Bolad's Kitchen THE SHOOTS AND TENDRILS

This is a long overdue note of praise and kiss on the head to all those patient and earnest people; people from every shore, hill, valley, desert, plain, jungle, marsh, and peak of this great suffering Holy Earth, who have been waiting and encouraging me, Martín Prechtel, to start up another class in that life-loving mud palace in the sandy hole of grief, beauty, delicious wind and hope of our funny little ranch called Bolad’s Kitchen.

I here officially announce, and proudly as well, the opening of registration for the first year of the next four-year course of study in Bolad’s Kitchen called “The Shoots and Tendrils”.

It would be so kind and useful for people who want to become students, to register for this class right off, as soon as you can, because I will judge our ability to actually convene a new class only if there are enough people actually committing to it.
It would be a great thing for all us when you sign up to keep in mind what Bolad’s Kitchen is trying to live out and what my books are trying to inspire. One of these things is a sense of gratitude for life, everybody’s and every thing’s, and another is the courage to have a courteous heart. In other words no desperation, spoiled self-centeredness, and above all no meanness to my employees. They are proven students, every one, big hearted, able and their policies are my policies.

For Bolad’s Kitchen has to happen when you’re in your car, on the computer, on the phone at your home, the way you close your door, the way you say hello. Otherwise what I teach is dishonored and of absolutely no use if not given a place in our lives.

Anyway, that having been said, everyone of course is welcome: the open minded, the deep hearted, people with a desire to become the shady tree in whose protective arbor and shade, the growth of a plant of hope could be cultivated, people whose tendrils could pull a vine of real viable culture out of the confusion of our time to feed one beyond our own, people with their own flowers and sprouts: their little children who are always welcomed and loved here (as long as the parents agree to look after their little ones). Antique people are very welcome, ancient crab-walking people are welcome, people of all cultures and countries are welcome, all languages, all ages, looks, most confusions, every degree of education, or lack of it, all genders (all), all shapes, pudgy, skinny, tiny, wispy, weird, tall, round, angular, all colors, walks, teeth styles, eye colors, all dreams, all incapacities, and especially all people with heartbreaks from varying degrees of failed attempts at changing things for a viable reality.

Once you sign up and there seems to be enough interest to make a real class, then I require every student to read all four of my books (a couple more are getting ready to jump out) at least once each, or two of my books at least twice each (deeply), or one book four times. At this point you will also have been forwarded the new requisite riddle for the beginning session for which Bolad’s Kitchen is so famous.

Every registered student must take the time and effort to investigate and wrestle with their own rigid stigmas of their individual upbringings and respond in writing to the riddle. I will correspond with you some and let you know more and when to send this response to me, well ahead of the first time we get together. This is another reason to sign up right off so as to have enough time to approach this.

The first session of “The Shoots and Tendrils” will start in New Mexico’s flower-studded August 25, 2011, ending September 4, 2011, and the second session in the first year will be February 23, 2012 to March 4, 2012, the winter let-up when all the Sandhill cranes by the thousands fly over Bolads Kitchen’s hall and sometimes even land for awhile. The spirits willing, all of my other classes will still be ongoing at that time. Outside of my love of the Holy in Nature, my love for my wife, our little daughter, my house, the desert wilds of my heart, my horses made of agate and jealous wind, and my magic butter making cow, all the classes I’ve taught up to now of Bolad’s Kitchen, The Kishigten and The New Sprouts, are the principle source of my personal joy and feeling of worth in a world that hates beauty, the Indigenous Soul, and a sustainable life dedicated to feeding the Holy in Nature.

Those Bolad’s Kitchen students who have stuck it out, have become people who continue to struggle hard, trying to keep alive and fresh as they have over so many years, the desire to relearn how to become humans of beauty, with knowing their spiritual worth enough to feed the Holy in Nature. They are the reason I want to continue teaching, and start a new class.

I can think of nothing more inspiring than the prospect of so many of you, some whom I’ve known, others with whom we have just became acquainted during one of our road tours here and abroad, and others who I’ve never had the honor of seeing, coming together, because all of us love or want to learn the diligence of love for the Indigenous Soul that is Bolad’s Kitchen.

