The Journey to Tamera (part 2)

Some first impressions of Lisbon and the beginning of the residency

Having finally caught up with sleep, I am multi-tasking through heaps of overlooked tasks very slowly. My relaxed (or perhaps sluggish) movements are evidence that I am participating in the “snail ministry” a term coined by my dear friend, Magdalena Gomez. As I carefully attend to the accumulated chaos both in the home and garden, I am listening to the recordings of the course, “Introduction to the Love School” from last winter. It was fascinating to listen to, given that I have now heard in person various perspectives about the “Love School” from people who live in the community. While I was watering the garden, I was surprised to hear my own voice making comments on the recorded zooms of the first and last sessions - (I wasn’t able to attend the other virtual sessions live). One of my comments was unsurprisingly about how crucial art is to the healing of our world and our individual trauma, and the other was about wanting to model a new perception of what it means to be a creative, solo, sexual seventy-year old woman with a big appetite for life in the midst of deep grief.

Listening to the recorded Zooms helped me conjure up the mix of feelings and sensations I experienced during my twelve days at Tamera. When I tell the story of the trip orally to friends, fragments of the experience are shared like bursts of breathless energy. I will see if I can conjure up a similar passion here.

I was able to capture this screen shot of the Google Map of some of the Tamera acreage. I wish I had had a map like this when I was staying there. It would have helped to orient me as I navigated so many trails. The largest white rectangle is the tent building with indoor seminar rooms downstairs and the dormitory spaces upstairs. The red-roofed arc-shaped building was the guest house where I lived for over a week. The dark squarish building toward the bottom of the photo is the AULA, the largest grass-roofed structure in southern Iberia and the space where big community events happen. The small rectangles at the bottom of this photo were the Centro Cultural where people met in the cafe/bar for conversations, presentations, dancing, and singing. This Google Map was obviously made during the years of drought since the lakes appear quite dry in places.

My preparations for the trip were complicated, given that I needed to help my son get into a program that would keep him safe and supported in my absence. Thankfully that happened, although not without some hiccups. More on that another time.

My first two days in Lisbon were mostly an attempt to recover from jet lag. That strategy did not work very well, but I did the best I could. I arrived in Lisbon in the early afternoon, and after resting briefly in my hotel room, I decided to go out for a walk to explore the neighborhood and find the train station that I would be using in two days. After exploring the maze of the station briefly, I walked through a huge shopping mall to get to the promenade along the Tagus River. I saw a lot of public art that was both silly and fun.

After a walk and a sit by the river where I watched a parade of diverse folks strolling by, I realized that I was hungry, but I didn’t feel like I had the capacity to sit in a restaurant. I stopped in a Lisbon-version of a health food store and purchased a baguette egg sandwich with an unexpected combination of sweet and savory toppings and a bottle of vegetable detox juice. After a few steps outside the store, a security guard asked me for my receipt. Startled by this request, I proceeded to spill the juice, a bright red fluid (lots of beets) all over my new nice white blouse. I was too tired to be flustered by such a disaster and there’s no photo documentation of the event. Trust me, washing out that blouse in my hotel room was the perfect ending to that not very remarkable day.

Iberian Lynx by Bordalo II (found the title and artist on Google Image search)

Antony Gormley’s Rhizome II (found the title and artist on Google Image search)

The next morning I almost missed the included breakfast, but I would have better off not even tasting it. It was a European version of processed food (think Holiday Inn Express with a few local pastries and a lousy espresso machine) so I decided that my first adventure aside from purchasing my train ticket, was to get nourished by some better version local cuisine. My first snack was at what I learned later was a health food chain, Honest Greens. It gave me a dose of how commodified everything “new age” has become. What’s not visible in this self-arranged plate of hummus and crudités, were the flocks of hungry scavenger pigeons waiting for people to step away from their tables.

Also not visible in this photo, is the disorientation I was feeling, traveling alone in a strange city, still carrying grief. I noted this in the journal I was carrying. Seeing romantic couples kissing and hold hands, enjoying their time together in the breezy promenade along the Tagus brought up more longing than I expected.

