Back to June 2007
Living Arts - June 2007
An Oasis of Calm The Tea House Spa
by Scott Randall
If you had one hour to do anything you wanted what would it be? More than likely, a soak in a hot tub would be at the top of your list. And if you were fortunate enough to be in Santa Cruz when the hankering to hot tub strikes, the Tea House Spa would definitely be the place to go.
A soak at the Tea House Spa is a unique experience. It starts with a warm Santa Cruz greeting from the Spa staff. They are sincere in wanting to make your visit relaxing and memorable. And that's just the beginning.
Once you select your private room, you are swept away from the cares of the outside world. Each room looks out onto its own private view of giant cypress or delicate bamboo. The layout of the rooms eliminates all city and traffic noise and you feel as if you are on a rainforest retreat. It is hard to believe that in fact you are in the middle of downtown Santa Cruz.
Each of the four hot tub rooms includes cool natural slate, a redwood deck, hot tub with jets, and shower. The Shoji windows add an Asian feel and open out onto a private garden. For an extra treat, you can extend your stay and take a trip to the warm, skylit massage room after your soak. Or you can peruse their selection of local art and bath products for sale while sipping on complimentary herbal tea. My favorites are the Royal Garden, ginger and spearmint.
At the Tea House Spa, relaxation, peace and tranquility pervade. Conversation is kept soft and cell phones, along with tobacco, alcohol, food and glass containers, are left at home.
When Ann Sunlight created this refuge for peace and rejuvenation over 50 years ago, the standard was set. Now her tradition lives on. For me, the Tea House Spa delicately captures the spirit of old Santa Cruz in its sense of calm, caring and attention to detail.
The Tea House Spa is located at 112 Elm Street in downtown Santa Cruz. For more information, rates and hours, call (831)426-9700 or on the web at teahousespa.com. Phone reservations or walk-insj only please. Gift certificates are also available.
The Shamanic Power Of Water
by Jesse Wolf Hardin
"Love this river, stay by it, learn from it.... Yes.... it seemed to him that whoever understood this river and its secrets, would understand much more, many secrets, all secrets." Hermann Hesse
"....the water, in time, became a wonderful book, a book that was a dead language to the uneducated.... but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell each moment." Mark Twain
In the dark beneath a blanket of stars, a campfire's orange glow sparkles on the water and sloshes up the sides of volcanic cliffs. The assembled are modern day students on a weekend intensive. Those who have answered the call, undergo personal transformation and receive the necessary training will be considered shamans. Like the river beside which they will learn this weekend, they will soon be agents in one way or another of awakeness, reintegration, healing and transformation.
Rivers have always been a place of gathering and healing, on every habitable continent. The ancient ones all built their villages riverside, ditches channeled some of the water to crops, and young men and women met secretly in the rushes along the shore to make love to the sonata of murmuring currents. For eons the Rio Frisco was both the actual and spiritual fountain of the native pit-house dwellers the anthropologists call the Mogollon (Mo-go-yone).
My partners and I were the first protectors of the Rio Frisco since the Mogollon moved out a thousand years before. We fenced off parts of the river from grazing cattle, encouraging replanting and restoring its banks. Today, this healed part of the river helps people who come from afar do their own necessary healing. All of us feel the river's energy vibrating through the grass-covered ground where we sit, gathering like our purposeful predecessors in a quest for shamanic vision, understanding and power.
A shaman knows the singing river as he or she knows reality itself. The water we watch now is not the same water that passed before us a minute before. A river connects not just the ocean and the cloud, but also the past and the future in its eternal undulation. It teaches us about form without constraint, the importance of being able to find one's way over or around obstacles and how patience and sheer will can allow even the softest of waters to gently carve their way through solid rock.
In the river's waters, we witness the rise and fall of dreams and fortune. We discover ourselves in its reflectionour moods ranging from tickle and trickle to murky depression, from shallow to deep. Like the river, we can be full of ourselves, spilling out over our edges, expanding beyond our imagined limitations as we seek to penetrate and inundate the universe. It's at this point that our searching becomes a spiritual thing, as we join in as participants in the ongoing Chautauquathe rousing riparian revival. Freed of rational constraint and incessant doubt, we partner with the crowds of buzzing bees and spinning dragonflies, rapt grass and attendant trees.
