Gardening + Yoga = Happy Body Happy Spirit

I spent the last seven days attending a workshop, entitled "Entering the Temple Gates - a Yogic Approach to Organic Gardening". Intriguing? Confusing? Potentially a flop? Well, I didn't have to pay for it, so I didn't mind. I readily entered the flow of the week. The class was led by Juaquin and Yoga Ma Barbara, an eccentric "couple". Barbara lives in a van down by the ocean for the winter in San Pancho, and Juaquin used to have a very active Vivero (nursery) there, which reached a rapid and mysterious demise ten months ago. Barbara is an excellent yoga instructor and Juaquin is a scatterbrained philosopher and perfectionist in the garden.
Our preliminary meeting was to feel out who wanted to participate in the course so they could shape it (or one could say, Juaquin did absolutely no preparation). Those that showed up: Salvatore and I, the Americans, three Mexicans, one French woman who has lived in the area for eight years, two French Canadians, and one Swedish woman. Her name is Emily, and she was the first one I saw when I arrived, with her baggy pantaloons and squashed leather hat. Emily has spent the last year and a half of her life spending time taking courses like this one, and WWOOFing (World Wide Organization of Organic Farming), which is what I would like to do as soon as my time here is over. And to add a little awesome icing, she lived in Canada for the past months. She travels alone. And she happens to have the same skin type and basic body features as me. As the week progressed, we became good friends.
The third and fourth days of our class brought an impressive storm, which washed Emily up in Litibu. The ten foot overhang of our porch still allowed about a six foot strip of our floor wet, we had to move our bed into our "guest bedroom" aka the other side of the curtain. It rained all day and several inches and then all night. So our plans for double digging were severly compromised. But we were able to complete it by the end of the class. We learned preparing seed flats, sowing and planting different size seeds in flats and beds, transplanting, and soil preparation. So I'll let you decide if this was a lot or a little for seven days, but we learned how to do it all with perfection. I am not a perfectionist.
Juaquin is trained as a biodynamic gardener, which involves planting with planet, moon, and sun cycles, and focuses on the health of soils. Our course was not explicitly biodynamic, but Juaquin was trained by Alan Chadwick, a famous personality that further developed the biodynamic and French intensive system. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdMeyywc2xo, it's worth it just to hear his voice).
The last day we came to Litibu, to evaluate our site and talk about our food forest. Salvatore hired Juaquin to do a design for us, and he came out several days previous to the course to give us suggestions and scout out the land. Our day here turned out to be 90% unproductive in terms of developing our design. Juaquin went through some tree varieties with us in a semi-systematic way, for the benefit of other community members. But we ate some delicious locally made popcicles, and did some yoga in Salvatore's serenity garden.
Although the variety of information may have been limited, what we learned we learned well, and I feel completely competent in starting my own seeds or garden, or possibly even a nursery! Not that I actually want to do that...but I wouldn't say no to a greenhouse. Are you reading this, Dad?