After another hour of strolling about the neighborhood, I ventured back into the train station to purchase a ticket to Funcheira. The lines were long and I got in the wrong one at first, but I was patient, and when I finally got to the ticket booth, I discovered that the agent was in the midst of an intense coughing fit. I truthfully felt sorry for him, and asked him if he was recovering from something or whether he’d been tested for COVID. He said that he had given up smoking a year earlier, that he now has this chronic cough and is supposed to go to the clinic for check up, but he hadn’t had time for that. I don’t know whether he was carrying anything contagious that flew through the hole in the glass window, but the next day, en route to Tamera, my nose began to run. More on that in a minute.

After my ticket purchase, I looked on my map app to find a restaurant that was serving an early dinner. I checked for reviews, evaluated photos of dishes, tallied up stars, and proceeded to walk up and down hills searching for places that no longer existed (pandemic closures probably). I learned that most places wouldn’t be serving until 7:30 and I wanted to be in bed by then. Just as my feet were giving out, I found a cafe that was open so I could sample some local sardines. I wished for a local friend who could teach me how to successfully eat this food without choking on the bones; the free olives were a good distraction from this dilemma.

The next morning I dutifully wheeled my repacked suitcase & carry-on over a bumpy 10 blocks of cobblestone sidewalks (there seemed to be only cobblestone sidewalks in Lisbon) to the station, and got on a train to Funcheira. I had arranged for a shuttle to pick me up and take me to Tamera. Annoyingly, my nose started running as I was seated. I assumed it was an allergic response to the breakfast foods at the hotel, but as the coming days revealed, it was a cold that ended up settling in my lungs. On the train, I was gratefully distracted by conversations with a young woman and her toddler who sat next to me for the first half hour. Other than this distraction, my eyes glazed by jet lag and the virus beginning its journey through my body, all I could do was acknowledge the shifting landscape of olive trees and villages outside the train window. I couldn’t smell it nor did I have any associations with it. I felt slightly disembodied and hoped that this feeling would pass quickly.

As we were about to disembark in Funcheira, I discovered a bright-eyed, young woman standing up and beaming at me with a warm smile. It turned out that she was one of the women in my new cohort. About 6 of us gathered together in the parking lot, all of us women of different ages. We got into the two cars shuttling us to Tamera. As our driver, an older man and German-born resident of Tamera, drove us down the curving paved and then dusty dirt roads, I tried to engage him in a conversation, but he did not seem in the mood for chatting. I imagined that he had probably already driven people back and forth several times that day, but as we drove past a huge, fancy estate adjoining the 300+ acre campus of Tamera, he mentioned that it was for sale. I soon learned about the gentrification happening in so many parts of rural Portugal, not just caused by expats, but also by wealthy Portuguese with romantic ideas about country living.

When we arrived at Tamera’s reception, I was introduced to my lodging for the first two nights: a crowded, hot, and stuffy dormitory room filled with dozens of beds, blankets, and storage areas, up a flight of very steep stairs. As my cold became worse in the coming hours, I realized that my sneezes and coughs might disturb the other residents during the night, but even worse, when I imagined navigating those steps in the middle of the night, and then walking the dirt road to the composting toilets, I realized that I needed to find another place to sleep. Fortunately, I found out that there was a “sick hut” just for this purpose, a cabin that was about a 10 minute walk down the trail, where I could make as much noise as my body needed to, not disturbing the mice that lived in the walls. It was a blessing.

The “sick hut” called Eucalypto (Portuguese for Eucalyptus). Many of us thought it should be better named the “healing hut.”

At dinner, I was introduced to some of my cohort in the Sacred Activism program and many of the work/study volunteers. We shared a vegan feast that would be repeated with many variations for the next 12 days. I learned that many of the volunteers lived in our community on campus: in a tenting area, within the tent dormitory that I had escaped, and in various temporary dwellings, like caravans and RVs. They had come to Tamera for short term volunteer work (1-3 months) doing all kinds of needed support from kitchen work to gardening to media.

