Visao Futuro - Dreaming the Future Center Brazil

I am at Visao Futuro again and feeling so at home in many ways. Greeted by a soft, spacious landscape, friends from past years, some familiar routines and discovering that somehow my Portuguese has ripened even while on the shelf and I can speak and understand far better than practice would predict.

This is a rural yoga/meditation/spiritual education retreat center about 2 hours from Sao Paulo, drenched in natural beauty and the years of love invested by the founder, Susan Andrews, and the staff and the maybe thousands of students who've refound themselves here. Susan and I met 'by chance' on a ferry when she was attending a future visioning events in Seattle nearly 10 years ago and we created a sisterhood in that short water crossing. We are the same age and bent - passionate about spiritual/social transformation. Her path post Harvard led her to India and PK Sarkar, a guru in the tantra tradition and social philosopher (google PROUT). After his passing she was inspired to live and teach in Brazil and create what he called a Master Center, a self sufficient rural, ecological and spiritual community - what we might call and ecovillage.

Engaged as I am in "relocalization" - imagining a flourishing future with less oil and therefore more local production of "the good life" - I am looking with new eyes at this center. The teaching of profound spiritual truths here happens as much via the arts as it does via traditional spiritual practices. There are always actors and dancing and ceremony and play mixed in with Susan's lectures on biopsychology and principles of yoga and long meditation, yoga and changing sessions. Right now on the lawn in the spring sunlight and heat perhaps a hundred people have just done a patty-cakes game and are now doing a joanna macy exercise.

To decorate for this spring festival (it's the day of the child here in Brazil so the spirit is childlike), they painted old 2 liter pop bottles and then sliced them like peeling an apple in one piece so they hang like bright corkscrew streamers from the trees. A "bulletin board" was made by lashing bamboo poles together with twine (made from coconut shells) and stretching fabric over the frame. Flowered fabric was also cut in strips and has wrapped all the building poles. In other words, an oil-depleted world may be an art-rich world where the leftovers from industrial society become the art materials. While I haven't been to Bali, I am told everyone there is an artist. We humans have had paint and fabric and twine - not to speak of hugging and laughter and games - for thousands of years. We have to remember that easy cheap oil has brought us new and easier ways to do what we have always done - communicate, create, care for one another, grow and harvest food.

The design of this center is also a model of ecological living. They process gray water through purification ponds and reuse it for everything but drinking. They have dug several water cachement ponds to supply the center which hosts a hundred or more people every weekend. Organic gardens grow most of the food we eat and the growing, cooking and cleaning employs dozens of locals who otherwise might have migrated to the favelas of sao paulo to survive. They have photovoltaics and solar hot water. i believe many of the bricks for building were made here.

Ahh, everyone is dancing now towards the next activity. it's a day of theater and play celebrating spring and to the degree i can understand (sometimes I'm helpless but someone will point me right) I will participate.

Ate mais! Seeya soon.