| Fourth Annual Conference Love Letters to the Flowering Earth Sipapu Lodge, Vandito, New Mexico, October 2-5th, 2002 |
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 The first great grief we humans know is the loss of our mother’s heartbeat after leaving her familiar womb. The first sound we utter with our first breath is a unique penetrating song of grief about that loss. Our own little rhythmic hearts thereby add their own sounds to the massive complexity of life’s continuous symphony. Like every bird, animal, plant, rock and wind on this wild flowering earth, we, even as adults, are incessantly looking for the lost rhythm of that much distanced womb. In every natural sound we make we are looking for the rhythm of being at home again: the sounds of the lost land. By our births we are singers of the word. It is this singing, longing and delicious speaking that is life itself. The symphony we are left with must become our home. If by words we mean a language that comes from music, then the language that our grief-struck searching for home rides over life’s drowning lake of inevitable losses is a beaver of songs and stories who, with a twig of ecstasy between his teeth, needs grief’s water to take us paddling toward home. In these times when the subtlety and real substance of Nature’s sounds live trivialized beneath the roaring digitalized sigh of modern life, we humans are yet wealthy with the wild sounds of our natural souls still hiding in our bones. What is Holy and gives all things life needs to hear these sounds and is fed by them. Humans need to speak them to each other and need to learn to listen to them as well, instead of becoming like the electronic boxes that make a lot of noise, say nothing natural and never listen. Come help me, Martín Prechtel, and my friends to try and make a climate where some of these natural seeds of language, writing, music and ritual can be planted, flowered, and inspired into fruit to make more viable seeds to keep them alive so they can be planted beyond our time. – Martín Prechtel |
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| Conference Site : Sipapu Lodge in Vadito, NM “ Though presently residing at the lower altitudes of river basins or alongside desert streams, most of the Native people of what is now known as New Mexico consider the places of their various primordial origins to be located in or among the lakes, springs and cave-riddled cliffs of the mysterious alpine forests of New Mexico’s high mountains. Like gigantic quivering humps and backs of the wild turkeys, bears, elks, beavers, eagles and trouts that they hide, bristling stands of shivering aspens, Douglas firs, Cibola pines, mountain junipers, ponderosa, oaks, berry bushes, chokecherries, willows and ash grow thick like fur along the sides and ridges of these heights out of which desert-feeding mountain streams rush and gurgle; one such stream, the Rio del Pueblo, runs right in front of the lodge at Sipapu where this year’s “Love Letters to the Flowering Earth” is being held.” During the summer these mountains and others like them around the state are filled with the Holy plants that I and most original New Mexicans gather for use as medicinal foods and herbal remedies to maintain the health of our families and animals throughout the winter. |
Though all local Native peoples within a two hundred mile radius, annually remember these places in ritual and have individuals who make the pilgrimage, there are other tribes whose entire population still migrate annually to these same mountains to revisit, relive and ritually feed the geographical place of their own origins, thereby renewing and healing the people, plants, animals, and the earth itself. The word Sipapu is an Americanized pronunciation of one of many very holy indigenous terms that refer to these actual physical locations in the ground: visible, spiritual bellybuttons hidden in the mountains from where all people are known to have emerged directly out of the earth from the invisible spiritual layers of the other worlds into this world of speech, sound, hunger, feeling and wind. In some smaller but similar way, the annual “Love Letters to the Flowering Earth Conference,” after spending three years meeting on the desert floor beneath the red cliffs around Abiquiu, must now migrate up into the brilliant red and yellow aspens and intoxicating air of Sipapu in this year’s search for the natural sounds, grief and eloquent-spirit-feeding language of our indigenous spiritual origins as well. – Martín Prechtel
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Conference Cost: $ 395 DOES NOT INCLUDE meals and lodging $150 deposit due with registration.Refundable until August 1st less $25 handling fee Attendance will be limited to 120 people. LODGING: All of the lodging facilities at the Sipapu Lodge have been reserved exclusively for this conference. All rooms are heated with bathrooms and some accommodations offer kitchens. There are a variety of lodging options which include: double occupancy, units with occupancy varying from three to six persons, dorm style rooms with maximum capacity of eight occupants, and camping. Single accommodations are not available. Costs range from $10 to $35 per night per person depending upon the amenities FOOD: Sipapu has it's own restaurant on site which will be open during the conference for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The restaurant serves New Mexican and "American" food - the cooking is wonderfully "homestyle" – and the cooks are friendly and generous. For registration form & more info- click here Lodging Registration Call or 860 -923-6987 E-mail: hiddenwine@earthlink.net |
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 Martin Prechtel's life, the well known subject of his previous books Secrets of the Talking Jaguar and Long Life, Honey in the Heart, took him from his native New Mexico upbringing as a half-blood, Native American from a Pueblo Indian reservation to the village of Santiago Atitlan where he eventually served the Tzutujil Mayan population as a full village member becoming a principal in the body of village leaders, responsible for instructing the young people in the meanings of their ancient stories that took place in the rituals of adult rights of passage.Martín once again resides in his native New Mexico. Teaching internationally through story, music, ritual and writing, Martín helps people in many lands to retain their diversity while remembering their own sense of place in the daily sacred through the search for the Indigenous Soul. Broadly cherished, Martín’s third book, The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun: Ecstasy and Time, has become a runaway, underground hit. Martín’s fourth book, The Toe Bone and the Tooth, the highly anticipated third in the narrative trilogy of Martín’s autobiographical series, will be released in the United States in April 2003 by Thorsons/HarperCollins. |
Martin Prechtel's Schedule |
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 Robert Bly has spent the last five decades writing poetry, translating poets from other cultures, giving poetry readings, and teaching psychology and fairy tales to men and women. Iron John, one of his best selling books, is now translated into more than 15 languages. Recently he published a new book of poems called The Night Abraham Called to the Stars to great acclaim."Robert Bly sees the preciousness in what is unseen and forgotten in the world, digging poems and ideas out of the ground like a single minded snuffling badger who will not be deterred. Polishing what was shunned and discarded, he hangs them around our necks as poems, making the world noble with the shine of desire for the best part of men and women, that part of us that modern culture would have tossed away." - Martín Prechtel |
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 Gioia Timpanelli is a storyteller and writer. The great granddaughter of a traditional Sicilian storyteller, Gioia is one of the founders of the current worldwide story telling revival. She won two Emmy Awards for her PBS television series "Stories From My House", and received the National Women’s Book Award for bringing the oral tradition to the American public. Her novella, Sometimes the Soul, won the prestigious 1999 American Book Award."When Gioia goes to the storytelling place the whole world stops and listens. She goes where the gods go when they want to be heard and makes that dangerous step allowing them to jump into her body, while the rest of us watch mesmerized, wondering which is which." - Martín Prechtel |
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| This year I have invited a few more good friends along to help us in making ecstatic gifts of music and language to the Holy. Many of them come from right around Northern New Mexico where we live, but all are known internationally: Reza Derakshani master of classical Persian music and painting, traditional nomadic music and his own art is coming from Europe to grace us with his ecstatic ney and comance. Vicente Griego and Santiago Martín will return again bringing their passionate flamenco and musical versions of Lorca. Larry Torres, a much loved local teacher and brilliant scholar, will give a lecture on the continuity of language culture among the Sephardic Jews, the Spanish, the Berbers, Arabs and Native Americans. Of course Gioia Timpanelli will tell stories, Robert Bly will give us a poetry reading from his newest book and Reza and I will do a concert. All of us will teach in the mornings and the musicians will do workshops on rhythm, music and movement in the afternoons. - Martín Prechtel |
Guest Teachers |