Akashavana

The last few weeks in Matarranya have seen the Shrine Room shoot up from its foundations where the vajra we planted lies within a metre of concrete. Vijayasri and Isla cleared the pathway between the retreat centre and the shrine room so now you can walk the 150 metres or so along the goat track on the side of the hill and through a little crop of pine trees without stumbling on loose rocks and ducking under branches.

Through the pines you see the first views of the shrine room. It is a large rectangular building, raised a metre off the ground to protect it from damp. It has been built from scratch with red brick faced with stone or sand coloured render. Discussions about the size and placement of the windows in the shrine room occupied the ‘Aranya group’ for many a month, along with debates about where we would place the shrine. Now seeing the building with its walls built the large windows look great and where we place the shrine seems obvious. It’s hard to take in sometimes that the building will be a shrine room. When we walk around it our thoughts are in building site mode and we’re full of questions and anxieties. Do the builders really intend giving us a lintel above the door made out of a bit of old pallet? And why is one window lower than the other and just a bit crooked? We ask our questions and of course the builders have noticed and they are both just temporary things!

Apart from enormous beams crossing from wall to wall the roof is still open to the views. The ridge behind the shrine room rises to 1200 metres and even with all the banging and clattering of building noise, on one visit I watched two wild goats climb a hill a hundred metres away. It almost seems a shame to put the roof on but I think once the building is enclosed with a wooden ceiling and floor it will really start to become our shrine room.

The retreat centre work has slowed down a lot whilst different scenarios are mooted for our services. Water is fairly clear; we’ll have a large tank near the spring below the house and pump it up to another tank above the house and gravity feed it into the retreat centre. Lighting is also becoming clear and with the high ridge behind the retreat centre it’s important to place the solar panels where they’ll get maximum sun particularly for the shorter winter days. We’ve decided on a position that’s not visible from the house but we need to build a small ‘casita’ to house the solar batteries. Santi the carpenter is away making our doors and windows to fit the frames already in place. Many of the doors will be part glass to let more light into the rooms.

Our discussions turn more regularly to kitting out the retreat centre. What sort of kitchen will we have, and who will make it? How many beds do we want in this room and when do we need to put in an order to ensure we have them in place by spring? It is still a way off and much needs to be finished off in the retreat centre by then but it’s exciting to have got to this point. We are still hoping the builders will have finished their work before winter really sets in – by late November.

July in Matarranya has been hot and work outside has been put off in favour of mortaring walls and scrubbing beams inside. The community house is really starting to show the results of the hard work put in by volunteers over the first half of this year under the guidance of Bianca. Bianca has extremely high standards and it shows in the quality of the finish of the whitewashed walls which contrast beautifully with the beams protected and stained with linseed oil. It is a very simple house and we’ve managed to maintain that quality of simplity - it’s like being in a white cave in places - but combine it with comfort. It’s an easy house to be in particularly in that the thick walls keep the temperature 10 degrees lower than outside.

Up at the retreat centre the work continues to go well. Door and window frames are mostly in place and the concrete floors are laid throughout. All the external pointing has been done which shows off the old local stone perfectly. There have been a few surprises along the way. The dining room is practically a cathedral due to another part of the building needing to have the roof raised slightly and this impacting on other rooms. This gives us the option of creating second floor above the dining area in future. The bathroom is taking shape with individual stalls for the showers and toilets. I’ve found it an interesting that building work doesn’t appear to be a very exact science. We have all these incredibly detailed plans laying out materials and how many square metres of this and that - but then a wall that you expect to be stone turns out to be made of mud and there are consequences to this! Another example is the bedrock in the downstairs bathroom and storage area turned out to be much harder to remove than expected so we’ve made a feature of it and it’s now supporting the washbasins. We were due to have a false ceiling in the bathroom but have decided to keep the enormous beams showing. They are of various types, some round and some rectangular and not very symmetrical but they have character! Wherever possible we want to keep the original features.

Last week we met to talk with Luis, our architect and Jose, the builder. It was nice to sit down with them in the local hotel in the village. Usually our meetings are two or three hours of standing in the sun or walking around the building site with at least 3 conversations going on in spanish at the same time. We were meeting to talk about the next payment that was due and to finalise plans for our Shrine Room before the work starts on it. But somehow we got on to talking about other holy places and San Benito who started the Benedictine Order of Monks. Luis is particularly interested in our spiritual tradition and what do Buddhists do? Vijayasri manfully articulated our practice as Buddhists as being more to do with a commitment rather than a particular life-style. “So you’re not ‘monkas’ (literally female monks) then?” Luis asked. There was a sort of amused snort and shake of the head from Jose. “Oh no, they’re not monkas” Vijayasri and I looked at each other and we all laughed. I guess our shorts and steel toe capped boots are just 2 of the reasons we seem quite far removed from the grey clad nuns seen all over Catholic Spain.