The ancients recognized the similarity between the physical/spiritual cycles of life and death, and the water cycle's endless circling back into itself. Here we find the balance-within-change that so personifies nature. It's often symbolized by a circular watercourse with each part feeding the other, in what the conservationist Aldo Leopold coined the "Round River." As diverse as various river cultures are, river folk from the Amazon to the Tiger, the frigid Yellowstone to the temperate Frisco seem to share at least a few spiritual or philosophic beliefs in common. Foremost is that there's something continuous and contiguous that we're all a lasting part of. Here perhaps is the real meaning of the expression "going with the flow".... not malleable, indifferent or directionless but rather moving in the same direction as nature, in the direction of evolving spirit. Like the river, we are forever changing. And yet, in some capacity, something of us remains.
Dipping out a cup full of river water, it's hard not to be affected by its crystalline clarity, intrigued with the way the surface curves up the sides like a cat rubbing against a leg. We remember that without this most vital liquid, the digestion and assimilation of nutrients would be impossible. The universal solvent, water reduces the nutrients necessary for both plant and animal life, dissolving them in the bowels of the soil as in the twists and turns of the human digestive tract. It's capable of penetrating most barriers including the walls of living cells. Water constitutes up to three fourths of a mammal's total weight. Similarly, three fourths of the planet's surface is covered with it300 million cubic miles of fresh and salt water. Looking at satellite images of the blue planet, one might be tempted to name it Oceanus instead of Earth.... a world of water.
On the other hand, while the deepest trenches of the Western Pacific could easily swallow the breadth of the tallest mountain, the oceans are but a shallow film in relation to the mass of the Earth. Even before the full impact of the Greenhouse Effect, competition has gotten fierce for ever-scarcer fresh water supplies. Underground aquifers in the West are fast being depleted through wasteful surface irrigation and the growing demands of industry and suburban life.
None of us at the workshop take the river for granted. We heed its example and tales. Some of us walk to the river as the weekend comes to a close, stand in the gently moving current and fall backwards into its welcoming arms back into balance and into sensate self.
Our minds hushed, the cool flow commands the attention of our entire beings. I sit up and fix my eyes on shifting opal patterns on the river's surface. With my hands still in the water I can feel it pass through my fingers. I can neither grasp it nor hold it back, but upon opening my hand it becomes instantly full again. Unexpected tears become rain that become a stream. We see how water, like Spirit itself, is consumed without diminishing and changes form without depletion.
Who can say which is the origin? Is it the ocean or the cloud? Perhaps it is the glad and grieving human heart, both empathic and ecstatic, that is the source.
Jesse Wolfe Hardin is an acclaimed author and teacher of Animá earth-centered practice. He and his partners offer correspondence courses and host retreats, vision quests and internships in their river canyon, an ancient and authentic place of power. Events include the Wild Women's Gathering June 29-July 4, and the Shaman Path Intensive July 26-29: You can contact Hardin at the Animá Wilderness Retreat Center, Box 688, Reserve, NM, 87830, www.animacenter.org.
Irrigating the Soul - My Time Helping in an Ecuadorian Community
by Neil Gupta
As an engineer, I have a responsibility to change the world in a positive manner.
However, three years out of college, I found myself working in the aerospace industry under an increasingly belligerent federal administration. It is true that the advancements of technology created in the defense sector eventually filter through to the commercial world and make society better. However, I was increasingly dismayed by the short-term prospects for the technology I was creating. I found myself at a crossroads and decided to leave the country. I wanted to better understand the challenges that face developing nations.
Off to Ecuador
After extensive research, I found an Ecuadorian-based group called Fundacion Jatun Sacha, through which I could work for four months. I was assigned to a small community at one of their reserves in the outlying rainforest of Ecuador. Jatun Sacha runs ten such reserves throughout Ecuador, a country of unbelievable biodiversity and a friendly, vibrant culture.
The village of Tsuraku is comprised of 10-15 wood framed tin-roofed houses spread along two miles of the 50-mile dirt road between Puyo and Macas in the Pastaza province of Ecuador. This densely forested area is home to the Shuar and Kichwa Indians.
