Experiencing Matutu Valley
Day 3
What a day!
Watching the Sunrise above the mountains from te bed, I started the day really slow. Time was at the same pace. Birds started to announce the light, the cold of the night (we had 2 *C) started to disappear.
A short shower, some socials and off to breakfast I went. What a nice walk from the chalet to the reception, birds all over the place, streams dancing joyfull through the gardens. The place is called crying mountains. For a reason.
And I had to think back to the Dragon Dreaming Summer Camp in France, where the message from the river there was catched in a poem.
By the river in the Pyrenees
– A Message from the River –
Start with what you know, remember
You humans call it, the old
For us it’s the rocks and the pebbles
This is the centering, grounding place
So start with your rocks and pebbles
Where you come from
What you already learned and experiences
Your life stories
All the people and knowledge and experience
You already have in your river of life
You think that these stories
Will hold you back
Look at us!
We have so many rocks of all sizes
And the waters still flow
The rocks are out story tellers
They tell stories as we flow
They help us remember where we come from
And where we’re
They connect us to the places
We flow through
Centering, grounding stones
And we, waters, find it way around, over and under them
It’s fun to find thousands of ways to flow
Not just one,
So we dance and flow and sing
About our feelings and our dreams
Thousands of possibilities to flow
In one direction
To the great waters of one big ocean
That’s where we’re flowing
We might know it or not
And the great big ocean is always there
We can discover and see something new on our way
New trees, new land, new cows, new people
And some of them we already know
Old and New
They work together
They help each other
They inspire, inform, and flow
So our message to you, humans
Honor your old stories
And receive the new ones
Start with what you know
And flow into the new
And remember that in the end,
There’s only one great big ocean
We’re all flowing to…
In the morning, I met Manu and his family, a board member of the Matutu community, serving the environment by putting up a wild fire monitoring system (one of his things…) We are here in the Atlantic Rainforest, a very special ecosystem, because of the difference of humidity in the summer coming from the Atlantic, and the drought in the winter, and then especially at this height in the mountains. Basically, the Atlantic Rainforest systeem is a collection of several biotops, depending on water, height, sunhours etc. There still are a few places, never touched by humans. Protecting these unique places is crucial.
We dedicated a few hours to talk about essentials in Dragon Dreaming and wrote our shared dream for the next few days. In any way, its a kind of mini-project, working on (certainly mine) personal development, building our small own community and being in service to the earth by, for instance, sharing experiences with sustainable projects.
After lunch – and let me remind you – food in Brazil is great! – we took a walk along the edge between the ecovillage and the by them protected forest area. Learned a lot!
Back in the chalet, I tried to internalise al the information and deeper connections I made.