We missed our chance with the ‘buena luna’ (the good moon!) to get the large machine needed to clear out the ancient water deposit around the spring up the mountains. Another building crew is working in Penarroya and the road up is blocked until they move their crane and vast amounts of sand and gravel. So we’re waiting on the next month to start sorting out our water system. The digger will also dig an access track to the terrace where the Shrine Room will be built.

In the next few weeks we will disperse over summer. Bianca and Vijayasri will be in Holland and Wales respectively for retreats. Jose is going on holiday to his daughters on the spanish coast. Luis will be at home in Alcaniz but ‘taking it easy’. I will be attending a family reunion in France. The work at the retreat centre will continue in the capable hands of Alexis and his team.

The retreat centre has a roof! Amazing the difference a roof can make, transforming a building site into a viable building, with outdoors and indoors. And it has guttering! I never dreamed how excited I could get about guttering, but ours is special guttering, made of softly gleaming copper.

All the exterior stonework is pointed now, so that old blends into new, and at our request the builders left some of the old blue colouring on the wall. The pigment is called azulete, in fact the same thing as used to be used in Britain for whitening the wash - ‘washing blue’. The Matarraña traditional was to mix azulete with cal (lime whitewash) and paint the walls an intense sky blue. It was often painted around exterior doors and windows, we’re told, to keep the evil spirits away. We found an old sack of azulete from the previous owners in the house - it had been there since the1960’s but still looked usable, so we will be experimenting with our own spirit protection. I especially like the casual way this was done, just slapped around a window, no particular worries about neat edges.

Downstairs the workmen have been digging out bedrock with pneumatic drills. All the dormitory rooms now have been dug out, taking down the floor level so that you don’t bump your head on the ceiling beams any longer. But in the storeroom area they seem to have hit a particularly hard part and José our builder was clearly reluctant to keep expending effort on what was only to be a storage area. It’s too hard, demasiado fuerte, he complained. Vajradevi kicked it and some crumbled away. ‘OK, you keep kicking it, Vajradevi,’ I suggested.

Now the hot weather has really set in, and working outdoors can become intolerable in the middle of the day. The Brazilian workmen drive from Morella, a town 50km away to come to work, so no chance to go home for the afternoon siesta. Fortunately there is plenty of work indoors, preparing the walls for plastering, concreting the floors downstairs. Thick stone walls keep the interior of these old houses pleasantly cool in the fiery heat of summer - another reminder of how well suited the traditional building methods are to the climate.

So, all goes well, and our main discussions with the architect and builders now centre around the services - water, electricity, heating. The man with the maquina (digger) will be coming up this week to dig out the spring, now that the moon is full - the ‘buena luna’ that draws out the water, according to local tradition.

I arrived back in Spain after a 2 week absence from the mountains on June 9th. The World Cup was starting and I was retreating into the mountains! It had taken 2 days to return as my train in Tortosa missed the last possible bus back to Valderrobres where Bianca was picking me up from. I sat in a mosquito filled park at dusk in Tortosa as the text messages went back and forth. Eventually it was decided - I would stay in a hotel overnight and get the lunchtime bus the next day.

What had changed in two weeks?

The growth spurt on every single tree in the mountains seemed to have slowed down. Before I had left each tree had a good few inches of paler green growth at its tips. I had never realised quite how much growth happened in springtime. The new shoots on the pine and carrasco were now blending in. I noticed for the first time another type of tree; Guhyavajra who came from Guhyaloka, our mens ordination retreat centre, to visit, thought it was some sort of maple. It’s lovely to see a few deciduous trees amongst all the evergreens.

The weather has been quite erratic with violent thunderstorms and sweltering humidity. I went exploring down a beautiful dry river gorge at the weekend and was accompanied by loud rumbles and cracks of thunder the whole way. It felt like I was being accompanied on my walk by my Yidam (meditation deity) Wrathful Vajrapani. Eventually torrential rain came and with it hailstones the size of chick peas. I hid under a bush as they have been known to fall the size of golf balls. I chided the sky. “Come on, it’s June. In fact it’s nearer July than May. What’s this all about?” The reply was more thunder and lightning flashes.

For the second time in a week lightning struck the highest ridge we can see from the support community. The hail instantly extinguished the smoke that came from the strike. However the first time it happened there was little rain and a fire started. Vijayasri saw the flames start to spread and tried to phone the fire service (the ‘bomberos’) but our usually poor mobile reception was even worse that day. Eventually she called our builder Jose at home in the village and he phoned the firemen. They came in a fire engine with special tyres for off road driving accompanied by landrovers with the ‘guardia civil’ (local police) and guardia forestal (forest police). However most of the work was done by a helicopter that sprayed water on the fire returning a few minutes later having picked up more water from the resevoir an hours drive away. After about ten trips the patch of ground was left smouldering and then the fire was out. It was scary to see how easily forest fires can happen but reassuring to see how quickly the fire service responded with very effective means of putting the fire out.

