig, lime, orange, mandarin, macadamia, three classes of mango, and three varieties of banana. Recent arrivals from the Rainbow Gathering in Palenque, Chiapas built a temascal sweat lodge and a sacred fire in a single day, while draping our porch with colorful hammocks. Travelers from Poland, Italy, the United States, Austria, Switzerland, France, South Africa, Canada, Australia, and Portugal have all shared this space together during the past month, taxing our capacity with fifteen bodies sleeping under the same roof.

The holiday season in Guatemala is notorious for copious amounts of ‘cuetes’ (fireworks) of all sizes, colors, and sounds being deployed for days (and nights) leading up to Christmas and continuing through to the new year, whence it climaxes at the strike of midnight. Upon first arrival in Guatemala four years ago, I had the impression that there was a guerilla war in the mountains around me.

For the winter solstice and total lunar eclipse, which coincided for the first time in hundreds of years and completed a 52-year Mayan calendar cycle, five of us traveled to the ancient Mayan city of Tikal, to pay our respects to the spirits who dwell there and ask them for guidance and protection. The bus trip from Lake Atitlan revealed breathtaking landscapes through Quiche and Alta Verapaz, including one huge gouge in the earth from years of landslides. I felt like I would be swallowed up as well. Passing through Coban, we found out that martial law had been declared that day due to drug-trafficking activity in the nearby jungle, and the military and police were present in force. Passing through Peten, we saw hours of rainforest converted into cattle-grazing pasture, the result of increasing meat consumption in Guatemala and worldwide.

Finally arriving to Tikal, I fell to my knees at the site of the first ceiba tree I had seen thus far (the national tree of Guatemala and the sacred tree of the Maya). The primary ceremony took place in the central plaza, between four regal temples. Tourists were snapping photographs despite the wishes of the Mayan priests. The sacred fire burned powerfully, fueled by copal, myrrh, and other traditional incense. Liquid cacao was handed out to all those around the circle, cold and sugarless, as is the ceremonial method of consumption. About sixty Mayan priests were in attendance, hailing from all parts of Guatemala.

In the afternoon we discovered a separate ceremony, presided over by priests from Lake Atitlan, with the help of their apprentices of primarily foreign origin. Many familiar faces from San Marcos la Laguna and San Pedro la Laguna appeared during the five-hour ceremony, which capped a six-day series of ceremonies in holy sites throughout the Peten jungle. The lunar eclipse the night before was pure magic deep orange, spectral and luminescent.

Back at the Lake by Christmas, we shared the afternoon with the village, imbibing in tamales, hot chocolate, pan dulce, and a projection of the Planet Earth series, jungle episode. The locals derived great merriment from images of the faces of baboons and other primates. Afterwards, they asked if I had any videos of ‘puro animales’.

New year’s eve into the dawn, we celebrated Universal Dance Guatemala, where 150 of us gathered in cosmic convergence to dance into the sunrise on the beachside near Santiago Atitlan. Many blessings were received, an outpouring of thanks, and many participants saying that there hadn’t been an event in five years with the energy that we manifested that night. It was a magical journey to the sunrise.

A flock of birds landed on the shimmering lakefront on the start of the first day of the new year, in the backdrop an indigenous fisherman out for an early catch, and two volcanoes looming on the far side of Santiago.

I felt that everything is as it should be, with a bottomless depth of gratitude for the opportunity to be here sharing this experience with so many beautiful people.

This week we are supporting a local NGO, Amigos de Santa Cruz, to construct a nutritional center and organic garden for woman and children from the village.

The Green Festival

2009-11-04T09:48:00.000-08:00

Across the United States, people gather in forests, deserts, and urban spaces such as churches and convention centers, to discuss the ongoing environmental, ecological, and economic crises that we face. These events hold space for workshops, lectures, conscious art and music. Demonstration displays of new innovative technologies can be found, from dry-compost toilets and grey-water filtration systems to natural architecture techniques and solar energy systems. This is the type of event after which we are modeling our annual festival, Universal Dance Guatemala: Awakening, at the Project Nuevo Mundo base in Guatemala, which will take place on December 31, 2009 - January 2, 2010.