After the first two nights, I moved into a truly luxurious space in the guest house, which offered the comfort of a private room, a mosquito net over the bed, a desk, a couch, a large closet, a bathroom with a flush toilet (most of the toilets on the campus are composting ones) and a hot shower. While I deeply appreciated not having to climb down steep stairs (in the women’s dorm) to use the outdoor bathroom at night or listening to the night noises of others (or disturbing them with mine), being separated from the other participants by my living situation created a hurdle in terms of socializing, but it also provided me with a much needed refuge from the intensity of our time together.

Our cohort of 27 was a diverse bunch with folks from Brazil, India, Sudan (taking refuge in Europe), Argentina, Italy, Spain, Germany, Luxembourg, Israel (taking refuge in Portugal & Spain), Jordan, Dubai, and Palestine. Only two of us came from the US, although three others were born in the States, but have lived in Europe or the Middle East for quite some time. Many of the Europeans do not live in their country of origin and are busy setting up intentional communities or are working within communities who have escaped conflict. As much as I want to, I will not be naming anyone in our cohort out of discretion for both their privacy and safety.

All of our sessions were in English (and I was deeply grateful for that privilege) but there were many other languages that often floated through our meals and music that we shared together: Brazilian Portuguese, Arabic, Spanish, German, French, Flemish, Italian, and Hebrew. That spicy buffet of languages sometimes fed me as much or more than the vegan food did.

Age-wise, I was the oldest. It seemed that the average age of the participants was somewhere in late 30s/early 40s; we ranged in age from early 20s to me, 70. Being seen as the “wise elder” was both unexpected, occasionally delightful, and truthfully, a bit daunting and uncomfortable for me. It was as if I had been asleep for a decade, and someone just knocked me on the head with this new information. I went through some stuff around this shift in my self-perception that I will write about soon in a future essay.

The first two days we attended was an “introduction to Tamera” and perhaps not too surprisingly, I have only retained a few threads of what was discussed. Jet lag, insomnia, and my cold conspired to make me float through those days. We learned that the Tamera community now “housed” 160 members of 4 generations. I use the term “housed” in quotes because housing is often makeshift and rustic, but comfortable enough. The Portuguese government has forbidden the building of new, permanent structures on the land for many years now, so many residents live in caravans, yurts, tents, etc. They do have beautiful structures on the land that were built before that ruling, and there are gorgeous vistas everywhere, trails that take you to unexpected structures, solar panels, a solar kitchen, the food storage areas for the permanent residents, the homeopathy office (where I went on the second day of the residency to do a consult and received 3 remedies to help me heal).

Learning about some of the ecological innovations on the campus gave me a deeper understanding of how crucial it was to have had a rainy winter after many years of drought. The joy that this was bringing the community was quite evident, especially since the fires in rural Portugal had come quite close the year before. The water retention lakes that were dug years ago under the supervision of a permaculture design team were full for the first time in a long time. We were told that the greenery of the campus was not something to take for granted. Despite the dry & dusty dirt paths and roads, the trees, vines, meadows, and shrubs were vibrant with life; some of the fruiting trees offered snacks to the hungry. The critters were plentiful from insects, frogs, and birds, to wild boar who gallivanted about with their cute litters of young ones as if they owned the place. They were not afraid of us and we were told not be afraid of them. I was not.

For those two introductory days, we had two volunteer facilitators, one originally from Germany who had been part of Tamera’s community for decades and the other was originally from the US who had lived in Europe since his 20s. He’s been working at Tamera since 2011.

After some introductory words, they invited us to pair up and introduce each other, and I got to know a very interesting man who had lived in many countries and whose work life has been very interrupted by the introduction of AI into the film industry. He is reinventing how he serves the world as a social activist. Later, I sought out the only other person who had come from the US, a young man who had been introduced as someone examining the broken systems creating our mental health crisis in the US. As the days passed, we shared lots of stories with each other.

In my next post, I will share some of the more vulnerable aspects of the residency, including the discussions about trauma & grief, what it means to be an activist on the frontlines of conflict and genocide, and how our sexual expression and deeper connections with the sacred in nature can be a key to unlock the violence inherent to patriarchy.

More soon….