Aranya

It was breathtaking. The retreat house stands on a kind of promontory of land at about 920 metres, with 300 metre cliffs behind and a vast open vista of mountains all around, including the spectacular and monumental Masmut – seemingly one enormous rock the size of a small mountain. When I walked from the double-height porch into the equally high-ceilinged dinig room with pristine white walls, huge woodburning stove and blue-stained tables made from recycled doors, my jaw literally dropped. The retreat centre building was stunning inside as well as out. The architect had transformed the ruined farm-house and barn into a spacious and aesthetically pleasing space, utilising features such as door and window-lintels to bring character and contrast to the simple white walls and concrete floors.

The living conditions at Akasavana are basic. We only had hot running water in the kitchen and there was no heating in the bedrooms downstairs. We went to bed in our thermals & woolly hats (when we got there, in April) with hot water water bottles heated by pans on the woodburning stove in the sitting room. We had calor gas for cooking and heating water. Lighting and the water pump from the spring is powered by solar power and we used rainwater to wash our clothes. Water in scarce in Spain, so we were told at the start that our daily ration was two buckets each, to include washing self and clothes and flushing the loo. (Drinking water was fetched in big containers directly from the spring a couple of terraces further down the hillside.)

All our un-compostable rubbish had to be carried out by the 4×4 which had brought us and would bring our food supplies up the 8 km dirt track from the village, Penarroya de Tastavins. WE had a very hard-working support team of 3 women for the retreat (Padmadharini, Santasiddhi and Alokada) and they lived in the community house a mile or two away on our second plot of land. The total area owned by the Retreat Centre is 108 hectares – a satisfyingly significant number for Buddhists! (It’s the traditional number of beads on a mala, for counting mantras.)

It took weeks to grown accustomed to the scale of the place – look across the valley and we owned that hill, too! Walk up to the top of “our track” and it was a good ten minutes walk. Climb onto the lower ledge of cliff some 120 metres about the retreat house and that, too, is land we own, where maybe one day we could create a solitary retreat facility. It was hard to take in that we actually own this stunningly beautify, amazingly remote place. After six weeks I heard a dog barking and realised it was the first intrusive sound I had heard since we got there!

Being the first retreat there, we had the delight in participating in “mythologizing” the land. Rituals had been done from when the land was first acquired to connect with the local spirits of the place. Now we also began to create shrines to Buddhas, marking out the cardinal points with flags and cairns for the 5 dhyani Buddhas, creating a ritual space dedicated to Vajrasattva in a beautifully arched cave we own further down the mountain and even just simply naming local tracks. Not long after we arrived, wild peonies were spotted growing in the middle of the track leading up behind the retreat centre ridge. For the rest of the retreat this became known as the Peony Path.

It wasn’t until I’d been there about a month that I scrambled with Vijayasri up onto the topmost of the cliffs above our land and looked down, getting a clear picture of the lie of the land and its extent. The way our boundaries run down the shoulders of the hills, the clear path made by our new vehicle-track to the shrine-room building, a three-minute walk along a narrow short-cut path from the retreat house.

That’s a lot of words about the physical environment of the place (without mentioning the ground itself, full of fossils and crystals, the goats, the griffin vultures, the rosemary, thyme, lavender and wild roses, as well as the ever-changing mass of wild flowers.) But I guess the physical environment was a major conditioning factor right through the retreat. It’s a challenging place to live: not only remote, it’s an easy place to fall over, even just walking along on the lose stones of one of the tracks. There are scorpions to be found under rocks (admittedly I only saw one, when it was specially pointed out!) and two people saw hooded vipers. A harmless but beautiful green-blue southern smooth snake made its way into one of the bedrooms through an open door and coiled under a bed, until gently removed by Anilasri….