Events of this nature take place year-round, but the outdoor campout events tend to fall during the summer months (May through September). The Symbiosis Gathering takes place annually against the beautiful backdrop of the forests of Northern California, and this year saw over 5000 participants. The festival is billed as a gathering for “Art. Music. Conscious Living. A synesthaesia of transformational learning. ” It is a synthesis of participatory workshops, lectures, live and electronic music, green technology exhibits, information booths, art displays and performances such as poetry reading, fire-dancing and various acrobatics. Events varied from Native American shamanic healing ceremonies to workshops on Tantric meditation and acro-yoga and classical Indian singing to a lecture on contemporary visionary art by renowned artist Alex Grey, who later started and finished a painting in a little over 12 hours just to the right of the main stage, as the performers followed one after the other from dusk straight through the night and into the next day. Other lectures included topics such as adaptation to a bioregional future, using MDMA to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, and the prospects for transformation when empire falls (Daniel Pinchbeck). At the tribal market, rows of stands were lined up with artisans selling handmade one-of-a-kind clothing and jewelry; many of the products were made from entirely recycled (upcycled) materials. A plan was hatched between friends to create a fair trade fashion company that fuses indigenous Guatemalan and Mexican textile work with sustainable production methods and a flair of psychedelic couture. The participants of Symbiants came from all over the United States, and many of the people I talked to expressed interest in Project Nuevo Mundo. One of every three or so people I talked to had already visited Lake Atitlán and knew of its spellbinding beauty.

Next weekend, the first annual Grassroots Economics Festival took place in Oakland, California, in a church that is powered with solar energy. The festival brought together activists and interested participants from all levels of ethnic and socioeconomic background, and I was inspired by the projects and collaborative efforts that are taking shape at this moment, seemingly given a renewed burst of energy by the symbolic victory of Barack Obama in the presidential elections. However, the point was repeatedly emphasized that corporate power still governs this country and that it is not one man but the activated multitudes who will provoke the change that brings the United States into a new era. “The door is open a crack. We can push it open further or we can let it get slammed in our face.” Local speakers held forth on topics like “Resources for the Grassroots Economy” and “Urban Food Security”. My favorite idea I heard at the festival was a forming network of urban gardeners who host “garden parties” where someone who wants to make a producing garden requests to host a party, and volunteers gather at the house, providing delicious locally grown food, live music, and their sweat labor. The end result is an organic garden to provide fresh produce daily to its residents, a diffusion of the knowledge of urban gardening, and a strengthening of community bonds. All this without really resorting to the use of money.

From the weekend of October 1 - October 4, we headed down to Joshua Tree desert in Southern California for the first annual Water Woman Festival, an “Art and Ecological Design Festival”. Once again, there were brilliant lectures on sustainability topics, such as “Ecological Systems Design” and “Sustainability Engineering”, and hands-on workshops like textile-making and lucid dreaming. An aesthetically pleasing grey-water filtration pond was constructed on the site, as were some cob benches, with the aid of many of the attendees. I made some fruitful connections here as well, including a lady who lives at a permaculture farm and school in Southern California called Quail Springs, and a renowned temple builder named SunRay Kelley who will most likely come to Guatemala during the coming Spring to build a temple from natural local materials on the Project Nuevo Mundo site.

The next weekend (October 10 - 11), I found myself in Washington DC at the DC Green Festival in the Convention Center downtown. There are green festivals happening all over the United States, including one in San Francisco from November 11 - 13.
Many prominent speakers were in attendance, Ralph Nader, Amy Goodman, Lester Brown, and John Perkins to name a few. John Perkins is an ex-corporate economist turned rainforest activist, who co-founded two organizations, Dream Change and the Pachamama Alliance, both of which we plan to collaborate with in the future in our work in Guatemala and beyond.
One salon at the Convention Center held yoga classes nonstop while another showed documentary films, including one exposing the disastrous environmental and health consequences of bottled water. The film is called “Tapped”. The main room was filled with hundreds of organizations and green businesses. I even found a booth two ladies who are residents of Lake Atitlán selling indigenous textile products that came from the women‘s cooperatives there! The Hemp Industry Assocation had its own pavilion, which comprised of textile products, particle boards, and super foods all made from hemp, as well as educational materials and lectures. A car that ran on hemp biodeisel fuel stood proudly on display. This plant, which has a plethora of industrial uses, is actually illegal to grow in the United States due to an archaic law, so all of the industrial hemp material is imported from Canada and China, to the chagrin of American farmers (and you wonder why the economy is failing!). The Green Festival is a mammoth production and is a great resource for getting educated on a variety of green issues. In addition to the San Francisco Green Festival taking place next month, there are also festivals in Denver, Seattle, and Chicago.

