Sun up and sun down:
The bounds for work are simple.
Just crunch, store, repeat.
Today finds us using the 13 Moon Galactic Synchronometer. Fiorella spends some time explaining to us what this means. She speaks a little English, but her Spanish is better, so we find ourselves leaning on that mostly. She tells us about the aim of the Garden experiment: to acclimatize people to this more natural calendar and to exercise the social structure of the Dreamspell Earth Families. Every person is assigned a galactic signature by birth (Evan : white crystal wizard, I : yellow spectral star), and this influences his or her relationship with nature. Dreamspell Earth family organisation is intended to alternate work and rest days, after a fashion, for each person. Every day, one colour has its biosphere day (i.e. everyone with red works in the fields), a cycle which resets every four days (the four colours were red, blue, yellow, and white). There is also the family cycle, which takes five days and determines who cooks and works in the house each day.
The calendar is designed to resynchronize people with natural events like the lunar cycle. This is a shortcoming of the Gregorian calendar, its proponents argue, because the Gregorian calendar has entirely arbitrary month structure and length. Fiorella also pointed us at a book called The Cosmic History Chronicles written by the man who rediscovered all this knowledge (which is based on the Mayan calendar). We're encouraged to read it over the week we are here.
This morning we awoke with the sun and headed from our walnut-tree-side campsite to the main living complex. Fiorella popped out of a building we didn't explore and invited us in to participate in her morning ceremony, called Agni Hutra. We were permitted to watch as she sat in front of a tiny shrine, singing to a tiny fire and dropping rice grains into it. The fire went out eventually, and she coaxed the smoke over her head and onto her chest, encouraging us to do the same. She explained that the burning object was a cow dung cake soaked with ghee (clarified butter), and that the ritual was to promote healthy land and good harvest. It is done every morning and evening.
After this ceremony, Fiorella showed us her morning exercises of the 13 points of articulation. Ankle, knee, hip, wrist, elbow, shoulder, neck, shoulder, elbow, wrise, hip, knee, ankle. Each of these points corresponds to a moon in the cycle, and she explained the powers of each point (communication, learning, etc.).
Most of today was spent learning about Fiorella and shelling almonds. Have you ever seen a fresh almond? So, think of an almond that you buy in the supermarket, just the amber-coloured, teardrop-esque nut. Now, imagine a light tan shell around it with tiny holes all over. Around that shell, there is a green (if you're lucky) or black/brown/pink/grey (if it's covered in mold, ew) fruit that's a little bit furry. This outer thing generally comes off fairly easily, and then the inner shell must be cracked with crackers. Then you have to judge the almond for quality (if it's soft, it's rotten; if it's got just a bit of mold on the outside but is still hard, it can be toasted and eaten; if it's barely a nut at all and has wasted away to grey fluff, you probably shouldn't try eating it). The way of the Garden is to have minimal impact, so there are three piles that we make as we shell: one pile of good almonds for human consumption, one pile of bad almonds "for the nature" (they get scattered back over the land to compost or be eaten), and one pile of shells and fruits for burning.
So it goes. We spent the day sitting in the sun and chatting about the land. Fiorella said that we shouldn't cook anymore; she would take care of it for us. Tonight we had some delicious lentil stew. Mmmmm...