In the yurt our first solitary dweller has finished her 7 week long retreat and at our invitation was able to feed back how the facility had worked for her. She had got to know the surrounding areas well through some long walks which we’ve been trying out. We’ve been getting used to being able to make lots of banging and other building sounds once more, and calling out to each other outside without a sudden “whoops” and muffled giggle and retreat into whispers.

Today we picked up our official planning permission for the retreat centre. It’s taken almost 6 months to come through and even though we were able to start the work without it it feels a very significant step to now have it in our possession. Another milestone (knowing that we finally had the ‘permiso’) was showing 2 local journalists the retreat centre building. They had both been interested in our project for several months - particularly in why we had chosen the region of Teruel to have our Ordination retreat centre. Having managed to pick up more Spanish vocabulary for building terms than we were ever able to in English we realised we need quite a different language to express the Dharma in Spanish…

The builders have been working on the retreat centre for 5 weeks now and the speed with which the building is changing is astounding. Vijayasri and I have moved on from our reaction on viewing our future retreat centre of “oh no what have we done!”. If anything the building site effect is more pronounced with piles of rubble forming dusty mountains on the terraces below the house, stacks of old tiles waiting to be re-used on the roof andThe builders have been working on the retreat centre for 5 weeks now and the speed with masses of old wooden beams and planks, door and window frames and old cupboards lying around. And the building from above as you approach is still a cavernous hole looking into the sky blue walls of the barn and dining room.

Our response at the moment is more one of excitement. Pallets covered with bags of cement, new roof tiles and red bricks are stored alongside the track opposite the house. A lorry load of new wooden beams lies covered with tarpaulin waiting for work to start on putting the new roof on. As well as the destruction what is now clearly evident is the new building beginning to emerge. Old walls of mud and stone are still being pulled down but now new walls of brick faced with stone are forming new rooms.

I’m finding that as the building changes from the old collection of small, low roofed rooms, as the walls grow higher and dividing walls are knocked out, the plans make more sense to me. I’m full of admiration for what Luis, our architect, has envisioned. It’s really lovely to walk into a roofless barn with holes for windows and be able to imagine it as a spacious library cum sitting room.

Yesterday Vijayasri and I had our weekly meeting at the retreat centre with Luis, Jose (one of our builders) and Jesus, the local town surveyer. Yesterday we were also joined by the foreman on site. We walk around the building at a leisurely pace. The mood is relaxed and friendly as Luis inspects the work and invites us to express our concerns or questions. With requests for repetition and clarification we manage to keep up with the conversation which of course is all happening in Spanish. Cigarettes are smoked and there is time for exchanges of local news. At the weekend there was a village day walk from Penarroya to the ridge standing at 1200 metres, 250 metres above the retreat centre. A different walk is chosen every year and a substantial part of the village population of 650 participate.

In one room a small dividing wall has fallen over. It was a feature Vijayasri and I had wanted left out anyway so Jose teases us by asking if we pushed it over ourselves. No, no, we protest laughing, it was the recent storm!

I find the new section of building particularly exciting. On the ground floor it houses a 3 person bedroom and the ‘installations’ room for the boiler and solar panel batteries. Above is a spacious kitchen and store room with fantastic views through the open holes of the windows. The stone walls are being built up over the kitchen door as we watch. The local stone is incredibly expensive to buy but really beautiful, and definitely preferred as a visible building material by the local authorities. I really like that all our new build can be constructed from our existing stone which is first cleaned off and chipped into the right shape. The result is a little more uniform than the old parts of the building but looks great.

The work is progressing satisfactorily. Luis and Jesus are both impressed with the Brazilian team of workers and the speed and standard of their work. We are gradually getting to know their names though they are still quite shy with us.

After looking over the building we go down to the spring to talk about different options for a water deposit. We check out a site above the house where the water could be pumped up to and then gravity fed down to the retreat centre. This would cut out the need for a second power hungry pump on our lean solar budget. The site is next to a pool of muddy water visited regularly by wild goats and wild boar. Their footprints are sunk into the mud. My dictionary comes in handy when Jose shows us a mud stained pine tree with the bark rubbed off by the boar having a good scratch. Is it fleas? No. Ticks? We have some experience of finding these in our clothing! No. Finally we establish the wild boar are covered in lice!

Finally we all stand a little way above the retreat centre watching and admiring. The work is progressing very well. I comment with a word I’ve learnt while watching football on television with Vajrananda during our days living in the flat in Penarroya. ‘Son un bueno equipo’. ‘They are a good team’. The others agree. Then we say our goodbyes and agree to meet same time, same place, next week.