The rising of the Teepee!!

The teepee standing proud

Up it goes!

Erection party!

The Teepee, a North American 26foot 8 meter diameter huge ceremonial teepee that Benjamin gifted to TierraMitica finally arrived after many transport and customs adventures from Colombia after travelling there from Canada through the US and found its home in TierraMitica.


 It is a location with spectacular views of the mountains and the valley, of Tarapoto and TierraMitica and of the Cordillera Azul, the spectacular mountain range framing Tarapoto that is a protected natural park full of wildlife.                                                    

Hand painted wooden pegs by Marion

 Lying a few minutes uphill from the shamans tambo, it offers views and privacy at the same time with wild gorges and jungle near by. It will be used as an isolation tambo for dietas, accomodation for people who wish more privacy, for various events and ceremonies, as a romantic place for couples, a resting place for the Temazcal, the traditional Sweat Lodge that we will build in the bowels of Mother Earth and much more.

 It has a dry toilet and a shower next to it with running drinking water from our mountain spring. We made an adobe floor for it with a built in fire pit, benches and hammocks and furnished it with beds and couches, wooden tables, a small altar and netting wardrobes. 

Sara and Mieke making adobe

Putting it up was a massive undertaking, we needed 20 wooden poles 10 meters length each and everybody in TierraMitica to help, so we made a party and a picnic of it!! 

main triangle is up

Amin led the erection and everybody helped in various ways: Carrying adobe bricks and materials up the hill, making adobe plaster, lifting trees, sanding them and preparing them and it was great fun!!!

Lucas the acrobat!!

Lucas climbed fearlessly up the Teepe to tie and pull and fix, Sara and Mieke enthusiastically stomped on mud to make plaster, Tim, Kumoo and Loretta among others decorated the fire pit with river stone and for lunch we ate yummy sandwiches that Loretta and Sara had made for us.

Magical nights!

 

Erection almost done

It took us many hours, but we made it. Afterwards, a great party ensued to celebrate the departure of our dear friends and Argonauts of the Mythic Voyage Amin and Marion that had stayed with us for almost a month after the Mythic Voyage and opened our hearts (besides fixing everything in the place!!

taking form

the fire pit with Sara, Tim, Marion and Mikis

Matias enjoying the night

The teepee was already used in a joint dieta in December by Jens, Hase and Matias and proved itself as a beautiful addition to TerraMitica life. Especially the beautiful nights with the fire pit blazing and the flutes and guitars charming the birds and the animals of the mountain were precious. It will serve many people for a long time. Thank you Benji!!!

The Wedding of the Year

The TierraMiticans who found love

Sweet secrets

Wedding Cake

 Sara Villeneuve and Ferdinand Tongston are the first new TierraMiticans. They joined us volunteers from the beginning and grew to love Tierra Mitica, the land, the project and the soul.They are now fully committed to Tierra Mitica and have joined their lives with the project, the holy work of helping people find love, vision and clarity in their lives and the art of creating Tierra Mitica. They learned to love everything about it and are amazing guides giving love, presence and insight to all those who come here to seek their transformation.
In the process, they fell in love with everything and everybody in Tierra Mitica, including each other and chose to walk (or fly?) a common path in life.
Their friendship started quickly and grew beautifully, each one supporting the other fully in their own, personal transformations towards happiness and openness and their romantic union is recent but decisive and full of intention.

Thus, they decided on New Year's Eve to fully commit fearlessly to a life together and asked to be joined and blessed in their decision that very day. 
Members of the community and happy Argonauts that had recently finished the December Mythic Voyage alike created with their heart amazing flower thrones , flower gates and candle lit flower strewn passageways and spectacular art in the Yoga deck by the main water fall over the natural pool , baked them a wedding cake while others were fighting the weather and delayed buses to pick up Spyro who arrived at the last moment to make it just on time to participate in the ceremony and the party just on the change of year 2012. 

Chocolate, Honey Cinnamon cream and Mango cake!! Yummy!!!

