December 2004: Gifts in Abundance

December 18th, 2004

The Chamber is Open.

It doesn’t seem very “Christmas-y” this month, yet there were gifts in abun­dance! The com­post is begin­ning to come in, the Chamber is built, the guest room is com­pleted, and our dear friend Annette has come to stay for a cou­ple of months. We are both putting in a lot of extra time at the Blossoming Lotus due to the sea­son and a staff shortage…

Here’s the lat­est image from the “gar­den cam.” I won’t say it pro­vides all our needs, but the veg­gie plot is a con­stant source of herbs and veg­eta­bles. Next to be har­vested is the peanuts (to the right, but you can’t really see them), the green tops turned in to nour­ish the next round. The nuts are good food– we like to sprout them and eat them raw. Large green patch on the left is sown with a nitrogen-fixing ground cover. In the rear are papaya, one just pro­duc­ing it’s first ripe fruit this month.

The two major events this month are the open­ing of the Transformation Chamber and the mov­ing of the bees. I com­pleted the fourth wall of the Chamber, cut­ting a hep­tag­o­nal win­dow to frame the view.

The build­ing strikes me as some­what over­sized, util­i­tar­ian with a few aes­thetic touches. I won­der how it will adapt to its use here.

Lisa painted three madalas to focus the trans­for­ma­tive ener­gies of the chamber.

And so begins the experiment…