A little bit about the history: After the Spanish military conquest, Catholic priests followed with their subjugation of the Shuar and destruction of their culture. Gone were the rituals, the migratory way of life and even the traditional names of Ecuadorian people. A feudal system was installed, and appointed Spanish masters owned the plantations as well as the newly enslaved native peoples.
During the reforms of the 1960s, much of that system finally collapsed. Left in its wake, the Shuar were often convinced to sell their raw materials to developed countries that in turn made 200-fold profits on the finished goods. With the Ecuadorian old growth forests depleted and their oil reserves tapped, many Shuar clear-cut large tracts of land for cattle. Unfortunately, this system proved unprofitable and they found themselves without resources in the midst of a land that used to provide them with everything they needed.
Building a trusting relationship with the people of Tsuraku was the most difficult and on-going challenge to my work there. Each person had a different criterion by which they judged my intentions and there were different ways that I could best reach them. For one of the elders' sons, it was a night of hard drinking; for my good friend Mario, it was long nights spent talking, including several arguments; and for the local doctor Ramon, I think he could see it in my eyes. I wanted to help. My intentions were good and I was sincere.
Toilets for Tsuraku
Some of the most successful and possibly useful projects I worked on were those that directly and immediately increased quality of life for the people of Tsuraku; for instance, the design and construction of composting toilets.
At the time, residents dug a shallow hole out on their land and used that as a toilet. When the hole got partly full it is topped with dirt and a new one is dug.
Unfortunately, Tsuraku sits on a relatively low point in a broad valley and is near the water level of a large river. Since it is in the rainforest, a large amount of standing water and heavy rains are frequent. These rains carry waste from the open pit toilets across the land, where people pick up bacteria and get ill.
Our concept was to build a composting toilet system that uses ash and wood chips to break down solid waste and turn it into manure that would be safe to handle. The first component of this project was, of course, to get community consensus. The discussion of waste, several diagrams of the processes by which waste is currently spread among the community, and how the new toilet system would work brought giggles from the participants.
The only time I was ill while volunteering was, ironically enough, while building the sanitary composting toilet system. During the construction of the system, we used sand from the nearby dirt road in creating part of the building's foundation. It was a perfect illustration of the health problems created by the runoff from nearby pit toilets. The bacteria-infested waste made its way down to the road and into the sand that I handled, making me quite ill for several days.
We conducted research into several other composting toilet systems used in the United States and several in Ecuador. I made a trip to an amazing inn in central Ecuador called the Black Sheep Inn with one of the nicest compositing toilet installations I have seen. Having specific examples of other (primarily Western) people using composting toilets helped to encourage acceptance of the concept in Tsuraku.
In the end, our design consisted of two plastic drums sitting below the bathroom floor, one "in-use" and the other "processing." A plastic funnel channeled liquid waste out in low concentrations where the high nitrogen levels help to fertilize plants. Solid waste went into one of the bins, and each use was followed by a handful of ash and woodchips, to cover waste and help in its breakdown. The total cost of this structure was less than $25, with plastic bins and hoses bought in the nearest town two hours away.
Real time temperature and pH testing was not conducted, and there are several ways I hoped to improve the design. Overall, though, the biggest achievement was starting a trend toward a better waste management system for the community.
The benefit for me was getting to learn about another culture and spend time in an extraordinary environment. Ecuador will always hold a draw for me, and my desire to do something meaningful over there has been brewing ideas ever since I returned to California. Although I admit there were several times I thought about leaving the jungle and times when I felt frustrated, it is those challenges that made the effort so rewarding.
I also believe people grow best when they are challenged. Whether in Ecuador or elsewhere on the planet-even in your own community-I encourage everyone to seek opportunities to help. Every little bit of good work helps the world, and in the end perhaps you are the one who grows the most. The change within you alone could make the world a better place.
Neil Gupta has a MS in mechanical engineering and is currently working in the aerospace design field. In his spare time he designs alternative energy devices and works to place them both domestically and abroad. He can be reached at EmergentSystems@gmail.com
The Ecuadorian group Jatun Sacha can be reached at www.jatunsacha.org. They are always helpful and pleased to have volunteers.