Our thanks to Jens who directed the efforts and to Hase and Matias, our Swedish friends and brothers for ever who gave their hearts to helping and everybody in Tierra Mitica who is our human family.

With Ruben, our master Ayahuasquero

 The wedding was an amazing ending to an amazing year, a year of creativity, transformation, creation, openness, hard work and endless challenges that have been part of the process of creating Tierra Mitica : The healing center, the community, the work of Art, our home, our lives, our offering, our purpose, our hearts.

May they be happy for this and many lives!!!

The wedding dinner

Union on flower thrones

Why are words needed?

Blessing Sara and Ferd as the first TierraMiticans

 They are the first TierraMiticans, inhabitants of a place and a community of beauty and their Union date is carved artfully for ever on the wood of the Yoga deck, a monument to their path and love.

 Sitting on their flower thrones they received the gifts and blessings of the community, the friends and our Shipibo shamans. 

Happy Happy Happy Happy

We all felt deeply their love, their commitment, their happiness and their intention to keep openning to each other and the human family, supporting each other through thick and thin in the beautiful adventure that is life.

Here comes the bride.....papapapam!

 Sara was shining, spectacularly beautiful and Ferd was in full presence and love.



WE LOVE YOU!!!!!

 

Casablanca, the Plaza Mayor of Tierra Mitica

Casablanca under construction

 Casablanca, our main social building is in its finishing stages. It is a building in the shape of an Andean Cross (not an Inka Cross), virtualy a circular building with a cross running through its center creating a big, 220 square meter circular main hall that will serve as the main dining room, living room and main ceremony room when it rains and until the main ceremonial maloca is built. 

View from the West

It is also a place for celebrations and fun and all types of events and workshops that require big spaces such as Yoga and others.  The legs of the cross protrude as 4 separate units, situated symbolically exactly North, South, East and West.

The main hall

 North will be our main kitchens, South bathrooms, showers and a Spa room for massages and other healings, East a small two room apartment with a kitchenette and a bathroom to house the family of our carpenter and our building and electrical expert (and visiting craftsmen) and finally West will house our office and a small bedroom with a bath.

 There are skylights to allow everything to be bathed in natural light and huge netted windows for spectacular views of Tierra Mitica. Art will be exhibited on the walls when finished and the East wall will serve as a huge screen for our projector so that we can watch movies together and also offer fun to the children of the workers of Tierra Mitica.

Skylights bring natural light everywhere

  Casablanca is situated above the dirt road that goes to Okopua, a few minutes from the waterfalls and the Eye, on a beautiful grassy hill. 

Casablanca view from the mountain

We will make gazebos and gardens around it, loungers and hammocks and it will play the role of the main "square" or Plaza Mayor of our community.
With its proximity to Okopua, our main accommodation it will create the social axis  Tierra Mitica, concentrating it on the North side of the river, allowing the majority of the land on the South side to be dedicated to the sacred, to our Shipibo shamans, to nature and isolation, to the unspoiled holiness of the land.
By now, it has progressed way more than in the pics. It will be fully operational by the opening of the season in April.

La Piscina!!

Are words needed?

 We have finished the natural pool at the first waterfall. We made a wall on one side made of stone from the river and now we have a huge deep natural (almost) swimming pool under the waterfall. It is seven to eight feet deep and is spectacular!! The wall forms a reservoir from which we take water by tube 100 meters away to our hydroelectric wheel and dynamo in order to generate totally clean electricity for our needs.

The hydroelectric project is nearing completion after many delays and setbacks but it is giving new life to TierraMitica. It will allow us to cut the umbilical cord with Tarapoto, it will cut down the pollution and noise of the generator, we will be able to have electricity all day with no noise or cost of gasoline and it will power Okopua, Casablanca, the shamans tambo and many other places still to be built.