So please, come over, I cannot wait to see your tendriled viney hearts and crazy flowering hopeful faces willing to jump up and live again, your tendrils ever reaching beyond the ancestral prejudices and arrogant mechanical mindset of the present cynical age, to raise up from the compost of our present failures a tendriled tree of hope, whose fruit could feed a time of real culture beyond our own.

All Blessings.
Long Life, Honey in the Heart, No Misfortune, 13 Thankyous,
Martín Prechtel

Bolad’s Kitchen:

A course in the overlooked and rare histories of forgotten peoples, their animals, places, plants, food, music, clothing, language and the flowering of their hands, all in an attempt to find an intact original indigenous approach to living, that addresses in a tangible way the maintenance of the reality of our eternal everyday physical and spiritual indebtedness to the world’s earth both past and present. A place where we can not only give a living home to those ancestral memories that reside yet today unheeded in our hands, original minds and strange disregarded parts of our lives, but to maintain our debt balance to the earth with the ability of their revived remembrance in order to hold a place out of which to sprout a time worth living in beyond our own. 

After over fifteen exhausting years of flying in metal airships, being hauled in trains, ferries, canoes, motor boats, buses, taxis, driven in private cars, camping for the occasional two days in hotels, privates homes, mountain sides, beaches or the more usual catnaps caught between engagements in cars and planes, all to fulfill the commitment I still have to my deep love of the Holy in Nature and the possibility of a natural culture for all people no matter how deeply spiritually eroded, numbed or distanced from their Indigenous Souls hidden in the forgotten wilderness of their original being they have become, one day — after hearing the red-wing blackbirds of a fiery New Mexico dawn mimic my sighs and the early morning sound of my truck starting up as we headed out again, I luxuriously conjectured about the unlikely possibility of making a “school” where some of these same good dedicated people we’d been seeing on the road might be willing to travel to me. A place closer to my Spanish ponies, my deserts, our life, my shrines, the New Mexico sunrise and violently starry nights inside the cultural and natural desert earth that gives what I teach its life. A place of ritual learning, doing and feasting where many of the marvelous and heartfelt people spread throughout the world who like myself have for so long deeply desired a life of natural intelligence, courage and Indigenous majesty could come together for ten days in a row, two times a year to continue and add on to what we learn each session in order to eventually be capable of making a “real” village type ritual feast for the Holy in nature with a deepened capacity to hold hands with our diverse Indigenous Souls. 

Because inside of Bolad’s Kitchen I can now, after all these years, teach a little more to capacity sailing freer in a more open sea of thought and discovery with my mates unhampered by the barnacled brains of academic stigma and the self-imposed restrictive time-harbors of the modern world’s neurotic need to compress, delimit, compartmentalize and commodify even the inner space of our souls leaving nothing unsellable, trying to convince the world that the resulting cultural vacuum is some precious freedom instead of the walking death of amnesia it is, I have, in the company of such hard working and receptive hearts, been able to attempt shores of understanding I only dreamt of in the past.

Like all the tribal nomads of the world, it has become a way for a bunch of “spiritual orphans” like myself to have a friendship with our hands and a home for our deeper and mutual comprehensions for at least  twenty days a year if not more. 

While Bolad’s Kitchen has become as precious to me as a pile of new born puppies or the sweet aroma of a free-born cavorting colt or a newly found ancient red clay jar full of still viable seeds from a forgotten time, the school is nothing without its students. After all, these students and their personal discoveries in this village style of teaching are the seeds. It is the very diversity of our backgrounds, cultures, colors, ages, doubts and sincere failed attempts for a better future that make up the content of the kinds of spiritual seeds needed to keep these knowledges alive and renewable today as we continue trying to intactly live in the digesting belly of the blasé nightmare of modernity’s arrogant untenable trance. 

Because I am an admitted addict of the ecstasy of such deeper learning in service to the Holy in Nature, I in my love of it am calling for the next group of seeds; I am inviting those of you that wish it, to plant your forgotten hearts into the next four year cycle of students to add to the caravan of beauty already there.

This new class is called:
The Shoots and Tendrils

I can’t wait to begin and as all Bolad’s Kitchen classes, like all village teachings throughout the world and indeed life itself, begin with teaching through having its students attempting to comprehend a riddle, to those that sign up, I will send the first years riddle right away to you.