The resources necessary for making a new world possible exist in abundance, so let go of your fears, trust the world to support you, follow your passions and your dreams, and reject the indoctrination of impossibility. We are the people we’ve been waiting for.

You can fly. The wind is there waiting to catch you.

Love and Light,
David

Burning Man: An Orgy of Art and Self-Expression

2009-09-10T10:16:00.000-07:00

Every year during the first week of September, tens of thousands of artists, healers, musicians, dancers, and individuals from all backgrounds and countries make the pilgrimage to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada for a celebration of life and love. There they erect a temporary city, Black Rock City, which has become the Mecca of the American underground art scene. Black rocks from outer space can even be found amidst the all-embracing dust, which permeates every centimeter of skin, clothing, and camping space. Gargantuan art pieces adorn the bleak white expanse, many of which are ceremonially burned at the end of the week, symbolizing the cycle of death and rebirth, destruction and renewal. We purify our spirits in the desert, exorcise our demons, our sorrows, and our pains, and leave reborn.

Although Burning Man (http://www.burningman.com) is an experiment in freedom and self-expression, there are some rules. The most important rule is that there are no monetary transactions permitted within the festival grounds. The economy runs on gifting, bartering, and love. Bars, restaurants, cafes, yoga studios, massage centers, live and electronic dance music stages, and art galleries abound, all of them completely free. The underlying philosophy at Burning Man is radical self-sufficiency, so every participant is asked to provide everything they need, and many bring more to share with others. It is truly an experiment in the Solidarity Economy, and functions beautifully for one week per year. The challenge is to bring this mentality out into the 'default world' when we leave the playa, and some groups are working to make this a reality. One manifestation is Permaburn (http://permaburn.org/), a permanent Burner community currently forming in the Sierra Nevadas of Northern California, 70 miles from the site of Burning Man. Another beautiful project is the Burners Without Borders (www.burnerswithoutborders.com), started as a disaster relief effort in Peru in 2005 and quickly expanded since then, participating in disaster relief efforts in New Orleans and elsewhere. Project Nuevo Mundo is now a member project of Burners Without Borders, and I anticipate a fruitful relationship to grow from this partnership in the future.

Our camp at Burning Man was called the International House of Folk Tales (iHOFT). In the mornings, we served the most delicious pancakes I have ever had the privilege to experience (cooked on our solar cooker), and the evenings were filled by folk tale performances from around the world, produced by my gorgeous camp-mates. Russian, Arabian, and Native American tales were enacted out in front of small crowds of theater-goers taking a break from the constant electronic beat witnessed 24 hours a day, all 7 days. A group of Persians camping nearby provided drums and informal percussive dance parties were held on our fortified Grid Beam stage, which was illuminated all night by solar power, channeled by our SolMan. You can learn more about these technologies at http://www.gridbeamers.com/; these materials were provided to us by a very helpful group of DIY (Do It Yourself) California engineers that will most likely be joining us next year for pancakes and folk tales at the iHOFT.

Over the week, I made many fortuitous connections with shamans, yoga instructors, massage therapists, fire dancers, and international DJ's. One meeting of particular synchronicity was with a Danish party organizer who lives in Lago de Atitlán, Guatemala, the exact same location as the Project Nuevo Mundo site, as fate would have it. We had a mutual friend at Burning Man who introduced us, but it seems that it would have been only a matter of time until this acquaintance was made. He has a bar on the Lago de Atitlán called Freedom (http://www.thefreedombar.com/), which glows under the black light at night while multi-colored mandalas spin from the roofs and fire-dancers perform out on the lakeside.
We will be collaborating to throw the inauguration party of the Project Nuevo Mundo site on New Year's 2010. The last surviving member of the Buena Vista Social Club will most likely be in attendance, and it will be a festival to remember, with organic food from our farm and restaurant, morning yoga classes, mid-day lectures and art workshops, evening sweat lodge and hot tub sessions, and live and electronic music. The name of the festival is Universal Dance Guatemala, and there are also Universal Dance Art and Lifestyle Festivals happening in Bolivia and Chile on New Year's. You can find out more about the festival and concept on the Universal Dance facebook group (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=15677531757). I hope to see many of you in Guatemala on New Year's as we dance for peace, peace with each other, peace with Mother Earth, and peace within each one of ourselves.

