‘Tis the season

We have had an extremely busy insanely great December!  Due to people having time off from work and travelers wanting to spend the holiday season with a community, our group is larger than normal.  We’ve had people coming through from Canada, USA, Mexico, France, Australia, Italy, England, Germany, and India.  All of our visitors have been such a pleasure; leading activities such as meditation and temezcals (ritual sauna), making amazing sculptures and paintings, and working on building very needed furniture: tables, bunk beds, and shelving.

We are SO thankful to have such a large group of hard working individuals right now, especially since we are fighting a plague in our pine trees.  I’ll write a more in depth entry on that soon, but we really cannot express our gratitude for all the people who have helped us save the forest.  Their arrival and spirit was timely; we have cleared the plague out of several areas of the Bosque.  There is still work to be done, but the enthusiasm and drive of our volunteer team is astounding.

Though Christmas and holidays at the Bosque are not very traditional, we did take some time on the 25th to celebrate our current community.  Judith made an advent candle centerpiece for our table and Justine made a holiday tree.

The advent candles being lit for the second week of advent:

Justine’s tree (the base is the bottom of a maguey flower stem and the branches are madrone):

And now we prepare for the new year.  We are feeling really positive about what it will bring.  The amount of recent creativity and generosity has been such a wonderful thing for Brian and I to witness.

We wish you a happy solstice/Christmas/festivus/Kwanzaa/Hanukkah/whatever.  Mostly, Happy December.

Looking foward to 2010!