Long Life, Honey in the Heart, No Evil, Thirteen Thankyous.
Martín Prechtel

Those of you who are interested in this type of ongoing- Martín Prechtel-all-encompassing-village-style-learning for the next round of Bolad’s Kitchen’s search for a friendship with the Indigenous Soul. Please call, write or register below.

Bolad’s Kitchen
PO Box 338
Ojo Caliente, NM 87549
phone: (505) 583-9103

bluetayra@newmexico.com
www.floweringmountain.com

How Bolad’s Kitchen is presently set up:

The sessions for Bolad’s Kitchen will be successive, meaning that each year two sessions of ten days each (20 days all together) will take place. For those interested in attending Bolad’s Kitchen as a school, attending all the sessions in sequence for the full four years is important, not only for the integrity of what is being taught, but also because each student will be doing research and independent activities in between the sessions, the completion of which will be necessary for the knowledge to continue on to the next session.

The cost for ongoing students is $1500 per year if tuition is paid by the early date and $1700 thereafter. For those paying for one session at a time, it will cost $850 per session. We have struggled long and hard over the pricing of the school, trying to keep the price reasonable enough so that all who truly want to attend will not be hindered by their economic situation. Knowing full well that to maintain the respect for the teaching that is being offered, we should be charging at least $5000 a year per student, and in keeping with this we are suggesting a price of $2500 a year for those who can afford it. As we are a "non-endowed" school, this second tuition rate may help insure that Bolad’s Kitchen can continue on because we would then have a fund to provide scholarships to certain dedicated students who otherwise would be unable to attend. We are trusting completely that those who have the means to pay $2500 or more, according to their desires, will show their ability to make it possible for the remainder of the students to attend at the lower tuition, in accordance to their means as well.

The Cost is $1500 for one year (20 days) if paid by March 15, 2011; $1700 if paid after.
Or $850 for each session.

For those who can, the cost is $2500, or $1250 for one session.

If you would like to donate to the scholarship fund, please see form below (you do not need to attend Bolad’s Kitchen to donate to the scholarship fund).

If you would like, as well, to give money to help make it possible for Bolad’s Kitchen to build Bolad’s Kitchen library, children’s learning palace, visitor’s housing quarters and a ritual farming area according to Martín’s dream, please contact us directly at bluetayra@newmexico.com or (505) 583-9103. The library would be an elegant circular 3-story tower, lined with all the ancient volumes, rare writings, and all the books used over the years in Bolad’s Kitchen teachings as well as Martín Prechtel manuscripts and transcripts of previous classes available to all students and some select scholars. You can also contact Marianne Lust at (802) 453-6325 or marianne@gmavt.net

Class tuition DOES NOT include lodging, food or travel arrangements. Participants are responsible for their own meals- until we can build our own meeting hall and kitchen, at which point Hanna will pass on the registration to someone else and pick up her apron and knives.

Bolad’s Kitchen The Shoots and Tendrils
Schedule and registration for 2012:

Schedule:

The February 23rd – March 4th, 2012 session will begin at 8:00 pm Thursday evening February 23rd, and registration will start at 6:30 pm at “The Lady", Ojo Caliente. The session will end no later than 11:00 am on Sunday, March 4th.

Lodging and Food:

There are many lodging establishments in the Ojo Caliente area that range from camping to quite spacious houses, ‘50’s style motels to the local mineral springs, and the always gracious Felipe Ortega’s bed and breakfast. For a list of some lodging options in the area and contact information please go to: Lodging

Participants are responsible for their own meals.

Transportation:

For our out-of-town students shuttle transportation will be available to transport you to and from Ojo Caliente and the Albuquerque airport. We will send shuttle details and cost as the new class approaches. Please schedule your flight to arrive before 3:00 pm on the opening day and to leave after 3:00 pm on the closing day. The shuttlevan will stop at a natural foods grocery market in Santa Fe on the way up to Ojo Caliente for students to buy groceries for the week, if they choose. A transportation registration form will be sent to you about 8 weeks before class begins for those who would like to ride the shuttle.

Registration

Cost

Schedule

Lodging
and Food

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