Planetary
Elements
Acivating
Conscious
Evolution

Love and Light,
David

El Salvador: Permaculture, meditation, and after-school programs

2009-08-20T14:39:00.000-07:00

(August 14 entry)

I visited a friend´s project in Bajo Lempa called Voices on the Border (http://www.votb.org/), in the hot and sweaty lowlands of El Salvador (acqui hay un chingo de calore!). We visited a few of the different communities she works with. The area is populated partly by war veterans (guerillas) who were awarded the land (that they were already in control of) as a result of the peace treaty at the end of the Civil War in 1992, and by recipients of a last-ditch land reform right before the outbreak of civil war in 1980 (too little, too late).

The communities are annually flooded as a result of a hydroelectric dam upriver run by a heartless Italian multinational energy company in theoretical collaboration with the Salvadoran government. The dam accumulates and releases tons of water during each rainy season. During the Central American tragedy Hurricane Mitch in 1998, the entire community was flooded, and people standing on the highest building in town, up to their necks in water, were miraculously rescued by fishermen from another village.

As a result of this event, 29 communities in the flood zone formed a type of inter-community institution to coordinate against future flooding. The organization is called United Communities (or Comunidades Unidos). Right now they are building a levy, which has not yet been finished due to contractors running away with some of the money.

The community we visited, Nueva Esperanza (New Hope), along with the other local communities, are suffering a grave problem of death from kidney failure as a result of having contaminated the drinking water supply with agricultural pesticides and chemicals, some of which are illegal in the United States and will hopefully be illegal here soon as well. If this isn´t an educational lesson about why you shouldn´t spray chemicals on your land, I don´t know what is.

The project I found most interesting during our short visit was the Escuela de Agroecologia (School of Agroecology), a group of ideological peasant-engineers wielding the weapons of appropriate technology and a knowledge of organic agriculture techniques (biodigestors, vermiculture and composting, testing of natural pesticides with ingredients like garlic and chili...). I talked with the jefe, who espoused support for creating alternative economic systems and spreading knowledge and tools for self-sufficiency. We are on the same page.

The next day, I gave a lecture on the solidarity economy, traveler´s support networks, holistic development and self-discovery, and connecting art to the soul and nature through self-expression. The audience was a group of teachers of gifted children in the fields of art and music.

We talked awhile about reconciling, overcoming, or transcending the issues presented by material society while at the same time living immersed in it (after all, an artist thrives on expressing the pain (s)he feels, and where would one be without that pain?).

We also discussed techniques on reconciling the ¨hippy traveler lifestyle¨with ¨normal society¨, where everybody perceives you as a crazy loon lost in acid dreams. I remember having this same discussion with a roommate a couple years ago, who made the point that it´s a good strategy to make yourself as appealing as possible to as many sectors of society as possible, so as not to isolate anyone, and therefore you can have access to more ears and minds than if you rolled around with dreadlocks and a tie-dye shirt (I´m still not going to shave my beard though).

Another topic raised, this one by a Salvadoran brought up in California, was how people who are natives to Salvadoran society but raised in the United States are treated. These people are looked down upon by Salvadoran society, whereas much respect is given to foreigners (me, for example). He shared his own experience trying to reintegrate into Salvadoran society, and his travels to Cambodia, where he was treated very well, but his Cambodian friends from Los Angeles were given a similar reception to the treatment he himself received upon his return to El Salvador.

In the afternoon, we visited Marta Benavides´(Museo Aja, www.museoaja.org) permaculture farm outside San Salvador, which we are planning to turn into a place for kids from another friend´s after-school foundation (Fundación Nueva Vida, www.nuevavidafundacion.org) to come and have a day in nature to learn organic agriculture, and to mentally detoxify from the urban chaos of San Salvador, which is rated as the most dangerous city in Latin America (and competition is stiff). The Museo Aja is an ecological education and peace-oriented museum in Santa Ana, and it is open to the public. Its objective is to raise consciousness and create planetary citizens. Fundacion Nueva Vida is located in Ciudad Delgado on the outskirts of San Salvador, and has recently started their own garden project. It is an after-school accompaniment program for at-risk children, where you will find many wonderful children in a loving environment.