Bridges and vegetables and more

Our new bridge

 We have been doing a lot of work, adding safe paths and bridges everywhere, always with respect to the environment and the beauty of the land. One project was a footbridge that could be usable even in very high waters. We thought of suspension bridges, rope bridges and all sorts of things but finally we made this beautiful wooden bridge out of fallen trees. We have also made many passageways with hand rails, using always stone from the river and fallen branches.

 The organic vegetable and fruit tree garden is growing, we now have many varieties, we are growing fennel, tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage, bell peppers and hot peppers, zucchini, eggplant, cucumber, radishes, many aromatic plants such as basil, parsley etc, papayas, bananas, mangos, oranges, mandarins and much more.

 We plan to keep growing the garden and experimenting with more varieties and organic ways to keep pests away in order to achieve self sufficiency for vegetables and fruit within two years. To that we will add our project of the free range chicken coop that will give us fresh eggs and chicken. We are also cooperating with our neighbor Vidal Dias who is making a fish farm to have fresh fish daily.

 Plans that are still in the future is to have some goats in order to make our own goat cheese and fresh Greek Yogourt. We already are baking our own, fresh bread daily and we are going to restore a very old wood oven that is behind Okopua with a new adobe dome soon. Everything is very exciting, and as we keep adding (slowly and carefully) volunteers we will have more people to handle and be inspired by the various projects around.

 We will be soon doing Sara's Moon circle for ceremonies of the feminine, and that together with the North American native Indian teepee, the Temazcal or Sweat Lodge that we will make out of earth and adobe and the Art therapy school and work shop will complete the Indian Village on the hills of TierraMitica.

Hello There

Vision of Ayahuasca

 To start with, we need to apologize for not having posted anything for so long. We have been so busy being creative both on the land and ourselves that we haven't had the time. To start with, we have acquired an amazing painting of the grandmother Ayahuasca that will be giving life to a wall at Casablanca, the biggest building in TierraMitica, a building in the shape of the Andean Cross that will be our main socializing area, our dining room, cinema, living room, main kitchens, office, Spa, accommodation for staff and our center point                                                                                                                      

 It will also serve as a place for ceremonies when it rains until the main ceremony maloca is finished. It is now more than 60% done, and we hope to have it finished within 2012.
The painting is by a very talented young Peruvian artist, Luis Tamani.
The photo does not do it justice, it is a magnetic experience finding the pictures within the pictures within the pictures.

Marion painting signs

 Our "ferocious" guard dog, Huascar is growing at an amazing pace. He is now a little over 3 months old but his paws are enormous. His coat is turning blonder all the time, he jumps in the river and the natural pool at least 5 times a day and is eager for a walk, following everybody playfully. 

The November Mythic Voyage was amazing, everybody went away very very happy and with new vision for their lives. Many stayed on and shared our life here in TierraMitica and enjoyed being creative. We have new members of the community, except Ivan we now also have Mieke and Kumo. Amin and Marion just left yesterday after a great party for raising the Indian TeePee and a Mocha and Banana cream cake!! Friends for life. They will be back next year to spend more time with us. Hurrah!!!

Aura,Theo, Kumo, Leslie and Sara

Life in Tierra Mitica continues creatively. 

We just erected the huge (8 meters or 26 feet in diameter) North American native Indian Teepee. Soon a blog with photos will appear about this, but it has an adobe floor, a fire pit and sits on a beautiful spot with awesome views. Many people will enjoy this in the future. After some finishing touches, it will be ready to use.                                                                   

Jackie with Deli

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Our shamans are now living continuously with us and Deli is teaching us the Shipibo language and also the Art of the Ikaros, the traditional, thousands of years old ceremonial chants.We are discovering that TierraMitica is full of a great variety of Medicinal plants and we have plans to put many of them together in a botanical garden of Medicinal master plants so that visitors can see them and understand what each one of them is and what it does.

 Our shamans are very happy in TierraMitica and excited with everything going on, with the new things appearing all the time and the beautiful energy of everybody around.

Ferd, Juanita and Ivan

An amazing Mythic Voyage!!