A final visit was made to a piece of land Marta owns on the Lago de Ilopango, a beautiful lake about thirty minutes outside San Salvador. We have ambitions to turn this piece of land into a Vipassana meditation and retreat center.

blue Energy on the Caribbean

2009-08-20T13:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I made it out to Kahkabila, a Miskito indigenous village with a population of 400, on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua. To get here, I took a 10pm bus from Managua, the capital, arriving to El Rama at 3 in the morning, and from there taking a speed boat out to Bluefields, arriving finally at 7am. I spent a day in Bluefields checking out the blueEnergy operation there (www.blueenergygroup.org), a wind and solar energy NGO consisting mostly of volunteer engineers from the United States and France. A good percentage of these volunteer engineers are currently suffering from the dengue fever, which is sweeping the Coast right now. Good times. From Bluefields, I took another boat out an hour to the Pearl Lagoon, and from there contracted a fisherman to take me out in a canoe to Kahkabila. It turned out to be quite a treacherous one-hour journey in a small canoe with a black plastic sail, accompanied by heavy winds and spots of downpours, soaking us to the bone. It was a constant battle to scoop water out of the boat with a half of a plastic water bottle, which served as the pail. Ghetto rigging indeed. At times I felt myself out of a scene of Old Man and the Sea. My guide reassured me that ´all is good, all is good´, in that Caribbean-twanged dialect of English they call Creole.

Arriving in Kahkabila at last, we were greeted with an outburst of heavy rainfall, so we hid under the awning of one of the houses and waited it out. The owner of the house wasn´t actually home at the moment; when he eventually came, I heared my guide Ariel say something in Miskito with the words ¨white man¨ stuck in the middle of the phrase. Everyone was very respectful towards me, and even praised the work of the American (!) and European governments while criticizing the Nicaraguan authorities for doing nothing to help them (actually, the only foreign aid project I have seen out here is a Japanese road-building program).

The Caribbean population of Nicaragua lives in harsh conditions on the stormy Coast, on land inaccessible by road. This makes anything imported from the outside prohibitively expensive. In addition, the only cash income these people earn is generally from the fish they catch and fruits and vegetables from small farms (although every once in awhile, a sack of cocaine floats into the Coast, ditched by Colombian smugglers fleeing the Coast Guard, and the lucky recipients of these treasures are plainly visible from their Japanese motorboats and sparkling concrete mansions, significantly contrasting to the leaking wood canoes and wood and corrugated metal huts common in these parts). The electric grid came to Kahkabila at the beginning of this year, and before that blueEnergy had been working two or three years in the community. The first action of blueEnergy here was to erect a windmill, and they have since had to constantly come and repair it (in fact, neither of the two windmills on site were working at the time I visited). The energy from the windmill originally served to charge cell-phones and other battery-powered devices, and still has its purpose as a backup source of energy when the conventional grid isn´t functioning (which is at least a bi-weekly occurence). An energy commission, consisting of townspeople, was created and capacitated by blueEnergy to maintain basic upkeep on the windmill and charge a small fee for people who use the facilities to charge their devices. Since the electric grid came a few months ago, they have lost this revenue stream that was used to maintain the windmills. However, they were devising a new way to raise money: by distributing the energy-efficient products that blueEnergy was promoting (the Nova DLight solar-powered flash light, and CFL lightbulbs, which are preferable to LED´s at this point because of the light quality). The two windmills in the village are still used to power the village´s school and health clinic, and are augmented by recently installed solar panel systems. One or the other is almost always generating energy.

The community was kind and receptive, and even called a meeting of the Energy Commission so I could ask them questions. They asked me to stay the night but my boatmen wanted to get home in time for a dinner of fried fish (broke my six-month fast from eating animal carcasses! There isn´t much to eat other than seafood and coconuts around here). I was somewhat dejected (although certainly not surprised) to find that the first appliance after light bulbs in the village was television, which is spreading like malaria through the village and gluing little children to screens for hours, as gun battles and helicopter explosions fill the eyes and minds of two-year old chidren and make them cry. The general concensus among the inhabitants of the village was that television was a good thing, signifying progress.

We made the journey back paddling against rather strong headwinds, again getting slammed all over (and all over again) by large and fast-moving raindrops. My guide was very happy to get back home safely, and we enjoyed our meal with a nice warm coconut soup called ´Rondon´, eaten with breadfruit. I dropped to sleep on the wooden floor shortly afterwards.